It is perhaps not surprising that the central thread of manorial land law should be found in the pauper problem; for one of the most urgent needs of any age or society is the prevention of destitution. The “sturdy beggar” and “such as walk by night and sleep by day” were the terror of Plantagenet as well as Tudor, while the distress of the aged and impotent was as bitter in the thirteenth as in the sixteenth century, though voiced by no popular poet or press. The Court rolls of the Abbot of Crowland's manors of Oakington, Cottenham and Drayton give constant evidence of the effort consciously or unconsciously made to obviate these unproductive elements of the population, which might become a burden upon the efficient classes.

In the belief that the immigrant Irish were not merely degraded but degrading, and in support of a cataclysmic theory of history towards which he was advancing, Friedrich Engels in 1845 was convinced that “the Irish immigrants in England have added an explosive force to English society which will have significant consequences in due course’. By ‘English society’ Engels intended that of Scotland also, but a century later the historian of die Irish in Scotland, Dr James Handley, was writing: ‘Whether die immigrant has revolted instinctively or not against die bleakness of Scottish industrialism … the fact remains mat he has not made his presence effectively felt among the forces that attempt to control it’. If, however, Engels expected too much of the Irish, Dr Handley appears to have done diem less than justice, although his use of the word ‘effectively’ may have a special significance for him.

In recent years the outpouring of historical work on witchcraft has been prodigious. Twenty-first-century studies encompass every conceivable chronological and geographical area, from antiquity to the present, Massachusetts to Muscovy. Approaches have been varied, with witchcraft explored as an intellectual, legal, political, social, cultural, and psychological phenomenon. Of particular interest – and difficulty – is the ‘reality’ of witchcraft: how historians might recover contemporary meanings, beyond the meanings imposed by rationalists, romantics, and social scientists. This article examines nine books from the last five years to assess the state of the field, and to offer some suggestions for research in the future.

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.

For some years now, the repression of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) by the Paris police on 17 October 1961 has been a subject of controversy. This is despite the fact that those who have written about this incident are in agreement about its magnitude (more than 14,000 people arrested in two days) and its senseless violence. Yet there remains disagreement over the emotive question of the number of people killed. The recent publication of a study by Jim House and Neil MacMaster provides an opportunity to return to this issue, and to raise important questions about the methodologies and standards of research that have been used.

Although sometimes seen as a bastion of royalism, the northern counties supplied some of the most militant members of the Long Parliament. Northern MPs and peers figured prominently in the war party, played a key role in negotiating the Solemn League and Covenant, and comprised an important element within the anti-Scots, pro-New Model Army faction at Westminster. Anglo- Scottish relations in the Civil War period were intimately linked with the parliamentary history of the northern counties during the 1640s. This article examines the development and structure of the northern interest in the Long Parliament, and in particular its collaboration with the parliamentary Independents. Analysis of the drafting of the Newcastle peace propositions and of the Commons' efforts to reduce the size of the Covenanting forces indicates that the Independents relied heavily on evidence of abuses committed by the Scottish army in the northern counties to advance their own programme for settlement and to frustrate that of the Scots and their English allies. It is also argued that the Independents' exploitation of the northern reaction against the Scots had a profound impact upon the relations between all three Stuart monarchies.

Even though so much has so often been done, the study of parliament remains active, not least so for the sixteenth century. A fresh look at the present state of the question seems appropriate on this occasion when we are assembled to commemorate Sir John Neale, the foremost historian of the Tudor House of Commons. It is now nearly twenty years since Neale completed his life's work, and those twenty years have not been without further study and thought, sometimes assisted by the discovery of new evidence. No one, we may be sure, would have been better pleased than today's honorand to find that what so fully engaged his interest and his labours should continue to attract his successors – to know that he had not closed a book but opened a window.

This article explores the social, legal, and administrative response in Tudor and early Stuart England to people known in law as ‘Egyptians’ or ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ but commonly called ‘Gypsies’. It argues that such people differed from ordinary poor vagrants in their heritage, their language, and such activities as horse dealing and fortune-telling. Elizabethan and Jacobean publications placed Gypsies on the fringes of fecklessness, criminality, and the picaresque, and established a stereotype of deceit and imposture that has not yet disappeared. Acts of Parliament in 1531, 1554, and 1563 criminalized ‘Egyptians’, forbidding their entry, ordering their expulsion, and eventually making them liable to the death penalty. Enforcement, however, was haphazard, and repression co-existed uneasily with growing registers of tolerance. This is a neglected topic in early modern social history, with links to international and interdisciplinary Romani studies as well as work on itinerancy, ethnicity, and marginality.

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state's power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.

The following attempts a modest reconsideration of one of the most well-known early modern Englishmen, Samuel Pepys. More precisely, the article suggests that much closer attention needs to be paid to Pepys's textuality (not sexuality). In modern times, his diary has achieved canonical status to the detriment of other texts scripted in unison with the famed Cambridge manuscript, now meticulously transcribed. Tracing the multiple textual transactions elided by the final manuscript allows for important insight into the diary's partiality. We need to resist, as much as possible, the temptation of contextualizing the diary with biographical detail because that detail is so often derived from the diary itself. We should reverse our interpretive strategy: begin with Pepys's texts (plural), unravel their main interconnections, and only then reach tentative conclusions about the man. Establishing motive is a risky business when there is no subject for interrogation. There is, however, a text that wants a more rigorous contextualization.

This article addresses the extent to which Protestant states in Europe and North America depicted the French Protestants who had found refuge in these states, as having contributed to the process of nation building and the formation of national identity. It is shown that the arrival of Huguenots was portrayed positively as the historians of these nations could contend that Huguenots had been absorbed readily into the host society because their virtues of frugality and industry corresponded admirably with the ethic of their hosts. The article demonstrates that, in no case, did this depiction correspond with reality. It shows that within those countries of refuge, Huguenots fostered a distinctive French Protestant identity that enabled them to remain aloof from the culture of their host society. In all cases Huguenots asserted themselves as a self-confident minority, convinced of the superiority of their language and culture who believed themselves to be privileged in this world as in the next. When national histories came to be composed, this dimension to the Huguenot minorities came to be expunged from historical memory as was also the fact that the Huguenots were but one of several minorities whose distinctiveness had contributed largely to the shaping of the state, culture, and society of the emerging nation-states.

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.

The five years 1917–21 are commonly regarded as a period of unusual turmoil in Britain when fears of revolution reached an intensity unknown in more than three generations. In explaining this unrest, historians have naturally concentrated upon the organized Labour movement; upon the complex dialectics of a conservative rank-and-file marshalled behind creative revolutionary leaders in the engineering trades; and, in the trades unions and Labour party, upon the genesis and meaning of Clause IV. In all such studies the state's most powerful servants have, however, commanded relatively little attention. Other than as an instrument of public order intruding into industrial disputes, historians of the working class have shown scant interest in the serviceman who remains very much the ‘candy man’ in uniform. This article, by way of redress, is concerned to examine the character of unrest in the armed forces, to compare and contrast disaffection in the army and navy, and to review Labour's response to both veteran and serviceman.

The word hero cannot be defined simply. According to time and speaker, it can imply anything from the bravery of a moment to the courage and statesmanship of a lifetime. We do not enjoy the distinction in English which La Bruyère drew in French: to him un héros was a young, dauntless and venturesome man, one like Alexander; but against him had to be set the truly great man, the grand homme, the one with judgement, foresight, experience and considerable ability - a man like Caesar. As we shall see, hero can be used to describe both kinds of men. But if it has no very specific meaning, it is an important word for any study of the Victorian era - an era that for our purposes is taken to cover the years from the 1830s to the outbreak of the First World War. For the Victorians loved a hero, and the word often came to their lips. Carlyle, whose Heroes and hero-worship was first published in 1841, thought that a nation's whole history could be told in terms of its heroes, and he and Kingsley and Froude, to name three of the important literary figures of the age, regarded heroes as being vital to any society. They thought it particularly important that the new burgeoning industrial society should have heroes of its own, and that these should act as beacons and as examples. As Froude said in Representative men (1850), ‘the only education worth anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a character unless we have some notion of what we would form’.

During the half century (1854–1904) which followed the opening of Japan's ports, Westerners scrutinized the rediscovered archipelago and attempted to classify its inhabitants within their racial system. Despite the claim for ‘scientific’ objectivism, Western racial views of the Japanese were largely dictated by contemporary political and moral attitudes toward Japan. Hence, writings on the Japanese ‘race’ reflected not only the racial knowledge of the period but also the asymmetry between the West and Japan. These writings embodied a genuine discourse: they were propounded in texts, historically located, and displayed a coherent system of meaning. Critically, the Western discourse regarding the identity of the Japanese people aimed to maintain, and even produce, power relations between the colonial powers and the local population, and as such it exerted ideological influence on both Western readers and the Japanese. The present article traces this racial discourse, and attempts to explain the rapid transformation of the image of the Japanese people from an almost unknown racial entity to a national group Westerners perceived as a major racial threat.

This article argues that many traditional historical narratives of individualism have been reproduced in more recent discussions of the self and selfhood, and that attempts to discover a point at which the ‘modern’ self came into existence have been hampered by such assumptions. To provide an alternative to these approaches, discussions of the self in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will be examined. Eschewing overarching narratives, the discussion will focus on how neo-stoic sources were employed in the context of challenges to traditional forms of the humanist ethics of office-holding. Such ideas, important in writers like Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and William Cornwallis, have been associated with an idea of ‘new humanism’, but this article aims to discuss with precision how they relate to early modern ethical discussion. Here an insight can be gained into a particular philosophical development of the idea of the self. This can be more productive than some recent ‘new historicist’, or sociological, approaches to the literature of this period, which tend to the deconstruction of a particular set of sources through the use of the self as a theoretical heuristic.

At a meeting of the Birmingham Political Union in May 1833, the principal guest, Daniel O'Connell, congratulated his audience on having carried the Reform Bill through to success, for, he said, ‘it was not Grey and Althorp who carried it, but the brave and determined men of Birmingham’. In the heat of the struggle, even some of the whig ministers were willing to admit in the famous words of Russell that ‘it is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of the nation’. One of them told Thomas Attwood in May 1832 that ‘we owe our situation entirely to you’. Lord Durham maintained that ‘the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution’. Earl Grey himself, after the safe passing of the bill, thanked Attwood for all that he had done ‘to maintain popular support for the measure outside the House of Commons’.