In the fall of 1589, ten-year-old Jane Throckmorton pointed to the old woman who had settled into a seat in her family's cavernous stone hearth and cried out, “Looke where the old witch sitteth … did you ever see … one more like a witch then she is?” With those words the child set in motion a four-year-long drama that culminated in the hanging of three of her neighbors from their fenland village of Warboys in north Huntingdonshire. Within weeks after the executions, Jane's father and uncle, with the help of a trial judge and the local parson, published their version of this tragic story in a pamphlet that now resides in the British Library.

After Jane Throckmorton and her sisters had shared symptoms such as violent sneezing and grotesque seizures for several weeks, and two medical doctors at Cambridge had suggested the possibility of witchcraft, Gilbert Pickering—a relative from Northamptonshire—arrived at the Warboys manor house to conduct numerous experiments with Jane and her neighbor, Alice Samuel. His intention was to demonstrate that the old woman was the cause of the girl's symptoms. In February 1590 one of the sisters was taken to the Pickering home in Northamptonshire where the results of further experiments were recorded for eventual inclusion in the pamphlet.

In recent years, historians have conducted an extended debate on the nature and level of violence in early modern English society. This debate has come to focus on the murder rate as an index of violence and to turn on highly specialized points of statistical analysis. In some ways it can be characterized as a debate between optimistic and pessimistic historians. Lawrence Stone, representing the “pessimists,” paints a portrait of early modern society as violent, unloving, and uncaring until civilized by the eighteenth century; J. A. Sharpe, representing the “optimists,” emphasizes the problems of the data used by Stone and argues, like Alan Macfarlane, that English society in the early modern period was little different from that of today. J. S. Cockburn, the latest entrant into the fray, leans toward the optimists but has expressed some hesitation about the debate itself: he notes not only the serious problems with the data involved but also the difficulties of defining what constitutes a violent society, as “it is not at all clear that homicide rates are a reliable measure of the overall level of violent behavior in a particular society.” This caution suggests that we should take an entirely different approach to the problem of violence, to look for “the social meaning of violence.” We must move beyond the statistical data (important though they be) to a broader context for thinking about violence.

The way historians think about violence has been deeply influenced by the work of Max Weber and his assertion that “legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state”; it is often forgotten that the first word of that sentence is “Today.”

William Lambarde (1536–1601) has been much celebrated, and cited, by historians of Tudor England. Besides compiling what is generally recognized as the earliest county history (A Perambulation of Kent, completed in 1570; first published in 1576) and a pioneering edition of Anglo-Saxon laws and customs (Archaionomia, 1568), Lambarde's famous manual on the duties, powers, and responsibilities of justices of the peace (Eirenarcha, 1581) “gives an account, which is both complete and systematic, of the organization of the local government … as it stood at the end of the sixteenth century.” Although his abilities and achievements received only a modest measure of contemporary recognition, toward the end of his life Lambarde successively acquired the posts of Deputy in the Alienations Office (1589), Master in Chancery Extraordinary (1592), Master in Chancery and Deputy Keeper of the Rolls (1597), and Keeper of Records in the Tower of London (1601). He had been associated to the bench of Lincoln's Inn in 1579 (having, as the Black Book citation put it, “deserved universallie well of his comon wealth and contrie”); these promotions induced the ruling Council to make him a full bencher, “being one of Her Majesties Masters of hir Court of Chancery and of great reading, learning and experience.”

In depicting the conscientious Elizabethan J.P. as burdened by “stacks of statutes,” Lambarde coined a phrase which has indeed “burrowed its way into most historical textbooks.” Besides numerous articles, modern scholarly interest in the man and his works has generated two biographies (published in 1965 and 1973), while the point of departure for John Howes Gleason's institutional-cumprosopographical account of local government under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts was Lambarde's own record of his activities as a Kentish justice in the 1580s.

In nineteenth-century Britain, friendly societies (working-class mutual benefit clubs) and ruling elites contested definitions of respectability and independence in a struggle to delineate relations between societies and the state. This process was an important part of an ongoing set of negotiations by which working-class organizations influenced middle-class attitudes toward collective action. Pressure from friendly societies forced members of Parliament and bureaucrats to accept their claim to respectability and, with it, to independence from state control, changing the discourse of respectability in three stages. During the first quarter of the century, clergymen and landowners equated respectability with middle-class patronage and independence from the Poor Law. Around midcentury, the societies appropriated the discourse of respectability and, with qualified elite approval, used it to redefine independence as freedom from middle-class supervision. By the 1870s, however, friendly society leaders requested government assistance to limit the independence of rank-and-file members, whose autonomy they claimed was a threat to the societies' respectability.

Friendly societies wanted, as one member wrote, “to do what is ‘respectable.’” This meant redefining respectability in a collective, working-class context. While middle-class definitions rested on the premise that individualism and self-help were the twin foundations of respectability, friendly societies gained access to the social power of respectability by offering an alternative definition based on collective self-help and independence from external control. Friendly societies were democratically managed insurance clubs offering sickness and burial coverage and sociable activities in return for regular payments. They often met in public houses, which they identified as respectable, contradicting middle-class attitudes.

Late in March 1604, as his biographer John Strype records, Archbishop John Whitgift's “Corps was carried to Croydon … and there honourably interred in the Parish-Church … with a decent Solemnity.” Sir George Paule concurred, noting that the “Funerall was very honourably (as befitted his place) solemnized.” The funeral's honor, decency, and solemnity were somewhat marred, however, for among those laudatory elegies and epitaphs traditionally placed upon hearses, some audacious soul had contrived to pin a far from complimentary piece of doggerel. Entitled “The Lamentation of Dickie for the Death of his Brother Jockie”—Jockie being Whitgift and Dickie his successor as archbishop, Richard Bancroft—the poem was a vicious tirade against the late archbishop and his policies. The fullest extant copy survives in a collection of political papers once owned by the Kentishman Sir Peter Manwood:

The prelats pope, the canonists hope,
The Cortyers oracle, virginities spectacle,
Reformers hinderer, trew pastors slanderer,
The papists broker, the Atheists Cloker
The ceremonyes procter, the latyn docter
The dumb doggs patron, non resid[e]ns champion
A well a daye is dead & gone,
and Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Prelats relent, Cortyers lament
Papiste bee sadd, Athiests runn madd
Grone formalists, mone pluralists
frowne ye docters, mourne yee Procters
Begge Registers, starve parators
scowle ye summoners, howle yee songsters
Your great Patron is dead & gone,
& Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Popishe Ambition[,] vaine superstition,
coulured conformity[,] canckared envye,
Cunninge hipocrisie[,] faigned simplicity,
masked ympiety, servile flatterye,
Goe all daunce about his hearse,
& for his dirge chant this verse
Our great patron is dead and gone,
& Jhockey hath left dumb dickey alone.
Yf store of mourners yet there lacke
lett Croyden coull[i]ers bee more blacke
And for a Cophin take a sacke
bearing the corpes upon their backe
dickye more blacke then any one
as chief mourner may marche alone
Singinge this requiem Jhocky is gone,
& dickye hopes to play Jhocky alone
holla dickye bee not so bould,
to woulve yt in Cheif Jhesis fould
as yf to hell thy Soule weare sould,
lest as Jhocky was oft foretould
If thou a persecutor stand,
God likewise strike thee wth his hand:
A-rankinge thee in the bloudy band
of ravening cleargie woolves in the land.

On August 12,1851, Albert Smith, a middle-aged journalist and entertainer, reached the summit of Mont Blanc with three Oxford students and sixteen guides. Smith and his companions were not the first people to climb Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. In 1786, two Chamonix natives climbed the peak, but over the next sixty-seven years the ascent of Mont Blanc was repeated only forty-five times. Yet after Albert Smith's dramatic account of this ascent made mountain climbing popular among the middle classes of Victorian England, Mont Blanc was climbed eighty-eight times in a five-year span. In 1852, John Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, the bible for English tourists abroad, noted that the ascent “of Albert Smith, in 1851, has effectually popularized the enterprise.” While this could be construed as praise of Smith, it sounded very faint indeed when Murray asserted, “it is a somewhat remarkable fact that a large proportion of those who have made this ascent have been persons of unsound mind.” By 1858, however, Murray mentioned that twenty or thirty people now made the ascent each year, thanked Albert Smith for his help with the text, and purged all references to the mental health of mountaineers.

Over the next decade, Murray's Handbook recorded numerous first ascents in the Alps during what later became known as the “Golden Age” of mountaineering. This article attempts to explain why mountaineering became popular during these years and to suggest the broader significance of mountaineering to the construction of new middle class and imperial cultures.

John Ruskin, art and social critic, master of English prose, is one of the most infuriating yet attractive Victorian figures. In the last twenty years, a revival of interest in his work after years of neglect has stimulated a considerable body of scholarly analysis and several biographies. As Ruskin himself would have hoped, historians have been most interested in his trenchant attacks on the assumptions and effects of nineteenth-century political economy, but paradoxically he appears in women's history only as the author of “Of Queens' Gardens,” promoting a fundamental Victorian paradigm, the ideology of pure womanhood. Yet the anthologized excerpts which are all most people read of Ruskin do not do justice even to “Of Queens' Gardens,” an admittedly cloying piece, and although biographers have analyzed his tortured relationships with Effie Gray and Rose La Touche almost to the point of tedium, there is no extended general study of his many relationships with women and the expectations he had of them. An adequate analysis of Ruskin's view of women requires familiarity with all his works, an understanding of his fears for the state of England, and a greater knowledge of his relationships with women than provided by the lurid details of his failed marriage and predilection for adolescent girls. The following is an attempt to sketch an outline of such an account.

It is curious that the unprecedented agitations in support of the rights of Caroline of Brunswick in 1820–21 have been represented as an “affair.” The word seems first to have been used by G. M. Trevelyan and was promptly seized on by Elie Halevy in his 1923 Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle. The labeling of this popular ebullience as an “affair” has consequently framed the development of its now not inconsiderable historiography. The episode was initially explained as a diversion from some main line of historical development, be it whiggish or Marxisant. More recently, historians have rescued the agitations from this condescension by showing how the radicals identified the king and the government's treatment of the queen as oppression and corruption at work. Since the common thread running through both whig and Marxisant accounts had been a concentration on the effects of the agitations on reform and radical politics, those attempting to put the episode back fully into their narratives emphasized the same factors. This time, however, it was to show that the agitations were not a diversion from the main line of reform politics. What follows is a further contribution to the process of giving greater attention to the queen's cause when telling the story of mass politics in this period, but one which concentrates on other neglected contexts and phenomena important for the explanation of this popular explosion. In the light of this, it may be necessary to change the way we refer to this episode.

The career of John Wilkes was full of paradoxes. John Brewer's description of him as “a mercurial elusive rake” is apt in two senses: Wilkes eluded those who sought to crush him, and, posthumously, he continues to frustrate those who seek to understand him. He was a libertine who was lauded for political virtue; an aspiring aristocrat who rose to prominence as the self-proclaimed champion of those he dubbed the “middling and inferior class of people.” He would succeed in achieving a remarkable rapport with his plebeian followers, yet all the while preserving an ironic detachment from them. The judgment of one of his contemporaries still contains solace for the historian: “It is … not altogether unpardonable if a writer should err in the portrait of a character so equivocal.”

Understandably, one response to the problematic issues of Wilkes's personality and conduct has been to steer clear of them, treating them as irrelevant to the supposedly larger questions of those movements conducted in his name or in response to his persecution. From this kind of perspective, his presence on the political scene is construed as merely the occasion and not in any significant sense the cause of campaigns assumed to have separate, deep-seated origins. Such an approach offers some advantages that have been realized in distinguished studies of the crusades with which Wilkes was associated. But it is also limiting in that it forecloses the possibility that the nature of the movements that swirled around him was influenced by the idiosyncracies of his character and behavior.

The images are familiar and ineradicable: cities scorched by blasts of tremendous heat, with thousands of civilians vaporized, thousands of others burned and disfigured, landscapes rendered desolate and uninhabitable by radiation; submarines, automobiles, luxury liners, and airplanes powered by clumps of uranium the size of a human fist; homes heated and cooled by limitless supplies of cheap energy drawn from secure reactors; land-based particle beam weapons capable of destroying airborne missiles and thus of providing a protective shield for civilian populations; eccentric physicists with thick central European accents, unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, and a crazed gleam of unearthly mischief in their eyes; politicians, civil servants, joint chiefs blinkered by hatred and ambition, ignorant of even the first principles of science and technology, careless of civilians, reckless in brinksmanship, and arrogant in assessments of military capability.

Such images, indeed, are part of the consciousness of all citizens of the atomic age: we who have stared at the newsreels of Nagasaki and Chernobyl, sat riveted with John Hersey's unforgettable Hiroshima, laughed over the absurdities of Dr. Strangelove (1964), winced at the smiling publicity of atomic energy authorities or the local power company's plans for a new reactor, trembled at the apprarently inexorable proliferation of nuclear technologies into the Third and Fourth Worlds, or grown angry at the exaggerations—both budgetary and practical—of yet the latest “generation” of weapons systems. And yet the images of obliterated cities, atomic-powered ships, and particle beam weapons—images which have come to define so much of the anxiety as well as opportunity of the postwar world—all existed in the popular consciousness in Britain and America long before August 1945, before, indeed, December 1941 or even September 1939.

Addressing the Women's Institute in London on November 23, 1897, Eleanor Sidgwick, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, observed that

With these remarks, Mrs. Sidgwick joined the extended debate over the rights and duties of spinster daughters that the Victorian women's movement pursued for decades. For many participants, it was the preeminent issue that women had to confront if they were significantly to improve the condition of their lives.

Among the churches of nineteenth-century Britain, the Anglican Church held a unique, and somewhat embarrassing, position. It was, of course, the established Church of England—an arm of the state, assigned the honor and duty of serving as the focus and guide of the nation's spiritual life. Its position was embarrassing by the mid-nineteenth century because it obviously was not fulfilling its ostensible role. The increasingly secular nature of industrial society on the one hand, and the Christian challenge of Nonconformity on the other, cost the Church membership among all classes of people. That loss significantly undermined the Anglican claim that the established Church served the religious needs of the whole nation, and it led to persistent Nonconformist cries for disestablishment. Furthermore, Christianity's appeal to its traditional following, the poor and lowly, seemed to evaporate in the industrial environment of the Victorian city. Not only did typical urban workers not go to church (or chapel, for that matter), they were generally rather hostile to organized religion and particularly to the Anglican Church. In the Church of governors and employers, where services and sermons often could appeal only to the educated, workers felt, not unjustly, uncomfortable and unwelcome.

There were several internal impediments to increasing the popularity (and thereby the social influence) of the Anglican Church, not the least of which was the dominant theology of early Victorian England. During what Boyd Hilton has called the “Age of Atonement” (roughly the first half of the nineteenth century), evangelical thought both shaped and justified the economic and social assumptions which underlay the policies of competitive capitalism.

The influence of computer usage upon the landscape of British history has been subtle and often profound. This influence has been one of several historiographical and cultural trends which have changed the nature and scope of “history.” The declining importance of the so-called grand narratives of national and class histories, and the fragmentation and loss of cultural authority of scholarly history in the face of increasingly diffuse popular and political uses of “history,” cannot be separated from the impact of the new technologies. The coherence and accessibility of history is not only challenged by the postmodernist questioning of the very validity of the search for authoritative coherence and by the philosophical assertion of the self-sufficiency of the text as a basis for analysis and explanation. This coherence and accessibility is also being challenged by the increasing importance of information technology in historical research and teaching. The scholarly presentation of computer usage by historians has tended to emphasize technical and methodological aspects. Important as these are, this has tended to conceal the major philosophical issues raised by such computer usage.

There is then a double challenge to historical practice as it has been developed over the hundred years or so since Tout, Firth, and others established a modern institutional structure toward the end of the nineteenth century. The irony of the conjunction of the postmodern cultural and philosophical challenges and the computer user's technologically based challenge is not perhaps so surprising when it is considered that what the computer user is doing is creating metadata from data/sources/texts and producing metanarratives from that metadata.

The 1945 Labour government came to power with a clearly formulated economic program relating to nationalization and the continuation of wartime planning and controls to smooth the transition to a peacetime economy. The first of these components, at least, was largely carried out according to plan over the next six years. The transition to a peacetime economy was much less smooth, and Labour's policies here underwent a major shift. While controls remained an important part of the policy regime down to 1951, they increasingly gave way to the instruments of fiscal policy. In large part this reflected the buffeting of the economy by balance-of-payments problems. But while the compelling force of economic circumstance must be given its due, it is clear that the increasing dependence on demand management was a political and ideological defeat for Labour, in the sense that it had previously based its distinctive appeal so much on microeconomic policies usually summed up in that ambiguous term, “economic planning.” In that sense the reliance on demand management represented a retreat for Labour from its policy position of 1945: “Socialist planning was a notable, if unlikely casualty of Labour government after the Second World War.”

On one influential view, Labour's conversion to macroeconomic management may be considered a success; eventually, as Alec Cairncross records, that management delivered balance-of-payments equilibrium without sacrificing the goal of full employment. But it is increasingly recognized that Labour's agenda involved issues beyond these macroeconomic goals, important as they undoubtedly were.

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.

If Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill fought World War II determined not to be the prime minister who lost the Empire, Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and Herbert Morrison, who as Labour members of the Coalition government served with him, were equally determined to hold on to Empire once peace was won. The Empire/Commonwealth offered both political and economic benefits to Labour. Politically, the Commonwealth provided substance for Britain's pretensions to a world power role equal in stature to the new superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. For this claim to be effective, however, the Commonwealth needed to be demographically strong and firmly united under British leadership. Economically, imperial preferences and the sterling area offered a financial buffer against Britain's true plight of accumulated wartime debts and major infrastructural damage and neglect. Receiving over 40 percent of British exports and providing substantial, and in the case of Australia and New Zealand, dollar-free imports of meat, wheat, timber, and dairy produce, the Commonwealth seemed a logical body on which the United Kingdom could draw for financial support. In short, postwar policy makers believed preservation of the Empire/Commonwealth to be a necessary first step in domestic and foreign reconstruction.

Yet in 1945, a variety of circumstances combined to make the task of imperial preservation one of reconstitution rather than simple maintenance. First, it seemed that, just at the moment when Britain needed them most, some of the strongest and oldest members of the Commonwealth appeared to be moving away.