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This book is the first collection of translated sources on towns in medieval England between 1100 and 1500. Drawing on a variety of written evidence for the significan and dynamic period, it provides an overview of English medieval urban history. Readers are invited to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by a wide range of sources. The merchant, for example, is seen from different angles - as an economic agent, as a religious patron and in Chaucer's fictional depiction. The prominence of London and the other major cities is reflected in the selection, but due attention is also given to a number of small market towns. Occasions of conflict are represented, as are examples of groups and societies which both contributed to and helped to contain the tensions within urban society. Changing indicators of wealth and poverty are considered, together with evidence for more complex questions concerning the quality of life in the medieval town. The book moves between the experience of urban life and contemporary perceptions of it - from domestic furnishings to legends of civic origins and plays in which townspeople enacted their own history.
record publishing became popular in the nineteenth century. Every published edition of a source extended the range of possibilities for both national and local historians, but it was the principle of public responsibility for records which really stimulated change. The founding of the Public Record Office in the mid-nineteenth century improved access to the national archives, and from 1889 the principle of local responsibility for archives was enshrined in the legislation creating county councils. In this chapter we look initially at the growth of access to records
unworthiness for the role and lacked the confidence and the inclination to undertake public responsibility, should become the spiritual leader of Catholic Ireland. Notes 111 112 113 114 115 1 6 117 118 119 Freeman’s Journal, 12 Jan. 1891. Cullen, Economic History, p. 149. Townshend, Political Violence, p. 115. Lee, Modernisation, p. 73. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants, pp. 9–11. Larkin, Modern Irish State, p. 24. Toner Biography, Logue Papers, ADA, box 10, folder 4, ch. 5, p. 12. Martin to Logue, 25 Feb. 1880, Logue Papers, RDA, no. 107 (1880). Dublin Mansion House Relief
J. Andrew Mendelsohn’s chapter focuses on economic, governmental, and medical policies in early modern mining societies in Saxony. Starting with the example of a penny box of German miners’ societies and the in and out of clinking pennies, the weekly payments of miners to the societies’ penny box, and the money’s use for injured or harmed miners suffering from miners diseases, J. Andrew Mendelsohn combines economic history (miners’ societies and sick funds as the earliest form of social insurance) and medical history (expertise on miners’ diseases as the earliest form of occupational health). Accounting, Mendelsohn argues, constituted each in relation to the other.
Mines and mining towns were both an important economic sector and a kind of experimental field for medical observation and knowledge production, amid the background of attempts to govern the laboring body of miners. This was because mining investors, with their public responsibility in miners, had a vested interest in miners living longer and healthier (and thus more productive) lives. In this sense Mendelsohn argues that all-pervasive values and practices of welfare, effective work, and good governance – in both a moral and technical sense – entailed accounting for anything significant happening to the bodies of miners. For this reason, the practice of the official mining physician involved substantial administrative organisation, managerial and medical oversight, and various forms of recordkeeping, especially simple forms of accounting, all within a framework of accountability that was both political and economic.
the Swedish welfare state. The expansion of public responsibility for social security that took place in the post-war period was based on the notion of security and social citizenship as the foundation for an efficient society, and indeed as a prerequisite for future economic growth. However, as the SAP embarked on its ‘third way’ in the late 1970s and early 1980s, its understanding of social policy as a
growth had to be matched by increased public responsibility for individual wellbeing. This was the true meaning of the metaphor of the strong society. The continued expansion of social security in the industrial society was the prerequisite of individual freedom. In a society of rapid economic change, the emancipation of individuals was dependent on a social safety net that provided for freedom of choice
Victorian medical men could suffer numerous setbacks on their individual paths to professionalisation, and Thomas Elkanah Hoyle's career offers a telling exemplar. This book addresses a range of the financial, professional, and personal challenges that faced and sometimes defeated the aspiring medical men of England and Wales. Spanning the decades 1780-1890, from the publication of the first medical directory to the second Medical Registration Act, it considers their careers in England and Wales, and in the Indian Medical Service. The book questions the existing picture of broad and rising medical prosperity across the nineteenth century to consider the men who did not keep up with professionalising trends. Financial difficulty was widespread in medical practice, and while there are only a few who underwent bankruptcy or insolvency identified among medical suicides, the fear of financial failure could prove a powerful motive for self-destruction. The book unpicks the life stories of men such as Henry Edwards, who could not sustain a professional persona of disinterested expertise. In doing so it uncovers the trials of the medical marketplace and the pressures of medical masculinity. The book also considers charges against practitioners that entailed their neglect, incompetence or questionable practice which occasioned a threat to patients' lives. The occurrence and reporting of violent crime by medical men, specifically serious sexual assault and murder is also discussed. A tiny proportion of medical practitioners also experienced life as a patient in an asylum.
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. It outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle. This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this book offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain.
politics. The emphasis on public responsibility and collective solidarity as the precondition for individual emancipation and economic dynamism in the 1950s was replaced, in the 1970s, with a radicalisation that focused on the standing of individual social rights and, to some extent, turned against the collectivism of the labour movement. This 1970s discourse provided an important part of the underpinnings of third
This book aims to revisit the county study as a way into understanding the dynamics of the English civil war during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a ‘county community’. It investigates the responses of the county’s governing elite and puritan religious establishment to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I’s Personal Rule. The second half of the book provides a rich and detailed analysis of the petitioning movements and side-taking in Cheshire during 1641-42. This important contribution to understanding the local origins and outbreak of civil war in England will be of interest to all students and scholars studying the English Revolution.