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This chapter aims to shed light upon the post-war context of Nottingham's multicultural, working-class communities, before exploring their dynamic, interactive and accessible literary creations. Particular emphasis is placed on African Caribbean and white British authors through readings of selected Nottingham texts. This introduction contextualises ‘Notts’ cultural expression as diverse as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958); a digital app that immerses walkers in the streets of Sillitoe's fiction; the Afrocentric (out)spoken word
This book explores the legal actions of women living in three English towns – Nottingham, Chester and Winchester – during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For the first time, it brings together women’s involvement in a wide range of litigation, including pleas of debt and trespass, as well as the actions for which they were punished under local policing and regulations. The book details the multiple reasons that women engaged with the law in their local communities, all arising from their interpersonal relationships and everyday work and trade. Through the examination of thousands of original court cases, it reveals the identities of hundreds of ordinary urban women and the wide range of legal actions that they participated in. This wide-ranging, comparative study examines the differing ways that women’s legal status was defined in multiple towns, and according to different situations and pleas. It pays close attention to the experiences of married women and the complex and malleable nature of coverture, which did not always make them completely invisible. The book offers new perspectives on women’s legal position and engagement with the law, their work and commercial roles, the gendering of violence and honour, and the practical implications of coverture and marital status, highlighting the importance of examining the legal roles and experiences of individual women. Its basis in the records of medieval town courts also offers a valuable insight into the workings of these courts and the lives and identities of those that used them.
to market countercultural art. During the latter years of the 2010s, stepping outside Nottingham train station revealed a colourful banner stretched across a large building on Station Street. Travellers to the city were met with portraits of Lord Byron, D.H. Lawrence and Sillitoe, arranged under the heading of ‘Our Rebel Writers’. In the colloquial register of local cultural magazine LeftLion , the Rebel Writers installation is ‘a whacking great banner down on Station Street that's celebrating our gobbiness’. 2 The
forbidding backdrop. And, as the suffragette movement spread, the brutal experience of prison reached far beyond London and big cities. So how did Votes for Women play out in the industrial Midlands? The story is introduced here through the waves that imprisonment sent into one WSPU branch, Nottingham, and on one suffragette there, Helen Watts. From there the narrative spreads out to Leicester and then of course the regional capital, Birmingham (see Map 1). It was here, in Winson Green prison, that the confrontation between suffragettes and the Home Office escalated most
grass-roots venues. Anxieties over shared space and noise are telling of the gulf which exists in the UK between the public sphere as represented by ‘world-beating’ institutions such as London's West End and that of the counter-public sphere where performance poetry operates. Situated in the East Midlands of the United Kingdom, Nottingham provides a valuable backdrop against which to map the reimagining of a ‘public sphere’ in which performance poetry can thrive and grow. With its diverse communities of writers, performers and audiences, strong
course of a year, as part of a fixed regime of inspection and monitoring that took a specific form within each town. In Winchester, where offences were recorded among the pleas of the city court, trading presentments appear more frequently than in Nottingham, where they were reported twice per year, suggesting that these Winchester presentments were made on a somewhat ad hoc basis. The court and its officials appear to have paid more attention to recording a larger range of trading offences over time, with more being documented
provincial towns including Norwich, which was both. The business of writing such histories really took off with the expansion of the new industrial towns, as a group of historian-commentators produced detailed histories of Manchester and Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester, and smaller centres such as Hinckley. These studies were important not just as histories, but for the contemporary comment and description they included. Hardly surprisingly, the quality varied, and where corporations offered sponsorship there was an obvious tendency for authors to write in a more
involved a large number of individual men and women, trading partners, as well as married couples. Richard Britnell estimated that in Colchester during the 1370s, there was at least one plea of debt for every eight adult residents of the borough. 9 At Nottingham, where the borough court rolls are most complete, around a third (469) of the number of 1377 Poll Tax payers (1,477) were found in court annually during the 1370s. 10 The majority of suits (72 per cent) were debt pleas. The debts that were the subject of these pleas
Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and Mrs Dean is proprietress of Three Harrows Music Hall, Tunstall.2 Since not all theatre managements are recorded in the adverts and reviews, there were almost certainly other women working in similar capacities at other regional venues at this date.3 The majority of those who were acknowledged in the sample are described as lessees, a finding at odds with Davis’s assertion that in this period remarkably few women worked in this capacity (T. C. Davis, 1996: 114). She outlines the legal and financial accountability of the various managerial
Interlude 4 Telling stories about war differently This interlude includes a fictional, spoof newspaper created by members of the Women’s Cultural Forum during a workshop in Nottingham in 2017. The newspaper is called The Double Standard. Working from headlines, and using social media GIFs that were analysed in the media research phase of our project as source material, the group sought to reveal the double standards applied to migrants and to wealthy individuals and powerful corporations. The first page (figure 7) shadows the ‘World News’ section of mainstream