AbstractThis article constitutes the first large-scale examination of the Cork anti-Methodist riots of 1749–50. Methodist hagiographers have described the rioters as disengaged foot soldiers for Cork’s corporation and Anglican clergy. By exploring these disturbances in their religious, political and social context, this paper suggests that the predominantly Catholic rioters were fuelled by their own

This article examines the revival of the de viris illustribus genre in the twelfth century. These catalogues of the most important Christian authors were modelled on a template created in late antiquity by Jerome, but adopted new attitudes to what constitutes distinguished Christian literary activity. They regard the editing, collecting, and re-ordering of texts as equal to the composition of new works

AbstractIn a newly discovered passage from an 1810 diary, Yorkshire tenant farmer Matthew Tomlinson considers the notion that homosexual desire is a natural, divinely ordained human tendency, discernible from adolescence and undeserving of capital punishment. Although ultimately inconclusive, his reflections offer tantalizing evidence that historical attitudes towards same-sex love in early nineteenth-century

AbstractThis article considers the nature and development of episcopalian identities and attitudes during the mid-seventeenth century by examining the case of Alexander Griffith. Griffith has been known to historians as an unbending ‘Anglican’, an exemplar of obdurate royalism and a man who was in the vanguard of resistance to the puritan experiments in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s. However, the

AbstractThis article examines contradictory attitudes towards insanity in the navy and how mental disorder affected officers and seamen’s reputations and careers. It challenges assumptions that dangerous sea-service and the prioritization of ability meant that those who experienced disorder were considered inherently ‘unfit’, exposing the complexity of eighteenth-century ideas of merit and disability

AbstractThis article adopts a media historical approach to studying the modern history of genealogy, suggesting an alternative to both the dominant methodologies and periodization of the field. Empirically, it focuses on the ways in which correspondence was adopted as a tool for long-distance research by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1910–45, examining in particular its research

AbstractThis article overturns a century of scholarship concerning Master Hore’s infamous voyage to North America in 1536. Richard Hakluyt’s sensational account of this expedition provided the earliest narrative of an English experience of the New World, which has long been deemed to be corroborated by several High Court of Admiralty documents. However, it is demonstrated here that these sources do

AbstractFrom October 1939 to March 1940, Conservative member of parliament Alfred Duff Cooper and his wife Diana toured the United States. Their public appearances drew thousands of audience members and provoked the ire of isolationists, but the true importance of the Coopers’ tour lay in the conversations they undertook with prominent Americans. This article examines the controversy surrounding the

AbstractOverseers were essential both to the profitability of North American slave plantations and to maintaining white racial hegemony. Yet they and their families were frequently condemned by planters as shiftless, incompetent, dishonest and brutal. Drawing on the sociology of reputation, and in particular the concept of ‘reputational entrepreneurship’, this article argues that the damning claims

Concluded at Rouen in March 991, the Anglo-Norman treaty has traditionally occupied a very small corner of the huge historiography for King AEthelred’s reign as one of the first of the king’s failures to deal with the threat of renewed viking raids. This article is an attempt to rethink the place and importance of this treaty in the scholarly literature by looking at it from the perspective of how

Restoration scholars have embraced the relationship between social memory and social forgetting, although the resulting dialectic has invariably been presented as a contest between the Cavalier-Anglican establishment and the remnants of Puritanism. This article argues that the social forgetting of Shelford runs counter to this perception, revealing instead serious disunity within the pro-royalist collective

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved

By analyzing the little-studied sermons of Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter 1161–84, against the backdrop of archival sources for the history of the city of Exeter, this article examines the bishop’s relationship with his cathedral city. Charitable activities in twelfth-century Exeter involved co-operation among urban lay elites, the secular clergy, religious houses and the bishop himself. Bartholomew

Before 1939 continental Europeans were settling in Scotland, in a polity shaped by distinct religious and legal traditions. In the same period, ‘Scottish’ state institutions were gaining significant powers over welfare, public health and local government. This article, as the foundation for a wider study on migrants in Scotland, uses state records to examine this machinery’s attempts to engage with

The relationship between serving in the officer corps during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and identification with the British nation has received little attention from historians. This article examines this relationship, and argues that military service in this period consolidated a ‘British’ national identity within the officer corps, particularly through adherence to the values

The fame of Quia maior – commonly considered one of the most important medieval papal crusade encyclicals – belies the fact that we actually know little about its composition at the curia of Pope Innocent III in 1213. This article compares a lesser‐known draft of the letter, Quoniam maior, preserved in the chronicle of Burchard of Ursberg, with Quia maior in order to reconstruct the debates and concerns

This article explores the ways the political upheavals of the mid seventeenth century were represented in English almanacs, and argues that study of this much overlooked printed product illuminates several facets of the mental afterlife of Britain’s domestic conflicts. It contends that the prominence of political and military events from the sixteen-forties and -fifties within almanacs shows a popular

For all its notoriety, the 1812 British sack of Badajoz during the Peninsular War has been surprisingly overlooked as a subject of historical investigation, symptomatic of a broader neglect of European sieges and sacks for this period. This article explores British officers’ reactions to the sack through their letters and memoirs. It suggests rethinking Badajoz as a site not only of excess and atrocity

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of memory, the past and a popular interpretation of history to the identity of political parties. This article takes the Labour party as an example of this tradition and analyses the ways in which its leaders, adherents and rank and file members mythologised the story of its traditions and forebears at the time of its foundation and subsequently. By analysing

This article explores the roots of the characterization of John Stuart Mill as a ‘Neo‐Malthusian’. Making extensive use of the Norman E. Himes Papers, held at the Countway Library of Medicine, it shows that Himes, a U.S. sociologist and committed birth control campaigner in the inter‐war period, framed a characterization of Mill that endures to this day. The article demonstrates how and why Himes repeatedly

This article examines attitudes to the Boer War − and nationhood and empire more broadly − through the prism of carnivals held in London in 1900 to raise money for the Daily Telegraph’s fund for combatants’ widows and orphans. Drawing on detailed press coverage of these events and the rhetoric surrounding them, it highlights how the carnivals and their rationale offered a point of consensus around

The Bristol merchant William Weston was the first known Englishman to lead an expedition to North America. Analysis of two important document finds suggests that Weston was an early supporter of the Venetian explorer John Cabot. A monetary reward demonstrates Henry VII’s satisfaction with the outcome of Weston’s voyage of c.1499 and the king’s continuing commitment to transatlantic discovery after

The British ‘financial revolution’ was a colonial as well as metropolitan phenomenon. Yet the structures used by colonists to participate have rarely been studied as anything more than a subset of commercial developments. A close examination of the islands of St Kitts and Nevis, who received almost £100,000 in government debentures between 1706 and 1721, confirms that they used the same types of networks

This article offers a systematic analysis of the earliest uses in charters of the Anglo?Saxon vernacular, Old English, for purposes other than describing the geographic landscape. By doing so, the article draws attention to the dynamism of documentary culture in the first half of the ninth century and it argues that several of the developments of the period are best understood when considered from

This article explores how perceived inefficiencies and inadequacies in the militia were reflected in contemporary works of fiction and satire. The militia's public image was consistently poor: half-trained battalions, staffed by inefficient senior officers, chronically short of subalterns and recruiting from the very worst elements of the working class. It suffered from the combined flaws of both regulars

Notwithstanding recent interest in the politics of housing, squatting in the formative contexts of post-Restoration rural England remains little understood and studied. Drawing upon a diverse archive of central government papers and those of the local officers of the New Forest – the largest crown forest in England and Wales – the paper argues that the resort to squatting was both a function of the

This article explores the public ceremonies chosen to mark the restoration of Charles II in a range of provincial towns. It emphasizes both the extent of performative creativity and the prominence of martial forms at the proclamation in May 1660 and the coronation in April 1661. Using evidence from contemporary printed sources and the records of civic government, it demonstrates how local authorities

The sources and nature of ‘radicalism’ in late eighteenth-century Britain have long been debated. At the same time, the impact of war on British politics, society and culture in this period has been underappreciated until recently. While war is recognized as having aided the spread of popular loyalism, its role in stimulating radicalism has been neglected. Based on study of the publications and letters

When a Jacobite plot to assassinate William III was discovered in 1696, supporters of William and his whig-dominated ministry pointed out similarities between this Assassination Plot and the 1683 Rye House Plot against Charles II. Embodying the links between the plots in these accounts was Robert Ferguson, a notorious radical whig who had become a Jacobite active in writing and plotting against King

This article examines the formation of Catholic communities and the roles played by religious politics and kinship networks within that process. It contributes to historiographical debates about early modern English Catholics' self-identification in religio-political terms, suggesting that intra-Catholic feuds were not the sole preserve of the Catholic missionary clergy. It uses the Petre family, barons

© 2017 Institute of Historical Research. This article broadens ballad studies to encompass a regional perspective and significantly adds to the literature on Welsh royalism. It argues that the ballad author sought to destabilize the newly established parliamentarian government by attacking its members’ honour, religion and personal morality. The article provides a contextualized and detailed textual

Those who read English history in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries encountered significant coverage of Wales. English readers of late fifteenth-century chronicles, however, found little sense of the situation of Wales, even regarding its role in the invasion through Wales of Henry VII, a king with Welsh ancestry. This change suggests there were limits to English fifteenth-century preoccupations

This article investigates office-holding and private enterprise in eighteenth-century Sicily through a case study of the activities of Baron de Piro, a native of Malta. Based on documents held in Maltese and Sicilian archives, the article demonstrates how political developments in the kingdom both opened up and circumscribed the opportunities within which an upwardly-mobile household sought its fortune

The 2017 Historical Research/Wiley lecture was designed to raise some general issues about the nature of ‘civil wars’ as a prelude to a conference that looked at many examples across time and space. It takes the events of the sixteen-forties across Britain and Ireland and notes that very few participants accepted (at least publicly) that they were engaged in one or more civil wars. There was widespread

Princess Elizabeth Tudor's holograph letters have long been prized, but often reveal more about her education than about her life before she became queen in 1558. Her scribal letters, by comparison, can offer more matter-of-fact insights into these years, showing how Elizabeth negotiated with the governments of her brother Edward VI and sister Mary I, how she managed her household and estate, and how

When Simon de Montfort took control of the government of England in 1264, he replaced the sheriffs appointed by Henry III. The new sheriffs were relatively obscure and have been little studied. The baronial reform movement raised expectations that sheriffs should be honest, and natives of the counties they governed. De Montfort's sheriffs largely met these requirements, as their backgrounds and careers

This article examines the evidence of the early medieval Latin Physiologus manuscripts for compilatory practices within the context of Carolingian ecclesiastical and educational reform in the period c.700–1000. It argues that miscellany manuscripts, in which the Physiologus is exclusively found in this period, represent a conscious and highly organized encyclopaedic drive that created multi-purpose

This article examines how some key Conservative leaders conceptualized the problem of ‘the future’ in the final stages of the Second World War. It contends that the mental map employed by senior Conservatives for navigating the challenges of post-war national renewal has remained significantly misunderstood. The article conducts a close reading of Conservative positions on a range of issues – from

This article challenges the influential revisionist interpretation of the impeachment of the duke of Buckingham in the parliament of 1626. It argues that Buckingham's enemies sought to remove him from power rather than ‘reform’ his errors or reach a compromise settlement whereby he would give up some offices. It explores the relationship between M.P.s and their patrons in the house of lords, the ideological

Since the nineteen-seventies public history has emerged as an increasingly coherent discipline in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and, latterly, in a wider European context. In all of these places it has had a connected but distinctly different gestation, and the nature of how history is applied, constructed, proffered or sold for public consumption is unique to each society. In Ireland

In response to the pressure of the invasion debates of 1903–5 the Admiralty developed a new strategy, ‘flotilla defence’, to counter arguments brought forward by the War Office. This concept was a purely political one; it was a cynical bid to mislead the Committee of Imperial Defence in order to secure naval funding. By placing ‘flotilla defence’ in this context this article will demonstrate that it

This article examines jurisdictional disputes between the city of Salisbury and its bishops in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, showing how debates over local control articulated broader ideas of order in the state. The civic leadership identified itself closely with the monarch in its bid for incorporation, arguing that prosperity and peace could only be achieved in this way. The bishops,

Building upon recent scholarship, this article presents a study of policy formation within the composite monarchy of Charles I. Through a scrutiny of the 1636 canons – a crucial but neglected aspect of the ‘Laudian’ programme in Scotland – new light is shed on the contested dynamics of the working partnership between the king and William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury (1633–45). The article also engages

Desertion from active military service has always been a contentious action, especially in times of war. Deserters in the eighteenth century were routinely castigated as poor patriots or traitorous subjects. Recently, scholars have begun to analyse in greater depth how and why desertions occurred, and have demonstrated that political considerations were less important than issues of identity and interest

This article explores the influence of the Hundred Years’ War on Fowey between c.1337 and 1399. In so doing, it employs naval pay rolls to study the contribution the town made to royal fleets and considers the mechanisms which the Crown employed to defend the port from enemy raids. It also examines the degree to which the war was extended though the agency of ‘pirates’. The article argues that the

In Anglo-Saxon courts, from the eighth century down to the Norman conquest, ‘officers of the mouth’, bore household titles and served the king and his guests during meals, at least on major occasions. Those butlers (pincernae) and dish-bearers (dapiferi, disciferi) were not mere ‘waiters’ but members of great aristocratic families; serving the king's table was an honour for them, with all the implications

As one of Britain's landmark constitutional reforms, the 1832 Reform Act has attracted considerable historical attention. However, only cursory notice has been paid to the extensive work completed by the 1831–2 boundary commission to reform the nation's parliamentary boundaries. Drawing on previously unused archival material, this article provides the first sustained analysis of the boundary reforms

The Howard family, dukes of Norfolk, are usually described as Catholics and considered to have been religiously ‘conservative’ throughout the early modern period and beyond. Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, the family patriarch at the beginning of the Reformation, is thought to have remained on the conservative ‘side’ and it is assumed that the rest of the family followed his lead. By examining

This article offers a new perspective on the context and significance of the 1553 succession crisis precipitated by the Protestant Edward VI's abortive bid to exclude his Catholic sister Mary in favour of his evangelical cousin Jane. Challenging the view of Jane's coup as an evangelical crusade, and of Mary's victory as the only successful Tudor rebellion, it analyses the constitutional principles

This article is an ‘emotional’ intervention in the field of early Soviet legal history: it provides a theoretical background on the role of emotions in early Soviet legal thought and practice. After sketching the wider context necessary for an understanding of emotions in the specific setting of the courtroom, it charts three possible directions for applying the history of emotions framework to early

This article examines anxieties about nervous illness, and the positive visions of health that emerged in response to them, in works written for popular audiences in late imperial and early Soviet Russia. It deepens our understanding of revolutionary change by exploring the role of conceptions of health and illness in efforts to make sense of social and cultural change and in structuring visions of

There has been much written about the official commemorations of 1917 in Soviet Russia, but after 1991 the revolution became a contentious event and it is unclear how the state will commemorate the centenary. It is too big to ignore, but potentially dangerous politically. After the ‘colour revolutions’ and the Arab Spring, revolution has been associated with instability, violence and terror, and is

This article investigates whether the partisans and warlords (otamany) active in Ukraine during the Russian civil wars were ‘fighters for the independence of Ukraine’ as the Ukrainian laws on historical memory claim. Following Sheila Fitzpatrick, it suggests that the partisan leaders were ‘tearing off the masks’, that is, trying to create new identities, often via imposture, in response to the collapse

This article challenges the notion of leisure space as apolitical by investigating why the Karelian Isthmus dacha settlements, located in the Grand Duchy of Finland, served as preparation grounds for clandestine political activity. Using memoirs, newspapers and Russian archival sources, this article reveals how Finland's legal position in the Russian empire, combined with the particularities of dacha

After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks needed to battle to control Russia's urban and rural spaces to win the war, exert state power and transform mentalities. This article argues that revolutionary tribunals played an important role by organizing travelling sessions to reach beyond abstract spaces into the familiar places central to people's everyday lives. They held trials in public squares

This article examines how the Bolshevik party and state officials in early Soviet Russia understood the agency of their enemies, an important consideration which illuminates the particular dynamics and complexities of state violence in the Soviet context. It focusses on criminal justice, and on the relationship between the state and peasantry. The evolution of Bolshevik thought on these issues is traced

One of the outstanding features of the overthrow of tsarism was its comprehensive nature. Within weeks of the Petrograd uprising in late February, tsarist authorities were deposed across the whole Russian empire. This article examines how revolution was achieved in a key Siberian locality, Krasnoiarsk, focussing especially on the organizational structures which were used to mobilize local actors against

As one of the first anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century, the Indian struggle for independence has attracted a vast and rich historiography. Much of this has been focused within the boundaries of India. This article adds a transnational dimension by examining Indian anti-colonial activism in exile. The experience of political exile, both voluntary and involuntary, provides insight into

This article analyses the public debates about the two corporate forms used in the seventeenth century to develop England's international commercial reach: the regulated and joint stock company. It examines pamphlets to assess the changing public postures of the two forms across the period, and challenges histories of seventeenth-century English overseas trade that argue the triumph of free trade over

This paper examines the uses to which Cambridge University’s ten-year statute was put suggesting that its increasing popularity from c.1815 reflects both increasing career insecurity among non-graduate clergy, and the closing of traditional non-graduate routes into the Anglican ministry. Using a quantitative study of university calendars and ordination records alongside a review of controversial pamphlet