It is widely accepted by scholars that the Hundred Years' War, in general, and the reign of King Edward III of England (1327–1377), in particular, witnessed a crucial stage in the development of state sponsored propaganda efforts to mobilize the nation for war. Edward III's government made particularly skillful use of the church to disseminate the justifications for the king's wars in France and against the Scots. The royal government also used church leaders on a regular and continuing basis to organize a spectrum of religious rites and ceremonies encompassing the largest possible sections of the English population, including the laity and clergy, to seek divine intervention on behalf of English troops serving in the field. These religious rites included prayers, penitential and thanksgiving processions, intercessory masses, vigils, almsgiving, and fasting.

A valedictory article is a piece of sadness, but it is also an opportunity to shout at the wind. This piece is doubly written in that sense, first because it focuses on a king, and secondly because it discusses sources and emphasizes the need for archival research. Readers who are enthralled in modishness, and in the multiple mirrors of post-modernism, will proceed no further, but that simply reflects the peculiar and self-serving nature of the dominant approach to eighteenth-century British political history, with its fascination for the rhetorical strategies of discourse and its lack of interest in the contents and contours of politics, and in the hard work required to re-create them.

In part this reflects a sense that somehow all this high politics has been done, but that is deeply misleading. It is particularly so for the reign of George II (1727–60), for that monarch, a king in deed as well as name, still lacks a scholarly biography. This is an important omission, for, without such a study, the monarch appears as a figure of episodic importance, distinctly secondary to his ministers, and as a restraint on them, rather than as an initiator of issues. To understand the king and his role, it is necessary to consider him not thus from the outside but rather on the basis of a thorough study that makes full use of the surviving sources. Secondly, without a focus on the king, it is difficult to understand the Anglo-Hanoverian monarchy, and the problems this created for British ministers. Thirdly, the failure to give due weight to George II ensures that Britain appears more different from Continental states than it should, and certainly removes a possible way to offer a comparative study.

“My men should use their swords and bucklers…but if John Stanshaw is in one alehouse then I will be in another.”

To historians of medieval and Reformation England, these lines should not be all that surprising. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the heyday of livery and maintenance, ritualized effrontery was in vogue among the affluent and they often employed large retinues of armed servants as signs of potency and prestige. However, it may surprise some to learn that the above statement was uttered by a priest, Geoffrey Elys, vicar of Thatcham (Berks.), around the beginning of the sixteenth century. Though the medieval Church tirelessly struggled to convince its flock of the wickedness of interpersonal aggression, its own servants were not immune to bouts of conflict and strife. As R. N. Swanson cautions in his study of parish priests, the clergy “can be considered as a group; but they were also individuals who created their own careers and had their own personal relations with their parishioners.” Indeed, the conduct of clerics in their parish communities, especially their violent conduct, can be quite baffling if one only evaluates it by the criteria of ecclesiastical proscription and fails to recognize that such proscription was just one thick strand of an intricate web of relations and expectations. In his examination of thirteenth-century parish priesthood, J. Goering has traced the transition of pastors from merely members of the village to semi-detached individuals who were compelled to abide by both village customs and the values of a more unified and doctrinally authoritative Church.

Over a century ago, the pioneer English historian of law F. W. Maitland observed that “If some fairy gave me the power of seeing a scene of one and the same kind in every age of history of every race, the kind of scene that I would choose would be a trial for murder, because I think that it would give me so many hints as to a multitude of matters of the first importance.” For many decades Maitland's remark was ignored, as historical scholarship passed over murder trials as far too “atypical” and “sensationalistic” to merit serious study, leaving them to amateur devotees of courtroom drama and detection mysteries. One notable exception was Brian Simpson, the distinguished legal historian, whose Cannibalism and the Common Law, published in 1984, for the first time placed in its social context the leading case of R. v. Dudley & Stephens, which in 1884 produced the still-authoritative rule governing the “necessity” justification for homicide. In Simpson's hands the case, a “sensational” one indeed, involving the eating of a cabin boy by shipwrecked sailors, opened up the little-known world of late Victorian maritime life. However, Simpson's lead was not followed up, and his book remained a fascinating “one-off,” regarded as an “amusement piece” by an otherwise “serious” scholar of arcane legal reasoning.

Only more recently, with developments such as the rise of the genre of “micro-history” and the legitimation of interest in the “sensational,” have historians come to accept homicide and its legal treatment as a worthy subject.

In the violence over Protestant marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s much of the debate centered on two towns, Portadown and Drumcree. Students of seventeenth-century Irish history will note that those towns were sites of some of the most infamous stories of rebel atrocities in the 1641 uprising. The continuity of such images reinforces the notion that ethnic and religious conflicts are immutable and perhaps inevitable. A certain fatalism surrounds the acrimony of Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, English and Irish arising from the conviction that such conflicts have raged, as if unchanging, over centuries. However, when viewed over time, the struggles between such groups are dynamic rather than static and have helped construct how each group sees the other and how it identifies itself. In the dynamism surrounding Anglo-Irish relations a number of important turning points can be identified. One of the most important is of course the seventeenth century, particularly the 1641 uprising. More than thirty years ago W. D. Love noted how for three centuries Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish intercourse had been molded by the events of the mid-seventeenth century and had compelled historians to support or deny the charges made by each side about the events of the 1640s. In trying to understand the searing nature of those events, and how they came to frame political as well as historical debates from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a number of historians have noted the importance of Sir John Temple and his propagan distic piece, The Irish Rebellion. Temple's work offered not just an interpretation of the 1641 uprising but a portrait of the two peoples, English and Irish, as basically and permanently incompatible—a thesis that has had remarkable staying power. Published in 1646, Temple's work was a departure from the Tudor and early Stuart canon on Ireland. While Temple borrowed much from earlier commentators such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, his analysis differed from them and set out in a new direction by defining the Irish as ethnically distinct. Spenser and Davies suggested that the problem of Ireland arose not from the land, or even its people (although Spenser devoted considerable discussion to the ways Irish customs undermined English success), but from foolhardy or poorly executed English policy. Even though the late Tudor and early Stuart commentators saw the Irish as barbaric, the Irish were thought to be amenable to the benefits of English culture and rule, although their reformation might require draconian measures. Even the divisive issue of religion was not thought insurmountable. Davies and Spenser argued that a religious reformation begun after peace and stability had been secured in Ireland would succeed. In contrast, Temple viewed the 1641 revolt as conclusive evidence that the Irish were irredeemable and posed a deadly threat to England and its people.

“Pacifism + non-resistance are by-products of some central things to which we have to testify.”

Richard Roberts

Although Rev. Richard Roberts was the chairman of the founding conference of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) at Cambridge in 1914, its first general secretary, and the key figure in its early ideology, he has largely been ignored in the secondary literature. Admittedly, Vera Brittain, in The Rebel Passion, sketched an appreciative vignette, but Jill Wallis, in her more recent FOR study Valiant for Peace, mentions him only six times without discussing his ideas. Even Roberts' daughter Gwen's biography, Grace Unfailing, fails to analyze the basis of his contribution. Yet, seven decades after attending the founding FOR conference, its only survivor, Horace Alexander, wrote that, while he could not recall the details, Richard Roberts had impressed him most, for he “got right into [him], and helped [him] find a sure foundation for life.” Alexander's comment points in the direction Martin Ceadel began to develop when he defined pacifism as a faith. But Ceadel restricted that faith to its relation to war, a restriction that was inappropriate for the early FOR. Pacifism, its leading members posited, should pervade all of life, private as well as public. Their conception of the new organization sounded like a worldview, a framework through which they viewed the world. Nevertheless, although pacifism should influence all of life, it was, as Roberts suggested, a by-product rather than the central element. Hence, rather than explicating his understanding of pacifism, at the founding conference Roberts focused on Christ's atonement as the ground of all ethics and as supplying the regulative principle of the Christian's reconciling ministry in the world. From this perspective he drew the conclusion that reconciliation implied a wide range of social activities for which the energies of youth, being used in warfare, should be mobilized in something akin to a Franciscan tertiary order. It was this call for social regeneration combined with evangelism that impressed Alexander. Only in passing Roberts declared the “simple,” pre-1914 pacifism bankrupt, while expecting that reconciliation in all spheres of life would undercut the commonly held view that war was “a hateful affair yet a noble enterprise of Christian chivalry.” This notion of reconciliation, with all that it entailed, became central. Even before the FOR had a conscription committee it had established committees for its rehabilitation of young offenders commune, for education, and for social service. The limited secondary literature has generally ignored these committees and failed to analyze the notion of reconciliation, focusing instead on the by-product and on conscientious objectors. Methodologically, Ceadel defined the FOR as quietist, and compared to the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF) that would be quite accurate. Indeed, for while the FOR encouraged its members to be politically involved—it had a political group committee—it shied away from being a political pressure group, regarding the NCF tactics incompatible with reconciliation. Although its methodology was quietist, its ideology was radical, aiming at the transformation of society. In order to understand this largely Roberts-influenced reconciliation ideology, it is necessary to take a closer look at Roberts' worldview.

John Stow's abridged chronicles present a short, simplified version of English history that formed an important component of sixteenth-century popular culture. The author was a citizen historian, a self-educated man, whose social status placed him outside the gentry, and a scholar who was closer to medieval traditions than to the New Learning associated with Renaissance humanism. Stow and his chronicles therefore stand apart from the university-educated intellectual elite whose writings shaped the high culture of Elizabethan England. His abridged chronicles, based on his larger Annales of England, offered readers of lower social and economic status a more affordable national history than was available in the larger quarto volumes. This essay considers the character of abridged chronicles, examines Stow's interpretation of a variety of significant topics from the Norman Conquest to the death of Henry VIII, and argues that Stow's work offers valuable insights into the historical understanding of ordinary men and women.

For centuries John Stow, identified in the Dictionary of National Biography as a “chronicler and antiquary,” lived in the shadow of more illustrious contemporaries. Shakespeare preferred Raphael Holinshed's chronicle to Stow's Annales of England as the source for his history plays while William Camden was a scholar of vastly greater erudition to whom the DNB assigned the higher status of “historian.” In contrast to the glittering literati of Elizabethan England, Stow is usually cast in gray, a worthy man of negligible learning who through a lifetime of hard work produced books that were generally accurate but dull.

The story of beleaguered Protestants who fled to the continent during the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s is well-known, but less familiar is the attempt by the queen and her representatives to order some of those exiles apprehended and brought back home for confrontation or punishment. One agent placed in charge of tracking down a few of the more prominent exiles and serving them with papers was John Brett: over the course of several months, in which he himself was pursued, insulted, beaten, and ultimately chased from Frankfurt and Strasbourg by protestant sympathizers, Brett persisted in his attempt to reach figures such as Katherine, the godly duchess of Suffolk, and her family; the result however was utter failure, described in an account of the tribulations written by Brett himself after his empty-handed return to England.

An extensive literature that has appeared over the past two decades on the Hanoverian electorate and political culture at the constituency level provides a more sophisticated understanding of party conflict in Britain during the long eighteenth century than earlier work focused on high politics or other subjects. H. T. Dickinson points out that most people experienced politics at the constituency level where negotiations between different political groups within communities and the voters provided a voice for competing interests that an older historiography focused on high politics failed to recognize. These local aspects of Hanoverian politics established the context for two important developments in the early nineteenth century; a greater appreciation for the impact of public opinion on politics at Westminster and the development of a two-party system. The emergence of a self-conscious provincial identity sustained by new economic and institutional forces drove both trends. Christopher Wyvill's Yorkshire Association formed in 1779, the General Chamber of Manufacturers founded in 1785, anti-war petitioning efforts by local groups during the conflict with Napoleon, and the successful campaign in 1812 against the regulatory Orders in Council demonstrated the growing impact of provincial activism. The intersection between new provincial interests focused on issues debated at Westminster and constituency politics with its own rituals and dynamics provides an opening to explore the final decades of the Hanoverian political order. Connections between local and metropolitan drew into sharper focus as party conflict at Westminster extended into national politics.

This article investigates the influence of the Maynooth and Repeal crises on Conservative politicians after 1846 and the putative maintenance of their identity as defenders of the Church after the Disruption of the party. Historians of the Conservative party have long realized that it suffered from a crisis of identity for a long time after 1846. Some of the leading Peelites were heading more and more towards the Liberal party, and most backbench Peelites gradually joined the Protectionist party; but the Protectionists did not have enough experienced leaders to qualify for the inheritance. Norman Gash has argued that “the Protectionists were not a political party in the sense of one able to provide and sustain a Government in the circumstances of the mid-nineteenth century…. The weakness of the Protectionists was not merely that after 1846 they represented the Conservative party with most of the brains knocked out, but that until they could shake off the monolithic character implied by their title, they could scarcely hope to become a national party or form a viable Government.” Likewise Robert Stewart and John Ramsden consider that the Protectionists were unable to take the place of the Conservative party, given their lack of effective and experienced leaders. It is undeniable that the Protectionist party was not as strong as the Conservative party had been in terms of executive capacity or party organization. But to say also that it was unable to inherit the mantle of Conservatism is to fall into the same trap as Gash and to exaggerate the importance of Peelite executive ability. More significant is the fact that the party of Stanley and Disraeli maintained fidelity to the core principles of the Conservative party—i. e. the constitution of Church and State, and the principle of protectionism. In this sense, the Protectionist party did become the sole inheritor of the Conservative party during the later 1840s.

One of the few achievements the communist left in Britain can still plausibly claim is its anti-fascism in the 1930s and beyond. This has recently been most dogmatically reasserted in a series of publications by David Renton, who calls for a distinction to be made between “anti-fascists” and “non-fascists.” The former are characterized by their “correct” understanding of fascism and reliance on organized, active resistance, often in the streets; whereas the latter contributed very little to fascism's defeat. Such a loaded definition of anti-fascism ensures that only the Communist Party and their acolytes fit the bill. But within the historiography even more “neutral”—and seemingly encompassing—definitions have tended, in practice, to look largely to left-wing organizations.

This article will question these perspectives and argue for the significance of a “liberal” anti-fascism, which brought together many Liberal, Conservative and Labour politicians and intellectuals in cross-party pressure groups. What characterized the anti-fascism of these men and women was not resistance to the actions of the BUF, which most regarded as thuggish but insignificant, but resistance to the ideological challenge to English parliamentary democracy represented by continental “totalitarian” movements. The article will begin by considering the compromised nature of the British Communist Party's anti-fascist record and why “liberal” historians have, on the whole, tended to underestimate the extent of liberal anti-fascism. It will then suggest that a truly less exclusionary and partisan approach to anti-fascism should readily include the likes of the liberal Sir Ernest Barker and many in his political and social circle. It will also argue that, even accepting Renton's own, restrictive definition, Barker would still qualify as an anti-fascist, rather than a non-fascist, for he combined a coherent analysis of single-party, totalitarian states with a commitment to organized action through bodies such as the New Estates Community Committee and the Association for Education in Citizenship to remove the pre-conditions of antidemocratic beliefs.

The study of English constitutional history has fallen on hard times. Once an intellectually thriving field, constitutional history now conjures up visions of bad tweed and bow ties coupled with dryly-legalistic discussions of statutes, charters, parliamentary debates, Year Books, and legal reports. Indeed, whether Whig, Neo-Whig, Revisionist, or Post-Revisionist in orientation, constitutional history has traditionally concerned itself with the “activity of government”; it has emphasized the formal structures of government, their historical origins, their changing composition, their evolving roles, and functions. These formal structures, the Crown, Parliament, the Council, the established church, and the law courts, together constituted the sinews of government. Constitutional controversy arose when the respective roles and functions of these formal structures came into conflict. Accordingly, constitutional historians became experts on the anatomy and development of the particular organs of government and their changing roles yet they were often unable to see the broader conceptual forest in which they were standing. As a result, some critics have lampooned constitutional history and its leading proponents as lacking theoretical engagement and being overly preoccupied with the minutiae of government at the expense of conceptual sophistication and breadth of vision.

In 1862 Mary O'Bryan Thorne, daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher, wrote in her diary: “At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening.” She regarded this as a routine engagement; something she had been doing since her sixteenth year, and that her daughter had every right to continue. Female traveling preachers (itinerants) were important, perhaps crucial, in establishing the Bible Christians as a separate denomination and their use was never formally abandoned. The persistence of this tradition makes their history an important case study of women preachers’ experience in nineteenth-century Britain, showing a trend toward marginalization similar to the experience of many other nineteenth-century women who sought to enter increasingly professionalized occupations open only to men. Even in the early years of the Connexion when the organizational structure was fluid and evolving, women were never on an equal footing with male preachers. With the development of a formal organization in the 1830s their numbers started to drop and the gap between male and female responsibilities widened, with women never assigned the full duties of male ministry.

Consumption has recently acquired key importance in re-interpreting post-war British politics. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska has argued the Conservative construction of a popular alliance in opposition to rationing and controls was crucial to their electoral recovery after 1945 and in securing an advantage among women voters. A wealth of evidence indicates Labour, by contrast, had scant purchase on affluence in the later 1950s. It was not only, as Amy Black and Stephen Brooke would have it, “Labour's befuddlement at the problem of women and gender,” but that it was ambivalent, if not hostile, towards the goods, lifestyles and values associated with consumerism and the people obtaining and exhibiting them. Other factors blur differentiation between the parties. Both were affiliated to the world of production—through their business and trade union links. Richard Findley has contended the Conservative abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM, whereby manufacturers fixed retail prices) in 1964, aroused electorally deleterious opposition from manufacturers and backbenchers. And while Labour consumerists were rare commodities, as is argued here, Labour revisionism made an important contribution to the Consumers' Association (CA).

This focus on consumerism corrects the neglect of it by narratives like political consensus or historians' consuming passion with production and work. It arises from rethinking Britain's much vaunted “decline” as, for example, the transition to a post-industrial society. In Matthew Hilton's hands how the consumer “interest” was variously articulated and gendered becomes a means to unlock modern citizenship and the configuration of private and public spheres.