Abstracts of recent publications

As a former journal editor, I am far from happy about the practice of publishing on the web PDFs of papers which are in copyright. But I am more than willing to publish a list of recent papers with abstracts. If colleagues really cannot access the ‘full texts’, I will supply PDFs of papers (where I have them) on request, but for private use only.

‘“Wrightsonian incorporation” and the public rhetoric of mid-Tudor England’, History 101 (2016), pp. 20-41.

This paper introduces the idea of ‘Wrightsonian incorporation’ in the later sixteenth century to a wider audience. A number of scholars have taken Wrightson’s original idea, that village society split in the later sixteenth century as the ‘yeomen’ were incorporated into the state as officeholders, and elaborated upon it, particularly using it to explain why a late medieval tradition of rebellion should have ended in 1549. A number of reasons are offered as to why we should not readily accept the idea, but it is then shown how the public rhetoric of the period was deeply hostile to all forms of collective action, which it defined as rebellion. It is suggested that this context was as important as ‘incorporation’ in the sense that Wrightson and others have used it in changing the attitudes of the yeomen in the village by closing off options for political expression and activity.

‘Peter Walkden and the world of goods’, in C. Dyer and R. Jones (eds), Farmers, consumers, innovators. The world of Joan Thirsk (2016), pp. 139-56.

Peter Walkden (d. 1769) was a nonconformist cleric and, for a period of his life, a small farmer near Chipping in Lancashire. He was also a compulsive diarist. The surviving volume of his diary gives us one of the fullest accounts of rural society in northern England in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In this paper we consider how far the Walkden family entered the ‘world of goods’, either as consumers of butcher’s meat or clothing. (There is no evidence of them having taken up the new beverages of the eighteenth century.) The contribution of the household to the market is as considered, including Catherine Walkden’s establishment of a small enterprise spinning jersey.

‘An essay on Border service’, in C. Maginn and V. Power (eds), Frontiers, states and identity in early modern Ireland and beyond: Essays in honour of Steven G. Ellis (2016), pp. 109-129.

Border service was the obligation placed on adult makes in northern England to serve against Scotland when called on to do so by the wardens of the Marches, providing their own horse and harness and without wages. It was a source of confusion to contemporaries and no less so to modern historians. The paper draws together the evidence for Border Service, mainly from the late sixteenth century but including recollections of its workings from after the Unification of the Crowns. Border service is perhaps best understood as a part of the custom of individual manors. It was a far from static institution. It was also very much alive and being actively managed on the eve of the Unification in 1603.

‘Before the village’, in Spencers Wood Local History Group, More from our village of Spencers Wood (2016), pp. 3-20.

A piece of local history writing, working out the tangled manorial history of the area around Spencers Wood (in Shinfield parish, to the south of Reading) and explaining the enclosure history of the Spencers Wood common.

‘Daniel Defoe, the Palatine refugees and a projected new town in the New Forest, 1709’, Southern Hist. 38 (2016), pp. 130-49.

In 1709 an influx of Protestant refugees from the Rhineland posed a major social problem for the English state. Daniel Defoe was one of the few who saw advantages in this migration. He advocated that the Palatines should be used to establish new towns on the Crown’s unimproved commons, including the New Forest. This was the subject of some debate in government before the sheer impracticality of the idea was realised and so nothing came of the idea at the time. Defoe regretted the failure of the scheme and included details of it in his Tour over a decade later. Despite the project never taking wing, the episode is revealing of ideas of improvement and the ‘improving mind’.

‘Britain’, in G. Alfani and C. Ó Gráda (eds.), Famine in European History (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 141-65.

The first attempt to draw together the literature on famine in Britain from the middle ages through to the end of the eighteenth century, to establish its incidence and disappearance

‘A new reading of the Gest of Robyn Hode’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 60 (2017), pp. 67-113.

This paper re-examines the Gest of Robyn Hode. It is argued here that this is the oldest and most coherent of the Robin Hood ballads, composed about the second quarter or middle of the fourteenth century but first printed in the early sixteenth. It is a single composition turning on four visits to Robin Hood in his forest. Robin, it suggests, inhabits an alternative world with its own morality but which has elements of parody of an aristocratic household. He and his friends can enter this world: but his enemies cannot find it. It is argued that Robin and his men are not yeomen in the fifteenth-century sense of the word, but merely ‘good men’. Nor are they outlaws in a legal sense: they are out of society. The paper suggests that there is nothing in the Gest that a knightly audience would have found attractive — indeed, it represents a gentleman’s nightmare of falling — but attention is drawn to the merry men’s cult of physical strength and it is suggested that the Gest has elements of a soldier’s tale. The Gest is read here as a work of imagination if not actually an elaborate joke; some elements of the Gest were plainly impossible and were meant to amuse. Finally, a tentative suggestion is made as to when and why it was written.

‘“Fountains of Justice”: James I, Charles I and equity’ in Joanne Begiato, Adrian Green and Michael Lobban, (eds), Law and Litigants in Early Modern English Society[essays in memory of C. W. Brooks]  (2019), pp. 79-112.

Could an English monarch sit in his own courts? The usual answer would be no, but the paper draws together claims that he could, and instances of the king acting quasi-judicially. This leads into a role of the chancellor. Successive chancellors felt that they were bound to implement the king’s direct decisions. Hence the king’s adjudication in the disputes over the inheritance of the estates of the Irish earl of Ormond were registered as a decree in the Irish Chancery. The crown appears to have been creeping towards something similar in England in the late 1630s where Chancery appeared to be coming close to enforcing a royal order for the establishment of rates to support the clergy of Norwich. Chancery therefore offered a route towards royal absolutism where the Chancellor might register as a decree and then enforce royal orders. Of course, this did not happen, but it is shown that some contemporaries were aware of the dangers.

‘Prices and seasons in late seventeenth-century England’, in Wouter Ronsijn, Niccolò Mignemi (eds), Stocks, seasons and sales: Food supply, storage and markets in Europe and the New World, c. 1600-2000 (2019), pp. 31-60.

Previous studies of English prices have largely concentrated on compiling annual price data from which deductions about the quality of the preceding harvest could be drawn and real prices calculated. In this study we look at the movements of the prices of the chief grains over the year drawing on the familiar but largely unexploited price data in John Houghton’s Collections for the improvement of husbandry and trade (1692-1702) and a new data set of prices from sales made by the clerical farmer and tithe proprietor, John Crakenthorp of Fowlmere in Cambridgeshire. The seasonal pattern of prices from Houghton differs from that that suggested for medieval sales by McCloskey and Nash: there was no marked tendency for them to rise over the year. Instead, we find that prices were normally fixed in the weeks following the harvest and maintained over the year. They might rise or fall around this base level according to an assessment of prospects for the following harvest. An examination of Crakanthorp’s sales suggests that he did not withhold grain from the market in order to take advantage of rising prices: his pattern of sales is consistent from year to year. Nor did he carry grain over into the following harvest year but had invariably sold out in advance of the new harvest.

‘The Listers of Gisburn: the rise and fashioning of a gentry family’, in Northern Hist. 56 (2019), pp. 46-77.

The Lister family of Gisburn, created Lords Ribblesdale in 1797 are an example of a family with yeoman or minor gentry status in the sixteenth century who, by the persistent purchase of land in and around Gisburn and a number of fortunate marriages, established themselves amongst the county gentry in the eighteenth century. They also acquired a share in the pocket borough of Clitheroe and served in the House of Commons continuously from 1718 to 1780. The paper describes the ways in which successive Listers fashioned the image of the family through their education, engagement in politics (where they were at the least Tories and possibly Jacobites), by their erection of a new house (Gisburne Park) in the decade after 1727 and the creation of a parkland landscape to surround it. This is explored through the surviving documentary materials (which are not exhaustive but include reflections by Thomas Lister (d. 1745) on his political creed), by the house and landscape of the park and an abortive scheme for the park, but above all through the art they commissioned and the representations of landscape that it contains. Pictures attributed to Robert Griffier, Peter Tillemans and Arthur Devis, all formerly at Gisburne Park, and an engraving by François Vivares of Malham Cove, are discussed.

‘Beck House in Giggleswick: the house and its builder’, in Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 91 (2019), pp. 131-43.

Beck House in Giggleswick has been largely overlooked by local and architectural historians. Its architectural quality raises the question of when it was built and by whom. Whilst offering a description of the house, this paper draws on the title deeds and other materials to show that the builder was almost certainly one Charles Nowell (d. 1749), a gentleman with connections to the legal and gentry circles of north Craven and who may have been a lawyer himself. The house was probably erected soon after Nowell’s acquisition of the site in 1720. Parallels are explored.

‘Opposition to the creation of national parks: the case of the Yorkshire Dales’, in Agricultural History Rev. 67 (2019), pp. 284-314.

The ten first-generation national parks created under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949 generally disappointed those who had advocated national parks in the 1930s and 1940s. Their governance was much less strong than had been envisaged, their administration generally being no more than the planning committees of the county councils within whose boundaries they lay. Here we explore the establishment of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, designated in 1952 and confirmed in 1954. The idea of a Dales National Park had been canvassed since the early 1930s. We find little public opposition to the designation of the park but little public support for it either. Farmers expressed fears of the damage which an influx of walkers would cause, but it is hard to ascertain whether their fears were well grounded. Opposition came mainly from the North Riding County Council. The West Riding County Council seems to have been more accepting of the park, but was reluctant to be yoked to the North Riding in a Joint Board as the act envisaged, so both councils could readily agree that they wanted a weaker Joint Advisory Committee. It was this unsatisfactory arrangement that was finally implemented in 1956.

‘Shrewsbury, dearth and extreme weather at the end of the sixteenth century’, Agricultural History Rev. 68 (pt 1), (2020), pp. 23-37.

This paper contributes to our understanding of dearth in early modern England and adds new weight to the developing recognition that famine is first and foremost the consequence of adverse climatic conditions and only secondly the outcome of market failures or unemployment. Drawing on a chronicle source from Shrewsbury which has remained unexploited to this end, it provides our first evidence of weather in western England in the dearth years of the 1580s and 1590s. These are shown to have been years of unusual rain. The Chronicle also sheds light on the response of farmers to poor conditions. It outlines the relief effort mounted by the borough authorities in Shrewsbury in these years: its account is supplemented by material from the borough archive. It shows that the town attempted to manage conditions in the difficult circumstances produced by extreme weather. Finally evidence is provided of the use of vegetables as a famine food in Shrewsbury.

Forthcoming in 2021

‘The Sheffield Cutlers and the earls of Shrewsbury’ forthcoming in Hoyle (ed.), People, Place names and Pennines: Essays in history and landscape in memory of David Hey (2021).

The traditional account of the relations of the earls of Shrewsbury at the Sheffield cutlers is quite simple. The earls nurtured the cutlers and provided regulations for their conduct in 1565, 1590 and 1614. But the last was also the moment at which the seventh earl cut the cutlers free in recognition that on his death, none of his co-heirs would offer the same benign management that he and his father had done. The cutlers were then incorporated by statute in 1624. This paper suggests a different interpretation. The management of the cutlers through the manorial court was no longer a practical proposition in the early seventeenth century, not least because there were now cutlers who lived outside the court’s jurisdiction. The orders of 1614 may have been introduced after the failure to secure an act for incorporation in the parliament of that year (the ‘addled parliament’) but the signs are that they quickly went into abeyance. These orders failed because there was no means of compelling subscription to them. An attempt to secure an act for incorporation failed in 1621 (that parliament producing no legislation). In 1624 a statute incorporating the cutlers was enacted and discipline restored. A comparison with Leeds is employed to show how similar problems there at much the same time were approached in a different manner.

‘The Agricultural Revolution’, in J. Whayne (ed.), The Oxford handbook to agricultural history.

This paper offers a new interpretation of the agricultural revolution. It begins by reviewing the historiography of the late eighteenth-century agricultural revolution, showing how the idea had been largely abandoned by writers in the 1980s but has since been revived. The paper sees room for several agricultural revolutions. The one normally considered is the introduction of rotations including turnips on light soils. Increasing productivity on these soils encouraged the enclosure and conversion of open fields on clay and heavy soils. It is explained how contemporaries saw agrarian change in the late eighteenth century as evidence of failure given that England moved to being an exporter to an importer of grain. War after 1793 encouraged a revival of arable agriculture and massive investment in agriculture including the enclosure of wastes; after 1815 there was perception that a bubble had burst. The argument that an agricultural revolution took place in the depressed years after 1815 is quickly reviewed.