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Violence Archive
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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... -
‘A Hand Prepared to be Red’: Manliness and Violence on Britain’s Colonial Frontiers
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsOn the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, a culture of violence prevailed. Frontier men accommodated violence in their lives as a routine and normal part of frontier living. The Victorian ethos of 'manliness' - the possession of essential virtues such as self-restraint, courage and strenuous effort - had within it the potential for violence. On the frontier the practice of manliness often entailed violence and the manly ethos could be distorted to justify and legitimise violent acts. -
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. -
The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Toleration
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe relatively minor role torture played in the Gunpowder Plot investigation is a good example of the myths that surround this emotive subject. Permission was given to employ torture on Fawkes, who initially refused to say anything, but whether it was actually used and how much is unclear. -
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. -
Negative Portrayals of Poles in Elizabethan Literature
Posted on December 8, 2012 | No CommentsAnglo-Polish relations improved during the first half of the sixteenth century. The newly established power of the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania probably raised English hopes that English merchants would gain greater access into the Baltic Sea. High-level diplomatic contacts between the two nations became more frequent. -
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. -
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. -
The Curse of Macbeth
Posted on October 11, 2012 | No CommentsWilliam Shakespeare wrote Macbeth sometime between 1603 and 1606 for King James I (Macbeth). -
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. -
Heinrich Bullinger and the Marian Exiles: The Political Foundations of Puritanism
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn this paper two fundamental issues related to the Reformed views on politics from the sixteenth century will be considered: Firstly, what the theoretical origin of these Reformed views were, and secondly, identifying the political basis for the views of the Huguenot theorists. -
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 -
‘A Suffering People’: English Quakers and Their Neighbours c.1650–c.1700
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsPopular hostility towards Quakers has attracted little attention from historians. Studies of crowds and riots in the Restoration period make little mention of violence against Quakers -
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. -
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. -
Home invasions: Victorian domestic space and the figure of the outsider
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn order to explain the Victorian ideology that underlies domestic space and its perceived threats, my thesis discusses several different aspects of identity in relation to inside and outside the home. -
Anne Askew and Margaret Fell: Religious Women in Prison And Technologies of the Self
Posted on August 26, 2012 | No CommentsBoth Anne Askew (1521-1546) and Margaret Fell (1614-1702) were imprisoned and wrote significant writings in jail. In prison Askew wrote The First Examination (1546) and The Latter Examination (1547); Fell wrote Women’s Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed by the Scriptures (1666). The two Protestants’ imprisonment indicates not only their struggle for freedom of their Protestant belief but also the government’s arbitrary exercise of institutional power over non-conforming women. -
Poisoners, Larcenists, and the Mad Chambermaid: Villainy in Late Victorian Detective Fiction
Posted on August 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary fiction chosen for this thesis is in short story form, published in Britain in either periodicals or anthologies during the time period of 1870- 1905...In short, the detective story is centered on the process of unraveling a mystery and exhibiting the unknown for the reader. -
‘Wanton and torturing punishments’ : patterns of discipline and punishment in the Royal Navy, 1783-1815
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsThe British Navy of the time of the Napoleonic Wars acquired a fearsome reputation, not only for its success but also, in the eyes of many historians, for the cruelty with which it recruited and treated its men. It is not simply that the forms of punishment, including hanging, flogging and gagging were, to the modern eye, barbaric and unacceptable. -
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. -
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. -
Robert Harley and the Myth of the Golden Thread: Family Piety,Journalism and the History of the Assassination Attempt of 8 March 1711
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsOn 8 March 1711, a possible French double agent, the marquis de Guiscard, on his own initiative bearing a grudge against both Robert Harley and Henry St John, attempted to assassinate Harley, the chancellor of the exchequer (later lord treasurer and earl of Oxford) and head of the new tory ministry established the previous year, by stabbing him with a penknife. -
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. -
The taming of the duel: masculinity, honour and ritual violence in London, 1660–1800
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe duel had a long history, but it was a malleable custom, and has been variously described as fundamentally feudal, early modern, and modern."Although traceable back to medieval tournaments, feuds, and judicial combat, the single combat to resolve questions of honour developed in the sixteenth century in several European countries, arriving in England in the 1570s. -
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. -
Aberrant Accounts: William Dugdale’s Handling of Two Tudor Murders in The Antiquities of Warwickshire
Posted on October 5, 2011 | No CommentsAberrant Accounts: William Dugdale’s Handling of Two Tudor Murders in The Antiquities of Warwickshire Broadway, Jane Midland history, Vol. 33, No. 1, Spring (2008) Abstract This article examines two accounts... -
The case of Aaron Kosminski: was he Jack the Ripper?
Posted on October 4, 2011 | No CommentsThe case of Aaron Kosminski: was he Jack the Ripper? S. K. Lekh, A. Langa, P. Begg and B. K. Puri Psychiatric Bulletin (1992), 16:786-788 Abstract The Whitechapel murders of...