The extracts in this chapter provide an idea of the scope of the jurisdiction of the institutions as set out in their articles and commissions. This chapter investigates the nature of medieval criminal justice. A more permanent solution to the problems of local justice was found in the development of the county circuits of assize and gaol delivery. In the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries general oyer and terminer commissions were employed less frequently as the assize justices and court of king's bench took over much of the investigation of the behaviour of officialdom. Equally important for local justice was the evolution of the office of justice of the peace, which largely took place during the fourteenth century. The precociousness of the system was responsible for the enormous variety of cases that came before the justices.

This chapter challenges two traditional assumptions about the story of Red Crosse’s infidelity to Una in Spenser’s ‘Legend of Holiness’: first, that this infidelity has, allegorically speaking, little to do with sexuality, and, second, that the book’s sexual satire (such as it is) is directed at lust and infidelity. Rejecting both these premises, this chapter contends that what the book really satirises is Red Crosse’s bodily shame. Its core argument is that, as an allegory of idolatry, the knight’s affair with Duessa in part represents a misled and hypocritical commitment to celibacy. This counterintuitive play on Spenser’s part is underscored by bawdy symbolism, wordplay, and innuendo. More than a vehicle for talking about something else – something elevated and spiritual – sexuality emerges as a touchstone for the very condition of embodiment that ‘holiness’ must negotiate.

This book aims to explore the general questions of land, landlordism and agrarian capitalism. Through a detailed examination of a single village in north Essex, Earls Colne, it asks how rural society operated and how land was used in the two formative centuries after 1550. Before turning to that study, this chapter reviews three influential but contrasting explanations of change over those centuries. One, Marxist in its inspiration, was re-formulated most recently by the American historian Robert Brenner. The second, very different interpretation, is Alan Macfarlane's hypothesis about English Individualism, which explicitly rejects the idea of ‘the Great Transformation’. The third view, espoused by English rural historians over the past century, charts the decline of the small owner-occupying farmer between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

This chapter shows that a great deal of land was bought and sold in every decade, but, on a numerical calculation, especially in the 1630s. On the other hand, the retention of land for three or four generations — between 60 and 100 years — was not uncommon, and the inheritance of land was perfectly normal and perhaps expected. The 1630s was undoubtedly a decade of instability, but individual mishaps and misfortunes explain this as much as any underlying response to economic conditions. After 1650, the land market perhaps came close to re-achieving the stability of the three-quarters of a century before 1625. On 1 January 1625, one-third of the land in view was still retained by the families that held it in 1550. One-third of the land in 1725 was held by the families that held it in 1650, and in 1750, a little short of a third of the copyhold land in Earls Colne had been in familial possession for 75 years.

The decisive feature of Earls Colne during the century after 1592 was that it was in the hands of a resident gentry family, the Harlakendens, whose financial and property interests did not extend far beyond its boundaries. As gentry with puritan inclinations, and as JPs, they were members of an elite group of Essex gentry to which they were also connected to marriage. The Harlakendens' interest in, and integration into, the village meant that after their acquisition of the manors, the relationship between lord and tenants changed. For the earls of Oxford, particularly Edward de Vere, seventeenth earl (1550–1604), the two manors were of importance only as part of the patchwork of estates from which they drew income. For the Harlakendens, the two manors were their prime concern, and constant interest, over three generations. In many respects, this meant that the Harlakendens had a greater influence in the parish, and could govern behaviour and attitudes within it to a greater extent than the De Veres did. This chapter shows how this personal involvement often meant that the Harlakendens became enmeshed in local disputes and animosities, rather than being able to prevent or rise above them. Moreover, the Harlakendens may have brought conflict upon themselves.

Srdjan Vucetic builds upon his previous work on the cultural infrastructure of British society by examining the meanings of America embedded in British school textbooks published throughout the period of the special relationship. As textbooks directly shape, and are shaped by, the discourses of national identity, this source material is fertile ground for the assessment of representations of the United States, and by extension Anglo-American relations, which exist in the British national consciousness. Vucetic employs an inductivist discourse analysis of textbooks to identify three ‘master images’ of the United States that have been mostly positive, exhibit impressive continuity over time, and have the ability to influence the cultural underpinnings of the special relationship.

The statement made by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, with which this chapter opens, suggests at least one sense in which there is a degree of continuity between the modern and post-modern worlds. The intellectuals in both modern and post-modern worlds tend to regard Marxism with ironic disdain. A good deal of the debate within Marxist circles on the nature of post-modernity centres on the contested interpretation of the undoubted defeats inflicts on the left and the workers' movement since the 1970s. Marx's democratic model of socialism is opposite to the statist model of socialism associated with both Stalinists and social democrats. Fredric Jameson is perhaps the most prominent and influential Marxist to have joined the legion of theorists who have engaged in the debate over the nature of post-modernism.

This chapter focuses on the inadequacies of the stricter versions of mnemonic individualism. The view of remembering as an action of purely individual minds arbitrarily reduces the complex business of remembering to those of its elements that seem least communicable. Frederic Bartlett's principle focus is on the ways in which individual remembering is affected by group culture, not on the ways in which that culture is related to the larger workings of society. Changes in a society's economic or political arrangements, or in its governing ideologies, may erode the mnemonic cultures previously operative in certain parts of its social and institutional structure. The cultural devices that individuals use in articulating mnemonic and recollective comportments are themselves indicative of broader cultural and therefore sometimes social identities. The connections between memory-formation, social interaction and cultural initiation may be especially obvious in the context of early childhood development.