Several recent studies dealing with the English church during the Norman period add immeasurably to our understanding of the era, but nonetheless represent a lost opportunity to recreate the actual ecclesiastical milieu, an English church unsevered from its Norman counterpart. Institutional differences surely existed between the two churches, yet much is lost in treating them separately. Indeed, few historians would attempt to study the great eleventh and twelfth-century cathedrals and abbey churches in England detached from those in Normandy. It is therefore the purpose of this paper to examine the customs, ideas, and especially the individuals which the two churches shared.

A concerted effort to reexamine political institutions as they once functioned, rather than as a necessary condition for the states which they later became, has already begun. In 1976 John Le Patourel produced an impressive synthesis, The Norman Empire, and asserted that following the Norman Conquest, England and Normandy formed one dominion. It was united by a ruler who was at the same time King of the English and Duke of the Normans, and by a baronial class which had extensive holdings on both sides of the Channel. This supposedly came to an end in 1144 when Geoffrey of Anjou conquered Normandy. A recent review of the The Norman Empire, which like most reviews speaks of its sterling qualities, nevertheless points out that the sections dealing with the church are, “not given much space … (and) are probably the most derivative in the book.”

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.

In the decade after 1807, the Whig Opposition was divided between the conservatives and the progressives, the former consisting of the Grenvillites and most Foxite-Whigs, particularly their leaders, while many of the latter associated together in the Mountain. This was led by Samuel Whitbread until his death in 1815. It was distinguished from the rest of the Opposition primarily by its independent, aggressively activist support for economical and parliamentary reform and its willingness to associate on these issues with the followers of Sir Francis Burdett and the metropolitan radicals. The Opposition as a whole, and more recently the Grenvillites, have been carefully examined as part of the ongoing study of political groups in this era, but as yet there is no systematic analysis of the Mountain. This paper identifies twenty-one Mountaineers and marshalls the evidence for the nature of their activities together. It also analyzes the sources and nature of their reformist ideology, their independence, their tactics as a pressure group and their relationship to the Whigs and the radicals.

I

Twelve Mountaineers were by birth aristocrats and gentry. The Mountain's independent character was in part shaped by country gentlemen like Thomas William Coke and Charles Callis Western. Although committed to Whiggism and the Whig party, such men also inherited in some respects the eighteenth-century country party mentality which believed that the executive was corrupt and prided itself on acting independently as a check upon its excesses. Young Lord Folkestone, even more independent, was committed to Whiggism but not at all to the Whig party for he thought of himself as an independent, virtuous aristocrat guarding against and exposing government corruption.

In 1835 the English Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst introduced into the House of Lords a bill to correct an ambiguity in the law concerning marriages within prohibited degrees. The existing law, based on the 1533 Henrican statute fixing the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, specified that marriages within prohibited degrees could be annulled at any time within the lifetime of both spouses by the Ecclesiastical Court. Lord Lyndhurst argued that the uncertain status of such “voidable marriages” created an inconvenience and hardship for the married persons and especially for their children, who could during their parents' lifetime be declared illegitimate. His specific motive was to guarantee the legitimacy and inheritance of the son of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had married his deceased wife's half-sister, a relationship within the prohibited degrees. Lyndhurst proposed that parliament pass a bill to limit to two years the time within which marriages could be annulled.

The consensus in parliament was that the ambiguity of “voidable marriages” should be eliminated, and they readily passed a revised form of Lord Lyndhurst's bill, declaring that all marriages within the prohibited degrees of affinity contracted before August 31, 1835 were immediately and absolutely valid. Yet, even as they eased restrictions on existing marriages, they tightened the law for the future by adding a clause which made marriages of both affinity and consanguinity contracted after that date absolutely void.

In the parliamentary debate on the bill, there was some opposition from those who argued that marriages within certain degrees of affinity, in particular a man and his deceased wife's sister, should be permitted.

Historians agree that the public schools played a central role in the creation of Victorian society and that in particular they were seminal in the construction of that “mid-Victorian compromise” which made the mid-century an era of “balance,” “equipoise,” and accommodation. There is further agreement that the cadre of boys produced by the newly reformed public schools became that mid-Victorian governing and social elite which was at once larger, more broadly based, more professional and, to many, more talented than the one which preceded it. The importance of the public schools in this regard was, as Asa Briggs affirms, twofold. They assimilated the “representatives of old families with the sons of the new middle classes,” thereby creating the “social amalgam” which, in Briggs' view, “cemented old and new ruling groups which had previously remained apart.” Secondly, the singular expression of that amalgamation was an elite type, the “Christian Gentleman”—the result of an “education in character” administered under the influence of Dr. Arnold. Arnold was able to do this because he “reconciled the serious classes” (that is, the commercial middle class) “to the public schools,” sharing as he did “their faith in progress, goodness, and their own vocation.” At first, the schools “attracted primarily the sons of the nobility, gentry and professional classes.” Later, it was the “sons of the leaders of industry” who were, like earlier generations of boys, amalgamated with “the sons of men of different traditions” in a broadened “conception of a gentleman.”

In Florence Nightingale's correspondence a series of letters to and from J.S. Mill treat a different subject than her usual correspondence with government officials, health and sanitation reformers, and hospital administrators in many parts of the world. Although it was never her intention when she initiated the exchange of letters, she and Mill quickly became involved in a controversy concerning the role of women.

Interwoven with some religious and philosophical matters, the Nightingale-Mill correspondence which falls into two periods, 1860 and 1867, is essentially a debate on women's rights. One debate concerns terminology and hinges on the entire validity of the question of publicity for the women's movement, then in its infancy, as well as the opening of the medical profession to women. The other focuses on differing perceptions of the role of women in political action. The exchange never became public during the lifetime of the participants, emerging with little notice only in the twentieth century with the complete publication of their correspondence in the journal Hospitals in 1936.

J.S. Mill's views on women's rights were public knowledge in his own day and have continued to be studied exhaustively. Florence Nightingale has been studied as the remarkable woman responsible for opening a respected profession for women. The point is often made that she refused to sign the women's petition Mill presented to the House of Commons in 1866 and would not at first become a member of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.