The law of capture at sea probably had its beginnings in the eleventh century in the Mediterranean Il Consolato del Mare. This was a code of sea laws compiled by order of the ancient kings of Aragon. Originally written in the dialect of Catalonia, it has since been translated into every language of Europe. By this code, neutral goods in captured enemy ships were restored to their owners, and enemy goods in neutral ships could be seized, although neutral ships and neutral cargoes had to be restored. Encapsulated in this and recognised by all the States of Europe as a common instrument between them, was the question of prize, from the Old French ‘prise’ meaning ‘taken or seized’. In the Atlantic the Rôles d’Oléron, perhaps initiated by Eleanor of Aquitaine, were based on the maritime trade in wine from La Rochelle along the Atlantic coast from the end of the twelfth century, and were sanctioned by the immemorial usage and custom of the sea.

The earliest recorded judicial proceedings regarding the legality of capture of foreign goods or vessels took place in 1357, and later proclamations through the centuries repeated the basic principles of legal obligation preserved within the legal system. The laws of the sea were enshrined in Liber Niger Admiralitatis, originally in ancient French or Latin. The earliest manuscript version, held in the National Archives, dates from 1450. This was a medieval code of maritime law and included not just the Rolls of Oléron, but all the most important laws, ordinances, decisions and acts of the High Court of Admiralty. This code emerged as a separate entity probably after the battle of Sluys in 1340.

Institutions, like the materials contained within them, can have long histories of their own. Founded in 1613, the Bristol Library was not the first public library in Britain as was once assumed by its nineteenth-century librarian, being preceded by libraries in both Norwich (1608) and Ipswich (1612), but it could proudly boast of being one of only a couple of dozen active during the seventeenth century. Nor was it necessarily the first accessible library in Bristol, with one held and managed by the Guild of Kalendars at All Saints Church (see Map) and active from 1464. The earliest iteration of what would one day become Bristol Central Library began its existence as a small collection of books managed by the city's civic governance, the Corporation, on King Street, then situated on the western edge of the city close to an area of marsh. Throughout its history, this library existed within a wider ecosystem of public and private repositories and archives, including that of church, club, and university libraries. Over centuries, interactions across these institutions, whether motivated by civic benevolence or private interests, influenced the form, functions, building and collections of Bristol Central Library today. The first home of the Bristol Library was a ‘lodge’ on King Street, south of Bristol Bridge, donated to the city in 1613 by Robert Redwood, a local merchant, as a ‘place to put bookes for the furtherance of Learninge’. Redwood would augment his gift with a further bequest of ten pounds, in 1630, to fund the acquisition of books, but the earliest texts in the library were chiefly the donation of Tobias Matthew (c. 1544–1628), the Bristol-born Archbishop of York.

The act of reading literature or watching drama is partly also an act of (re-)construction: piecing together the meaning, or at least one possible meaning, of a literary or dramatic narrative, including constructing the fictional lives and history of that narrative's characters. In the case of Classical, medieval, and Early Modern texts, such interpretative reconstruction is usually dependent upon not just the reader's literary– critical judgement – a judgement Fiona Tolhurst so ably illustrated in everything she wrote — but also the textual–critical decisions of the editor who stands between the modern audience and the pre-modern artefact or manuscript. The manuscript editor and codicologist must also reconstruct meaning by recapturing or even reconstructing the voices of the past that are recorded in these manuscripts. In this sense, as Ralph Hanna notes, textual criticism is partly ‘an act of cultural recuperation’ that ‘attempts to effect an historical bridge between a lost productive past and a consuming present’. In the case of the textual and critical reception of Sir Thomas Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’, however, the bridge leading the modern reader to the medieval text is littered with warning signs. My current argument was written as a prefatory addendum to, and is not a précis or reproduction of, the work Tolhurst and I have been doing trying to recuperate Malory's ‘Boke of Sir Trystram’ and its most famous protagonists; by a happenstance of publishing timelines, however, this current chapter will appear in print as a preface to, or very close contemporary of, our previously finished ‘Trystram’ theses.

The sixain, expertly used by William Shakespeare and Robert Southwell in their bestselling works of poetry, Venus and Adonis (1593) and Saint Peters Complaint (1595), moved through the hands of an extraordinary multitude of poets in the early modern period, from the sacred to the profane. The six-line stanza form has become known for both its capacity to hold together the play of paradox and antithesis and its ability to test a poet's control of metre and metaphor. In this chapter I suggest that the sixain offers an ideal case study for thinking about what might make good and bad poetry and how we might connect critical judgements concerning the use and misuse of particular poetic forms to intertextual and marketable phenomena. In so doing, I build on recent work by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton that establishes a ‘genealogy of the sixain’ and contests the idea that the form is ‘Shakespearean’, as suggested by popular reference to it as the Venus and Adonis stanza; as they note, ‘between 1476 and 1603, some 2445 poems were written entirely or partly in this stanza (7.5% of the total poems published or transcribed in the period), confirming it as one of the most popular English verse forms’. In looking beyond the sixain's use in Venus and Adonis they propose recognition of a countertradition that associates the sixain with poetry written ‘in the complaint mode and expressing amatory (or religious) distress’.

In seeking to further the notion of a counter-history of poetic form, then, this chapter also builds on a research project led by Lukas Erne that had the aim of establishing a quantitative approach to the popularity of printed books of poetry during the period 1583–1622.

Menyetla: Individual agency, collective collapse

The menyetla described in this book demonstrate the agency of township residents who, far from being powerless and waiting for the delivery of constitutional promises, find ways in which to advance their interests. However, this book is no celebration of menyetla. Quite the opposite. I have used the term menyetla because it carries greater neutrality than the best English translation. But this is neutrality in terms of the lex lokasi. The impact of menyetla is not neutral but has consequences. A key point developed in the case studies is that menyetla provide short-term benefit for individuals, albeit accompanied by risk, but result in damaging long-term consequences for society when practised at scale.

Thus framed, we should reject the idea that menyetla should be applauded as challenging South Africa's inequality. By and large, the menyetla described do constitute distributional struggles within a complex configuration of class and race. But, as much as inequality is the fundamental fault line of South African society, the pursuit of these menyetla do not provide a viable response. Chapter 10 described the dramatic, if little reported, destruction of the Metrorail system as short-term gain trumped the long-term value of urban infrastructure serving the poor. The unchecked pursuit of menyetla leads not to transformation but disintegration.

The pursuit of menyetla reflects a collective action problem in which it is rational to pursue individual short-term interests even when this results in the undermining of social and economic institutions. Individuals, and confederacies, do what they can in the absence of leadership able to marshal progressive collective action.

Daniel O’Connell was and remained Paul Cullen’s political hero. This chapter traces Cullen’s involvement with O’Connell and his campaign for the Repeal of the Union.

In early 1323, abuses in the collection of taxes by the Flemish ruling elites had precipitated an uprising in coastal Flanders that soon spread from the countryside to other castellanies and urban centres like Bruges and Ypres, whose skilled artisans quickly made common cause with the rebellious peasantry. While some of the first rural riots were dispersed by the year's end, the general hatred felt towards the nobility, together with the pro-French stance of Louis I, count of Nevers (r.1322–46), who had recently succeeded his grandfather as count of Flanders, soon transformed this localised peasant insurrection into a full-scale rebellion supported by a much broader coalition drawn from across the social hierarchy. At first the rebels were mostly peasants but, by the end of 1323, they had been joined by a significant section of the urban nobility and artisanal classes. As townsmen and peasants fought alongside each other under the banner of Willem de Deken, the burgomaster of Bruges, the socially mixed insurgents quickly captured the cities of Nieuport, Veurne and Ypres. At Courtrai, they were even able to take Count Louis himself prisoner. In 1325, however, the rebels’ momentum diminished after their attempts to seize Ghent and Oudenaarde had failed despite two lengthy sieges. The king of France, Charles IV (r.1322–28), used this opportunity to intervene and negotiate the Peace of Arques, the terms of which included the release of the count of Flanders from captivity in February 1326. But the ceasefire broke down just a year later, prompting the rebels to take up arms once more.

After the end of the common stock annals c.892 we can more accurately refer to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in the plural, as the work of many authors, revisers and scribes working in many different places across the following two-and-a-half centuries. The evidence of the surviving OE versions and other witnesses points to a pattern of dispersal, divergence and at times neglect of the annals across the following century, beside recurrent contact between the developing Chronicle texts. In various places, especially in relation to annals across the second half of the tenth century, points of contact provide evidence for the retrospective work of eleventh-century chronicle making.

This chapter explores the authoring and compilation the Chronicles across the tenth century, beginning with the annals of the so-called ‘First Continuation’ (893–96). This group of annals, authored c.900, takes up the story of the viking army that appeared in Wessex in 892 and is shared by ABC, but is also found in D as the result of a collation of a Northern Recension text with a *BC-type Chronicle. Other witnesses – the E Chronicle, the Mercian Register, Æthelweard's Chronicon and St Neots – present varying patterns of convergence and difference at this point, signalling a dispersal of copies of the common stock annals from the 890s. A, B and C continue to share annals as far as 914, after which A and *BC part company. A continues the annals of the reign of Edward the Elder as far as 920, after which this manuscript was neglected for some decades, until a revival of interest at Winchester in the middle of the tenth century.

Three consecutive texts in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Brogyntyn ii.1, all copied by the scribe who has been identified as the chief organizer of the manuscript, form a sophisticated memento mori sequence dedicated to guiding the gentry owners of the manuscript to prepare their souls for the inexorable coming of death: item 24, The Father of Pity (DIMEV 5256, fols. 63v–79r); item 25, ‘Lo Worldly Folks’ (DIMEV 3160, fol. 79v); and item 26, ‘Earth upon Earth’ (DIMEV 1170, fols. 79v–81v). The Father of Pity is a unique Middle English rhyme royal translation of a popular Latin verse debate between the body and soul known as the Visio Philiberti. Prefacing the translation is a translator's prologue, explaining his purpose and methods in translating the Visio Philiberti. The poem concludes with a homiletic address to readers, reminding them of the inevitability of death and instructing them in right behavior while alive. ‘Lo Worldly Folks’, also unique to Brogyntyn ii.1, is a transitional piece between The Father of Pity and ‘Earth upon Earth’. Written in rhyme royal, like The Father of Pity, it recapitulates the moral lessons of the preceding text and instructs readers to ‘thynke uppon youre end’ (l. 14). Finally, ‘Earth upon Earth’ is part of a popular tradition of poems punning on the multiple possible interpretations of the word ‘earth’, including (but not limited to) humanity, worldly goods and the literal soil. Its central theme is admonishing readers about the futility of amassing riches in the world when they are destined to return to dust.

Deep inside State Papers, among a gathering of obscure and barely legible manuscripts, lies an extensive ‘relation’ by W. M., dated 19 May 1630. It presents an anxious argument, with stressful moral consequences, about a subject's lawful duty, career anxiety, faith, altruism, and readiness to die so that another might live. It introduces a forgotten life of thwarted clerical ambition, lived in the shadow of the religious troubles of the age. It opens a chain of letters and papers, up to the eve of the civil war, involving a network of associates who considered themselves ‘the well-affected people of God’. Never previously published, the Morton materials are worth close scrutiny. Any glossing necessary to identify named individuals is indicated here in square brackets.

The W. M. who agonized at length on paper in 1630 was William Morton, a member, perhaps a young fellow, of Sidney Sussex College. The biographical register Alumni Cantabrigienses appears to have confused him with another William Morton, appending the one's academic degrees to the legal and political career of another. This misidentification persists in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and The History of Parliament, though the online Clergy Database notes the ordination as deacon on 20 September 1628 of William Morton, M.A., by the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield Thomas Morton, a possible relation. There is no record of his subsequent ordination as priest, though gaps in such records are not unusual.

Special Sundays became common in the Church of England during the early twentieth century. These are particular Sundays each year on which the sermon and prayers during church services might be directed towards a specific ecclesiastical, moral or social cause, and in most but not all cases a financial collection made to assist the organization or organizations that promoted this cause. These special church collections have often provided a substantial part of the annual income of the sponsoring charitable association or church society. Special Sundays are distinct from the Church of England's annual round of religious festivals and commemorations, given in the calendars of the BCP and the church's later service books. They are not prescribed, but are approved or commended by the archbishops, church assemblies or collectively by the bishops: decisions on whether to observe them in particular dioceses and places of worship are a matter for individual bishops, cathedrals and parishes. Although these occasions came to be known generically as ‘special Sundays’, because most were initially or eventually observed on a Sunday, a number of anniversary appeals were or are observed on weekdays or for a whole week or octave (from one Sunday to the next).

Special Sundays and other church anniversaries differ in two respects from the national anniversary and particular acts of special worship that are the main focus of this edition.

This chapter discusses how quantitative tightening is conducted and the arguments surrounding the pace at which it is undertaken as well as how to gauge when to stop.