The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2020

Abstract The decision of Gladstone’s government to invade and occupy Egypt in 1882 remains one of the most contentious in late nineteenth-century British political and imperial history. This article examines the decision-making process in June and July 1882, revisiting Robinson and Gallagher’s influential study in the light of more recent historiographical research and previously unused sources. It looks at who made the critical decisions, what their preoccupations were, and how they were able to get Cabinet approval. Hartington and Northbrook were the two key figures, who co-operated to overturn Gladstone’s and Granville’s policy in June 1882. Yet their co-operation was momentary and they found themselves on different sides of the argument over the participation of Indian forces and international support. Although they shared a sense of Egypt’s importance to British imperial security, they each had a distinctive approach, so that the decision to occupy cannot be reduced to a conflict between Whig pragmatists and Radical idealists. The article also shows how the Alexandria riot on…

Abstract In a recent article, Christopher MacEvitt posited that historians should eschew the term ‘crusader states’ to describe the four polities formed in the Levant and Syria as a result of the First Crusade (the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, and the counties of Edessa and Tripoli), arguing that crusading and its remembrance had little influence in the east, and so these states should not be viewed as extensions of the west. This paper seeks to offer a critical response to this by making use of the methodological approaches which have recently traced the emergence, influence and definitions of crusading in the Latin West and have re-situated the movement within broader patterns of elite behaviours and cultural identities. The aim, therefore, is to examine the processes of identity formation among Latin settlers in the east, the active remembrance and memorialisation of the First Crusade, and, most especially, what influence the latter had over the nature of inter-cultural contact. It does so by adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which incorporates…

Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of the Domesday survey, drawing upon a collaborative study of its earliest surviving manuscript, Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3500 (Exon). It identifies five principal stages: first, the survey was launched at Gloucester in midwinter 1085; secondly, fiscal information extracted from geld assessment lists was integrated with manorial detail supplied by landholders to create a survey organised on a geographical plan by hundred; thirdly, this hundredal recension was checked by a second group of commissioners at meetings of shire courts, generating a substantial corpus of contested matter; fourthly, the hundredal recension was restructured into circuit returns which grouped together and summarised the holdings of barons who held directly from the king; fifthly, Domesday Book itself was written directly from these circuit returns. Royal assemblies held at Easter, Whitsun and Lammas functioned as deadlines for the second, third and fourth stages respectively; and a major geld levied at the rate of six shillings to the hide was collected and…

Abstract While the problem of political corruption in mid-nineteenth century Britain has been much studied, the experience of corrupt behaviour in public bodies, both new and long established, is comparatively neglected. This article takes the example of one of the first inspectorates set up after the Great Reform Act, the Factory Office, to examine the extent of corrupt practices in the British civic state and the means whereby it was addressed. It examines the changing processes of appointment, discipline and promotion, the issues of remuneration and venality, and the relationships between inspectors, workers, factory owners, the government and the wider civil service, and the press and public opinion. The article argues that the changing attitudes of the inspectors, especially those of Leonard Horner, were indicative of a developing ‘public service ethos’ in both bureaucratic and cultural settings and that the work of such unsung administrators was one of the agencies through which corrupt behaviour in the civic structures of Victorian Britain was, with public support,…

Abstract This article offers a comprehensive account of the drafting of ‘the Heads of the Proposals’, the peace plan framed by the New Model Army in July 1647. Using overlooked manuscript sources, including newly uncovered papers of Commissary General Henry Ireton, the article reconstructs the complex process of negotiation, revision, and bargaining through which the Heads of the Proposals emerged. It charts the influence of King Charles I on the peace programme, and offers new insight into the monarch’s response to the Proposals. However, the article also demonstrates that army leaders invited radical London activists to Reading to participate in framing the Proposals. These activists sought, with limited success, to bring the Heads into conformity with their own vision for the polity, but quickly revolted when they recognised the degree to which the king’s input and interests were reflected in the developing programme. The resulting tensions ensured that even before the Heads of the Proposals were completed and published in August 1647, the plan provoked serious controversy among…

Abstract The experience of the Protestant minority in Ireland during the years of the Irish revolution has been the subject of much academic and popular debate in recent years. At issue is the extent to which the decline by one-third of the Protestant population of the Irish Free State between 1911 and 1926 was a result either of intimidation, sectarianism or ethnic cleansing during the revolution itself, or of more mundane factors such as long-term patterns of migration and low marriage and birth rates. Drawing upon digitised census returns and the rich detail contained in the records of the Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches in County Longford, this article will show that the causes of depopulation are better understood when precise chronological, local, denominational and gender perspectives are brought to bear. It will argue for greater engagement with sociological literature to define more effectively the meaning of sectarianism in revolutionary Ireland. It will also invert the principal question of why the Protestants left and seek to explain why those who…

Abstract Historians have often debated why so much energy was poured into efforts to reform working-class leisure and cultural pursuits in nineteenth-century Britain. This article uses a case-study of singing classes established in the early 1840s for industrial workers by local employers in the Manchester region to provide fresh answers to this question. It criticises a tendency to cast middle-class reformers as the primary agents of change in working-class leisure activities, arguing instead that many supposed innovations had been developed already by the Chartists, whose extensive transformation of working-class culture is increasingly recognised by scholars. The strike wave of 1842 permitted a dramatic manifestation of these cultural achievements, as the sounds of factory machinery were replaced by highly organised Chartist bands and choirs broadcasting radical messages. The establishment of a network of singing classes in the aftermath of the strikes was thus a belated attempt by the region’s middle classes to counter the dangerous eloquence of Chartist sonic culture. However,…

Abstract This article offers the first analytical overview of the political thinking and organisational history of the Tory Reform Committee (TRC). It is also a contribution to wider scholarly debates about the making of a ‘New Conservatism’ in the 1940s and the development of Conservative thought in the twentieth century. The TRC’s leading members drew on the party’s Disraelian one-nation tradition to free them from adopting doctrinaire positions. They wanted to emphasise the merits of either state intervention, planning and social reform, or private enterprise, individualism and freedom, depending on the country’s economic and social position—and the party’s electoral position. Most Tory Reformers imposed limits on the malleability of their Conservatism by rejecting laissez-faire individualism, socialism, and the earliest signs of neoliberalism. Although the group was replaced by the Design for Freedom Movement, which adopted a similar political outlook on a non-party basis between 1947 and 1949, its broader significance relates to how its support for the principles of ‘design’…

Abstract Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Irish Catholic middle class became more powerful in both political and economic terms. It was this group that became the backbone of Irish nationalism as it emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. But how did the Catholic middle classes respond to what was the greatest disaster in Irish history, Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s? This article offers an account, based on a wide range of evidence, of the responses to the events of the Famine years, focusing especially on the role of the rural middle classes and the Catholic clergy, two of the most powerful elements within Irish political and social life. The overall argument is that, while it suited later nationalists to underline the universal nature of the catastrophe, suffering during the Great Irish Famine was concentrated in the ranks of the Catholic rural underclass, which was decimated by death and emigration.

The introduction to this collection of essays edited by Lisa Hopkins and Aidan Norrie provides a clear conceptual grounding for a discussion of women who lived ‘on the edge’ or on multiple edges or margins in the early modern period. The book focuses on the construction and use of identity, or in some cases multiple identities, which allowed women to navigate and explore their vulnerable and ambiguous lives. Lara Thorpe uses parish accounts, sessions rolls, hearth tax and other archival sources to counter the popular press depiction of the plague nurse as a murderous hag. She provides a more nuanced picture of these women, who competently served their communities during the Great Plague of 1665. The essay provides an example of the efficient functioning of a public healthcare system at the parish level at a time of extreme social crisis. Sarah Gordon’s chapter on the French chemist Marie Meurdrac places...