Follow Us!
-
-
-
Recent Posts
-
Pages
Legal History Archive
-
Henry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsHenry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law Steven G. Ellis (University College, Galway) The Historical Journal, 24, 3 (1981), pp. 513-531 Abstract It has been traditional to regard the reaction... -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
Policy-Making on the Victorian British Empire: British Imperialism 1837-1901
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsQuestion: “Far from being exceptionally aggressive and masterful, the rulers of Victorian Britain were generally reluctant imperialists.” How justified is this view? -
More Than Just Kidd’s Play
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsTom Wareham examines the role played by a legendary yet ill-fated pirate in the consolidation of England’s early trading empire. -
Common Woman to Commodity: Changing Perceptions of Prostitution in Early Modern England, C. 1450-1750
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsI began this project under the assumption that the modern definition and conception of the term “prostitute” had materialized by the eighteenth century. This is not a difficult conclusion to draw when examining the existing historiography of illicit sexuality in early modern England. -
Lessons from history: asylum patients’ Christmas experience
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhile it may be claimed that contemporary practice offers drug treatments and a wide range of therapeutic interventions unimaginable 150 years ago, it could also be argued that for all the advances in care and treatment the quality of life that patients experienced in the 19th century was, to some extent, superior. -
Social status and literacy in north-east England, 1560-1630
Posted on December 23, 2012 | No CommentsExamination of the surviving depositions from our ecclesiastical jurisdictions reveal something of the pattern of illiteracy in England from the age of Elizabeth to the end of the Stuart era. -
It Isn’t About Duck Hunting: The British Origins of the Right to Arms
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsWho, if any, of these American analysts has found the truth? Does the story of the British right to arms offer anything of value to the modern American gun debate? The academic literature has heretofore been sparse. My two books on gun control in Great Britain both focused mainly on twentieth-century gun policy, rather than the story of the 1689 Bill of Rights and its right to arms. -
Historical Perspectives on Violence Against Women
Posted on December 3, 2012 | No CommentsThree great bodies of thought have influenced western society’s views and treatment of women: Judeo-Christian cultural beliefs, Greek philosophy and the western legal code. -
Pinfold Politics – Violence and the Impounding of Animals in Early Modern England
Posted on November 28, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper describes a hitherto barely recognised form of popular direct action in the early-modern countryside: the use of violence during the distraining and impounding of animals. -
Sincere Lies and Creative Truth: Recantation Strategies during the English Reformation
Posted on November 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis leaves a blank page in the history of religious persecution and tolerance in sixteenth- century England. This paper hopes to contribute to some recent studies which are attempting to fill it, such as those of Susan Wabuda and Brad Gregory. These historians both suggest that the crown did not press for recantation only to maintain power. -
A Fortunate Dialect: Class, Language, and Survival in Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsMoll expresses her own sense of gentility to the reader by using the language of the upper class, but then, in the same breath, translates the implications and semantics to those of the lower class. She uses this adaptability as a survival tool. -
Undermining Apprenticeship: City, Law and Growth in early modern London
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper describes a very different, and entirely neglected, side of apprenticeship in London: the city’s system of contract dissolution. I suggest easy dissolution played a vital role in sustaining apprenticeship in London, and was apparently echoed in a weaker form elsewhere in England. -
The London Vagrancy Crisis of the 1780s
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsIn part, this can be seen as simply one more of a broad series of changes in the administration of crime. A whole raft of old and new punishments were being used in new ways, largely as a result of the end of transportation to North America – that had formed so prominent an aspect of penal policy prior to 1776. -
Violence and duelling between exiled courtiers: the case of the Caroline Stuart Court in exile, c. 1649-c. 1660
Posted on November 19, 2012 | No CommentsYet, though we can clearly say that the duel was not unique to the exiled Caroline Stuart Court, we must still concede that such acts of violence occurred quite frequently there. This was especially true from 1656-59, when Charles II’s Court was in the Spanish Netherlands, and this tendency to conflict was even remarked upon by contemporary observers. -
Managing Change in The English Reformation: The 1548 Dissolution of the Chantries and Clergy of the Midland County Surveys
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsDid the English Reformation happen because Thomas Cromwell, seeing political possibilities in the new religious ideas now abroad, applied these to resolving Henry VIII‟s marital difficulties? After all, Henry VIII wanted a son and, despairing of his now middle-aged wife, Katherine, had found a likely fruitful replacement in Anne Boleyn. -
Witchcraft and Family: What Can Witchcraft Documents Tell Us About Early Modern Scottish Family Life?
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsA wide range of document-types survive for the early modern period. But random survival rates of potentially detailed docu- ments coupled with their often significant lack of detail about women and the lower orders means that at this stage we do not know even the very basics about family life, let alone people’s subjective thoughts and experiences of family. -
Becoming British? Navigating the Union of 1707
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will take one extended family, the Humes of the Merse (Berwickshire) and use it as a lens through which to view the process of “Brittification;” the four main areas addressed will be the legal, religious and educational ramifications of union for ambitious Scots and the issue of self-identification. -
To Converse with the Devil? Speech, Sexuality, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn both of the above cases, the women involved were accused of witchcraft as a consequence of their wilful and disorderly speech; yet, in the course of the witch trial, they were also accused and convicted of participating in an unnatural sexual relationship with the devil. -
Deeds Against Nature: women and Crime in Street Literature of Early Modern England
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn early modern England, when news in printed form designed for a large- scale readership was only beginning to develop, accounts of murders committed by women assumed an importance entirely disproportionate in relation to their actual occurrence. -
The True Executor of the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper examines the culpability of Elizabeth and her Councillors in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, the woman who threatened to take Elizabeth's throne and life away from her. -
Policemen in Mid Nineteenth Century Whitechapel
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIt can be seen that the majority of the policemen came from outside London. This reflects the preference of the authorities for rural recruits, who were considered to be physically and temperamentally better suited to becoming reliable policemen. It can also be seen that 23% of the men came from Ireland, which highlights the fact that recruitment was a matter of supply as well as demand, and that the decision to be a policeman was related to the availability of alternatives. -
A Scottish Threat: Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsOne must ask, after nineteen years of confinement, was Mary, Queen of Scots really such a threat to Queen Elizabeth that her death would be necessary? -
Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company, c. 1779–c. 1821
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsFor the first century of the Company’s operations, which remained at Hudson’s Bay, the personnel needs of the HBC were small. A recruitment ethos was established in which the directors prioritised the employment of English ‘country lads’ and Scots, largely due to their perceived qualities of subordination, sobriety, obedience and ability to endure deprivation. -
Life in Montgomeryshire during the Tudor and Stuart periods
Posted on September 27, 2012 | No CommentsMontgomeryshire is fortunate in that the records of its Court of Great Sessions are good for the 290 years existence of the court -
What if the Irish had Won the Battle of the Boyne?
Posted on September 20, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the answers to these questions would be pure speculation, it is possible to extmpolate certain patterns o f cause and effect, and piece together an alternate history. But first it is important to understand the situation in Ireland before, during, and immediately after the War ofthe Two Kings. -
After marriage: The literature and culture of divorce in England, 1515-1650
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe following pages will argue that in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the idea of divorce, of marriage's breakdown and dissolution, was as important a concept as that of the marital union itself. -
Promises broken: Breach of promise of marriage in England and Wales, 1753-1970
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary basis for this study was are 875 breach of promise cases between 1750 and 1970. -
Bureaucratic mercy: The Home Office and the treatment of capital cases in Victorian England
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation is a study in the administration of criminal justice in mid-Victorian England, and in particular of the Prerogative of Mercy. -
Infanticide in Victorian England, 1856-1878: Thirty legal cases
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsTo combat this lack of modern memory of infanticide,it will be the purpose of this work to make a contribution to the understanding of the motives of the men and women who committed the crime in the nineteenth century and of those who commit it today -
Finding the Bodies
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsCastlehaven was a minor peer, but it was rare for the early modern English state to try, much less to behead, a nobleman for anything but treason. Castlehaven is the only peer of whom I am aware who was executed solely for what on the record were sexual crimes... -
The Medical Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn the families of the English gentry where the majority of the documented cases of demonic possession occurred, doctors played a significant role in interpreting strange and unusual illnesses. It was considered important to first rule out the possibility of natural causation when a supernatural affliction was suspected, and physicians were regarded as crucial in making the distinction. -
Gender Equality in Wage Labour Relations: the example of statutory regulation in late medieval and early Tudor England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe first question, not yet raised in labour historiography, is about the impact of wage labour relations on gender equality. The second question is related to the first one: what role did women play as protagonists of wage labour relations. -
The Culture of Crime: Representations of the Criminal in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsAs the title of this study should suggest, this dissertation aims to account for this increasing representation of criminality in England throughout the eighteenth century. And as the title of this opening chapter indicates, this introduction aims to account for the methods and biases that inform this study and are utilized throughout. -
“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 1, 2012 | No CommentsI hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the Financial Revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention, at least from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history: the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the Financial Revolution in gambling. -
English Reformation and Irish Witches: The Effects of Confessionalisation in Suppressing Witchraft Accusations in Early Modern Ireland
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIndeed, Ireland stands out among the countries of early Modern Europe as having very few recorded witchcraft trials and no actual witch hunts. In point offact, there was no actual statute in Ireland criminalizing witchcraft until 1586.3 Why was Ireland spared this plague of internal suspicion that took the lives of nearly 50,000 women and men in the rest of Europe? -
Law as the Engine of State: The Trial of Anne Boleyn
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe use of trials' in the treason cases of Tudor England illustrates an important feature of the Tudor view of law and legal institutions and provides additional insight into the relationship of law to politics, a relationship that can be understated as much as it can be exaggerated. -
Henry VIII: Supremacy, Religion, And The Anabaptists
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsAnabaptism was another variation of Protestant theology that began to emerge because of the Reformation. Their theology was considered the most heretical of the Reformation and they were persecuted all over Europe. Their noteriaty as extreme heretics caught the eye of Henry VIII. He realized they would make good tools to use in helping establish his new church. -
The justice of the peace and county government in the East Riding of Yorkshire, 1782-1836
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Riding was dominated by its geology and geography. It was predominantly agricultural with few major settlements and very little industrial development. -
The reform of urban policing in Victorian England : a study of Kingston upon Hull from 1836 to 1866
Posted on August 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe state in the sense of national, county and municipal jurisdiction defined the modem English policeman, employed him and empowered him to enforce laws and by-laws.' Until relatively recently, the history of the English policeman was dominated by a Whig interpretation which equated every event in his evolution as a rational advance, a visionary solution to problems of escalating crime, challenges to the social order and the local particularisms and capriciousness of 'policing' before the police. -
The reform of punishment and the criminal justice system in England and Wales from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the late seventeenth-century and throughout the eighteenth-century crime provided one of the principal subjects for popular literature. -
An examination of interpretations of ghosts from the reformation to the close of the Seventeenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsAn examination of interpretations of ghosts from the reformation to the close of the Seventeenth Century. -
Witchcraft, Politics and Memory in Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsBodenham’s fate was shared by several hundred others in early modern England, all of whom became trapped at a deadly intersection of circumstance. It is still sometimes assumed that ‘villagers were constantly engaged in contending with, or discussing, witches’, and that popular suspicions and grievances translated simply into prosecutions. -
‘Books with manuscript’: the case of Thomas Cranmer’s library English plague regulations and Italian models: printed and manuscript items in the Yelverton Collection
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough European cities outside Italy, for instance Lille and Barcelona, took measures to control plague during the fifteenth century, in England attempts at regulation were sporadic and local until January 1518, when a royal proclamation was issued, ordering, for example, that infected houses should be marked. -
Discourse on History, Geography, and Law: John Dee and the Limits of the British Empire, 1576-80
Posted on July 19, 2012 | No CommentsRecently, literary scholar William Sherman offered the most detailed examination of Dee's imperial writings yet attempted, including a brief discussion of his most important collection of manuscripts on empire, the "Brytanici Imperii Limites," which was only discovered in 1976. -
Staging Executions: The Theater of Punishment in Early Modern England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn 1571, the first permanent structure for public hangings was constructed at Tyburn. Attending public hangings at “Tyburn tree,” as well as other forms of public punishment was a popular pastime in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Events we would now call “entertainment” in early modern England were fairly limited. -
‘Witchcraft is a rife and common sinne in these our daies’: The Powers of Witches in English Demonologies, 1580-1620
Posted on June 25, 2012 | No CommentsI contend that a detailed textual analysis of these works displays the complexity of early modern witchcraft beliefs, as significant divergences among these authors‟ arguments demonstrate that it is impossible to identify a single, “typical” English demonology, or to conclude that “elite” ideas about early modern witchcraft were homogeneous and hegemonic. -
Incendiary texts: book burning in England, c.1640 – c.1660
Posted on June 8, 2012 | No CommentsThough heretics were no longer incinerated, had Bothumley been convicted of blasphemy before two Justices of the Peace and refused to recant he could have suffered death under the provisions of an ordinance of May 1648. -
Criminal trial procedure in eighteenth-century England: the impact of lawyers
Posted on June 3, 2012 | No CommentsBut how precisely did this happen? Langbein’s astute detective work has now revealed that this important shift in courtroom practice followed hard on the heels of a series of scandals by which innocent defendants were prosecuted on the initiative of unscrupulous thief-takers and ‘Newgate solicitors’ who invented evidence and coached witnesses with the aim of profiting from rewards for convictions. -
Jews and crypto-Jews in sixteenth and seventeenth century England
Posted on June 1, 2012 | No CommentsOn 31 October 1655 Menasseh waited outside the door as the Council of State sat in session. Menasseh hoped to present copies of his books to members of the Council and eventually a clerk went out to receive them. Among these books was probably a recently written work arguing the case for Jewish readmission ...