Guiding Threads

At the height of his fame, Döblin encouraged readers to think of each of his major works as having a foundation in ideas (“eine geistige Fundamentierung”: SLW 216). The context for this remark was an exposé in preparation for a public lecture on Berlin Alexanderplatz that he was to give at the University of Zurich in February 1932, and in it he went on to say that an epic work as he conceived it developed out of the presentation and exploration of an intellectual starting position (“Gedankenposition”), which was then put to the test in the course of the narrative, and was generally shown by the end of the work to have been superseded and replaced by a fresh question. Looking back on his writing career in 1948, in what he termed his “epilogue,” Döblin spoke indeed of each work ending with a question mark and “throwing the ball to the next one.”

The 425 years covered by this volume represent a formative period in the Isle of Man's history. Key external events had a significant impact on the Island, including the dissolution of the monasteries, the English Civil War, England's developing trade routes, and the revestment of the Island's sovereignty and customs rights to the British Crown. While the first volume of this series explores the political and constitutional position of the Island during this period, this volume explores the impact of these events, and others, on the Island's economy, society, and culture during the late medieval and early modern periods. The chapters in this volume are broadly thematic and, in taking such an approach, there is necessarily some overlap between the subjects covered. Chapter 1 details what we know of the Island's population, settlement distribution, land tenure, and the basis of the Island's economy in the early part of this period, before exploring the development of the ‘running trade’ and its impact on the Island.

Chapter 2 explores the status of religion and the established Island church, with additional sections on Methodism and non-conformism, Roman Catholicism and the Quakers.

Chapter 3 describes practical elements of daily life on the Island during this period. Material culture and aspects of family life are explored, in particular looking at the role of women and the life of children and adolescents. A major section of this chapter describes the provision of education on the Island, highlighting the roles of Bishops Barrow (1663–1671), Wilson (1698–1755), and Hildesley (1755–1772) in developing education and literacy in Manx and English.

LORDS OF MAN – 1405–1830

The lords of Man were styled kings in many Island sources and some elsewhere.

Sir John Stanley, lord of Man 1405–14

Sir John Stanley, lord of Man 1414–37

Thomas Stanley, lord of Man and first baron Stanley 1437–59

Thomas Stanley, lord of Man and first earl of Derby 1459–1504

Thomas Stanley, lord of Man and second earl of Derby 1504–21

Edward Stanley, lord of Man and third earl of Derby 1521–72

Henry Stanley, lord of Man and fourth earl of Derby 1572–93

Ferdinando Stanley, lord of Man and fifth earl of Derby 1593–94

Queen Elizabeth I takes back possession of the Isle of Man, 1595–1603

King James I holds possession of the Isle of Man until 1610, when the lordship reverts to the Stanleys

William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby 1610–42 and Elizabeth de Vere, countess of Derby 1610–27 (jointly lords of Man)

James Stanley, lord of Man and seventh earl of Derby 1642–51

Thomas Fairfax, third baron Fairfax of Cameron holds the lordship of Man for the Commonwealth 1651–60

Charles Stanley, lord of Man and eighth earl of Derby 1660–72

William Stanley, lord of Man and ninth earl of Derby 1672–1702

James Stanley, lord of Man and tenth earl of Derby 1702–36 (died without male issue)

James Murray, lord of Man and second duke of Atholl 1736–64 (maternal grandson of James Stanley, seventh earl of Derby)

John Murray, lord of Man and third duke of Atholl 1764–65

By the Revestment Act of 1765 (5 Geo. 3. c. 26) the sovereign rights of the Isle of Man reverted to the British crown

On 1 September 1807 the privateer Betsey (Chant) successfully captured the American merchant vessel Minerva (Caldwell). She had been bound from New York to Amsterdam, laden with sugar, coffee, hides and other articles. The vessel was brought into Plymouth, and, on 29 September, was restored along with all the cargo except 5,839 hides, which were condemned as legal prize. The captors alleged that the hides had been transferred to the Minerva from the Eagle, an American vessel that had purchased them at Monte Video. The owners of the hides disagreed and went on to appeal. The work of the arbitration commission under Article VII had been concluded for three years, thus there was no governmental assistance in the case. Nevertheless, through their merchant connections, the American owners found a way to get British aid: Charles Wall, a partner in the London merchant company Baring, Brothers & Co., appealed the case on their behalf. He took on the case for the New York owners of the goods in question: LeRoy, Bayard and Co. Sadly, the Lords of Appeal did not alter the decree issued by the High Court of Admiralty. LeRoy, Bayard & Co. had to accept the verdict of the British admiralty system.

William Bayard Jr (1761–1826) was a few years older than his distant relative, Samuel Bayard. Unlike his uncle, Robert Bayard, who had been condemning American ‘rebels’ during the War of Independence, or his father, William Bayard Sr, who had fled the country and whose property had largely been confiscated, William Bayard Jr remained in the United States and attained American citizenship. In 1786, he set up the mercantile firm of LeRoy, Bayard & Co. alongside his brother-in-law Herman LeRoy.

Stifter's body of work is a typical, yet particularly interesting case of how nineteenth-century authors straddled the publication contexts of multi-author journals, anthologies, and annuals and of single-author books and collected works editions. As is the case with nearly all authors in the mid-nineteenth century, the vast majority of Stifter's writings were first published in cultural journals and anthologies. At the same time, he aspired to have his single-author collections elevate him above the status of a mere writer for journals. His notorious obsession with reworking his texts—polishing and filing them down (ausfeilen), as he put it—is unique in literary history. Stifter's affirmative vision of what Johannes John calls “the utopia of the finished text” is undeniable, something that has led scholars to apply classicizing conceptions of completion and monumentality to Stifter's mature work, with ideals of perfection (Vollendung) informing the critical works editions published not long after his death. These editions sought to profile him as a “classic” German-language author, an aspiration arguably supported by Stifter's stated affinity to Goethe later in life.

That the Welles-Ros Bible is among the largest surviving illuminated manuscripts from fourteenth-century England underscores the ambition of Maud de Ros's project. The volume's page dimensions are surpassed by only a few of the lavish largescale missals made in England in the years around 1400, including the Sherborne Missal (see Fig. 8) and the originally massive Carmelite Missal. Also larger than or comparable to the Welles-Ros Bible in respect to their page dimensions are the two famous, mainly Middle English devotional and didactic collections known as the Vernon (c.1382–1400) and Simeon (c.1390–1400) manuscripts.

Produced from consistently smooth, professionally-prepared vellum with relatively few holes or tears, each bifolium of the Welles-Ros Bible would have been cut from a single calfskin. The scriptural text was written for two columns of sixty-one lines by several contemporary scribes who used minimal abbreviations. Nora Elizabeth Ratcliff estimated that the now-missing text containing the end of Hebrews and the Book of Revelation would have required about thirteen additional sides to complete. Assuming that Revelation included no extra or especially large illustrations, that biblical book would probably have ended on fol. 421v or possibly fol. 422r. Thus, a total of 212 or 213 skins would have been required for the (unfoliated) table of contents and the scriptural text together. This estimate includes the folio numbered (in a later hand) 328bis that contains the final half-column's worth of 2 Maccabees, the last book of the Old Testament. Unlike virtually all of the other pages of the scriptural text, this one is not foliated with a large roman numeral at upper left on its verso, probably because this verso is blank.

It is time to return to the African smallholders who developed the Angolan coffee economy during the nineteenth century and carry their story forward into the late colonial period. This group lost their position as the country's dominant cash-crop producers during the 1920s, as colonists took hold of most of the land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship available for coffee growing. State-sponsored settler expansion narrowed opportunities for material progress for thousands of farmers in northern Angola. It did not, however, destroy independent peasant production. In response to rising world coffee prices, smallholders in the north significantly increased their output. In 1928, they brought approximately 2,700 tons of coffee to market, but three decades later their contribution had grown to 22,500 tons, based mainly on expansion in the Congo district. ‘It so happens’, the Portuguese agronomist Jorge Trancoso Vaz observed, ‘that the native Kongo, taken by the increase in value of coffee, has amplified his plantations, making use of every bush available, just like the Europeans’.

This chapter uses qualitative – occasionally anecdotal – evidence to argue that coffee production improved the living standards of small-scale farmers in Angola, especially during periods of favourable commodity prices. The history of these farmers, poorly documented in colonial archives, is an example of African involvement in cash-crop production by grower initiative. This provides a contrast not only with known cases of coffee culture development in colonial Africa by state intervention – via taxation, propagation, or forced cultivation – but also with recent reformulations of classic dependency approaches to tropical crop production that relate it to colonial coercion and extraction.

The three violin sonatas op.30, composed in 1802, find Beethoven on the cusp of his middle-period style, which was firmly established in the following year with the ‘Eroica’ Symphony. The outer works of the op.30 series give, perhaps, little hint of things to come, though the contrapuntal intricacy of the A major first sonata, and the beauty and originality of its concluding variation movement, are striking enough; but the triptych's C minor centrepiece belongs among the composer's grand conceptions, foreshadowing the unprecedentedly large canvas of such middle-period masterpieces as the ‘Eroica’, the last two piano concertos, the Violin Concerto and at least the first two of the ‘Razumovsky’ string quartets op.59.

It was in the year after he embarked on the op.30 violin sonatas that Beethoven supposedly told Wenzel Krumpholz that he was dissatisfied with his previous works, and was determined henceforth to follow a new path (Ich bin mit meinen bisherigen Arbeiten nicht zufrieden. Von nun an will ich einen neuen Weg betreten). While there may have been no sudden stylistic change in Beethoven's music once the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth (pace Wilhelm von Lenz, whose influential Beethoven et ses trois styles arbitrarily located the start of the composer's middle period as falling in the year 1800), there seems to be a conscious seeking after novel effects in the works he wrote around the time of the op.30 violin sonatas.

The following transcriptions are of two protestations that were written and made public in October 1681. A ‘protestation against the parlimenters’ was penned by Stirlingshire blacksmith Robert Garnock and presented by him to the Privy Council on 1 October 1681. The second protestation is dated 7 October and labelled a ‘protestation against the assize’. It is signed by Garnock and the fve other men from across Scotland that were indicted and tried alongside him: David Farrie; James Stewart; Alexander Russell; Patrick Foreman; and George Lapsley.

Both transcriptions are taken from the original documents in the men's own hands. Although acknowledged at their trial in Edinburgh's High Court of Justiciary on 7 October, neither protestation was copied into additional legal records. Instead, both papers survive among uncatalogued trial material in the National Records of Scotland's JC26 High Court of Justiciary processes series. Analysis and contextualisation of these protestations can be aided by other contemporary records, such as the High Court's Book of Adjournal, witness accounts, like those of lawyer John Lauder of Fountainhall, and other texts written by the six men who composed and subscribed these protestations.

Protest and dissent

A protestation was an instrument of Scots law: a formal statement of either written or verbal protest against a legal ruling. During the seventeenth century this judicial device was adapted as a means of public protest.

“Do not imagine you are powerless”

In a letter to the “Mothers of England,” intended to mobilize them against child sex trafficking, British feminist, reformer, and outspoken campaigner Josephine Butler addresses accusations of being too harsh, hyperbolic, and incensed, and to have “wounded the susceptibilities of the men of other nations.” She reminds them, however, that even Christ himself, “our perfect example,” has “looked round about ‘with anger,’ because of the hardness of hearts.” Butler wants God “to kindle a holy and purifying fire in many hearts” by way of her letter, and spur them to action. “Do not imagine you are powerless,” she tells her fellow women. God will welcome them “in his great army of deliverance” and provide “the weapons to bring against this inhumanity.”

Searching for waste in Stifter's Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), a novel in which everything glistens in cleanliness and orderliness, may seem like an odd endeavor.1 The domestic spaces that the protagonist inhabits as a child and visits as an adult are veritable paragons of orderly households. These include the city apartment and subsequent suburban domicile of his parents in Vienna as well as the two country estates that help shape his later development: the Asperhof belonging to his paternal friend and mentor Risach and the Sternenhof, where his future wife Natalie and her mother Mathilde reside. Not a single speck of dust sullies these abodes, nothing lies purposeless within their confines; furniture is looked after with care, household items treated with deference. The same holds true for the extramural gardens and their harmoniously arranged grounds, particularly at Risach's Rosenhaus, where every fallen leaf is instantly removed, sandy pathways are regularly raked smooth, and trees receive a thorough bark-scrubbing every spring. Indeed, even in the otherwise detritus-generating realm of labor—here for instance the Asperhof's artisanal workshop—order and tidiness remain a top priority. Thus, given this initial sampling of hygienic examples drawn from the novel, what is the point of pursuing traces of waste therein?

At the end of the year 1812 Beethoven could look back on a remarkably productive decade that had seen him compose an array of large-scale masterpieces including the Third to Eighth Symphonies, the last two piano concertos, the Violin Concerto and the Triple Concerto, the string quartets opp.59, 74 and 95, two versions of the opera Leonore, and the Mass in C. In the two-and-a-half years that followed the completion of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies, and the culmination of his serene manner marked by the ‘Archduke’ Trio and the op.96 Violin Sonata, Beethoven experienced a comparatively lean period in his output. Much of this time was taken up with the final revision of his opera, and with occasional pieces such as Wellingtons Sieg (the so-called ‘Battle Symphony’), the cantata Der glorreiche Augenblick, the Namensfeier Overture, and the choral setting of Goethe's Meeres Stille und glückliche Fahrt. The only new work of real significance to emerge was the highly concentrated two-movement Piano Sonata op.90. It is possible that in the wake of the ‘Immortal Beloved’ letter of the summer of 1812 Beethoven experienced some form of mid-life crisis, as well as a prolonged period of depression. His state of mind is reflected in some of his diary entries from the end of 1812 and the early summer of 1813: ‘You should not be a human being [Mensch], not for yourself, only for others; for you there is no longer any happiness except in yourself, in your art. O God! Give me strength to conquer myself, nothing at all must fetter me to life.’

Beethoven's last chamber works with piano are intimately bound up with the nearly two hundred arrangements of folk songs he made in the decade between 1810 and 1820, the large majority of them for the Scottish philanthropist and folksong enthusiast George Thomson. Thomson's mission was to publish as comprehensive as possible a collection of Scottish folk melodies (and later, songs from Wales and Ireland), in settings with preludes, postludes and accompaniments for piano trio made by some of the leading composers of central Europe. To this end, he turned first to Haydn's pupil Ignaz Pleyel, then to the Bohemian composer Leopold Kozeluch (described at one point by the exasperated Beethoven in his voluminous correspondence with Thomson as a miserabilis); and eventually to Haydn himself, who had already provided two folksong collections for the Scottish publisher William Napier. But by 1803 it was clear that Haydn was becoming too frail to continue with this work for much longer, and it was in that year that Thomson made an initial approach to Beethoven.

Thomson's first letter to Beethoven, dated 20 July 1803, has not survived, but in his reply of 5 October the composer agreed to write six sonatas based on Scottish national airs for a fee of 300 ducats. This, however, was too high for Thomson, who was prepared to pay only half the requested amount; and, perhaps not surprisingly, negotiations at this stage came to nothing. All the same, Beethoven appears to have begun work on the project, and to have jotted down a few brief piano sketches of Scottish tunes in the summer of 1804.

1 January. How differently has the old year ended and the new one begun to what I expected. On the 30 Dec. I wrote to Hinck that everything in the world was going as I wished, and the very next day was one of the most melancholy I ever passed. Sutton came up again on Thursday from Brighton, Dan saw him on Friday and thought him much the same; on Saturday morning I went to his chambers determined to make him call in other advice, but after waiting an hour and a half went away without seeing him, as he was out. At 2 oclock his friend John Romilly sent a messenger to us in the City to say he was much worse and we must come up immediately. I went and found him attacked by paralysis and speechless. His apothecary had sent for Dr Bright, and as he could not come till 6 asked me to stay with him, which I did. He was downstairs in his library, sometimes sitting in one chair sometimes in another, walking up and down the room, taking down a book and putting it up again, cutting with his knife and so on to kill time. I took a book to read that I might not fuss him by appearing to watch him; I spoke occasionally and he tried to answer but could not articulate a word intelligibly. It was a most wearying time. … His face was very slightly drawn and fixed in one expression without the power of change or smiling. Bright treated him as Welbank had done before, cupped him and gave him a powerful medicine and I came away at 7.