This article explores how probation officers encouraged magistrates to hand down supervision orders for men charged with importuning via Social Enquiry Reports in the 1960s, a period characterized by a penal-welfare approach to crime and delinquent behaviour. Using nine reports on men charged with importuning, the article will show how ideals of citizenship were crucial to securing supervision. The article will consider to what extent definitions of citizenship varied depending on the offender's social class. In particular, the article will explore how ideals of citizenship were invoked to encourage supervision in circumstances where the offender already had previous convictions for importuning as well as cases where there were none. Finally, the article will consider to what extent the liberalization of the sexual offences laws in 1967 affected the way probation officers defined citizenship for homosexuals and altered the way supervision was encouraged in reports for men charged with importuning. Rounding up the above findings, the conclusion will also look at how successful probation officers were in securing supervision orders by portraying importuners as good citizens and will assess to what extent probation can be conflated with leniency and permissiveness.

This article examines the life of Lady Elizabeth Anson (1725–60), daughter of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, and the wife of Admiral George Lord Anson, first lord of the admiralty. Using a sample of her letters, this article argues that Lady Anson engaged with letter-writing as an inherently political activity. Previous studies of Lady Anson’s correspondence have emphasized her role in the Yorkes’ political network, but this article foregrounds her marriage to Lord Anson and her life at the admiralty. In a marriage shaped by the strains of naval service, Lady Anson used her talents as a letter-writer to establish a role for herself as her husband’s political partner. Building on the work of Elaine Chalus, Judith Lewis, and Sarah Richardson, this article explores the ways in which Lady Anson used letters to disseminate intelligence and negotiate patronage. It examines her friendship with the powerful admiralty secretary, John Cleveland, and considers the ways in which her physical proximity to the admiralty office gave her privileged access to the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Consequently, her writing provides important insights into the ways in which elite women could use letters to establish their own political authority.

The years between 1890 and 1914 saw several prominent studies from statesmen-administrators comparing British India with the Roman empire. These were not the self-congratulatory comparisons of earlier decades, but serious comparative studies aimed at learning practical lessons from Rome's successes and failures. To gain a clearer picture of the significance of these analogies and how they were used, the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination papers from the same period are analysed. It is argued that, following a move in 1892 to make the ICS a fully graduate service, the Civil Service commissioners showed a sustained interest in asking candidates to compare India (and the wider British empire) with the empires of Rome and Greece. Rome was considered particularly relevant for the directly ruled parts of the empire, with a focus on provincial administration and frontier defence, while Athens was preferred for questions of colonial federation. In the final section, the spread of subjects and weighting of marks within the examination are considered. It is argued that a series of changes post-1892 were designed to favour candidates who had studied Classics at university enabling them to obtain a higher proportion of the overall marks than those specializing in other subjects.

This article investigates the complex entanglement of neutrality and displacement in Hong Kong and Macau with a focus on the impact of and responses to an unprecedented influx of refugees during the Second World War. Displaced persons were of central importance in shaping the ambiguous experience of neutrality before Hong Kong's occupation by Japan in late 1941 and until the end of the war in Macau. Building on Elizabeth Sinn's conceptualization of Hong Kong as an ‘in-between place’, this article considers these two foreign-ruled territories as ‘in-between places’ where multi-layered transborder flows developed in an ‘in-between time’ of neutrality. Highlighting similarities and connections between Hong Kong and Macau, it argues that neutrality was shaped by the movement of refugees and that refugees often experienced neutrality differently depending on perceptions of race, class, and nationality. The presence of diverse communities of refugees shaped multiple dimensions of urban life, with colonial concerns for spatial order and social control co-existing with humanitarian co-operation. The discourses and practices around refugees are an important precedent to understanding post-war refugeedom in these territories.

In 1837 leading reformers in a number of England's rapidly growing but still archaically governed industrial cities began to agitate for the incorporation of their boroughs in accordance with the provisions of the Municipal Corporations Act passed two years before. Up until then little interest had been shown in the subject in the provinces, an attitude which is rather easier to understand than the sudden belated burst of enthusiasm. For, even after it had become clear in 1835 that the great reform bill had made some sort of municipal reform inevitable, Tory opponents of the measure had not given way without a struggle. By strictly limiting the powers of the reformed borough councils, by creating a property qualification for councillors, and by requiring the inhabitants of unincorporated cities to petition the Privy Council for a charter rather than, say, providing for automatic incorporation of parliamentary boroughs, they hoped to emasculate what they dared not destroy. In this they were remarkably successful. The borough councils remained hobbled for years because the powers of the variety of trusts which existed in most cities to take care of such things as paving, water supply, cleaning and general improvements were not handed over to the municipal authorities. And largely because of this even many reformers in the proud industrial cities of the north and midlands were often less than enthusiastic about getting a charter for their city. The prospect of replacing narrowly selected Court Leets and Boroughreeves with semi-democratically elected borough councils and mayors was appealing, but it had to be balanced against the fact that these councils would not supersede but merely take their place alongside already existing boards and commissions, with the result that the cost of local government was likely to go up. Looked at in this way there did not seem to be much in it, or at least not enough to make incorporation worth the fighting that would probably be necessary to secure it.

The earliest literature on the massacre of St Bartholomew, we are told, was dominated by the attempt of Henry, the Duke of Anjou, to secure the throne of Poland. Henry needed the support of the Protestants in that country—then a more considerable body than they have ever been since; and, as he had been one of the chief culprits in the massacre, the Huguenots were determined that the world should know the magnitude of the crime. He secured his election in 1573, but, in the face of the storm which was raised against him, he was supposed to have been seized with remorse in Cracow, and to have made a confession to his doctor, Miron—a narrative which we shall have to notice later.

The office of Marshal of the Eyre is the subject of at least two interesting cases reported in the Year Books of Edward II. As no account of this Marshalsy appears to exist it seemed worth while to bring together the following particulars, not only for their own sake, but as illustrating the history of a medieval serjeanty. These particulars fall under three heads: the origin and evolution of the office, its tenure and descent, and the functions and activities it involved.

It is a remarkable fact that the only continuous series of records which has survived from the twelfth century, the Great Rolls of the Pipe, was not completely available in print with adequate indexes until the thirties of the twentieth century. The search for an explanation takes one back to the beginnings of English medieval scholarship in the early seventeenth century. The great antiquaries of that day had not conceived the idea of printing adequately indexed editions of the records they used, for the medieval past, when books were patiently transcribed by hand for circulation, was too near. When scholars met to discuss their work it was of making copies by hand and passing them from one to another that they talked. They were concerned that the notes sent to them should be on ‘paper of the same size for bignesse as the sender first did use’. To them in the seventeenth century, the past was a virgin field in which they had no forerunners; and they themselves aimed at writing history which should stand for ever.

The decline in prosperity of the British West Indies after 1815 was so rapid as to obscure their importance during the Napoleonic War; but of their commercial pre-eminence among British colonies at that time there are many proofs. Thus, on 12 September 1804, while watching Toulon, Nelson, who knew them well, wrote in a lately published letter, “…I think the French will some day send their fleets to sea, and that the West Indies … is (sic) more likely for them to hurt us in than this country. We have but few troops to defend our islands and recent conquests; 10 or 12,000 French troops would injure us more there than in any other part of the world.” Herein he agreed with Dundas, who in August 1796 stated to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, that far more harm would result to our commerce and credit from a French invasion of Jamaica than of Great Britain or Ireland. As is well known, Nelson in April 1805 acted on his conviction recorded above, and, despite the perilously scanty news as to the course of the Franco-Spanish fleet, he chased it to the West Indies because of his conviction of the immense importance of those colonies. Lord Barham, now First Lord, approved his action; for he himself had come to the conclusion from the French moves against those colonies, “that depredation and the destruction of our trade is their grand object,” and that the invasion of England was now a secondary object. This view was for the present somewhat exaggerated; for Napoleon, who overworked his admirals even more than his generals, expected Villeneuve and Gravina first to devastate our Leeward Islands (with Tobago thrown in) and then to fly back, along with Ganteaume's fleet, to cover the invasion of England.

The revolution by which the municipal government of Cambridge was in the decade 1780-90 transformed from an oligarchy to a dictatorship has this in common with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, that it was made possible by the absence of a written constitution; but whereas it is impossible, as Maitland has said, by any stretch of ingenuity to make the Revolution of 1688-9 a perfectly legal act, the processes of constitutional change at Cambridge a century later were again and again submitted to the scrutiny of the courts. Indeed, Newling v. Francis, the judgement in which finally established the right of the corporation to revise its own constitution, may be described as a leading case in the law of corporations.

Students of history are well aware of the ambiguity of the term medieval. Although it may be true that for some thousand years, between c. 500 and c. 1500 A.D., the social, economic, political and religious life of Western Europe had characteristics easily distinguishable on a broad view from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization that preceded, and from what we call the modern world of nation-states that followed, yet within that millennium the developments are so great, and the changes and declines so numerous, that the careful historian distrusts anything approaching to a general judgment which might confuse century with century, and region with region. Yet in spite of this, many, whose knowledge of the social or artistic life of past ages is very wide, forget such distinctions, and speak readily of the medieval papacy, the medieval village, the medieval craftsman or medieval philosophy, as if each of these expressions denoted a single clear-cut system or institution.