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.

Changes in familial relations have influenced historical scholarship. The family is now seen more in terms of relationships that have to be activated to be meaningful. This study first looks at general features of the European nineteenth-century bourgeois family and its context, in particular the dramatic fall in the marital birth rate. Sigmund Freud's family is then taken as a case study. Turning attention from the usual psychoanalytic focus, it is possible to tease out those relationships in which Freud was actually embedded, particularly with his siblings and siblings-in-law. The consequences of neglecting these features are highlighted.

The association between liberty and the Anglo-Saxons has been rendered mythical by later retellings, both in the Middle Ages and afterwards. This later history notwithstanding, it is argued here that liberty occupied a significant place in the early English documentary record. Originally part of the cultural and linguistic inheritance from late antiquity, the notion of liberty was deployed by English churchmen in defence of monastic freedom from the eighth century onwards, creating an archival legacy which was rewritten and imitated in later centuries, becoming fixed in institutional memory as fiscal and legal freedoms bestowed on the populations of monasteries and towns by pre-Conquest kings.

How should information about distant places be collected? How should it be made available to the reading public? And how far could it be trusted? Such questions were posed by the expansion of exploration and travel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the leading scientific authorities, the making of accurate observations, the use of precise instruments, the methodical collection of specimens and the writing of narratives provided the principal means by which knowledge itself could travel. Yet the relationship between metropolitan science, travel writing and field observation remained fraught with difficulty. This essay considers a variety of ways in which the experience of disturbance shaped the culture of exploration during the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on writing, collecting and sketching.

Debates about the concept of ‘culture’ in Britain are usually related to the perceived rise of ‘mass society’ in the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay re-situates such debates in relation to the development, from the 1870s onwards, of an ethically driven interpretation of changes in English society in the late eighteenth century. Through an examination of the later work of the Hammonds and of its reception in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this essay brings out how Raymond Williams's enormously influentialCulture and Societyties the understanding of the concept of ‘culture’ to the emergence of this ‘new civilisation’.

The four hundredth anniversary of the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of James I inspired a number of conferences, the majority seemingly devoted to the new Stuart Britain. The last queen of England received her commemoration in the exhibitionElizabethheld at the National Maritime Museum from May to September 2003. The Museum and the Royal Historical Society also agreed to sponsor a conference to accompany the exhibition. Nigel Rigby, head of research, and Robert Blyth, curator of imperial and maritime history, organised both the mounting of the conference and the subsequent editing of the papers with the consummate professionalism that has become the National Maritime Museum's hallmark.

A well-known painting owned by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries of London,Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada, has long presumed to have been made in around 1588. By examining both internal and contextual evidence, however, this paper establishes that the work instead dates from during the reign of James I. It unpicks the multiple layers of events that are depicted simultaneously within the image, and suggests some of the diverse influences operating on the unidentified artist(s) and unknown patron. Finally, it examines the new purposes for which the work was to be appropriated in the mid-nineteenth century at the time of its presentation to the Apothecaries.

The year 2003 was also a commemoration of Pepys, whose lifespan corresponds exactly with that of Elizabeth a century before. The Navy was Pepys's professional concern, and in his Diary and other writings he frequently, and with increasing shrewdness, compared Elizabethan glories with the poorer record of his own day. Pepys also collected and bequeathed important sources for the history of the Elizabethan Navy. This paper uses these materials to consider the perceived failure of Restoration seamen to match the achievements of their grandfathers.

This paper identifies an English ‘national myth’ of sea-power, based on the folk-memory of the Elizabethan naval war, which powerfully shaped public attitudes and political choices throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This myth associated true, patriotic and ever-victorious English sea-power with political liberty, financial profit and, above all, Protestantism. The public judged successive governments on their willingness and ability to realise this programme. Most of them failed on one or both counts, until the elder Pitt made the myth work, and the French revolutionaries changed the rules.

This paper examines the extent to which English seamen in the later sixteenth century began to employ astronomical observations and mathematical calculations in navigation instead of relying largely on practical experience. It discusses the manuals of seamanship that were published in increasing numbers at this period and also looks at the availability of instruction in the necessary mathematics. The popularity of some texts including Waghenaer's theMariner's Mirrour, a book combining charts and sailing directions with the tables needed to use astronomical observations, are, it is suggested, an indication of the progress made in this respect by the early seventeenth century.

It tends to be assumed that Queen Elizabeth was interested in maps and globes, not least because she was frequently depicted in their vicinity. Investigation strongly suggests that this was not the case. It is argued that this did matter. By depriving her of an independent source of spatial information, it made her more dependent on her ministers and, in particular, it meant that the royal estates were not mapped before 1600, with long-term financial and possibly constitutional consequences for the crown.

Elizabethan travel books – and particularly the epoch-making anthologies of Richard Hakluyt – have been seen (and celebrated) as evidence of England's first great age of maritime expansion. This paper suggests, in terms first suggested by F. O. Matthiessen, that the work of the translator was closely connected with that of the voyager and the merchant. The role played by the translation of Classical and Continental materials is crucial to understanding the intellectual and practical outlook of those involved in overseas ventures and, in particular, to contextualising Hakluyt's patriotic claims and strategies in hisPrinciple Navigations(1598–1600).

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century England embarked on a strategic rapprochement with the Ottoman Empire. Elizabeth I's excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570 removed the papal levies for trading with the ‘infidel’, opening up commercial opportunities. England also explored the possibility of calling upon Ottoman military might to support her against the Catholic powers of mainland Europe. One product of this East–West engagement is a remarkable correspondence and exchange of gifts between Elizabeth and the sultana, Walide Safiye. Although the Anglo-Ottoman political accord failed, the exchanges between Elizabeth and the sultana set the tone for England's subsequent trading position in the East.

Descriptions of Tudor England by French visitors are scarce, but in the 1560s and 1570s a renewed interest in ‘all things English’ is perceptible amongst the French elite. The new religion, parliament, the eventuality of a royal marriage and genuine curiosity in such a strange country contributed to distract the attention of a few Frenchmen from Italy and Spain. In the 1580s, a major change was to occur: more books on England were being published in French, but their sole purpose was religious propaganda and many were translations of English pro- or anti-Catholic pamphlets.

The paper argues that Robert Parsons's tractThe Conferenceabout the next succession provides the immediate polemical and political context in which James VI wrote hisTrue Law of Free Monarchies. The argument is not that that tract is a simple reply to Parsons but rather a response to the position occupied both by Parsons and Buchanan, which in fact were very similar. James's pamphlet was occasioned, however, by Parsons's book and the concerns raised therein about the succession to the English throne and forms part of a concerted campaign to defend James's rights in that regard and to assert his view of kingship against the monarchomach theories of both Protestants and Catholics.

The image of Elizabeth I has its own significant historiography, with each decade over the past half-century appropriating the legacy of paintings and prints to discuss current issues of historical and social enquiry. Most recently, the representation of Elizabeth after her death, from her monument in the Abbey to the latest film, has been the subject of several monographs. This paper looks again at the diverse original contexts of these images, both in terms of physical space and of ideological intention, and places sculptural depiction more centrally than is often credited.

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to establish any permanent settlements in the Atlantic world. As a result, any balance sheet of empire drawn up on Elizabeth's death in 1603 would have valued prospects in the Mediterranean and the East Indies more highly than possibilities in the Americas.

This paper explores aspects of Anglo-Scottish relations in Elizabeth's reign with particular emphasis on the idea of dynastic union and the creation of a Protestant British kingdom. It begins by examining the legacy of pre-Elizabethan ideas of Britain and the extent to which Elizabeth and her government sought to realise the vision of a Protestant and imperial British kingdom first articulated in the late 1540s. It then focuses on the issues arising from the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots and her long captivity in England. The dynastic implications of Mary's execution in 1587 are highlighted and it is argued that Elizabeth's policy towards James VI and Scotland betrays little or no interest in developing a truly British agenda.

Elizabeth's reign was calamitous for Ireland and indeed the mismanagement there was close to bringing disaster upon England as well. Why could she not have muddled through in Ireland with the sort of Tudor consensus and conciliation that worked for England and Wales? Elizabeth had good intentions towards Ireland and Irish but these were stymied by a range of historical, political, gender and personal issues. Unlike Wales, the subjugation of Ireland had not been completed during the middle ages. Henry VIII had embarked upon the integration of Ireland at a time of religious upheaval and strategic threat. This process – the so-called reformation of Ireland – was still ongoing when Elizabeth came to the throne and the international situation became more menacing both ideologically and militarily as her reign unfolded. Female monarchical rule was a difficult enough task in the home polity but the task of governing a subordinate kingdom through male proxies made the government of Ireland doubly difficult. This paper starts with the problems facing Elizabeth in Ireland, looks at the personalities and policies of those she governed through, examines the responses of the Irish elite and makes some conclusions.

Elizabeth I's apparent vacillation over the Dutch Revolt is possibly the most disputed aspect of her foreign policy. On two occasions she was formally offered sovereignty of the rebel provinces, of Holland and Zeeland in 1576 and of the United Provinces in 1585. The circumstances of both offers were very similar, however different the outcomes. The course of the negotiations reveals how Elizabeth's prevarication arose from a moral dilemma: how to reconcile her acceptance of the legitimacy of the Dutch cause with her conscientious objection to territorial expansion.