On April 30, 1408, Archbishop Henry Bowet of York issued a commission ordering the deprivation of John, prior of the tiny and impoverished monastery of Hexham. The archbishop condemned the prior in the strongest terms, noting that, “to the manifest destruction of the English realm, he committed treason by receiving and cherishing the Scots and other false lieges of the king, grievous enemies of the kingdom all, and notorious traitors. In helping them to invade the realm he gave no heed to the danger in which he placed himself and the free men of the realm.” The archbishop went on to state that, when John abandoned his monastery in order to join the Scots, “there is no doubt that the prior perpetrated the infamous crime of lèse majesté.”

A note to the printed edition of this commission remarks laconically: “a startling document, which shows how thoroughly disorganized was the state of society on the Borders.” But the grim determination to punish that is so apparent in Bowet's commission was entirely justifiable, for incidents of desertion to the Scots were troublesome and none-too-rare among northern land- and officeholders, and in 1408 the memory of the rebellion of the greatest of these, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, was still fresh. In the eighteen months alone after Bowet issued his commission, the crown learned of another defection on the part of a formerly loyal Scottish cleric in England, as well as of the loss of one key border stronghold and the near loss of another, the results of treasonable conspiracies.

A celebrated article in Shakespeare Quarterly opens with the question, “how many people cross-dressed in Renaissance England?” Jean Howard, who posed this intriguing question, suggests that disruption of the semiotics of dress, gender, and identity during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods points to “a sex-gender system under pressure” and a patriarchal culture disturbed by profound anxieties and contradictions. Even if the answer to her question turns out to be “very few,” the discourse surrounding the practice reveals an area of critical and problematic unease. Female transvestism on the streets of London, male transvestism on the stage, and vituperative attacks on cross-dressing by Protestant reformers are among the symptoms that indicate that “the subversive or transgressive potential of this practice could be and was recuperated in a number of ways.” Dressing boy actors for female roles, for example, was not simply “an unremarkable convention within Renaissance dramatic practice,” as some scholars have suggested, but rather a scandalous “source of homoerotic attraction” arousing “deep-seated fears” of an “unstable and monstrous” and feminized self. Whether in real life or in literature, by this account, cross-dressing involved struggle, resistance, and subversion, as well as modification, recuperation, and containment of the system of gendered patriarchal domination. Renaissance cross-dressing involved ideological work of a complex kind that ultimately, in Howard's materialist feminist analysis, “participated in the historical process eventuating in the English Revolution.” This is a claim that may make English historians gasp, but it is one that they cannot ignore.

Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Joseph Nightingale gained admittance to the judges' room at the Old Bailey. He appears to have thought the room small and unremarkable, save for “a bookcase filled with the volumes of the State Trials, a few other law books of reference, and the yearly volumes of the Sessions Papers, or abstracts of the causes tried at this Court, from the earliest period to the present times.” It was this set of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, among all the books there, which most fired his imagination: “In casting one's eye over these records of our Fall, it is painful to notice the gradually increasing thickness of the volumes. Those which I have seen thus uniformly bound, lettered, with the date of the year, and the name of the Lord Mayor for the time being, commence with the year 1730, and reach down to 1812: the first volume may contain perhaps 150 pages; the last, five or six hundred: let it not, however, be hence concluded that this circumstance proves only the increase of vice; it indicates also an increased population, and extended commerce, and improved police.”

Nightingale's analysis of the causes for the increased length of the Sessions Paper shows an admirable grasp of both the changes in the character of society and in the means of ordering it to which historians address themselves. But a simpler factor in this change that seems to have eluded his notice was that, beginning in 1778, and especially after 1782, the length of individual trial accounts given in the Sessions Paper increased significantly.

The suffragette in the dock at Bow Street police court is one of the emblematic scenes of the “votes for women” agitation. She usually stood alone in the prisoners' box, facing the magistrate, flanked by tables lined with lawyers and police officials and backed by benches full of friends and supporters, newspaper reporters, and ordinary spectators. Notwithstanding the state's claims of legal equality and judicial impartiality, she seemed to be engaged in an unequal contest speaking truth to unbending masculine authority. She was powerless to alter the outcome, a guilty verdict and a spell of imprisonment. This scene, like those of the protester arrested in the streets and the hunger striker being forcibly fed in prison, underlines the spectacular nature of suffrage militancy. Yet its very power to seize and hold our attention can obscure the complex interactions and effects that made militancy such a profoundly ambiguous moment in the intertwined histories of the women's suffrage movement and the Liberal-ruled Edwardian state.

Recent research has displaced the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) from its once central place in suffrage history. Jill Liddington, Jill Norris, and Jo Vellacott have recovered the very important contributions of radical and democratic feminists to the movement. In recounting the efforts of moderate women's suffragists, Claire Hirshfield, Leslie Parker Hume, and others have helped to paint a much more complex picture of the high politics of franchise reform. Historians have also begun to examine the distinct experiences of the movement in Ireland and Scotland.