We are pleased that our first article addresses a medieval topic, as we would like more submissions about that era. In “Ravishment, Legal Narratives, and Chivalric Culture in Fifteenth-Century England,” Shannon McSheffrey and Julia Pope take a fascinating new approach to a classic case of ravishment in medieval England. In 1451, according to the first report written by John Paston I, Robert Langstrother allegedly abducted Jane, daughter of Edmund Wichingham, from her father's manor house, slinging her over a horse, carrying her off, and forcing her to marry him. However, in other legal records, Jane denied that she had been forced and proclaimed that she had consented to marry Robert Langstrother. The authors argue that both sides were inspired by chivalric narratives of romance. Langstrother could be depicted as a dastardly villain trying to abduct a fair maiden or, from Jane's point of view, as a hero rescuing the maiden from an unwanted marriage. McSheffrey and Pope provocatively suggest that these chivalric narratives created an understanding of sexual desire based on male advance and female retreat.
Next, we feature a special section on loyalty. Although these four papers were presented together at a conference on loyalties and allegiance at Liverpool in 2007, they have each been subjected to the usual rigorous review and revision process. Two of these authors engage with James Scott's concept of the hidden transcript of resistance in hierarchical societies.
As Andy Wood demonstrates in his perceptive article “‘A lyttull worde ys tresson’: Loyalty, Denunciation, and Popular Politics in Tudor England,” the applicability of this concept must take into account the willingness of plebeian people to turn in their neighbors for subversive speech. The humbler sort did so because they feared the authorities, while the “honest men” (comparatively well-off plebeians who served in village government) saw it as their role to police their neighbors.
Ted Vallance, however, finds Scott's concept more useful in his ingenious article “The Captivity of James II: Gestures of Loyalty and Disloyalty in Seventeenth-Century England.” Traditionally, subordinates were expected to demonstrate deference to their superiors through their gestures, such as removing a hat, and their control of their bodies, for instance, not wiping one's nose on one's sleeve. But when James II was captured by London seamen, this understanding broke down. Evaluating Scott's concept of hidden transcripts, Vallance shows that many of the common people no longer showed such deference, crowding into the room where James II was kept and chattering instead of keeping a respectful silence. However, others quickly kneeled before him; resistance was therefore episodic and uneven.
In “Loyalty and the Law: The Meaning of Trust and the Right of Resistance in Seventeenth-Century England,” Howard Nenner focuses on the legal meaning of trust in the king's judgment. Nenner makes the intriguing point that among some writers the right to resist could be seen as based on a theory of trust, rather than contract. Charles I declared he was entrusted by God with the power to rule for the welfare of his people. But in 1689, the Earl of Nottingham asserted that if a king acted against the good of the people, he was no longer a “trustee” because he had renounced that trust.
In her article “Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England,” Angela McShane emphasizes a different dimension of loyalty: the passion of love for the king. In a creative argument, she demonstrates that this love was often displayed through the purchase and circulation of objects, such as medals, pottery, lockets, printed ballads, and even warming pans decorated with the king's visage or loyal slogans.Footnote 1 While many such objects expressing love for Charles I and II survive, few seem to have been produced about James II. If loyalty were based on love, love could be lost.
In “Piracy in the Public Sphere: The Henry Every Trials and the Battle for Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Print Culture,” Douglas R. Burgess Jr. narrates a rollicking tale of piracy on the high seas that also illuminates important debates about the role of the state in the public sphere.Footnote 2 In 1694, pirate Henry Every seized a ship carrying the daughter of the Mughal emperor and her retinue, who were traveling to Mecca. This event threatened to erupt into a diplomatic and military crisis that endangered the East India Company's trade with India.Footnote 3 But popular print culture celebrated Every as a romantic hero. So the English government needed to convey the message to the Mughal emperor Aurengzeb and to the British public that piracy would not be tolerated. To do so, they arranged to publish the record of his Admiralty court trial to present the government's point of view. However, Burgess argues, the popular heroic narrative of piracy proved to be more compelling.
In her article “The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare, and the Interwar Extension of Child Emigration in Southern Rhodesia,” Ellen Boucher contributes to three currently important historical topics: childhood, race, and the interwar empire. Schemes to send children to Canada and Australia are fairly well known. These projects were intended to rescue slum children and uplift them to become useful workers in imperial society. In the 1920s, Kingsley Fairbridge wished to expand his previous project of emigrating orphans to Australia by reaching out to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Rhodesian officials were keen to increase their white population. However, Boucher demonstrates that this project became problematic because of the different inflections of race and class in Rhodesia. Whites were expected to be part of the ruling elite, with habits of command. Child psychologist William Moodie declared that orphaned or abandoned children came from broken homes, and the trauma they experienced would irrevocably warp their personalities and render them unable to take up such an elite place in society. The scheme did send almost three hundred children to Rhodesia, but these doubts ensured its failure by 1956.
Our last two articles continue the theme of filmic representations of World War II we have previously featured.Footnote 4 Both authors note the filmmakers’ insistence on “authenticity” and document how they, of course, created narratives that distorted the truth for cinematic effect. In “Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s,” Penny Summerfield focuses thoughtfully on the four films made during the postwar period that centered on female resistance heroines—an unusual theme to be sure. While most fifties films portrayed women as passive and feminine, these films depicted the exciting danger and adventure these heroines encountered. Nonetheless, by emphasizing their physical suffering at the hands of the Nazis, these films restored female status as passive victims. At the same time, by highlighting the suffering of these female heroines, such films occasionally made space, unusual in war films, for depictions of the sufferings of the war's main victims—concentration camp inmates, Jews, prisoners of war, and so on.
In “‘Europe against the Germans’: The British Resistance Narrative, 1940–1950,” Wendy Webster further illuminates the gendering of these narratives in a somewhat different way, arguing that most resistance films of the postwar era portrayed the British as masculine heroes rescuing the more feminine continent. The British saw themselves as doughty islanders struggling against the Nazis. However, Webster points out that between 1942 and 1944, a somewhat different narrative emerged, which depicted “Britons as part of a united Continent” (981), fighting together with continental resisters against the Nazis. At times, although not always, the narrative of the “people's war” could merge with the “people's resistance” by British and continental fighters.
Our next two issues will feature essays on traversing urban and continental landscapes with the subjects of ambulances, passports, and prostitution. We will include several articles on themes of peace and war, including turncoats in the seventeenth century, crime by soldiers in the Boer War, and the peace ballot in the 1930s. Scotland will also be the focus of several articles.
