A new topic of controversy was interjected into relations between the English crown and the community of the realm during the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries as a result of large scale purveyancing of victuals, military supplies, and transport to provision a nation at war. The old right of purveyance or prise-taking, which permitted the king, members of his family, royal officials, and the greater nobility to preempt foodstuffs and requisition carriage for their personal use, was transformed into an elaborate mechanism for supplying English armies fighting in Scotland and France. The conflict provoked by this institutional change dominated crown-community relations in England from the latter part of Edward I's reign forward through the reign of Edward II and much of Edward III's. In order to defend private property against royal purveyance, representatives of the community experimented—especially during the period 1297 to 1362—with several methods for restricting the practice. But efforts to regulate purveyance were hindered by the ambiguous nature of the king's right, which could be viewed both as a royal prerogative and as a simple act of buying necessities for the king and his court. Further, depending on its scope and extent, purveyance by the crown could be seen either as a means of provisioning the household alone or as a form of national taxation applicable to the country at large. Occasionally during this period the community equated purveyance with regular taxation and tried to subject it to parliamentary control. Eventually, however, the nation was compelled to accept the view of purveyance as a commercial arrangement between English kings and their subjects based on the more or less legitimate right of the crown to take goods and services by forced loan or under promise of future payment. Accordingly, attempts to regulate it assumed the form of legislation designed to assure the prompt compensation of sellers, the accountability of the king's agents, and the punishment of corruption.

“Social Darwinism” means almost as many things as there are people who have written on it; but this paper takes it to be a generic term for theories of human social development and maintenance which are in some way inspired by biological evolutionary theories—this “inspiration” could take the form of seeing human sociality as a straight extension of the animal (and perhaps plant) domain, or it could involve some sort of analogy. In discussion of the roots of social Darwinism two names invariably appear—that of Charles Darwin himself, obviously, and that of Herbert Spencer. Here, however is the end of agreement. Who was the more important and influential, divides scholars right down the middle; as also do the questions of who really came first and whether their doctrines were essentially the same.

Because there is so much disagreement, no one has yet adequately argued to precisely the right conclusion. To anticipate, this paper argues that both Darwin and Spencer represent fundamental advances (or, less normatively, shifts beyond) their common major source, Thomas Robert Malthus; and that although there was overlap (and undoubted mutual borrowing) their positions were fundamentally dissimilar. Consequently, a search for the roots of Social Darwinism yields two sources, Darwin and Spencer respectively, and that what came from these sources was different. This essay begins with a brief discussion of Malthus's views, paying special attention to his relevance to social Darwinian lines of thought, considers the views of Spencer and Darwin on human social structures, and concludes by comparing the two thinkers, noting their similarities, but arguing that these are far outweighed by their differences.

The Reformed Kirk of Scotland has a reputation for vigorous repression of festivity hardly to be surpassed by any other Protestant church. From 1560 on, the authorities of the kirk from local session to General Assembly waged a stern and unremitting campaign against the celebration of Yule, Easter, May Day, Midsummer, and saints' days; against feasting, whether at marriages or wakes; against Sunday sports and dancing and guising—in short, against anything that might distract newly Reformed laity from the central Protestant focus on the sermon, the Bible, and the godly life of moral discipline and prayer. Their goals were both negative and positive. They were intent on quashing popish superstition in part because they were convinced that its persistence helped to explain the recurrence of plague, famine, and other divine judgments on the land. In a more positive sense, they were trying to clear the way for construction of a new vision of the good life—one that exalted word over image and discipline over ritual, and in which community cohesion was achieved by a shared Protestant identity and the common goal of a devout and orderly society. Modern observers generally credit their campaign with remarkable success; certainly the popular image of Scotland after the Reformation is grim and joyless—and with some reason. Days of fasting and humiliation under presbyterian rule came close to outnumbering the old saints' days, and they vastly outnumbered new days of thanksgiving. Official policy on the matter of festivity was exemplary for a Reformed nation.

On March 9, 1623, ten English merchants were beheaded on Amboyna in Indonesia by order of Harman van Speult, the Dutch governor of the island. They died accused of plotting to seize control of Fort Victoria, the island's stronghold, in order to take over the local spice trade. Considering the number of lives lost in the centuries of conflict between Dutch and British merchants in the East Indies, the incident on Amboyna seems in hindsight to have been a rather insignificant affair. Yet the occurrence played an important role in English politics under the early Stuarts, and influenced English/Dutch relations for a century.

News of the incident, which the English came to know as the Amboyna Massacre, reached England on May 29, 1624, and caused a diplomatic dilemma. James I, who was negotiating an alliance with the Netherlands against Spain, chose to deal with the situation through diplomacy rather than military reprisals, a position his son supported. It was a decision for which neither the Stuarts' contemporaries nor their modern chroniclers would forgive them. John Chamberlain, the friend and correspondent of many important court figures, wrote in July 1624 that he hoped James would “say lesse so he would do more” to make the Dutch pay for insulting English honor. By February of the next year, he was lamenting that he had “knowne the time when they [the Dutch] durst not have offered the least of those indignities we have lately swallowed and indured.” Chamberlain's belief that James's policy consisted primarily of inaction, and that it played into the hands of the Dutch, has been a popular theme in modern accounts.

Most of Disraeli's recent biographers have drawn attention to the anti-Semitism which he experienced as a schoolboy and as an aspiring politician at the raucous free-for-all of the early Victorian hustings. But the barrage of anti-Semitism directed at him when he was prime minister between 1874 and 1880 has not received the same scholarly attention. Lord Blake, for example, in a work of almost 800 pages, devotes only three short sentences to the anti-Semitism of this period. To some degree it is easy to see why this is so. Although Disraeli was baptized into Christianity just before he turned thirteen, he was so harangued and ridiculed as a Jew during his early election campaigns that the anti-Semitic mood of the public could not be ignored, either by contemporary observers or by historians. The anti-Semitism he faced as prime minister, however, was not literally thrust in his face, and it did not intrude on his public appearances. It is perhaps understandable then that historians, contemplating the marked contrast between the vigorous Jew baiting of Disraeli's early elections and the absence of it in his later ones, would assume that, whatever prejudices might lurk in private diaries, letters, and memoirs, expressions of anti-Semitism in that most public of all arenas, the world of politics, were now unacceptable. Increasing political decorum, the triumph of liberal and nonconformist ideologies, the Emancipation of the Jews in 1858, their continuing acculturation and assimilation, their greater role in public life, and of course Disraeli's own prominence as leader of the “national” party combined, it might be argued, to create a political and social climate in which public expressions of anti-Semitism were neither profitable nor respectable.

Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports—Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's mid-seventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.

Historians differ widely in appreciating the fiscal grievances of the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Following the Dodds, some dismiss them as a marginal concern, while others regard them as a major cause of revolt. No matter where they stand, historians have handled these grievances without careful analysis. This seems to stem from a debate that has dogged both rebellions. The complexity of the rebels' complaint is obscured by a simplistic desire to show that the revolts were primarily of religious provenance, notwithstanding the variety of causes evident in the rebels' demands. Furthermore, the two main advocates of secular motivation, A. G. Dickens and R. R. Reid, perversely mention the fiscal grievances only in passing. Yet they were there, firmly declared in the rebels' bills, petitions, and songs. A pervasive force affecting the whole range of society, they sustained the rebel view that the government had to be checked not only to prevent the subversion of the Church but also the decay of the commonwealth. They were also present in the revolts of 1537 as northerners rose again, this time to protest against a breach of promise committed by the government's attempt to collect the lay subsidy and clerical tenth before the York Parliament had met to determine whether or not they should be collected.

This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst onto Britain's commercial scene in the early 1920s. Highly visible on packaging, poster hoardings, and advertisements within the press, brand mascots became popular media stars in the 1920s, seeming to herald a dawning age of material parity and collective consumer sovereignty. A decade later, Penguin's mascot used this utopianism around branded mass consumption to forge a leftist vision of social-democratic progress. Augmented by certain in-store display techniques and modes of purchase, Penguin Books appeared to constitute an enlightened public sphere. The cartoon bird became a lucrative mechanism through which browsers were invited to contribute to this progressive cultural project.

This article examines British understandings of the laws and legal traditions that regulated slavery in French and Spanish colonies in the late eighteenth century, particularly between the American and French Revolutions. Based on reports from those with firsthand knowledge of different slave systems, many imperial commentators contended that enslaved persons under French and Spanish rule were treated more humanely—and consequently worked more efficiently—than those in British jurisdictions. Advocates of slavery reform therefore looked to the slave management strategies of competitors to help advance their cause. For some, appropriating foreign slave regulations became a central feature of programs designed to lessen the brutality of slavery and eventually bring about emancipation. For others, highlighting the comparatively benign treatment of enslaved workers in French and Spanish islands served as a way to pressure the British government to more proactively police slaveholding in its own colonies. By exploring calls to emulate the slave regulations of rival empires, this article provides a window onto shifting British attitudes toward both slavery and imperial governance during a period of major political and economic change in the Atlantic World.

“Oh, Mr. Pym, this breaks the heart,” lamented Sir Richard Grosvenor in the House of Commons in 1629; “if God be God, let us follow him, and if Baal be God, let us follow him, and no longer halt between two opinions.” The Baalites, it was clear to the Commons, were the Arminians, who threatened “the very ruin and desolation if not dissolution of Religion in this land.” Such was the threat of Arminianism that when the Commons presented its Protestations on March 2, the first article read,

This was no ordinary condemnation of schism or theological haggling. The members of the Commons shared a strong suspicion of Arminianism as a political as well as religious heresy. They had a clear idea of what English Arminianism was and who was an Arminian. Before 1624, no Englishman had even been accused of Arminianism, either in Parliament or in contemporary literature devoted to religious controversies. How did the definition of English Arminianism develop between 1624 and 1629? How did Arminianism, originally a moderate Dutch Calvinism, come to be considered along with Popery as a treasonable theology?

At the turn of the seventeeth century, Jacobus Arminius, Divinity Reader at the University of Leyden, had proposed a theological compromise between Supralapsarian and Infralapsarian Protestantism.

Any model of English society during the “long” eighteenth century whether briefly characterized as an ancien regime or a confessional state must rest on some consideration of its seventeenth-century antecedents, and include some account of how and why a quite different historiography was worked out in the nineteenth century. Similarly, any critique, to be fully effective, would need to range as widely in time and theme. The preceding articles by James Bradley, John Money, and John Phillips offer useful challenges to part of the wider thesis but so far lack a broad perspective. This in itself focusses attention on my own books at the expense of those of my colleagues. The historiographical element in my work has made explicit my indebtedness to the many other scholars whose research over three centuries of British history is congruent with my own: only that restricted horizon which limits some enquiries to one or two decades could lead critics to fail to do justice to what is, after all, the work of a generation of authors and not one of “revisionist” alone.

It is because the new thinking which I addressed has been the product of a diverse generation of scholars rather than of a “school” of “revisionists” (let alone of an individual) that the restatements of an old orthodoxy have been so few. There has been no general counter-attack on the “revisionists,” and no alternative synoptic vision of the English past which remotely looks as if it could be a blueprint either for a revival of the old history or for some quite new vision. Replies have tried instead to defend some part of the old model on increasingly restricted ground. It has been suggested, for example, that “meaningful popular politics” can indeed be found in the borough of Maidstone in the late eighteenth century; but such an argument can only be sustained by not attending to the reasons which made Maidstone, and a few boroughs like it, unusual. Here as elsewhere, the pattern of response has been to defend a previous thesis by narrowing the frame of reference chronologically or geographically, searching for one area at least where it can be made to fit.

In his lively reassessment of extra-parliamentary politics early in the reign of George III, John Brewer advances a conclusion of potentially great significance. Where Sir Lewis Namier and Ian Christie see in Wilkism little more than a political May dance without important effect, Brewer finds a “focussed radicalism” embodying fundamental change in the nature of traditional English politics. Where George Rudé carefully delimits the geographical, social, and political range of Wilkite influence, Brewer argues that “focussed radicalism” was a truly national phenomenon personified in Wilkes and parent to the popular sensibility that underlay later anti-aristocratic and reform politics.

Brewer appears fully as unconventional in his attitude toward what constitutes proper evidence as in the conclusion he builds upon that evidence. Namier and Christie rest their cases on the seemingly solid foundation of election analysis. But Brewer rejects this evidence as inherently unsatisfactory. The “formal, institutional yardstick” of polls, we are told, cannot help measure the influence or extent of radical political opinion. Instead, he concentrates on non-electoral evidence, relying, above all, on the fragile and fleeting indications of support for Wilkes that are to be found in provincial newspapers, petitions, and public gatherings during the years 1768-1771.

The abolition of clerical celibacy in England was, according to its first great modern student, Henry Charles Lea, “a process of far more intricacy than in any other country which adopted the Reformation.” Since Lea wrote, historians have come to accept an outline of that process. According to this standard view, it was Henry VIII, acting out of his own personal conservatism, who retained and defended mandatory celibacy in the first stage of the English Reformation. Once the king had died and his leaden foot was removed from the brake, the clergy were able to overwhelm ineffective conservative opposition in the Edwardian government and legalize clerical marriage. The gains of the Edwardian years gave way before the reaction of the Marian period, and they were not reinstated after Mary's death because of the anticonnubial tastes and religious conservatism of Elizabeth I. Throughout this period, so the story goes, the clergy (a majority of them, at least) struggled for the right and privilege of marriage, only to find royal resistance (except briefly under Edward VI) impossible to overcome.

This traditional outline is misleading in several respects. Elizabeth I's attitude toward the marriage of the clergy is far more complex than has been recognized. Specific regulations of such unions developed from her desire to establish an ordered church worthy of popular respect and cannot simply be ascribed to a general, almost pathological, personal distaste for marriage or quirky personal religious views.

How adequate was the mid-Victorian workhouse diet? Basing their arguments on modern nutritional analyses of dietary tables, some historians have concluded that the workhouse diet fulfilled the basic nutritional needs of inmates and that the idea that workhouse dietary regimes were inadequate is the result of a “mythology” created by contemporaries—including Charles Dickens. In these accounts, Dickens's infamous scene where Oliver Twist becomes so overwhelmed with hunger that he asks for more food is construed as an exaggerated rendering of workhouse life. This article argues that efforts to impose modern nutritional techniques onto past configurations can produce misleading results and generate simplistic historical interpretations. The cultural categories historically surrounding food demand thorough attention and must be reconciled with modern scientific approaches if the boundaries between workhouse realities and mythologies are to be rendered less obscure.

This article reopens the vexed question of how many women in early modern England could read by calling attention to the precise ways in which women marked, initialed, and signed legal depositions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. It shows that initialing and signing were closely correlated skills, and it argues that women who wrote their initials had begun to learn how to read. Using initials as a proxy for elementary reading literacy, it goes on to map female literacy in early modern London, showing that urban upbringings fostered female literacy and that reading literacy was far more broadly socially diffused than the ability to write. Changes in initialing patterns as women aged suggest that women found reading to be useful and relevant to their lives, and that literacy carried social prestige.

Elizabethan puritanism, becoming programmatic, declared its intentions for the church in An Admonition to the Parliament, by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and in the Second Admonition to the Parliament, both in 1572. The first of those manifestos erected a “true platform of a church reformed” according to “the prescript of God's word” and the examples of the “best reformed churches throughout Christendom.” The second took up what its author called “the hardest point,” namely, to show how reform was to be accomplished—in effect, by persuading queen and parliament to become presbyterian. The admonishers appealed to the power of God's word, the threat of his wrath, and the promise of his reward, presenting the cause of reform as a national case of conscience for the civil authority.

Two years earlier, in a bold sermon to the queen, another spokesman for the faction had set forth these same considerations but with a significant difference, for the preacher, Edward Dering, grounded his argument on a theopolitical principle—the principle of covenant—which Protestant extremists (including English and Scottish exiles of the Marian period) had already given a revolutionary twist. This article examines the role of ideas of covenant in the ideological address of sixteenth-century puritanism to crown and commons, prince and people. It finds in the reformers' changing conceptions and applications of covenant a key to the character of the puritan movement and the making of the puritan mind.

Though puritans of the Elizabethan era made something of covenant doctrine in their theological writings, they rarely put it to political use, and when they did—when some hardy preacher proposed to constrain the civil magistracy by covenant to do God's will—such efforts boomeranged, endangering both the preacher and his cause.

A Center for the History of British Political Thought has been established at the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be conducting a series of seminars aimed at covering what is conventionally demarcated as the early modern period: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. No comprehensive history of British political thought in this period has to our knowledge been written, and it is an open question of what it should consist and what its organizing themes should be. The purpose of this article is to present a speculative inquiry into its conceptual scope.

The scope and meaning of the word “British” is fundamental to our inquiry. The core component is surely England, and both the weight of literature and the tradition of study render it inescapable that English will be the language and the dominant culture with which most of our program will be concerned. It will be necessary nonetheless to recognize the autonomy of Scottish political culture and its literature and of the cultures formed by English hegemony, whose political thought must be studied both before and after their assertions of independence.

We must further examine what is to be meant by the term “political thought.” A considerable methodological literature has marked the rise in the last two decades of what has been called the “new history” of political thought. This inquiry has become less an adjunct to the practice of political theory and more a history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on.