Among the familiar sights crowding the landscape of English history from the dooms of Ine to that crown plucked from a hawthorn bush at Bosworth, none is more deeply cherished than the crisis of 1297 and the “Confirmation of the Charters” to which it gave rise. For, despite all the sharp differences over detail that the documentation for this crisis has engendered, scholars have shown remarkable agreement in seeing it as the one defeat suffered by Edward I in a long and notably successful reign. And to that defeat they have attributed great constitutional significance. Stubbs set the pattern, calling the “result singularly in harmony with what seems from history and experience to be the natural direction of English progress,” and Wilkinson is only one among the many who have recently elaborated on that theme:

The conventional wisdom of English urban history holds that town government in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coming increasingly under the domination of a tight, resurgent oligarchy. This view was embalmed by Jacob in his volume of the Oxford History of England, and is reproduced in the newest works on medieval and early-modern towns. Clearly, the doubts voiced at length by Mrs. Green in the late nineteenth century and developed quite vigorously by Bridbury in 1962 have found no echo, and the doctrine is now, in the words of one historian, “apparently beyond dispute.”

Yet, in spite of such remarkable unanimity, any student of urban history in this period must feel some unease due to the slender empirical basis upon which this view has been predicated. Monographs on late-medieval and early-modern English towns are few, and specialized studies of town government are equally rare. Indeed, Hoskins has recently identified “the personnel of the governing class” as “one important and almost unfilled field of urban study.” Thus, an extended examination of the structures and personnel of a late-medieval and early-modern urban “oligarchy” needs little justification because of its potential substantive and methodological implications for the constitutional, political, and social history of the English town.

The following study attempts to do this for Oxford, a middling urban center at this time, which, according to Mrs. Lobel, shared in the heightened oligarchy of the age. It is neither a proper study in constitutional history nor a narrative of local politics or governmental activities. Rather, it focuses upon the changing structures and personnel of the town in order to shed some new light on the problems raised above.

A significant aspect of the religious scene in the early Stuart period was the survival of vibrant religious nonconformity in spite of Bancroft's “reconstruction of the English Church.” Historians have recently concentrated on the periods of excited religious politics under Elizabeth and the latter part of Charles I's reign and have tended to accept Hacket's Restoration apology that there was no serious opposition to official religious policy in the intervening years. But attempts to explain the phoenix-like rise of Puritanism in Caroline England by reference to socio-economic disequilibrium are not fully satisfactory.

Decades ago, Roland G. Usher, who did much to highlight Bancroft's reconstruction, explained the origins of the resurgent Puritanism of the Laudian period by pointing to the mid-Jacobean period. W. H. Clark concurred: lax ecclesiastical administration under Abbot made it possible for Puritans to re-group, starting from about 1614. Both men assumed that there had been effective enforcement of the new Canons of 1604, and of the official policy enunciated at the Hampton Court Conference, until Abbot came on the scene. Analysis of the Church court records indicates that this was simply not so. The number of Puritans continued to rise while vigorous enforcement was spasmodic.

Ironically, the years to which Usher and Clark attributed the origins of Caroline Puritanism were in fact the period when enforcement was possible. First, the Pamphlet War aroused by the new settlement had died down. Second, only two bishops, John King and George Mountain, held the See of London between 1611 and 1628.

The reign of Richard II has been one of the most popular subjects of attention for medievalists in recent years. As a result of this renewed interest, the ‘tyranny’ of Richard II's final years has been resurrected in the past decade in a new form by R. H. Jones as well as in its more traditional guise which can be found in the pages of T. F. Tout by Caroline Barron. This resurrection has not, however, gone unchallenged. Richard G. Davies has recently demonstrated the inadequacies of such a view in relation to Richard II's ecclesiastical policy, and research is now under way in regard to both Ireland and the Ricardian household which seems to limit still further the confines of the ‘tyranny.’ At the very heart of this concept is the condemnation of the King by both his contemporaries and modern historians for his development of a large military establishment which he employed to enforce his own will. This establishment has been pictured as a praetorian guard composed of the very dregs of society and eager to join Richard in a policy of absolutism. The archers of the crown deserve study in any attempt to examine the royal military establishment and to assess the tyrannical intentions of this ill-fated ruler.

Richard II, confronted with the recurrent efforts of a faction of magnates to control the governance of the realm, responded with an attempt to assert his personal will.

It has become the fashion amongst historians seeking to explain the collapse of early Stuart rule to ignore the center and to consider instead the alienation of the local communities and their leaders, on whose co-operation the execution of the crown's policy depended. G. E. Aylmer has become something of a lone voice in the respect that he accords to central government, and even he deliberately and cautiously refrained from commenting in his magisterial work on the efficiency and impact of the Caroline government. Scholars attempting to analyze the crown's problems in 1640 are increasingly turning to the concept of local inertia. Conrad Russell stresses declining collaboration between the crown and the parliamentary gentry in his discussion of the fate of parliamentary supply. Others in local studies have castigated the local magistrates for their destructive fiscal role, for lightening their own burdens, and looking on complacently when their neighbors and inferiors did the same. The gentry failed to give enough in parliament, and then ensured that the sums were even smaller when collected. Anthony Fletcher's verdict on the selfishness of the Sussex gentry is even more resounding than Russell's on the obtuseness of the parliamentary gentry: “The magnate gentry must bear full responsibility for the collapse of the subsidy as an effective fiscal instrument … as the King's servants in the county [they] acquiesced when the community at large followed their example and put the protection of their own pockets before the financial needs of the central government.”

In recent years the interest of English historians in poverty and poor relief during Tudor-Stuart times has grown appreciably. Besides new research on certain cities, towns, and counties, a number of studies, both published and unpublished, focus attention on the vital center of English poor relief operations — the parish. This growing emphasis on parochial responses to the problems associated with poverty and the poor in England reflects the view of a recent student of English poor relief, Geoffrey W. Oxley, who has insisted that there really can be no history of poor relief per se, “only the history of poor relief in particular parishes.”

It is common knowledge that London parish records have enormous value for students of English poor relief. A careful survey of essential documents such as accounts of the churchwardens and overseers of the poor, vestry minutes, and parish registers which survive for London's 108 parishes led to the selection of the seven parishes in this study. Regrettably, the ravages of time and circumstance have destroyed a substantial proportion of the City records of this type which once existed for the period. Almost without exception the larger, densely populated, and generally poverty-stricken parishes outside London's walls suffered the greatest losses. Consequently, the study which follows represents only the range of responses for ameliorating poverty which emerged within a limited sample of smaller, less highly congested, intramural City parishes.

At the same time this group of London parishes provides a fuller awareness of the ways in which England's poor relief regime developed and functioned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

At the close of the seventeenth century the English House of Lords played an important role in government. It was the highest court in the kingdom as well as the upper house of the legislature; and, as A. S. Turberville observed, the Lords still considered themselves the “hereditary counsellors” of the crown. The prestige of the peerage was such that well into George I's reign most leading ministers were, or sought to become, peers. Although over twice as large as a century earlier, the English House of Lords retained its exclusive character with a total membership of only 165-169 lay peers plus twenty-six bishops. Furthermore, thanks to William III's bipartisan creations, the upper house remained more or less evenly balanced between Whig and Tory sympathizers so that it acted as a counterweight to party fluctuations in the Commons. In addition, a number of peers exerted extensive control over elections to the Commons.

The Irish House of Lords between 1692 and 1727 did not constitute so influential a part of the Irish government, yet in most respects it resembled its English counterpart. It too served as a high court, with all members (as in England) joining the law lords in considering and rendering judicial decisions. As counsellors to the lord lieutenant (viceroy) Irish peers and bishops were, in fact, more active since they provided about half the membership of the Irish privy council. Unlike the English privy council, that in Ireland was a relatively small functioning body, meeting regularly with the lord lieutenant to review all proposed legislation.

Major emphasis has been placed on the political significance of the final abolition of the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1660. Not only did it remove a substantial source of grievance against the crown but, as part of a wider settlement whereby Charles II surrendered ancient dues in return for revenue granted by parliament, it formed a major signpost on the road from a feudal to a constitutional monarchy. Historians have also stressed the importance of abolition to developments in landownership and agriculture. To Blackstone writing in the eighteenth century, abolition was “a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even Magna Carta itself.” A century later G. C. Brodrick felt it “at least possible” that “this great reform” had provided England with “an advantage in agriculture over her foreign rivals which has not yet been fully exhausted.” David Ogg went so far as to suggest that abolition “was possibly the most important single event in the history of English landholding.” While most recently, in analysing the economic causes of the English revolution, Lawrence Stone has argued that “it is surely significant that among those [things[ whch were not [restored in 1660] were feudal tenures.”

It has been suggested that the more substantial landowners benefited in three respects from abolition: fiscally; collectively, in relation to other groups in rural society; and managerially, insofar as the reform increased their capacity to conduct their affairs effectively. Their financial position improved with the disappearance of the feudal exactions associated with wardship to which the majority of them had previously been liable.

Despite all the attention lavished on the mid-eighteenth-century parliament, the House of Lords has been largely ignored by historians. The Whig historians of the nineteenth century were concerned with tracing the development of the House of Commons as the principal vehicle of constitutional progress, and in this century Namierites and neo-Whigs have alternately challenged and defended the Whig position, basing their arguments almost entirely on their views of proceedings in the lower chamber. The House of Lords was easy to neglect, one suspects, because most historians assumed that the upper House could be conveniently explained away as an appendage of the crown where an institutionalized majority of bishops, Scottish representative peers, placeholders, and newly-created peers could easily maintain a ministry. This, in turn, has led to a tendency to explain events in the House of Lords at any point in the century in terms of a static political structure, largely without regard to current issues or changes in the “structure of politics” at the national level.

The two most conspicuous segments of the “Party of the Crown” in the Lords (and the two most abused for their alleged political servility) were the bishops and representative Scottish peers. The second Earl of Effingham expressed the conventional political wisdom of the eighteenth century when he told the House in 1780 that “those two descriptions threw a great weight into the scale of the Crown,” and historians have generally echoed this view. In the past two decades scholarship has begun to modify this picture for both ends of the century, though the old clichés still hold sway for the decades from Walpole to North.

The tradition of thought known as civic humanism has recently occupied the attention of a number of commentators. Not only has it been examined in the place of its birth, Renaissance Italy, and more especially Florence, but in a recent work J. G. A. Pocock has traced the influence of the tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and finally in the New World. The question considered here is the particular use to which civic modes of thought and argument were put by a group of moderate reformers in the debates on parliamentary reform in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Although this period has received attention from social and constitutional historians, it has not been discussed by historians of ideas.

Civic humanism is both an analysis of a political problem and a range of recommendations as to how the problem is best to be solved. The problem is defined in terms of the deleterious effects of time on political organization. Human organizations rely on the ordered and rule-governed behavior of individuals. Such behavior exhibits, over time, a constant tendency to disintegrate into selfish action. Political and legal institutions provide the immediate incentives to prevent this happening. Yet how can these institutions themselves be safeguarded or rendered self-regulating?

The solution to the problem of achieving political stability through time is seen essentially as a moral solution, that is to say it is seen to lie in the creation of a particular set of attitudes towards political life amongst the citizens of the polity.

It has been a literary (if not strictly historical) commonplace that the later nineteenth century was a time of pervasive rebellion of sons against fathers. For example, Butler's The Way of All Flesh and Gosse's Father and Son are texts often cited as indicative of a broader social phenomenon. “As Irish life runs to secret societies,” observed V. S. Pritchett, “so English life seems to run naturally to parricide movements. We are a nation of father haters.” Yet father-hating did not become conspicuous until the Victorian period, when, in contrast to the reputed submissiveness of the eighteenth-century son, a “growing self-consciousness by the son of his role as liberator” surfaced in fictional and biographical writing. Whether such a rebellion actually took place on any large scale is impossible to determine. Few men record such things, and when they do their real feelings tend to remain concealed or not fully understood. The premise of this study, based on selected examples of autobiography, is that the peculiar desperation of many Victorians to buttress eroding forms of traditional patriarchal authority had its first and perhaps most crucial effects within the family itself, intensifying ordinary generational conflict and its usual quota of rebellion, guilt, and neurosis. Amidst the conventional catalogues of accomplishment, there is a striking pattern of childhood experience within the family that incubated some version of future rebellion and profoundly affected the writers' emotional lives.

Open warfare between generations is uncommon; most often rebellion instead employs a disguised language and context for its articulation.

During the decade before the American Revolution, the dissenting schoolmaster, James Burgh, became one of England's foremost propagandists for radical reform. All of the recent works on English radicalism and the ideological origins of the American Revolution recognize the important place of Burgh's magnum opus, the Political Disquisitions, in these movements. Burgh himself, however, has remained a shadowy figure. The process whereby he became a radical has not been explored; important nuances of his political philosophy are unknown; the scope of his radical actions are insufficiently appreciated; and the extent of his influence has not been fully evaluated. In short, there exist some rather incredible gaps in our understanding of the author of a work uniformly agreed to be the “standard source book for reform propagandists in the 1780's,” and “perhaps the most important political treatise which appeared in England in the first half of the reign of George III.” More importantly, in rectifying this situation it becomes obvious that Burgh's career raises some important questions about the character and development of late eighteenth-century English radicalism and suggests the need to qualify or modify certain current perceptions of that movement.

One of eleven children, Burgh was born in late 1714 in the rural Scottish community of Madderty, Perthshire. His father Andrew was minister of the parish Church of Scotland. His mother Margaret was an aunt of the famous Scottish historian William Robertson. Although almost nothing is known of James's youth, his writing indicates that his childhood was happy and the force of his parents' example was considerable.

Strikes are like certain bitter-sweet varities of sin. However frequently and violently they are denounced and however painful the consequences to those who indulge, they continue to flourish. V. L. Allen noted this curious role of strikes in industrial society some time ago. “Strikes,” he wrote,

Strikes have become so common in modern society that they seem to be a normal part of the social landscape. This is perhaps one reason why historians have tended to ignore them and their history. Upon reflection, it is indeed surprising how little attention the history of industrial conflict has received from historians. Of course, certain dramatic events, like the General Strike of 1926 or the London dock strike of 1889, are relatively well chronicled, but even these are sorely under-analyzed. There are not even competent narratives of other episodes, like the explosion of militancy just after the First World War; and we know still less about the persistent dynamics of strikes throughout British industry. In this respect, historians lag well behind other social scientists who have been studying industrial strife for many years, but whose work is unfortunately limited by their frankly ahistorical or even anti-historical approach. It is time for historians to remedy this deficiency, and this essay is intended as a first, very small effort in that direction.

Myth and mystery continue to cloud the supersession of Herbert Henry Asquith by David Lloyd George half-way through the First World War. Then, and long afterwards, there was much talk of intrigue and conspiracy, often inspired by those who believed Asquith had been jockeyed out of the premiership by an unholy alliance of low schemers who scrupled at nothing. It is tempting to dismiss such charges as baseless, as the loser's perennial excuse. Yet in the records that have come to light there are enough gaps, irregularities, and teasing hints of suppressed evidence to keep alive old suspicions that some things occurred which many of the participants wished forgotten. Walter (later Viscount) Long, for instance, once wrote to Lord Beaverbrook in response to a request for his version of events: “I have omitted a great deal that happened at the time, as I believe I promised not to mention certain very interesting incidents.” Before he died Long seems to have weeded out of his private papers material relating to Asquith's overthrow. And in a massive three-volume biography of Lord Curzon there are only two slight references to the change of government in 1916, a remarkable feat of omission considering Curzon's role. The biographer, Lord Ronaldshay, later professed innocent astonishment at finding nothing pertinent to this great event in Curzon's voluminous papers. Another minister who was near the center, Herbert (later Viscount) Samuel, appears to have reshaped his chronicle of events in a manner more flattering to himself but less useful to historians.

But often in the world's most crowded streets
And often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life ….

The Buried Life, Matthew Arnold

Any comparison between historical phenomena is fraught with many dangers, particularly where a century separates their occurrence. Nevertheless, it is proposed to compare certain aspects of social protest in 1916-17 with the disturbances more closely associated with the final decade of the eighteenth century — the form of protest in question being taxation populaire. For, while examples of such riots can be found from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, as R. B. Rose has written, “… we shall be justified in regarding taxation populaire as primarily and typically an eighteenth century phenomenon.” E. P. Thompson, moreover, considers that “… the final years of the eighteenth century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market.” In both periods the country was suffering from wartime inflation, and food shortages caused by failures in domestic harvests and interruptions in imported supplies, threatened to cause breaches in social harmony. And in both cases the two national governments that emerged were fully prepared to repress the threat to national security posed by outbreaks of working-class unrest. Besides such central parallels, others of a more trivial nature spring to mind. Not too much imagination is needed to see the spirit of the Church and King Mobs marching amongst the ranks of those who attacked pacifist meetings and the property of those with German names; though it may be considered outrageously fancilful to see the devilry of Arthur Thistlewood behind Mrs. Wheeldon's plot to poison Arthur Henderson and Lloyd George.