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Recent Posts
- Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
- Sir Francis Kynaston: The importance of the ‘Nation’ for a 17th-century English royalist
- Anciennete among the Non-Jurors: a study of Henry Dodwell
- Wet-nurses in early modern England: some evidence from the Townshend archive
- Masters and servants: the Hudson’s Bay Company and its personnel, 1668-1782
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Social History Archive
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Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsEarly 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare can arguably be regarded as reconstructions of the plays for the ‘modern’ stage. Commentators such as Jean Marsden have convincingly suggested that post-1660 drama turns its attention to love, family and marriage, all subjects befitting the presence of women... -
Wet-nurses in early modern England: some evidence from the Townshend archive
Posted on May 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe study gives background information about the nurses and traces connections between them and their employers. It also questions our assumptions about what lay behind the widespread use of wet-nurses at this social level. -
‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England
Posted on April 29, 2012 | No CommentsSumptuary legislation can be defined as a set of regulations, passed down by legislators through statutory law and parliamentary proclamations, that sought to regulate society by dictating what contemporaries could own or wear based on their position within society. -
The Seymour Family: Edward, Jane, and Thomas, c. 1500-1552
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Seymour family was a very old and well established, if not distinguished, family. Their lineage can be traced to an obscure knight who came to England v/ith 1/iliiam the Conqueror. The Seymour name came to the family in the first half of the fourteenth century when Sir Roger de St.Maur married Cicely,the eldest sister and heir of John de Beauchamp. -
The enforcement of the anti-slave trade laws as an issue in British politics, 1833-1850
Posted on April 19, 2012 | No CommentsWhen the abolitionists began their campaign, England was still one of the world's major slave-trading nations, and by 1833 the British empire contained nearly 600,000 slaves. -
“Unspottyd Lambs Of the Lord”: Presbyterianism and the People in Elizabethan London
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsAs a result of this popular appeal, the presbyterian movement was able to endure the systematic attempts to eliminate it carried out by the Queen and the church hierarchy, to continue to help shape the nation's religious climate under the Stuarts, and to leave a lasting mark on English culture. -
Local Government and Society in Early Modern England: Hertfordshire and Essex, C. 1590-1630
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsIn this dissertation, I propose to study the administrative and social history of two adjoining English counties, Essex and Hertfordshire, for the period of 1590 through 1630. As a political and social history, this study will track the careers and social relationships of the justices of the peace, as well as other county officials, such as the sheriff, the deputy lieutenants, and the lord lieutenant (usually the resident nobleman of a county). -
“The Prince and His People”: A Study of Edwardian Propaganda, 1547-1549
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe conclusion of this study draws direct parallels between the 1549 petitions and the rhetorical strategies used in the previous two years. The government’s direct patronage of this propaganda and the language that drew the commons into a political partnership with their king helped to spark the rebellions, resulting in a crisis of leadership and legitimacy. -
Anatomizing the social body: representing the plague in London, 1665
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will analyze the motivations behind a broadsheet produced in response to the outbreak of bubonic plague in the City of London in 1665. -
Westall’s peasants : British identity and the crisis of nation in 1799
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis examines a set of stipple engravings representing groups of peasants and the rural countryside in four regions of the British Isles. -
From obligation to agreement: concepts of servitude in early modern England
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsUntil quite recently, servants played a central role in European family life...Early Modern England was no exception, for nearly every household participated in the institution of servitude. -
Poor Relief in Sixteenth Century England
Posted on April 5, 2012 | No CommentsThis study models any potential bias in recorded poor relief as a function of the characteristics of the data collectors themselves; such characteristics should be unrelated to the poor relief that the religious houses actually provided. -
Illustrated Soap Advertisements in Myra’s Journal 1875-1912: Hygiene, Beauty and Class in Victorian England
Posted on April 3, 2012 | No CommentsIdeas about cleanliness were also changing in the time leading up to the Victorian era; the observance of being clean developed from an activity largely practised by monks and those of the religious community into an exercise that almost anyone could and should adopt, though cleanliness came to be defined as denoting both physical and moral purity. The development of a cult of cleanliness occurred during this time, where this society detested dirtiness to such an extent that in advertisements, cleanliness received praise but dirtiness was ridiculed. -
![Opium was not an enormously expensive commodity, and “at 1d [,] an ounce of laudanum was cheap enough—about the price of a pint of beer,” in consequence, many, even of the working class, were regular users. Self-medicating, the cheapest, and often the only means available to many of the poor when sickness struck, was a socially acceptable practice.](http://earlymodernengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Opium-115x115.jpg "Opium Use in Victorian England: The Works of Gaskell, Eliot, and Dickens")
Opium Use in Victorian England: The Works of Gaskell, Eliot, and Dickens
Posted on March 27, 2012 | No CommentsOpium was not an enormously expensive commodity, and “at 1d [,] an ounce of laudanum was cheap enough—about the price of a pint of beer,” in consequence, many, even of the working class, were regular users. Self-medicating, the cheapest, and often the only means available to many of the poor when sickness struck, was a socially acceptable practice. -
The Wife’s Administration of the Earnings’? Working-Class Women and Savings in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a range of proposals for ways to improve the condition of the poor by stimulating savings. Institutions that encouraged and rewarded thrift would, it was argued, reduce dependence in old age on the Poor Law: the industrious would be rewarded for their good habits and the idle and vicious would suffer if required to rely on their own exertions rather than on public assistance. -
England’s Poor Law similar to modern day welfare system, scholar finds
Posted on March 7, 2012 | No CommentsA Cambridge academic’s research into the final days of the Old English Poor Law has thrown up some remarkable parallels to today’s welfare state – and casts new light on the ‘benefits system’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. -
Women Thieves in Early Modern England: What Can We Learn from Narrative Sources?
Posted on February 28, 2012 | No CommentsAccording to the Assize records for Sussex which cover the entire reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), 12 women were tried in that county and over that period of time for witchcraft, 24 for infanticides and 127 for all kinds of theft. -
Servants in Preindustrial Europe: Gender Differences
Posted on February 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe specific mobility and type of work of servants of both sexes were indeed a major feature in the delineation of building up European societies. Domestic service was the main way to elect for young rurals wanting to migrate towards small and big towns, since they could consider service as a transitory phase, giving them an opportunity to adapt themselves to a new way of life before marriage. -
The English Reformation In Image and Print: Cultural Continuity, Disruptions, and Communications in Tudor Art
Posted on February 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe sixteenth century was a period of social, political, and religious change for the English Crown and people. Of these shifts the English Reformation and the resulting modifications to Catholic traditions were especially significant. Material culture (including art forms such as portraiture, church art, and illustrated texts) was a prominent indicator of larger political and religious alterations. -
The protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe English conduct book writers, themselves from the first generation of married pastors, saw it as their task to model the patriarchal family afresh for this new world. -
‘Contrary to the liberties of this city’: Henry VII, English towns and the economics of law and order
Posted on February 9, 2012 | No CommentsFurthermore, the second half of the fifteenth century witnessed the increasing popularity of equity law as a desirable alternative to both common law courts and local jurisdictions. This situation was not lost on the mayors, burgesses and aldermen of English towns, nor on Henry VII. -
Tudor: What’s in a Name?
Posted on February 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn 2008, I published in the Times Literary Supplement an article suggesting that the word ‘Tudor’ was hardly used or known in sixteenthcentury England. Monarchs, after all, had no occasion to use family names. -
A Mechanized Society in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsMy choice of writing about mechanization is not only to describe how this mechanization of the society is but, to show the importance of fancy and fiction in the life of people. -
“The wife of Lucifer” : women and evil in Charles Dickens
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsThe central thesis behind this is that no human being commits evil “knowingly” – an evil action must therefore be the result of mistakenly believing that the action is good; or it must be done unintentionally, through accident, coercion, or incapacity. -
The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No Comments...While the likes of Victorian thinkers such as Marx, Mill, Carlyle, and Ruskin to name but a few,formulated the ideas of and laid the groundwork for social reform in the 19th c., it was in reality men like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy who pointed out through their various novels, the abuses of the Industrial Age in Victorian England. -
Seeking the Supernatural: The Exorcisms of John Darrell and the Formation of an Orthodox Identity in Early Modern England
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis examines the questions raised by Darrell‘s exorcisms and the ways in which they were shaped by relations of power. I hope that it will shed new light on the ways in which people formed their religious and ideological identities in this pivotal period in English history. -
English Assimilation and Invasion From Outside the Empire: Problems of the Outsider in England in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Posted on February 1, 2012 | No CommentsNo matter how relevant the novel may seem to current readers, it would be foolish to ignore the ways in which Dracula excited emotions in its earliest readers. Late Victorian English citizens would have viewed the novel through a number of different lenses that 21st century readers may be unable to appreciate. -
Constructions of Infanticide in Early Modern England: Female Deviance During Demographic Crisis
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsNewborn child murder may have been rare in early modern England, but there is little doubt that it happened. Evidence of it exists in the judicial records, as it was criminalized by the legal code. -
Chinoiserie: Revisiting England’s Eighteenth-Century Fantasy of the East
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsChinoiserie, a French word, is also used in the English language for a seventeenth and eighteenth century European style of ornamentation whose inspiration is entirely Oriental. Spanning centuries, continents and cultures, Chinoiserie explores the clash and fusion of values and perceptions between the East and the West. -
Musicians and Intelligence Operations, 1570-1612: Politics, Surveillance, and Patronage in the Late Tudor and Early Stuart Years
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsReligious and political upheavals in late Tudor England had markedconsequences on artistic patronage. Although this dissertation is not a comprehensive study of music patronage as it shifted with changing networks of power, I will propose that a form of alternative patronage did emerge with the growth industry in intelligence operations. -
The City of York in the time of Henry VIII
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsDuring this period, the role of the landed aristocracy was changing. With the creation of a professional standing army, in which soldiers were paid a wage, and the use of foreign mercenaries (think of the Swiss Guard), the traditional military function of the nobility receded. -
Victorian Governesses : A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsHistories and fictions explore the lives of Victorian governesses. The governess appeared lonely, depressed, and unwanted, yet thousands of women entered the profession. Victorian governesses experienced changing social and economic conditions. -
Beliefs and Approaches to Death and Dying in Late Seventeenth-Century England
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis study evaluates beliefs and practices of death and dying among Puritans and Arminians in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, from the English Civil War era through the Glorious Revolution. -
Forging a coalition army: William III, the grand alliance, and the confederate army in the Spanish Netherlands, 1688-1697
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThe wars against Louis XIV were fought by coalition armies. In the autumn of 1688, Louis’ forces invaded the Palatinate triggering the largest European conflict of the age, a war that would eventually involve — either directly or indirectly — every state in Europe. -
A Crisis in Regal Identity: The Dichotomy Between Levinia Teerlinc’s (1520-1576) Private and Public Images of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsTeerlinc’s career began with an invitation to serve as official court painter to Henry VIII (1491-1547). After his death in 1554, she worked for Edward VI (1547-1553), Mary I (1516-1558), and finally Elizabeth I (1533-1603). -
Courtship and Marriage Rituals in Seventeenth Century England
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will examine the more personal side of courtship and marriage, through the use of seventeenth century diaries and letters. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on January 23, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
English hunger and industrial disorders : a study of social conflict during the first decade of George III’s reign
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation will argue that while the distress of the industrious poor, which followed sudden fluctuations in food prices and declining employment was the common denominator in the numerous riots of the 1760's, the disorders were merely the surface manifestation of underlying political, economic, social and intellectual ferment which affected all levels of society. -
The Family of Love and the Church of England
Posted on January 13, 2012 | No CommentsOn Oct 3, 1580,a Royal Proclimation was issued entitle, "Ordering Prosecution of the Family of Love". In it the Queen expresses her displeasure at "certain persons which do secretly in corners make privy assemblies of divers simple people unlearned people..." -
Young England : the medieval spirit in an industrial age, 1842-1850
Posted on January 12, 2012 | No CommentsIt cannot be said that Young England left an indelible mark on the legislation or social life of Victorian England. As Disraeli's biographer, E.T. Raymond,,, has remarked, "It left no mark on the statute book. -
British attitudes to the Negro, 1850-1870
Posted on January 12, 2012 | No CommentsThe subjects of this thesis are white not black. Victorian attitudes to race were as much a product of developments in the white world of England as a result of encounters with the black man in the Empire. -
When January 1st Wasn’t the First of the Year
Posted on January 12, 2012 | No CommentsBut strange as it may seem, January 1st did not always signal the beginning of a new calendar year. Until 1752, the two were separate things in England and its colonies. Until that point, people began each calendar year on March 25, which was Annunciation Day—or Lady Day. -
The Debate over the Corporeality of Demons in England, c. 1670-1700
Posted on January 6, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis explores a debate which occurred in England during the late seventeenth century. The debate was over whether demons were corporeal or incorporeal. Believers in witchcraft claimed that witches provided proof of demons and those demons were incorporeal substances that could affect the temporal world. -
The politics of art and religion : Absolutism and Catholic iconography in early Stuart England 1603-1649
Posted on December 21, 2011 | No CommentsThe two Stuart kings, James and Charles, brought important change to England. For inspiration to modernize, James I looked outside of England, a strategy more vigorously pursued by his successor Charles I. -
Scholar discovers 16th-century love poem written by an Englishwoman
Posted on December 16, 2011 | No CommentsThe erotic-love poem seems to have been by a Roman Catholic woman and sent to a Protestant scholar who was the tutor to Edward VI. -
High crimes: the law of treason in late Stuart Britain
Posted on December 14, 2011 | No CommentsThis is the first work on treason to concentrate exclusively on the all important years between the Restoration and the Union, when the number of trials for this most serious of all crimes reached new heights and during which time the procedural law of treason underwent significant changes. -
Thomas Cromwell: aspects of his administrative work
Posted on December 12, 2011 | No CommentsThe conclusion attempts to account for the fact that in his administration Cromwell seems to have been guided by contradictory desires (to organise bureaucratically, and to evade bureaucratic organisation in the interests of personal ascendancy), and to assess his place as the founder of modern government in England. -
Christmas: Its Origin and Associations: Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries
Posted on December 4, 2011 | No CommentsHenceforth, I became a snapper-up of everything relating to Christmastide, utilised every opportunity of searching libraries, bookstalls, and catalogues of books in different parts of the country... -
The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth
Posted on November 22, 2011 | No CommentsOn January 16th, 1559, England’s twenty-five-year-old sovereign left Whitehall to be crowned Queen. This article, by A.L. Rowse, was first published in May 1953, exactly fifty years ago, in a special issue of History Today that marked the imminent coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. -
All Singing, All Dancing
Posted on November 22, 2011 | No CommentsSexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains.