Showing papers in "The English Historical Review in 2004"

The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914

Abstract: Margot Finn?s book The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740?1914 is the first volume in a new series published by Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories) which seeks to draw social and cultural history more closely together. In this respect the book is a resounding success, charting the ways in which economic and social relations were mediated through cultural forms. Many of the themes will be familiar to readers of Craig Muldrew?s work on credit in early modern England, which revealed the extent to which economic transactions took place within a web of social relationships.(1) It is Margot Finn?s achievement to demonstrate conclusively that the social and cultural relations created by credit continued to play a major role in the lives of all classes between 1740 and 1914. Economic activity remained a fundamentally social activity, embedded in historically specific cultural norms and expectations that profoundly limit the usefulness of analytic categories derived from classical political economy.

‘The Blood of our Sons’: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War

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Popular Politics and the English Reformation

Abstract: concepts. Even many people who never showed significant interest in Protestant ideas would have instinctively backed away from controversial issues and perceived ‘risk’ when bequeathing their lives’ savings. A vicious circle was thus created in which the controversy surrounding prayers for the dead made people nervous about paying for them, and people’s nervousness about paying for them increased the perceived controversy surrounding the issue. Out of this vicious circle emerged a new phenomenon, a trickle that was to become a flood: the dissolution of chantries, both by private individuals and by the Crown, without statutory authority or ecclesiastical consent. There had always been chantries that lapsed for lack of funds, either because of diminution of the principal for the endowment or because memories of the beneficiaries grew cold and their descendants needed ready cash. In the context of the dissolution of the monasteries, however, with predations seemingly so normal and natural, liquidations of intercessory endowments became commonplace. In Yorkshire, for instance, Thomas Boswell claimed chantry lands at Conisborough in 1537, Sir Edmund Ackroyd took possession of the lands of Frith chantry in 1539, and Thomas Markenfield seized the lands of St John’s chantry at Wathe in 1542.24 At Exeter around 1538, Richard Drew appropriated the property bequeathed to two parish churches for intercessory masses, while in the same year the prominent citizen John Blackaller confiscated obit lands at Shillingford.25 At Nuneaton, 23 Peter Marshall, The Catholic Priesthood and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1994), p. 54. 24 Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York, p. 207. 25 Whiting, ‘For the Health of my Soul’, pp. 74–5. 244 Collaboration and popular politics under Edward VI Warwickshire, in 1542, parishioners conspired with the descendants of a chantry’s founder to convert the priest’s service into a grammar school; this was certainly laudable in worldly terms, but it did little for the soul of the founder, still presumably awaiting release from purgatory. Similarly, at Monmouth, parishioners converted chantry funds into an endowment for a church organist, while at Harwich in Essex chantry funds were used to repair the town’s sea walls.26 At Olney, Buckinghamshire, in 1542, one Edward Brymley detained the rents of ‘a certain house called the Katherine Wheel’ which was owed to the ‘Earl of Warwick chantry’.27 In London, the Goldsmiths’ Company was sued in 1540 because masses were no longer sung for Robert Butler, founder of an intercessory endowment maintained by the Company. The Goldsmiths claimed that the income had been stolen and that therefore a priest could not be paid, rather a telling argument for such a rich London guild.28 The Crown’s own dissolutions prior to the first Chantries Act in 1545 were particularly significant, not only because of their scale but because they underlined the hypocrisy of a government which justified the 1545 statute on the grounds that chantry property was being embezzled by unscrupulous subjects. Between 1540 and 1545, the government dissolved at least nineteen chantries and fraternities, six free chapels, ten hospitals and twenty-five colleges, all institutions whose endowments included provisions for intercession for the dead. While the number of chantries and chapels was modest, twenty-five colleges amounted to more than one-quarter of all the colleges in the realm, and ten hospitals amounted to one-eleventh of the total; even the universities of Oxford and Cambridge feared for their continued existence in the wake of these extraordinary dissolutions. Some predations were particularly eccentric; at Burton-upon-Trent, for instance, the king sent commissioners in 1545 to dissolve a college that he himself had founded only four years previously on the site of a recently suppressed monastery. According to Alan Kreider, the government’s selection of intercessory institutions to dissolve was based not on the nature of the institutions themselves but on the attractiveness of their endowments: in many cases the king’s hand was encouraged by influential courtiers or magnates who requested the grants from these properties.29 The motivations for private dissolutions, where they can be discerned, ran the gamut. On the one hand, there is no question that some confiscations represented pious attempts to pre-empt anticipated assaults by the government. In the extraordinary case of Richmond, for instance, the borough took 26 Kreider, English Chantries, p. 157. 27 PRO E 301/108. 28 Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 387. 29 Kreider, English Chantries, pp. 160–4. The dissolution of the chantries 245 control of the endowments for six chantries, two chapels, and ten obits in December 1544, then provided pensions for the priests out of the town’s regular income so that they could continue their intercessory activities. With the complicity of the community’s leadership, Richmond successfully hid the existence of these institutions until late in Edward VI’s reign.30 This may seem extraordinary for 1544, before the Crown had made any official move against the chantries, but it was a natural reaction to Henry VIII’s reputation for impiety concerning prayers for the dead. As early as 1536, the abbot of Woburn had noted that ‘his grace as yet hath built no house of prayer, not so much as one chantry for himself that I know’.31 The continued maintenance of mass priests from dissolved chantries as occurred at Richmond, however, was extremely rare. Far more often, individuals or communities dissolved intercessory institutions for financial reasons, taking no action to continue their religious function; wealth was protected within the locality, but prayers came to an abrupt end. In 1536, for instance, the city of York, long suffering from recession, obtained a private bill in parliament allowing it to suppress three obits and nine chantries whose priests the corporation had been required to support; the bill granted the remaining property of their endowments to the ‘mayor and commonalty’ of the city. The only thing unusual about the York case was that the town got permission. Elsewhere, as in Walkeringham, Nottinghamshire, where the community created a fund for the ‘Trent banks and a highway leading to the same’, confiscations proceeded behind the king’s back, with no provisions made for priests’ livings. Whether these actions show any self-conscious change in beliefs about purgatory is questionable, but they certainly show a remarkable willingness to put the financial needs of the living above the spiritual needs of the dead.32 On the opposite end of the spectrum from events in Richmond, moreover, in some cases there clearly were reformist motives behind the dissolution of intercessory institutions. In the London parish of St Matthew Friday Street, for instance, the churchwardens tried illegally to remove a chantry priest in 1540; one of these churchwardens, William Etis, was indicted in the same year for harbouring evangelicals. Another London parish with a powerful early Protestant tradition, All Hallows Lombard Street, had an income of almost £6 per year for a chantry priest but provided for no such priest after 1540.33 In the village of Holflete, Lincolnshire, an undated dispute over ‘a chapel and alms house . . . and eighteen acres of land belonging to the same’ 30 Ibid., p. 158. 31 BL Cotton MS Cleopatra E. IV, fol. 111r. 32 Kreider, English Chantries, pp. 159–60 and 157; A. G. Dickens, ‘A Municipal Dissolution of Chantries at York, 1536’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 36 (1945), 164–74; Statutes, vol. 3, 27 Hen.VIII, c. 32, pp. 582–4. 33 Brigden, London and the Reformation, p. 387. 246 Collaboration and popular politics under Edward VI was radicalised by an accusation that ‘the inhabitants of the said hamlet of Holflete did continually use in the said chapel papistical ceremonies and the usurped power of the bishop of Rome’.34 In some instances, the stripping of chantries and free chapels could even look uncannily like the plunder of monasteries, with subjects breaking in and removing anything of value. In June 1544, for example, remarkable spoliation occurred at a chapel of St John in South Willingham, Lincolnshire: One Thomas Marbery, squire, William Twydale, Richard Thomson, Thomas Grene, John Redhed the elder, George Grene, Henry Johnson, Thomas Bard, Charles Bury, and John Redhed the younger, by the commandment and procurement of Francis Askew, squire, unlawfully assembled themselves . . . and the doors and windows of the same chapel then and there did riotously break, and a chest of books there being to the value of 12d, and a bell with a clock and the seat and desks of the said chapel, did then and there riotously take away and converted the same to their own uses . . . and pulled down and threw down all the leaf and covering of the same chapel and carried away the same . . . to the value of £40 sterling, and also took down out of the windows of the same chapel all the glass and iron . . . to the value of £5 sterling at the least . . . and left nothing there but only the bare stone walls.35 We do not know how Francis Askew ‘procured’ his accomplices, but, given that he was the brother of Anne Askew, we may reasonably assume that events at South Willingham had evangelical implications.36 In other instances the raiding of chantry wealth could be glossed, whether disingenuously or not, as a form of obedience to royal policy. In Chester, for example, the chantry priest Thomas Warnyngham claimed that he was ‘wrongfully expelled’ from his intercessory post at the collegiate church of St John the Baptist by ‘the dean of the said collegiate church with other the ministers of the same church’ who allegedly colluded in their ‘covetous and perverse minds’ to withhold his £3 8d stipend. The dean’s reply to these accusations, however, was that Warnyngham’s offi

Dressing Renaissance Florence: Families, Fortunes and Fine Clothing

Abstract: In a famous essay on the tenacity of the Burckhardtian conception of the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga wrote that '[A]t the sound of the word ‘Renaissance’ the dreamer of past beauty sees purple and gold.' After reading Carole Collier Frick’s engrossing, multi-layered book, Huizinga’s romantic dreamers will have to become far more nuanced in their visual imaginings of the past. Purple, it turns out, might be the colour pavonazzo, but there is no consensus in the primary sources, and peacock blue, peahen brown, red violet, blue violet, and a colour 'between blue and black', are all equal contenders for the name.(p. 170) Indeed, whether it is possible to recapture precisely what people wore in this period is thrown open to question in this book when, in the absence of substantial material remains, all we are left with are literary and visual sources, both of which are deficient and often misleading, intentionally or otherwise.

Policing the Past: Official History, Secrecy and British Intelligence since 1945

Abstract: This article provides a systematic analysis of post-war government policy towards the history of secret services. It focuses particularly upon the problem of preserving secrecy and argues that official history was an instrument through which government sought to address public pressure for the release information, while also extending a degree of control. It shows how the authorities enjoyed some initial success in cloaking the most significant wartime activities, including signals intelligence and organised strategic deception. However, this secrecy was eventually eroded by ‘insiders’, armed with privileged information and near-immunity from prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Once the existence of these secret activities had seeped into the public domain, officials were increasingly inclined to deploy official accounts of intelligence successes during the Second World War in order to offset some the more embarrassing debacles of the Cold War. These included the story of treachery by the double-agent Kim Philby which received wide publicity in the late 1960s. The article argues that there is substantial evidence of policy-learning in the matter of official history, explicable in part by the presence of officials who handled similar issues over long periods of time. This was exemplified by Burke Trend, Cabinet Secretary to Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and then Edward Heath. It is suggested that secret services have always enjoyed an adversarial relationship with historical researchers. However, official history, although bringing its own difficulties, offered government a middle way and an opportunity of making a positive response to the problems of policing the past.

Reform without Frontiers in the Last Years of Catholic Scotland

Abstract: Publisher's copyright statement: This is a pre-copy-editing author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in English historical review following peer review. The de nitive publisher-authenticated version Ryrie, Alec (2004) 'Reform without frontiers in the last years of Catholic Scotland.', The English historical review., 119 (480). pp. 27-56 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/119.480.27

Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600

Abstract: This book is about how we have treated nature in some of the most valued landscapes in Europe. Combining social and cultural history with ecology and geography, T.C. Smout has written an environmental history that is both profound and accessible. The Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, the Lake District and the northern moors and plains of England form a natural region. The crags, moorland, woods and wetlands have been both treasured for their beauty and biodiversity and reviled as unproductive deserts to be improved and reclaimed. The fields have been made more fertile for production and the waters tapped for industrial use, but at a certain cost. The contest between two views of nature - conservation versus development; use versus delight - is at the centre of the book. The author begins by taking a hard look at our encounters with the natural world. He shows how the Scots and the northern English never shared the southerner's view of their environment as intimidating, and describes how conflict between using and enjoying the land gradually arose and gave birth to modern conservation ideas. He reveals how the history of the woods - especially the 'Great Wood of Caledon' - is quite different from popular myth, and examines the history and fate of the soil and the fields; of the rivers, lakes and lochs; of the hills and mountains; and of the modern quarrel over the countryside. 'By the end,' the author writes, 'I hope to have presented on my theatre a dramatic tale that tells us a fair amount not only of northern Britain, but something about the globe and the European west as a whole over the last four hundred years.'

Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract: The historical study of love, sexuality and the ‘private sphere’ in modern Britain is now well established. A substantial amount of research has been undertaken on sexual identities, erotic behaviour and representations of romance, and has been ably synthesised by historians such as Lesley Hall, Angus McLaren and the late Michael Mason. In recent years, moreover, a string of television documentaries, displaying various degrees of intellectual rigour, have examined these themes for a broader audience. Yet there remain those who continue to believe that this work is not ‘proper’ history. Marcus Collins quotes one doubter, John Vincent (who has declared that ‘history is hopeless on love’), in the prologue of his ambitious new survey of personal relationships in twentieth-century Britain. While acknowledging that intimate actions and private emotions rarely leave direct documentary traces of the type favoured by historians, Collins observes that the quality of the existing literature on these subjects suggests that the difficulties can be overcome. A thoroughly researched and consistently thought-provoking volume, Modern Love can be added to the growing list of books that prove Vincent wrong. Written in a clear and engaging style, and explicitly aimed at both an academic and a lay audience, it is not surprising that this work has attracted the attention of newspaper reviewers. Although some sections might prove rather dry for the general reader drawn by the tantalising title, it is a significant and original contribution to the historiography and another illustration of the rewards of studying private life.