A previously unpublished memorandum on the life of Dr. Joseph Priestley written by Priestley’s former student, Benjamin Vaughan. Vaughan, who participated in the negotiations of the Treaty of Paris and served as a member of parliament, recounts the academic accomplishments, research interests and character of one of England’s most famous eighteenth-century polymaths. Vaughan’s reflections provide a

AbstractThis article re-evaluates the trajectory of sensationalism within twentieth-century American journalism and foreign correspondence by examining William Randolph Hearst’s chief foreign correspondent, Karl H. von Wiegand (1874–1961). By following von Wiegand’s activities as a journalist, celebrity, propagandist and diplomatic go-between through both world wars, it argues that post-World War I

This article offers new insights into women’s occupational identities and the production of art in seventeenth-century London. The identification of a previously overlooked portraitist named Anne Wemyss (1633–98) shows that she was part of a much wider circle of artists and elite patrons active during this period. An exploration of the training afforded to a number of female Painter-Stainers’ Company

This article explores Conservative critiques of Whig colonial rule in the 1830s. Its case is that imperial administrative and constitutional issues occupied a more prominent place in the Tories’ politics of opposition during the ‘decade of Reform’ than historians have assumed. Conservative writers and politicians styled themselves as vigorous defenders of imperial integrity, colonial constitutions

Marchamont Nedham, the English revolutionary journalist, for whom ostentatious side-changing became an occupational hazard, has earned a reputation among both contemporaries and many historians for perfidy and venality. This article proposes another interpretation of his career. A close contextualization of his canon of works and his professional circumstances with the varying political climates shows

AbstractDuring the First World War Britain’s criminals were mobilized in much the same way as the rest of society. Courts allowed defendants to avoid prison if they enlisted, while borstal boys, and later adult prisoners, were also granted early release. Although enlistment offered a chance for rehabilitation, criminals were also desirable due to their violent nature, and enlisting them reduced the

This article assesses the twelfth-century Rochester dispute concerning St. Mary’s hospital at Strood. Bishop Gilbert Glanville’s plan to endow the hospital with monastic estates was vigorously resisted by the cathedral monks, with Gilbert traditionally being seen as an anti-monastic bishop. This article reassesses the events of the conflict and places it in the context of other twelfth-century disputes

This article focuses on the role of mercantile coffee houses during the Seven Years’ War and the American War of Independence. The purpose is to examine mercantile coffee houses as public and private spaces, and to examine why people chose them as spaces in which to conduct business. The article examines how London’s mercantile coffee houses enabled the maritime population to understand, and remain

Prior to 1914, British strategic thinkers considered the question of how to maintain British world power in the twentieth century. They developed visions of co-operation at sea between not only Britain and the Dominions, but also other states in the international system. During the First World War, these ideas merged with plans for the League of Nations, which British policymakers envisaged as a tool

This article examines the production and circulation of news across the British Atlantic, focusing on two main events: the royalist rebellion at Barbados (1650-2) and the conquest of Jamaica (1655). Royalists and commonwealth supporters alike cast the rising on Barbados as an extension of the wars of the 1640s and early 1650s, which moved beyond England, Scotland, and Ireland into the Atlantic world

Historians of the trial of Charles I will be familiar with the two copies of the manuscript journals kept in The National Archives of the U.K. and the U.K. Parliamentary Archives. Besides these manuscripts, two further copies of the trial proceedings are held in the Beinecke Library, Yale, and in the British Library. This article compares these versions to propose a tentative document history of the

This discussion provides the first in-depth investigation into the meaning and significance of a quite exceptional petition presented by the parliamentary Commons in the reign of Richard II. The petition survives as a unique copy in the chronicle of Henry Knighton: it was not recorded on the parliament roll. Knighton inserted the petition into his more general account of the Merciless Parliament of

This article analyses the first years of the land order system of immigration that dominated Queensland’s settlement as a colony. Queensland issued land orders worth £30 per adult to fare-paying British and Irish immigrants who were mechanics, agriculturalists and people with modest amounts of capital. This form of immigration was facilitated through the work of an Emigration Commissioner – later an

AbstractThis article examines how shifts in political culture affect the formation of strategy. It does so by focusing upon the role that ‘public opinion’ played in debates over strategy in Britain from 1870 to 1914. The article makes three contributions. First, it challenges the notion that linkages between democracy and strategy were creations of the twentieth century or the result of developments

This article analyses the provision of military service by English barons in the wars in Normandy between 1194 and 1204, a topic that has not previously been examined in any depth. It demonstrates that an important section of the English baronage provided regular military service in Normandy, driven by their own personal interests in the duchy and the pursuit of royal favour and rewards. It concludes

The image of the Highland soldier as a brave, loyal warrior was central to nineteenth-century notions of Scottish national identity. This article uses material culture evidence alongside traditional archival sources to provide an interdisciplinary explanation of how the military dimension of Scottish identity was shaped in the early nineteenth century. It finds that it was the responses of the Highland

In the late Elizabethan period Ireland became a critical focus of the Tudor regime as the Nine Years War (c.1593-1603) threatened English rule in the second Tudor kingdom and the country became a theatre of the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604). As a result of this military emergency officials in Ireland began composing a deluge of policy papers from the mid-1590s onwards. Over two hundred of these treatises

AbstractThat Henry VIII’s will was stamped with a facsimile of his signature rather than authentically signed has long been taken as proof that it was ‘forged’ sometime around his death in 1547. This article explores the longer history of the stamp as an authorizing mechanism, locating its creation at the beginning of the reign for the purposes of justice-giving. An investigation of these earlier documents

British and Irish attitudes towards their Turkish enemy during the First World War have rarely been explored. Unlike the German ‘Hun’, Turks were praised as ‘clean fighters’, despite overwhelming evidence of the Armenian Genocide. Using largely unexamined press material, this article attributes the ‘clean-fighting Turk’s’ longevity to the sanctity of soldier testimony, where it originated, and the

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

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

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

Between 1930 and 1954 Mary Dorothy George wrote catalogue entries for 12,553 ‘Golden Age’ satirical prints. This article examines George as a curatorial voice, an interlocutor between the archived past and her readers. It examines the labour processes that produced George’s contributions to the British Museum’s Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, her writing as a corpus, and her interpretations

Abstract The 2020 Historical Research lecture, ‘Writing histories of 2020’, asked how future historians might study and understand the global coronavirus pandemic. The lecture brought together historians with three distinctive perspectives: contemporary history and writing of the very recent past, histories of record keeping and current archive creation, and the history of contagious disease and its

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