INTRODUCTION

Marion Pardoun, also known as Marion Peebles, was accused of witchcraft in Shetland in 1644. She was denounced by Janet Fraser, who had recently been executed for witchcraft, and she herself was tried along with Margaret Guthrumsdochter. The records of the other women's cases have not survived, but for Pardoun's own case a copy was made, both of the pre-trial and the trial records. It contains many details of neighbourhood quarrels and bewitchments, as well as some more unusual elements – shape-shifting into the form of a porpoise, and the ritual of cruentation or corpse-touching as a means of determining guilt or innocence.

Marion Pardoun lived in Hillswick in Northmavine. She was said to be over sixty years of age. Her husband was Svend Iverson, and she had adult children. She also had a servant, so she apparently was no poor woman. She was well known in the local community. Her neighbours testified that she had caused many bewitchments in connection with quarrels – but most of these bewitchments had been followed by successful reconciliations, and most of her alleged victims seem to have recovered successfully. There are instances of transference of disease from one person to another, and from a human to an animal. The cures all seem to have followed previous allegations of bewitchment; a few of them involved actions resembling healing rituals, but Pardoun does not seem to have practised as a healer.

Pardoun was initially investigated by members of the presbytery of Shetland. This investigation mainly involved questioning her neighbours, and dealt with harmful magic that had resulted in various misfortunes, particularly human sickness and animal sickness and death. A draft dittay produced after this investigation was presented to the presbytery on 15 March 1644.

Das heilige Ziel (The Holy Goal; released in Japan as 国民の誓 [The People's Oath], Nomura Kōshō, 1938) is a feature-length sports film about two Japanese ski jumpers and their German coach, devised as a German-Japanese co-production and shot in Japan by star cinematographer Richard Angst. While 国民の誓 (Kokumin no chikai) is sometimes used to translate the official “oath to the nation,” in the film's context it denotes the firm intention of the Japanese characters (and, by extension, the Japanese people) to sacrifice everything for the nation's success in international sports (and also in the political arena). The German title Das heilige Ziel also refers to athletic success and national prestige as a literal “goal” and adds the notion of “holiness” in the sense that it takes precedence over all other, especially individual, concerns. Since both Japan and Germany considered the nation to be “sacred” in the 1930s and 1940s, the two titles are very close in meaning. This film is one of a number of German-Japanese co-productions from the interwar period that, like many international projects, display a complex tension between the national and the transnational. Indeed, these cinematic undertakings demonstrate pronounced aspirations to further intercultural understanding while promoting respective national causes. At the same time, the individual participants in this co-production pursued their own artistic and professional goals.

While it is easy to dismiss Dyngley's patristic books as typical fifteenth-century miscellanies, close reading uncovers back-stories about their production. These stories are told by non-verbal clues: signage systems for numbering leaves and quires; an end-of-quire tally entered on the verso of the last folio in each quire, a scriptorium system in operation for centuries; and assembly marks used to authenticate the final order of leaves and blocks of quires before binding. This chapter explores the stories of eight works-in-progress, which in turn demonstrate how thoroughly Dyngley was in charge at every stage of manuscript production. Dyngley was not a commissioner of books, so a commercial scenario in which he engaged a stationer must be disallowed. The case studies will show that Dyngley performed many of the activities commonly ascribed to stationers. He acquired the exemplars, he worked in liaison with his main text scribe, he provided the guard quires, and he gathered loose quires into anthologies. Peterhouse was the control centre for Dyngley's patristic project.

From 1747 to 1750, Charles Lennox, the 2nd Duke of Richmond, pursued one of the severest anti-smuggling campaigns in English history. It led to the execution of over forty individuals. And it was triggered by a particularly heinous crime. In 1747, a gang of smugglers had broken into the Customhouse at Poole to rescue a seizure previously taken by the Customs. When an informer attested to the identity of the offenders, he, along with a Customs officer, was abducted, tortured, and killed by the gang. The episode is one of the best-known smuggling stories of the eighteenth century. In large part, this is due to Richmond seeking to publicise the events to garner support for his campaign. Historiography, too, has paid close attention to the campaign and it has since been a central theme in the discussion of eighteenth-century smuggling and the debate on the “crime wave” of the 1740s.

Much as we know about the campaign, there remain gaps in how it has been studied. Traditional accounts have depicted the events as a confrontation between agents acting for the common good – the duke, the magistrates, the Customs men – and the villains – the smugglers and murderers. In a recent discussion, the events are seen as a “classic confrontation between public terror on the one hand and a Christian conscience with its wish for law and order, and justice, on the other”.

9 June is also the date given for the inauguration itself. The statue was by Antoine Etex (1808–88), whom Berlioz had known in Rome in 1831–2. The concert consisted of the following, all by Rossini: the overtures to Il barbiere di Siviglia and Guillaume Tell, the Stabat Mater, act 2 of Guillaume Tell, an aria from Maometto II (the Italian opera revised as Le Siège de Corinthe for Paris), a cavatina and a duet from Il barbiere, the final aria from La Cenerentola, the prayer from Moïse, and the ‘divertissement’ from act 3 of Guillaume Tell.

Arguments about the statue had been going on for two years. Decades later, they were reactivated with respect to the plan in 1907 to erect a statue of Saint- Saëns in Dieppe. ‘There were some satirical comments by those who thought a statue to the living composer premature. The monument to Gounod had only recently been put up in St Cloud. In spite of, or perhaps because of the erection of one to Marshal Macmahon in his lifetime, a law forbade the inauguration of statues to the living. But significantly, government intervention enabled the ceremony to take place in the foyer of the Dieppe Theatre. “Since one only puts up statues to the dead, it follows that I am now counted among their number” [Saint-Saëns] remarked. “You will excuse me therefore from making a speech.”

There's been much discussion about the expediency of this homage being made to a man who is still alive; the majority are against it. We accept as tolerable statues to men who are dead, while the other arrangement is generally rejected. I confess this is a matter beyond my capacity.

Introduction

The South African Metrorail was built to provide cheap transport in large urban areas. There are four systems in the country with some 470 stations and over 2,200 kilometres of track. Other than the Eastern Cape lines, the system operates electric trains powered from overhead cables. The lines follow the geography of apartheid, running between townships and historically white urban areas: industrial estates, suburbs, and town centres. The trains are used by township residents commuting to and from work, college students, those going to shop in “town,” and job seekers. Or at least this will be the case when the system is rebuilt following its destruction in 2020.

The Metrorail's destruction was the result of a three-part tragedy of corruption, fare evasion, and looting during the COVID-19 lockdown. Corruption at the Passenger Rail Authority of South Africa (PRASA) that runs Metrorail, was carried out by what Jacques Pauw describes as the PRASA Nostra. This looting of PRASA from above has been documented by the Public Protector, the Commission of Enquiry into State Capture, or Zondo Commission, the Auditor General, the National Treasury, and others and shows no sign of letting up. This chapter, however, concentrates on fare evasion or, in township lingo, riding mangober. The lockdown looting is the subject of a later chapter.

Fare evasion is a long running problem on the Metrorail. In August 1996, fifteen people were killed in a stampede at the Tembisa Township Metrorail Station, northeast of Johannesburg, when security staff used electric prods as they attempted to prevent mangobers from accessing trains.

A week later they were back in Vienna.

On the same day as his conversation with Judith, the count had announced his decision to travel ahead of the others as quartermaster, to look after things in the mansion, where a suite of new rooms had been prepared. The truth, though, was that he just wanted to avoid sharing a railway compartment with Egon. He felt distinctly that he would fail to strike the right note, and might be unable to resist his tendency to sarcasm which, if unjustified, would seem simply insulting, and if justified, would make his questioning appear like that of an old gossip. He wished to remove the possibility of both the one and the other. In Vienna, encounters between them could be kept within limits, even assuming, which seemed doubtful, that such encounters were desirable. In any case the diversions of the metropolis were the best means of granting him a clearer view and restoring his unbiased judgment.

These diversions did indeed have an effect on him; all the more easily since his powers of observation, keenly acute despite an outward casualness, met with nothing which might feed the suspicions in his mind. Egon, when he appeared in the evenings in the old countess's salon, was more serious and taciturn than usual, but in his conduct toward Franziska there was neither any special reserve nor special intimacy. And so it was no wonder that the old uncle regained, if not a sense of complete trust, then a certain mid-ground of feeling, with just enough hopefulness to justify his marking the start of the season with a musical soiree, followed by a festive ball.

Though much published material has been used for this research, it was more helpful in researching vessels, politics and historiography, not individual American seamen. Newspapers, histories and prisoners’ memoirs, as explained below, provide limited information on American prisoners. It is the original, archival material that reveals who they were, their plight, and the diplomatic efforts to help them.

Contemporary newspapers of all nations, viewed on various online databases of historic newspapers, are invaluable in tracing and identifying a vessel. Their daily reports of shipping arrivals in and departures from ports helped to track voyages. Their regular reports of vessels captured by privateers also helped to confirm information found in other sources and the captives’ own accounts. La Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, the French government's mouthpiece, published reports of captures by French privateers. In many cases, these reports give more information than those about the same captures in the British Lloyd's List or the various American papers. However, they only rarely mention a ship's master and never the seamen by name.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century works about privateers of the War of 1812, such as Maclay's A History of American Privateers and Coggeshall's History of the American Privateers and Letters of Marque During the War with England in the Years 1812, ‘13 and ‘14, are filled with mistakes about the privateers sailing from France.

Introduction

This chapter turns to a very different case in north-western Zimbabwe which has a different ecology, one not full of charismatic species or landscape nor great commercial potential, but with a forest location that offers conservation for hydrological purposes further downstream. This unique ecological setting creates enduring liminality for the state as it is caught in between ceding the forest to surrounding communities or retaining it under state control. This is de facto what happened over the last two decades following invasions into the forest as a result of Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000. The case is a site of collaborative management arrangements from 1993 to the mid-2000s which the state abandoned once external support was no longer forthcoming, as well as the prevailing political environment of the FTLRP. The case also represents a site where the extreme violent side of the state (Peluso & Watts, 2001; Büscher and Ramutsindela, 2016; Ramutsindela et al., 2022) was unleashed for the second time in early 2019 on forest settlers. The use of brutal state force against land claimants left local people in a liminal situation about what course of action to take next as not all avenues have resulted in restoration of their rights to forest land. The technical state (the FC) has equally been befuddled with the back and forth between the central state and neighbouring forest claimants.

[1] [f. 157r]

[English]

It is to wit that in the year of King Henry V, William Sevenoke, mayor of London, John Perneys and Ralph Barton, sheriffs, William atte Wode, William Ederich, John Reyner and William Ferrour the Elder [were] Masters of this craft and of the fraternity of Brewers of London in the said year, and only for one year [above the line: and no more] at that time, as it is written before in the beginning of this book.

And in that year clothing was made and given to the freemen and brothers of the said craft. And also there was made a dinner called our Feast and on this manner it was used for many years before that time, in each year, to give clothing and make a dinner called our Feast, and to choose new Masters for the next year [above the line: following]. And also for as much as the craft perceived it was a great charge to give clothing each year, the aforesaid Masters and the worthy persons of the craft made an ordinance that the Masters who were next chosen should stand (still) for 2 years and then give clothing, and (to) make a feast and choose new Masters for the next 2 years.

And in the beginning of this aforesaid [scored: Masters] ordinance, the Masters chosen at that time to stand for 2 years were Thomas Grene, Robert Hilton, John Pyken and Robert Carpenter.

To end the story with 1822 is, to some extent, an arbitrary decision. In many ways, the history told here continues rather seamlessly. The shifting of coastal responsibilities between the Customs administration and the Admiralty, for instance, features quite prominently in the post-1822 history of the preventive service, or rather, the coastguard. Neither is the administrative rupture as stark as modern histories of the coastguard will have us believe. Its nineteenth-century history, moreover, is almost as neglected as the one that has been the subject of this study. At the same time, there are certain factors that change the shape of that history. Some of these are external. The ultimate dominance of the Royal Navy over European waters finally achieved the aspiration of a blue-water defence of the domestic scene and greatly facilitated naval operations against coastal threats. The firm integration of Ireland, in 1800, ultimately also removed many of the loopholes afforded by the previous indirect means of domination. And the demise of mercantilist protectionism, perhaps best exemplified, in the present context, with the end of the wool ban in 1824, obliterated many of the incentives previously afforded to the illicit trader. A more professional intelligence service, both abroad and at home, and the relative professionalization of dealing with aliens in the context of the Home Office bureaucracy eliminated another matter that had previously lent urgency to the preventive efforts of the Customs. Some of these things, in fact, had already happened by the 1780s and 1790s, and only the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had kept the old rationales alive.