In 1794 Joseph Priestley fled England and the church-and-king sentiment that had set ablaze his Birmingham house and laboratory in 1791. His flight to America was noted by the United Irishmen with a public letter. This most radical group in the entire camp of English sympathizers with the French Revolution not only lamented English repression but also offered a marvelous hymn to the tripartite linkage of America, useful science, and radical change.

The relationship between science and progressive politics was by no means one-way. Just as science would ameliorate the human condition, so a progressive politics would encourage scientific advances.

Britain's “long” eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation's art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vibrant city in the Western world. The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment literati abroad. The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficacy and range, bringing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain's landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the British Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies' strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.

I

Did men and women have different cultural and material values in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? We know very little in detail about the activities of people within their homes and especially about their attitudes to the material goods that they used and that surrounded them. Virginia Woolf's complaint that she had no model to “turn about this way and that” in exploring the role of women in fiction applies equally to women's behavior as consumers, for we still do not know, as she put it, “what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night.” Did their particular roles within the household result in different material values, just as their biological and economic roles were different? We do know that power was unequally distributed within the household, although we can also demonstrate cooperation and affection between family members. We take it that the household was, in some sense, the woman's domain, but very often we cannot explore what this meant in practice. In short, was being “subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men” reflected in women's cultural values and tastes?

These are broad questions that are not easily answered, either in theory or by observation, especially as it is not easy to identify the behavior of women as distinct from that of the family and household, but they are questions worth asking to see if there are signs of behavior different enough to warrant the view that there was a subculture in which women had the chance to express themselves and their views of the world separately, especially as the daily routines of their lives were different.

The enactment into law in January 1916 of the first installment of mandatory military service in modern British history was an event whose importance few scholars dispute. While invariably considered a significant break in the British political and military tradition, recent scholarship has tended to treat the passage of the first Military Service Act as an episode that has little new to tell us about the political rivalry within the coalition cabinet presided over by Herbert Henry Asquith since May 1915. No student of the compulsory service debate can deny that he has been warned off, as Lord Beaverbrook wrote in the late 1920s that close study of the politics of conscription in the Asquith coalition would be “tedious to the last degree.” Most forbidding was the judgment of Lord Blake in his life of the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law: “The question of conscription would indeed be a tedious topic to pursue through all its ramifications. The endless discussions, the attitudes taken by public men at various times, the compromises, the disputes, constitute a chapter in English history to which, no doubt in years to come dull history professors will direct their duller research students.”

Many historians of the world war who have found the subject less dull than implied above have concluded that it presents a straightforward story: the implementation of conscription came about because the traditional policy of voluntarism had proven insufficient to raise an army of adequate size. The episode has been judged essentially a triumph of the Tory right wing (with the collusion of the maverick Liberal David Lloyd George) over orthodox Liberalism.

In an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the work of William Dobson entitled “The Royalists at War,” one portrait among the Cavalier soldiers and commanders was that of Sir Thomas Aylesbury. Aylesbury holds in his hand a document that begins, “To the King's most Excellent Majesty The Humble Petition.” By posing in his official black robes that evoke the solemnity of the law and by giving the petition prominence, Aylesbury celebrates his position as a master of requests. As a master of requests even at Oxford in the 1640s, it was his role to present petitions to the king asking for redress of grievances or for personal advancement, in short, asking for royal bounty. As Dobson's portrait signifies, such petitions were not merely the seedy clamorings of early Stuart courtiers but an open and important link between the monarch and the subject, one suitable for commemoration in portraiture. The painting makes concrete, even in the midst of civil war, the king's traditional role as guarantor of justice and giver of favor. While the king's promise of justice goes back to early Anglo-Saxon dooms and tenth-century coronation oaths, his giving of largesse had expanded with the Renaissance monarchy of the Tudors.

Historians of early modern Europe have become interested in court patronage as they have analyzed politics and political elites. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, from the work of MacFarlane to Namier, the study of relationships between patrons and clients has been at the forefront of modern historiography.

The demonstration in the House of Commons on March 2, 1629, by Sir John Eliot, John Selden, and several other members was an event with the most serious implications. Their protest against the Arminian movement in the English church and against the levying of Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament was in fact an appeal to the country over the head of the king's government. One is inclined to agree with Conrad Russell that this act was potentially revolutionary. Its immediate consequence was a stoppage of trade and a widespread refusal to pay customs duties, at a time of desperate royal financial need. On March 3, Eliot, Selden, and seven other members of the Commons were summoned to appear before the Privy Council, where they were later interrogated as to the meaning of their words and actions. When questioned, most of them appealed to parliamentary privilege, four (including Eliot) refusing absolutely to answer any question concerning matters in the House. Two of the delinquents, Coryton and Hayman, submitted themselves to the king and were released. The remaining seven were detained. The prosecution of these men by the Caroline regime was an important political episode too lengthy to be dealt with here in its entirety. But one aspect of these proceedings is worthy of examination in its own right. The hearings in King's Bench on the return of the prisoners' writs of habeas corpus have not received the attention and the analysis they deserve.

In the society of late medieval Europe, where power, wealth, and influence were derived from the ownership of land, the delegation of responsibility by the ruling elite became a matter of financial, administrative, and political necessity. Not only was it physically impossible for a great rentier to oversee personally routine points of organization on his estates, but the overwhelming litigiousness of contemporary life also made it essential for any property owner of note to engage the services of men practiced in the law. Furthermore, regular consultation with leading members of his following played a crucial part in determining the success—or even the survival—of the magnate in question. Just as an astute monarch recognized the importance of the deliberative process, making himself accessible to his ablest and most powerful subjects, so too the great lord had to involve his kinsmen and supporters in questions of policy and politics. In the right hands the seignorial council could, therefore, become a formidable weapon, sometimes even providing an alternative power structure to the government itself. A striking instance of this usurpation of authority is to be found in tenth-century Japan, where the administrative council of the dominant Fujiwara clan effectively superseded the central bureaucracy of the Heian state. Indeed, it was from the chambers of this body (known as the Mandokoro) that the real government of the country was carried out. The old framework was carefully preserved, and the great council of state continued to perform a ceremonial function, but, so far as practical control was concerned, the orders of the Fujiwara advisers took the place of imperial decrees.

One of the most exciting and influential areas of research in eighteenth-century history over the last fifteen years has been the study of crime and the criminal law. It is the purpose of this essay to map the subject for the interested nonspecialist: to ask why historians have chosen to study it, to explain how they have come to approach it in particular ways, to describe something of what they have found, to evaluate those findings, and to suggest fruitful directions for further research. Like all maps, the one presented here is selective. The essay begins with a general analysis of the ways in which the field has developed and changed in its short life. It then proceeds to consider in more detail four areas of study: criminality, the criminal trial, punishment, and criminal legislation. This selection makes no pretense of providing an exhaustive coverage. A number of important areas have been omitted: for example, public order and policing. However, the areas covered illustrate the range of approaches, problems, and possibilities that lie within the field. The essay concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the subject.

The Development of the Field

Before the 1960s crime was not treated seriously by eighteenth-century historians. Accounts of crime and the criminal law rarely extended beyond a few brief remarks on lawlessness, the Bloody Code, and the state of the prisons, often culled from Fielding, Hogarth, and Howard. There were exceptions, but they fell outside the mainstream of eighteenth-century history. The multiple volumes of Leon Radzinowicz's monumental History of the English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 began to appear in 1948, but Radzinowicz worked in the Cambridge Law Faculty and the Institute of Criminology, and, as Derek Beales has pointed out, his findings were not quickly assimilated by historians.

In the past decade the role of science in the early eighteenth century has come in for close scrutiny and increasing debate. There is specifically one rather large and problematic issue, that is, the relationship between science and technology in England in the first half of the eighteenth century when, it is generally agreed, the Industrial Revolution had not yet made any discernible impact. There are those historians who have insisted that the Newtonian natural philosophy had nothing whatever to do with the mechanical creations and innovations of artisans and craftsmen. This may be understandable because Newtonian science has come to be regarded as fundamentally mathematical and experimental—and not even comprehensible, except in the broadest terms, to the Augustan virtuosos. This has often created the version of science as a purely rational and cerebral activity distanced from and above technology, a science unsullied perhaps by the grime of mechanics' hands. One might speculate on the ideological origins of such a universe, but it seems that one can at least see that such a version of events is determined in part by the question that proposes a direct causal relation between cerebral science and rank technology. The argument evidently is that, if one cannot find the historical evidence that establishes a precise link between Newton's interparticulate forces and the partial vacuum of the Savery engine, then one must conclude that no relationship existed.

But historical associations are never quite so simple. One could easily demonstrate that the Newtonian natural philosophy was deliberately propagated among men whose interests tended to be more practical than philosophical.

In the late 1680s, Archibald Pitcairne and David Gregory became devotees of Newton's natural philosophy. In the next decade, they formed the nexus of a scientific circle composed of their students. These men emerge as a specific group from the wider circle of Newton's followers for several reasons, having to do with kinship and community relationships as well as with shared intellectual beliefs. Gregory and, through him, Pitcairne were among the first to recognize Newton's achievement in the Principia. From their base in Edinburgh, later extending to Oxford and Leiden, they inspired several young men, including John and James Keill, John Freind, George Cheyne, George Hepburn, and William Cockburn. Gregory has long been recognized as a central figure among Newtonians, in part owing to his copious memoranda, but Pitcairne's significance both as an intellectual and as a catalyst has been neglected by historians. When one focuses on Gregory and Pitcairne and their notebooks and correspondence, as well as their published works, a well-defined group emerges around them who shared several characteristics. Politically, they were Tories. In religion, they were High Church Anglicans who valued the episcopacy and those points of ritual and doctrine that distinguished the English church from nonconformity. With the exception of John Freind, these men were Scots and shared kinship ties as well as geographic origin in the east and northeast of Scotland. Finally, all the members of this group were at least nominally physicians. Only one of them, John Keill, probably did not practice medicine, but he too took a medical degree.

Methodism figures as a kind of puzzle in the history of eighteenth-century England. Even writers who are not unsympathetic to John Wesley sometimes find his thought incoherent and confused. “The truth should be faced,” writes Frank Baker, “that Wesley (like most of us) was a bundle of contradictions.” Albert Outler celebrates Wesley's merits not as a thinker but as a popularizer of other men's doctrines. His Wesley was “by talent and intent, a folk-theologian: an eclectic who had mastered the secret of plastic synthesis, simple profundity, the common touch.” One man's eclecticism, however, is another man's humbug. The very qualities that Outler admires are those that E. P. Thompson condemns in The Making of the English Working Class. Here Methodist theology is dismissed as “opportunist, anti-intellectual, and otiose.” Wesley “appears to have dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worst elements of Puritanism.” In doctrinal terms Methodism was not a plastic synthesis but “a mule.” What offends Thompson is not so much Wesley's incoherence as the social ambivalence of the movement that he had created. In class terms Methodism was, Thompson says, “hermaphroditic.” It attracted both masters and men. It catered to hostile social interests. It served a “dual role, as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited.” The belief that Methodism is socially incomprehensible and perhaps in some sense socially illegitimate is not original with Thompson. Early statements of this assumption can be found in Richard Niebuhr's The Social Sources of Denominationalism and in John and Barbara Hammond's The Town Labourer.

The volume of publications on social history in the last decade has been enormous. The Royal Historical Society's Annual Bibliography of British History contains hundreds of new items each year, so many that keeping up with the latest research is almost impossible except within limited fields. The very quantity of material is a testament to the success of what has been termed the “new social history.” Taking as its focus the lives of the masses, this approach employs concepts and techniques drawn from cognate disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and statistics to uncover the rich complexity of everyday life in the past. New interests, new methods, and a fresh look at underused primary sources: these are the hallmarks. This is not to say that it is a homogeneous “movement” since there are vigorous debates about central issues such as the use of theory and about the correct balance between quantification and traditional qualitative, intuitive approaches.

The new social history has had a profound effect on the way in which all historians deal with their subject and even on its critics. That social history has arrived as a leader in historical analysis is amply attested by G. R. Elton's recent call to political historians not to accept reduction to the status of its poor cousins. The subject's position is assured, and its achievements have been substantial. This article deals with the main areas of research in social history: population, social structure, education and literacy, women, religion, and the family.

Just before Christmas 1721 William Moore, described in court records as “a Pedler or Petty Chapman,” arrived in the frontier community of Berwick, Maine. Had Moore bothered to purchase a peddler's license, we would probably know nothing of his visit. He was undone by success. His illicit sales drew the attention of local authorities, and they confiscated Moore's “bagg or pack of goods.” From various witnesses the magistrates learned that the man came to Berwick with “sundry goods and Merchandizes for Saile & that he has Travelled from town to town Exposeing said Goods to Sale and has Sold to Sundry persons.”

The people of Berwick welcomed Moore to their isolated community. One can almost imagine the villagers, most of them humble farmers, rushing to Phillip Hubbard's house to examine the manufactured goods that the peddler had transported from Boston. Daniel Goodwin, for example, purchased “a yard and halfe of Stuff for handcarchiefs.” Sarah Gooding could not forgo the opportunity to buy some muslin, fine thread, and black silk. She also bought “a yard and Quarter of Lase for a Cap.” Patience Hubbard saw many things that she wanted, but in the end she settled for a “pare of garters.” Her neighbor, Sarah Stone, took home a bundle of “smole trifles.” None of the purchases amounted to more than a few pennies.

Colonial American historians have understandably overlooked such trifling transactions. They have concentrated instead on the structure of specific communities, and though they have taught us much about the people who lived in villages such as Berwick, they have generally ignored the social and economic ties that connected colonists to men and women who happened to dwell in other places.

During the winter of scarcity of 1794, Hannah More wrote “a few moral stories,” drew up a plan for publication and distribution, and sent the package around to her evangelical and bluestocking friends. Their response was enthusiastic; even Horace Walpole abandoned his usual teasing to write back, “I will never more complain of your silence; for I am perfectly convinced that you have no idle, no unemployed moments. Your indefatigable benevolence is incessantly occupied in good works; and your head and your heart make the utmost use of the excellent qualities of both…. Thank you a thousand times for your most ingenious plan; may great success reward you!” Walpole then sent off copies of the plan to the duchess of Gloucester and other aristocratic friends. Following Wilberforce's example, such wealthy philanthropists subscribed over 1,000 pounds to support the project during its first year. Henry Thornton agreed to act as treasurer and Zachary Macaulay as agent, and the ball was rolling.

In March 1795, the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts issued its first publications. Prominent evangelicals and gentry worked to distribute them to the rural poor, booksellers, and hawkers and among Sunday schools and charity children. During the Repository's three-year existence, the fifty or so tracts written by Hannah More were supplemented by contributions from fellow evangelicals Thornton, Macaulay, John Venn, and John Newton, the poet William Mason, More's literary friend Mrs. Chapone, her protégée Selina Mills, and her sisters Sally and Patty More and by reprints of old favorites by Isaac Watts and Justice John Fielding.

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“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.

The Gloucester weaver strike of 1825 was part of a national revival of trade-union activity following Parliament's repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824. The strike also occupied a central place in Gloucester's economic history, marking a turning point in the evolution of its woolen trade from a protoindustrial to a factory-based system. For this reason, the strike embodied in its form the transitional state of the industry, combining characteristics of preindustrial “risings” with those of modern industrial disorders. And in this anomaly lay its distinctiveness and its special interest.

Scholars have little appreciated the strike's transitional quality, however, treating it inevitably as a straightforward confrontation between capital and labor. The Hammonds and, more recently, Julia de Lacey Mann have depicted the weavers as a homogeneous social group, their strike movement as autonomous, and their conflict with the clothiers as a unitary, year-long struggle for higher wages. Such treatment, moreover, reflects widely held assumptions about the nature of class and class consciousness in the English Industrial Revolution.

This essays offers a different perspective. The strike was organized and led by master weavers whose interests could differ from those of their journeymen and apprentices. Nor was their movement completely autonomous since the deference they displayed permitted elements within the employing and governing class to manipulate them. Those engaged in such manipulation pursued the interests of their own social group, however sincerely they invoked the values of paternalism. Indeed, the dominant pattern of conflict followed a traditional vertical arrangement; a hint of modern class conflict emerged only in the strike's final phase.