“Speenhamland” is a word popularized by late nineteenth-century historians as a derogatory term for the systematic subsidization of laborers' wages by allowances paid from the poor rates. This system was thought to have flourished in southern and agrarian England in the early nineteenth century, the size of the allowances determined by the size of the family and the price of bread. The unwitting “villains” were the Berkshire justices who met at the Pelican Inn, located in a tithing of Speen Parish. Moved by corn dearth and a terrible winter, the justices on May 6, 1795, set in train the fatal hemorrhaging of the Old Poor Law that, in turn, led to the draconian Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Myth this may largely be, and it has been explored elsewhere; however, no one questions that subsidizing the employed from the poor rates, including allowances in aid of wages, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in this sense that “Speenhamland” is used here, but to suggest a radically different and mainly constructive consequence for British economic and social development.

For subsidizing the employed poor, when it took the form of nonresident relief, could function as a kind of “Industrial Speenhamland” (freshly coined), to wit: a system of parochially funded labor migration that promoted a work force for expanding industries. This subsidization could include allowances in aid of wages as well as other welfare benefits in times of sickness and unemployment—all at the expense of the home parish or township, not of the places in which the factories and industrial workshops were located.

The images that the phrase “Marian Protestant” summons to mind are both dramatic and predictable. Whether they are of Cranmer holding his hand in the flame, Latimer exhorting Ridley to play the man, or more generalized images of men and women dying at the stake, we see the landscape of Marian Protestantism shrouded in the smoke from the fires of Smithfield and think of it exclusively in terms of martyrs. This unblinking fixation on the Marian martyrs is partly the result of an all too human fascination with violent death, but it is also the result of our dependence on John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563–83), popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs,” a sobriquet that does justice to Foxe's preoccupations when discussing the penultimate Tudor reign.

Nevertheless, to ignore the majority of Marian Protestants who did not die for the gospel is to study the steeple and believe that you have examined the entire church. Like the steeple, the martyrs are the most conspicuous group of Marian Protestants, yet like a steeple their existence depended on the support of the rest of the church. However, even this metaphor fails to do justice to those coreligionists who provided the Marian martyrs with physical, financial, moral, and emotional support. The relationships between the martyrs and their “sustainers” (to use Foxe's phrase) were profound and complex, with both parties drawing strength from each other. The relationships between male martyrs and their female sustainers are of particular interest and importance; in fact, it will be suggested in this article that these relationships had a decisive influence on the development of English Protestantism.

The secondhand clothes trade was a vital reflection of consumer demand in preindustrial and early industrial England, one that has gone unrecognized because of the nature of the trade. It did not involve the manufacture, finishing, or refining of raw materials or the sale of new commodities. It was largely invisible trade, leaving few records and generating no legislation. Yet the trade in secondhand clothing was a common feature of English life and met the needs of much of the English population in a way that other manufacturing trades and industries did not. Historians considering the characteristics of the domestic market in this era have naturally focused on the new manufactures and the widening range of goods produced in response to domestic demand both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—everything from caps, stockings, and pottery to the products of the British cotton industry. The growth of these industries has been seen as a testament to a strong demand among consumers for varied, attractive, and inexpensive goods. But the extent of demand among the various ranks of people and the intensity of this demand cannot accurately be determined solely from the development of new industries and the sale of new commodities.

The demand for clothing, textiles, and other consumer goods was not the sum total of the consumer impulse. An equally powerful drive was manifested not through the purchase of new commodities but through the sale, trade, and purchase of secondhand merchandise. Joan Thirsk has noted that “the labouring classes found cash to spare for consumer goods in 1700 that had no place in their budgets in 1550.”

Much has been written in recent years about the history of childhood in Edwardian Britain. To some extent, that concentration of scholarly effort reflects a profound shift in academic concerns away from the superficially extraordinary and noteworthy to the apparently mundane and neglected that has characterized much of the so-called new social history, and from which redirection of academic attention the history of childhood in modern Britain has been only one of many beneficiaries. But perhaps to a greater extent, the outpourings of recent historiography on the changing nature and changing significance of childhood in Britain during the first decade of the twentieth century and in the years immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Great War reflect an intellectual preoccupation that would have been perfectly comprehensible to the Edwardians themselves: a preoccupation, during the first decade of the twentieth century, with the discovery of “child life,” that is, with a form of mental, emotional, and psychological life peculiar to the child.

Precisely what that life consisted in, how it was discovered, and what, having unearthed it, the Edwardians made of it, is a subject too vast to be explored here. This article draws attention to only one aspect of that life and of the Edwardian discovery of and uses of it that has been largely neglected in modern historical writing. This is the religious life, religious education, and religious development of the child, particularly of that life as it was lived, nurtured, and brought (or not brought) to fruition in the Sunday schools of Edwardian England.

The Forced Loan of 1626–27 has traditionally been regarded as one of the milestones of early seventeenth-century politics. The great nineteenth-century Whig historian S. R. Gardiner saw it as the product of “new counsels” by which Charles I came increasingly to rely on the royal prerogative, and he depicted the opposition to this as a principled defense of Englishmen's liberties. Others writing in the same tradition have generally echoed these views. Thus the loan has been presented as the climax to a first stage of struggle between “Court” and “Country” or as a staging post on the “high road to Civil War.” Latterly, however, this verdict has come into question.

With the work of “localist” and “revisionist” historians we have come to appreciate more clearly the extent of attachment to the local community and the continual striving toward consensus in relations between king and subject. This has led to a general revaluation of what have traditionally been regarded as clashes of principle. Local historians have stressed that opposition to taxes generally owed far more to backsliding and provincial inertia than to any concern for constitutional propriety. And a greater understanding of the problems of administration—particularly in wartime—has led to a recognition that government decision making was often a reflex action, prompted by the immediate need to make ends meet. These insights have been incorporated into the work of Conrad Russell, who has provided the most recent assessment of the loan.

Historians such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe have recently stressed the “British” nature of the crisis which toppled Charles I's regime in the 1640s. England, these historians remind us, was not the first of Charles's three kingdoms to rebel but the last; the Scots rose in 1639–40, the Irish rose in the fall of 1641, but the English only belatedly followed suit in August 1642. They have thus suggested that the origins of the English Civil War cannot be explained within a purely English context but must be understood within the larger vortex of multinational British politics.

This injection of the “British problem” into the historiographical debate may seem like a neutral intervention, but in practice it has been closely associated with the revisionist interpretation of the seventeenth century. Since the 1970s, revisionist historians have contended that early Stuart England was an ideologically stable society which collapsed only after a series of sudden, contingent events disrupted the existing consensus. They have thus been at pains to find short-term, nonideological explanations for the Civil War's outbreak or else face embarrassing charges that they have proven why there was no civil war in seventeenth-century England. The “British problem” has come into the debate as just such an explanation, as an answer to thorny questions about how such a violent storm as the English Civil War could have arisen out of clear skies. After all, if radicalized Scotsmen spread the language of confessional conflict and resistance theory across the border, as Sharpe has argued, then no internal explanation for the English Civil War is required.

In the mélange of conflicting theories on the origins of the English Civil War, a number of English social groups have received scrupulous attention. Storms have brewed over the gentry, the aristocracy, and more recently, “the middle sort of people” in town and countryside. Even the rural peasantry, traditionally neglected by historians, have not been overlooked in the most recent debates. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the English professional classes although studies of the clerical and legal professions have been forthcoming of late. Perhaps worst served of all in the ongoing war of scholars has been the English medical profession. The recent historiography on English physicians and their relationship to the Civil War can be briefly summarized.

The little work that has been done on professional physicians revolves almost exclusively around the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1964, in a distinguished history of the college, Sir George Clark suggested that the fellowship probably leaned to the royalist cause, but out of political expediency accommodated itself to the reality of parliament's power in the City of London. Referring to the events of 1642 and 1643, Clark wrote: