This chapter reflects on the conflict between heroism and holiness in Book I of The Faerie Queene, and demonstrates Spenser’s use of mock-heroic humour to expose the inappropriateness of classical ideals of self-sufficiency in a Christian context. In particular, the chapter investigates Spenser’s comic handling of three conventions associated with classical epic: the exemplary qualities of the hero, the superiority of epic over pastoral, and heroic violence. The primary target of the book’s satire is Red Crosse, but Spenser’s own authorial persona as a newly invested epic poet is ironically implicated. Both Red Crosse and ‘Spenser’ rise above their humble backgrounds to serve a queen, and both have pretensions to a heroic vocation. While Spenser’s narrator explicitly renounces pastoral for the higher calling of epic, pastoral will not stop ‘interrupting’ his hero’s progress. Initially, such interruption has derogatory implications, but bathos ultimately proves to be spiritually restorative.

Finn Pollard explores P. G. Wodehouse’s early twentieth-century fiction and charts the evolution of the famous author’s portrayals of the United States and its people from his initial use of common archetypes to much more complicated themes and character relationships, including Anglo-American friendships as well as romantic entanglements. Pollard delves into the period influences that contributed to this evolution, including the boys’ school story, the nature of London theatre, and Anglo-American romance novels, and seeks to illuminate why Wodehouse’s British and American characters mingled with increasing ease, were at times treated as interchangeable, and asserted a mutually positive relationship. Ultimately, this exploration of popular literature suggests readers in both countries were increasingly exposed to a new, influential, and warmer narrative of Anglo-American relations in the period preceding the Great War.

The extracts in this chapter concern corruption and abuse. Perceptions of corruption within the law derived to a large extent from the close relationship between lawyers and landowners. This emerged in part from the retaining of lawyers for advice and assistance as legal counsel and in part from their natural affinity of interest as property owners and members of county society. Ironically, the Ordinance of Trailbaston and the Ordinance of Conspirators of the same year were designed to tackle the very forms of corruption and abuse of the judicial system that the anonymous author is complaining about. The smooth and successful operation of the judicial system was challenged and sometimes hindered by the existence of corrupt practices and abuse of its procedures. Concerns about the inadequacies of the law and problems in the workings of justice are surprisingly well articulated in examples of the imaginative literature of the period and appear to offer an indictment of the whole system.

This chapter is comprised of annotated and translated source texts on the concepts of law and justice. In the later Middle Ages a broad intellectual background for concepts of law and justice existed based on a composite of the Bible and the tenets of Christianity, the corpus of Roman law and canon law, and the writings of Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was especially influential on medieval political thought, reconciling the teachings of Christ with Aristotelian logic to achieve a distinctive philosophy of law and the state. The emergence of parliament as a political institution is a phenomenon that is inextricably linked with the development of concepts of law, justice and kingship. The relationship of the king to the law and the obligations of kingship were crucial themes addressed by jurists and political commentators. The revival of interest in Roman civil law at the beginning of the twelfth century infused jurisprudential writing with ideas of strong centralist government under a divine emperor.

The appearance for the first time of resident gentry in villages that had previously lacked them was a widespread phenomenon in the century after 1540 whose implications have barely been considered. These gentry disturbed settled patterns of self-government. As they sought to increase the profitability of their manors, they sometimes alienated their tenants and neighbours, who had formerly enjoyed the first pick of the profits of the manor in the form of cheap leases, under-valued copyholds, and largely unrestricted access to the resources of the manor, including its timber and commons. Incoming lords could also bring with them their own concepts of ideal social behaviour, which might engender another form of conflict within the village. This chapter reviews three areas of contact, and in some cases conflict, between the lords and the tenants. The first section describes the antagonisms prompted by the attempt to remould timber rights to the lord's advantage; the second the lords' intervention in the affairs of individual copyhold families; and the third the attempt to use the court leet to instil moral discipline into the inhabitants of the village. All need to be read against the long and protracted decline of the seigniorial interest in Earls Colne and English villages generally.

Dana Cooper assesses the cultural power of television in her analysis of Anglo-American narratives within the PBS series Downton Abbey, which became a financial success as well as a cultural phenomenon following its launch in 2010. Pointing out that the show’s aristocratic central family is inspired by the historical ‘dollar princesses,’ the hundreds of wealthy American women who married British men between 1865 and 1945, Cooper scrutinizes how the fictional characters, their dialogue, and their biases reflect American perceptions of themselves and their cultural cousins, and vice versa, and questions just how Anglo-American identity differences transitioned over time from sources of tension to sources of popular entertainment.