When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

More than four centuries have passed since the famous preambles to the various Tudor acts for the re-edifying of English towns generalized with such unnerving confidence about the lamentable state of provincial urban communities in the early sixteenth century; but no historian today who has the temerity to walk through those still perilous streets can be under any illusion as to the continued hazards of such an expedition. Yet that this journey, despite its dangers and frustrations, deserves to be undertaken more frequently and more urgently than ever before seems very clear. Even the most optimistic historian must occasionally suffer some qualms at a situation in which the single most important issue in pre-industrial English urban history—the exact contribution of the late medieval and early modern town to the society and economy of the nation as a whole—seems to be becoming more rather than less mysterious with every detailed monograph and every new methodological problem. For here of course, much more in 1976 than in 1894, we are in the presence of one of those ‘burning questions in which impetuous economists have outrun the historians, and have not found it pre-mature to set in order by the help of accepted theories the obscure chaos of social history in the Middle Ages’.

When Pirenne contributed an article entitled ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’ to the first issue of the Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire in 1922, he can have little realized how the ideas he there put forward were to be developed. His paper was designed as a protest against the traditional and deep-rooted conviction of western scholars that Latin Christendom was the direct and almost the sole heir of classical antiquity. Its argument was the now familiar one that Greco-Roman society survived with little change the shock of the Germanic invasions, and that it was only the appearance of Islam upon the scene that pushed the centre of Latin Christendom away from the Mediterranean and made possible the emergence of a new cultural unit based upon the land mass of western Europe. Medieval Christendom was not a continuation of the Roman world but something new, and Muhammed was a necessary precursor of Charlemagne

OVER the last fifteen years, a substantial literature has welled up, practically from nowhere, purporting to anatomise ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’, this literature suggests, is not a true estimate of national character, an enduring national essence, but rather a historical construct that was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by the ‘dominant classes’ in British society in order to tame or thwart the tendencies of their day towards modernism, urbanism and democracy that might otherwise have overwhelmed elite culture. These aspirations for social control determined the lineaments of the new ‘Englishness’. Nostalgic, deferential and rural, ‘Englishness’ identified the squire-archical village of Southern or ‘Deep’ England as the template on which the national character had been formed and thus the ideal towards which it must inevitably return. Purveyed by the ‘dominant classes’ to the wider culture by means of a potent array of educational and political instruments—ranging from the magazine Country Life to the folk-song fad to the National Trust to Stanley Baldwin's radio broadcasts—‘Englishness’ reversed the modernising thrust of the Indus-trial Revolution and has condemned late twentieth-century Britain to economic decline, cultural stagnation and social division.

There are grounds for seeing an increasing sophistication in the development of a self-conscious perception of ‘English’ cultural unique-ness and individuality towards the end of the ninth century, at least in some quarters, and for crediting King Alfred's court circle with its expression. King Alfred was not, as Orderic Vitalis described him, ‘the first king to hold sway over the whole of England’, which tribute might rather be paid to his grandson Æthelstan. He was, however, as his obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described him, ‘king over the whole English people except for that part which was under Danish rule’. Through his promotion of the term Angelcynn to reflect the common identity of his people in a variety of texts dating from the latter part of his reign, and his efforts in cultivating the shared memory of his West Mercian and West Saxon subjects, King Alfred might be credited with the invention of the English as a political community.

LENGTHY reports survive of speeches by several members of the Long Parliament for 9 November 1640, at the end of the first week of the session. The future royalist militant, George Lord Digby is reported to have begun his address by saying that:

you have received now a solemn account from most of the shires of England of the several Grievances and Oppressions they sustain, and nothing as yet from Dorsetshire: Sir I would not have you think that I serve for a Land of Goshen, and that we live there in sunshine, whilst darkness and plagues overspread the rest of the land

The future royalist moderate Sir John Culpepper is reported to have begun: I stand not up with a Petition in my hand, I have it in my mouth, and he enumerated the grievances of his shire beginning with the great increase of papists and the obtruding and countenancing of divers new ceremonies in matters of religion. The future Parliamentarian moderate, Harbottle Grimston, said that these petitions which have been read, they are all remonstrances of the general and universal grievances and distempers that are now in the state and Government of the Church and Commonwealth. The future Parliamentarian radical Sir John Wray said:

All in this renowned senate, I am confident, is fully fixed upon the true Reformation of all Disorders and Innovations in Church or Religion, and upon the well uniting and close rejoining of the poor dislocated Great Britain. For, let me tell you Mr Speaker, that God be thanked, it is but out of joint and may be well set by the skilful chyrurgeons of this Honourable House.

When I offered to read a paper on this subject, I had a particular hypothesis in mind. I thought—perhaps it would be more honest to say, I hoped—it would be possible to show that, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, the practice of the sacrament of penance in the traditional church had undergone a change which was important in itself and of general historical interest. The change, I thought, could roughly be described as a shift from the social to the personal. To be more precise, I thought it possible that, for the average layman, and notably for the average rural layman in the pre-reformation church, the emphasis of the sacrament lay in its providing part of a machinery for the regulation and resolution of offences and conflicts otherwise likely to disturb the peace of a community. The effect of the Counter-Reformation (or whatever one calls it) was, I suspected, to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual. The hypothesis may be thought an arbitrary one: we can but see. I think it will be admitted that, supposing it turned out to be correct, we should have learnt something worth knowing about the difference between the medieval and the counter-reformation church, and something about the difference between pre- and post-reformation European society. If if did not turn out to be correct, we might nevertheless expect to pick up some useful knowledge about something which is scarcely a staple of current historical discourse, though it threatens to become so.

Messianic visions burgeoned simultaneously in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the sixteenth century, directly involving sovereign rulers, and powerfully influencing international relations. This essay examines the propensity of Philip II (1556-98) to frame his policies in messianic terms, with special regard to England. It uses the Ridolfi plot (1570-1) and the Armada (1587-8) to show how the king disregarded strategic concerns, and failed to formulate fall-back strategies, because he expected God to provide a miracle to bridge the gap between means and ends. It also compares his vision with those of his Christian, Jewish and Muslim contemporaries.

IN her recently published diary of her first visit to Africa, in 1929, Margery Perham reported a conversation with seven degree-course men at the newly established college at Fort Hare. When, inevitably, talk got round to conditions in South Africa, they asked ‘terrible questions’. ‘Can England do nothing then?’ ‘But South Africa is the possession of England.’ ‘But the King! He is King of South Africa. What does he think? Will he do nothing?’

Prudent historians, when they consider the ordered power of the late Anglo-Saxon state, are apt to indulge a professional instinct, to hedge their bets. Such phrases as ‘specious uniformity’ and ‘rudimentary precocity’ have found favour. It has long seemed likely, and it has by now become certain, that such caution is superfluous.

In the early eighteenth century, the arrangements by which the English aristocracy and gentry commonly provided for their families conformed to a standard pattern, the strict settlement, in which the essential questions were settled at the marriage of the eldest son. Not only was his immediate maintenance fixed and his wife's jointure, but the provision for the children of the marriage—how much they were to receive, in what form and when—was decided at the same time. In its essentials, the marriage settlement first secured that the family estate should in each generation descend to the eldest son. It did this by limiting the interest in the estate of the father of the husband and, after him, of the husband himself, to that of a life-tenant, and entailing the estate on the eldest son to be born of the marriage. Secondly, the marriage settlement empowered both the father and husband to raise jointures for their respective wives and portions, i.e. capital sums, for their daughters and younger sons when they married or came of age; sometimes rent charges were provided for younger sons.

This essay aims to show that in England and on the Continent, ninth-century individuals and groups in a wide variety of social milieux from peasants to substantial landowners, and including women, had a strong sense of rights to status and property that were rational in something like the modern sense while surrounded by rituals that seem very un-modern. Un-modern, too, seem the terms on which rights were held, and the forms and contexts in which rights were negotiated and renegotiated between local holders, lords and kings. With reference to material from Wessex and from various parts of the Carolingian Empire, it is suggested that the linkage of rights and rituals was symptomatic of sophisticated cultures with apt ways of managing conflict and creating consensus in localities and in kingdoms. The so-called decimation of King Æthelwulf is discussed as a meaningful case in point.

The Commission for Africa, which reported in March 2005, drew attention to the enduring problem of poverty in Africa, but also reinforced the common perception that Africa has a troubled relationship with the ‘modern world’. This essay reviews the literature on Africa's long-term political and economic development, paying particular attention to the continent's insertion into the global system in the period described by C. A. Bayly as the ‘birth of the modern world’. It concludes that, though many of the continent's current problems arise out of recent policy failures, we should not ignore longer-term, structural elements of environmental, demographic and economic history, including the consequences (direct and indirect) of the slave trade.

Under the Old Poor Law internal migrants moved from one jurisdiction to another when they crossed parochial boundaries. Following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 central government took an enlarged and expanding part in welfare. As it did so, the entitlement to welfare of immigrants from overseas was scrutinised at a national level in a way that was analogous to the manner in which the status of internal migrants had previously been scrutinised at a parochial level. Having established this analogy, the essay asks whether the entitlement to welfare of outsiders improved or deteriorated over time and seeks to account for the broad trends.

The South Sea Bubble of 1720 looms large in popular depictions of eighteenth-century Britain. But in many respects it is seriously misunderstood. This article begins by exploring mythic `facts' about the events of 1720, but is also concerned to explore why the Bubble was mythologised long after the event. On several levels, therefore, the Bubble has itself been bubbled.

The modern historiography of the origins of British national identities seems riven with contradictions and paradoxes. First there is a major chronological problem. Is the forging of Britishness to be located in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Second, there is a difficulty in the compilation of such identities. Are they to be found in negative reactions to the perceived contemporary identities of others or in positive, if mythic, readings of ethnic history? Third, can there be a British identity at all when the cultural identities of what may be called the sub-nationalisms or sub-ethnicities of the United Kingdom seem to be forged at exactly the same time? And fourth, did the formation of the British Empire and the vast expansion of British imperialism in the nineteenth century tend towards the confirmation of the identity of Greater Britain or of the Welsh, Irish, English and Scottish elements that made it up?

On 29 April 1612 the London letter writer John Chamberlain penned another of his regular epistles to his friend Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador in Venice. For weeks a chief news item had been the declining health of the Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury. ‘I wish I could send you better assurance’ Chamberlain wrote, ‘but as far as I can learn there is more cause of fear than hope’. Salisbury was journeying to Bath, where he had often sought relief before, but he had been ‘very yll by the way yesterday and was almost gon once or twise’. His death was assumed to be imminent. ‘He is alredy much lamented and every man sayes what a misse there wold be of him and indeed [he] is much prayed for’. The news later in June was more of a surprise. Salisbury's passing, on the return journey from Bath, had been followed not by the expected tributes to his irreplaceability, but by a flood of ‘outragious speaches’.

Despite the rich and exciting work of recent years, the social history of England between the Restoration and the Industrial Revolution still bears something of a hangdog look, scarcely war-ranting, as yet, the cosmic conclusions and ferocious controversies to which students of early Stuart and early nineteenth-century society have grown accustomed. Yet, thanks to the work of one remarkable Englishman, who was born in 1648 and died in 1712, there is one aspect of this pre-industrial period—its social structure—on which we are all happy to pontificate. Gregory King's table of ranks and degrees, on which in the last resort so much of this confidence rests, has now acquired a unique cachet. The continual reproduction in post-war textbooks of this famous document, which we think of as King's ‘social table’ but which he described as his ‘Scheme of the Income and Expense of the Several Famillies of England’, is just the most obvious symptom of its dominant historiographical influence.

The development of industry and commerce in Wales during the Middle Ages may be regarded from two points of view. On the one hand we are concerned with the gradual decay of the commerce carried on by the inhabitants of the western regions of tribal Britain, and on the other hand with the development of the national commerce of the modern Principality.

Shopping was increasingly seen as a potentially pleasurable activity for middling and upper sorts in Hanoverian England, a distinctive yet everyday part of life, especially in London. This survey considers the emergence of a polite shopping culture at this time, and presents a `browse-bargain' model as a framework for considering contemporary references to shopping in written records and literary texts. The decline of polite shopping is charted with reference to the rise of cash-only businesses at the end of the century, and the shift towards a more hurried and impersonal form of shopping noted by early nineteenth-century shopkeepers, assistants and customers.