The National Eisteddfod of Wales, and its attendant robed ‘Gorsedd’ of bards, ovates, and druids, are the most visible legacy of eighteenth-century revivalism in twenty-first century Welsh culture. The first an annual cultural festival, and the second a ceremonial academy of Welsh luminaries in bardic dress, both were institutions creatively reconstructed by revivalists in the 1790s, embodying the movement's attempts to weave aspects of Welsh history and identity into forms that would thrive in modernity. Initially separate institutions – though created within the same revivalist network – the Gorsedd and eisteddfod were eventually united at the Carmarthen Eisteddfod in 1819. This eisteddfod was the first of the so-called ‘Provincial Eisteddfodau’, organized primarily by Wales-based ‘Cambrian Societies’, as distinct from the London-centric revivalism that dominated the movement throughout the eighteenth century: Carmarthen therefore has some claim to witnessing the end of the Welsh revivalist period covered by this book, and the birth of the Welsh National Eisteddfod in its current form. At Carmarthen, Iolo Morganwg unexpectedly performed some of his radically inflected pseudo-druidism outside the eisteddfod venue, inducting new members into his revived druido-bardic order, and establishing a still ongoing partnership between these two symbols of revivalist Welshness.

Since the later twentieth century, one tendency in Welsh scholarship has emphasized radical, anti-British-imperialist, proto-Welsh-nationalist contexts to these events and their legacies.

South Africa's crisis through a legal lens

Ideally, a country's laws, what citizens are required to do, are in harmony with its social norms, what people actually do, or at least what they say they should do. Such harmony is never complete. There is always some gap between law and social norms; whether because of criminals and deviants or otherwise upright citizens cutting corners. However, the extent of the disparity is important. When the difference is limited society is functional, but if social practice differs significantly from law there is a crisis of social order.

There are different ways in which the disjunction between law and norms exists. It could be that the law does not consider the plurality of a society and the disjunction between law and norms is uneven within the country. It could be that law lags social norms which have moved on. If so, the law is a conservative force that assists in preserving a past status quo, and with it the entrenched power relationship of a society. It could that the law is being used to engineer social change. If so, law is ahead of hoped for social norms which it has been introduced to bring about. Likely, all three possibilities co-exist, but to what degree and in what ratio will determine the significance of these disjunctures.

Whether codified law is ahead or behind social norms is contestable since it concerns evaluating existing and desired social values and the social order that promotes, controls, or outlaws these. In South Africa, a project of progressive social engineering has been attempted following the fall of apartheid. Its failure has created a yawning gap between practised norms and law.

Sieyès’s political thought stood at the confluence of the intellectual legacies of Hume and Rousseau. There were, certainly, important intermediaries such as Ramsay in Britain and Turgot in France, but the original conceptual building blocks were the work of the earlier pair. From Hume, Sieyès took over the concept of constituent power and the neo-Harringtonian claim about the relationship between property and political power that Ramsay adopted from Hume’s History. From Rousseau, Sieyès took over the concept of a social contract and its place within the structure of rights and obligations that Rousseau associated both with the concept of a general, or common, will and with the distinction between sovereignty and government as the basis of what, in his Letters from the Mountain, Rousseau had called the democratic constitution. From both, Sieyès also had available the possibility of a synthesis indicated by Rousseau’s claim that Hume ‘associated a very republican soul with the English paradoxes in favour of luxury’.1 One measure of Sieyès’s intellectual ambition is that he set out to establish a system in which the two legacies could be combined.

The Städtekrieg (Town War) from 1387 to 1389, fought between the Swabian and Rhenish Leagues of cities (Schwäbischer Städtebund and Rheinischer Städtebund), numerous major southern German princes and King Wenzel, the Roman-German monarch (Rex Romanorum), represents the climax of the violent struggle for civic autonomy in the Holy Roman Empire during the late fourteenth century. This essay questions the extent to which the conflict can be considered a rebellion from a security perspective, as the purpose of the urban alliances was to protect their members from the threats posed by both the king and the nobility. Considering its end, which led to the league's liquidation in the Landfrieden (land peace or public peace) of Eger (now Cheb in the Czech Republic) in May 1389, it might seem self-evident to interpret the war as a rebellion of the cities against their king. However, the dynamics of the conflicting parties’ security interests provide important clues showing that this conclusion is illusory.

INTRODUCTION

This case arose in Lecropt, a parish south of Dunblane, and was pursued by the presbytery of Stirling between July and September 1590. In the record it begins almost immediately after the case of Isobel Watson, edited above, but seems not to have been connected with it.

The accusation of witchcraft came from Janet Mitchell, wife of William Mayne. Mitchell complained that Marion McNab was a witch, and told a story of how McNab had bewitched her husband's malt. This initially prompted Mitchell to seek reparation and reconciliation – she told of having given McNab malt and honey in order to restore the quality of the malt. There was also mention of William Mayne's own sickness. Evidently the reconciliation attempt failed, and Mitchell then complained to the presbytery. The earliest record shows that she had already been induced to put the complaint in writing – she ‘producit in wret certane hedds of wiche craft practesit be the said Marione and of hir abwsione of the said Jonet’. This document does not survive, but the presbytery's procedurally inquisitorial response has its own interest.

McNab was then summoned. She denied most of what Mitchell had said, but her own story also told of a reconciliation attempt. She related setting out with Mitchell to seek the aid of ‘ane womane callit NcGilerss’ – probably a Highlander, whose name seems to have been a patronymic, ‘daughter of Gillies’. This woman was evidently a magical practitioner. But, McNab explained defensively, on the way she became uneasy about the mission and turned back.

The presbytery arranged for McNab to be imprisoned by the magistrates of Stirling, where she remained for two months, but they do not seem to have attempted to interrogate her there.

Mongolia hovers on the edge of early English drama: While no playtexts survive from the Elizabethan period featuring their history, there are consistent allusion to the peoples of the Tatary tribes unified under Chinggis Khan in English theatrical documents from 1536 onward. This chapter takes as a key case one of the eight surviving backstage-plots of the period to consider the stage life of Chinggis Khan inaugurated by the lost “Tamar Cham” plays. The two plays proved highly successful in the Elizabethan era and continued to haunt the paratextual record of early English performance into the late eighteenth century. The chapter explicates the financial data of the “Tamar Cham” plays in a repertorial context invested in Mediterranean tyrants to situate two newly discovered medieval source documents that together suggest a particular nostalgia in a fantasy if global unity.

Sailors aboard the royal warship Vanguard, under orders from the Admiralty for a mission of high diplomatic and strategic significance, were so alarmed and angry by what was expected of them in 1625 that they moved to mutiny. Some declared that ‘they will rather be hanged or thrown overboard’ than continue as ordered. Defying chains of authority from the quarterdeck to the royal court, they challenged official instructions and refused to comply. Senior officers shared their unease, though not their intransigence. Questioning directions that seemed to him dangerous, misguided, and dishonourable, Vanguard's commander John Pennington (1584–1645) suffered bouts of ‘perplexity’ in ‘a business of very great consequence’ as he weighed obligations to his ship, to his God, and to his king.

The ensuing drama produced a stream of high-level correspondence exposing hesitations and contradictions in English foreign policy. It threatened officers and men with punishment, and tested the leadership and loyalty of Captain Pennington who had orders, in extremis, to turn his own guns against ships under his command. Facing misleading messengers and duplicitous diplomats, in a time of shifting dynastic and confessional conflict, seamen were exposed to pressures as confusing as the winds and the tides. Captains questioned their orders, mariners manufactured delays, and officers fomented refractoriness. This sorry episode at the beginning of Charles I's reign brought more embarrassment than glory, as professional ambitions and habits of obedience clashed with moral, patriotic, and religious duties.