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.

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.

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.

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.