The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2021

Abstract Neither the idea that Britain ‘stood alone’ in 1940, nor that the British war was a ‘people’s war’, were at all common during the Second World War. If anything was thought to be ‘alone’, it was the empire, though the more common view was that the empire always had allies. ‘People’s war’ was a rare synonym for ‘total war’ and was sometimes used in an internationalist sense of a war of many peoples, and as the sort of war Britain should be, but was not, fighting. However, from 1945 a national ‘alone’ came into usage, for example by Churchill; but only from the 1960s was it a commonplace in history books. ‘People’s war’ became more widely used in histories written in the 1960s, which defined it in a national progressive sense, although the term did not become common until the 1990s. Both ideas were essentially the creations of historians, who nationalised the history of what was an imperial and internationalist war, often turning it into a radically different domestic story focused on a national Home Front (ignoring the many imperial home fronts), a story which marginalised…

Abstract This article uses the evidence of vocabulary to explore the connections between the two most substantial bodies of Latin literature to survive from late ninth-century and early tenth-century Britain, namely Asser’s famed Life of King Alfred and the corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters. By doing so, several hitherto unidentified connections are made that offer important new evidence in two regards. First, they add significant weight to the view that Asser’s Life is an authentic text of the late ninth century. Secondly, they provide rare insights into the reception of Asser’s Latinity in early medieval England. Throughout, particular attention is given to a single royal diploma of Edward the Elder that purports to have been issued at a meeting at Bicanleag in 904. External evidence tells us that Asser was present at this meeting, and, given the concentration of phrasal echoes of the Life within this document, it is suggested that it was composed by Asser himself. If this suggestion is correct, this charter therefore not only extends and expands Asser’s activity as a Latin author…

Abstract This article examines the work of the jurist and political and social theorist, Joseph Rey. It explores Rey’s role within a French and international network of intellectuals and conspirators who sought to overthrow established monarchies and replace them with popularly elected democratic republics. The article shows how Rey’s extensive writings on legal, political, social and educational questions give a unique insight into France’s political, intellectual, social and ideological life in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We argue that Rey’s contribution to the debates that defined the modern ideological categories of liberalism, republicanism and socialism was significant in its endeavour to reconcile all three. This attempt at reconciliation was motivated by a powerful desire to end the internecine struggles that marked France in the aftermath of the Revolution and Empire. This led Rey to draw on the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals in order to nourish a French republican liberalism rooted in the work of the Idéologues and combine…

Abstract This article argues that the historical writings of the Venerable Bede (d. 735) can also be used by scholars examining the political history of the Eastern Roman Empire in the seventh and eighth centuries. Although Byzantinists have increasingly drawn upon texts written in Syriac, Arabic, and other eastern languages in their scholarship, sources composed in the post-Roman West have yet to be utilised to the same extent. Bede is particularly informative for the reigns of Phocas (602–10), Constans II (641–68), and Justinian II (685–95, 705–11), three emperors who were vilified in later Greek sources. By considering the near-contemporary perspectives preserved in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Chronicle alongside the eastern evidence, a more nuanced understanding can be reached for these emperors’ final years. Moreover, Bede’s unique reports strengthen the view that papal history should be integrated into studies of imperial politics. The papacy emerges as a loyal partisan of Phocas in 610 and an institution linked to the growing unrest against Constans in the 660s, while…

Abstract The budding scholarship on the Congress of Vienna has devoted limited attention to the ‘Eastern Question’ in the 1810s. Even though the issue of the (non-) involvement of the Ottoman Empire in the new European state system has previously received mention, the rational and emotional factors that informed decisions taken by the Ottoman cabinet at the time have never been analysed in detail. Using previously unexplored Ottoman, Russian, British and French archival sources, this article historicises the ‘Eastern Question’ of the 1810s, when a new transimperial order was formed. It documents the attempts to ensure the security of Ottoman territories by European public law, and demonstrates that, although involving the Russo-Ottoman disputes in the Vienna negotiations was initially an Ottoman proposal, it was again the Sublime Porte that ultimately rejected it. The article discusses why this became the case, tracing the answer to diverse relational dynamics such as the conflicts in the Ottoman cabinet, the rivalries among the Great Powers, and the European endeavours to secure…

Abstract At the turn of the millennium, Germany and the United Kingdom experienced the most severe crises of their pension systems since the Second World War. In both cases, politicians reacted with extensive reforms. The political debates in each country revolved around the notion that demographic ageing was at the root of the crises. Hence, the call for greater intergenerational equity became the key justification of fundamental pension-system reform. But a comparative historical analysis reveals that it is a vast oversimplification to blame the pension crises entirely on demographic ageing. In fact, a combination of other factors—which varied widely between the UK and Germany—far overshadowed the ‘demographic time-bomb’ as the driving force behind the crises. A prime factor in the UK was the declining value of the Basic State Pension and the growing importance of means-tested benefits, along with the decline of company pension schemes. By contrast, the problems facing the pension system in Germany primarily arose from rising unemployment, the systematic early retirement of…

Abstract This article examines the formation of a commune at Benevento in the twelfth century. In this south Italian city, which was under papal overlordship, a commune emerged, briefly but spectacularly, in the years 1128–31. Its existence has been almost completely overlooked in the wider narrative of the rise of medieval urban communes and in Beneventan scholarship itself. The particular value of an understanding of the Beneventan Commune is threefold. Firstly, the timing of its creation situates it firmly within an important formative and contested stage in the wider communal movement. Secondly, the Commune’s emergence was recorded in a contemporary chronicle by Falco of Benevento. Thirdly, Falco, a layman, was a highly acute observer of and participant in urban affairs, and was arguably the ‘first notary-chronicler of Christian Europe’. His chronicle precedes the more recognised body of works by notary-chroniclers produced from around the mid-twelfth century onwards in northern and central Italy, the hotbed of the communal movement. As a city notary (and judge) Falco was a…

Abstract This article revisits the relationship between women and Chartism, the British mass movement for democratic rights that dominated popular politics from the late 1830s to the 1850s. It argues that the opportunities for women to participate in the movement were more varied, extensive and enduring than has often been appreciated. Particular attention is paid to late Chartism (1843–52) by documenting in full, for the first time, the number of female Chartist bodies in existence. By presenting new material, based on a combing of the press and the Home Office files, the article moves on to consider the role played by Chartist women in 1848, the year of European revolution when the movement revived. It then builds on the theme of late Chartism by offering a case-study of the Women’s Rights Association (WRA). This body was established in 1851 by a group of Sheffield Chartist women to campaign for votes for women, which, it is argued here, represented the culmination of a women’s rights discourse within early Chartism. The article concludes by comparing the women’s rights discourse…

Abstract To become a Chartist was to enter the world that print had made; to do so, most working men and women relied on a national network of sympathetic publishers, printers and booksellers. At the centre of this Chartist print culture was the bookshop. For some time now, historians have recognised the important contributions of booksellers as Chartist leaders and organisers; however, the role of bookshops in shaping Chartist reading practices and experiences has not really been explored. There has also been a tendency in studies of Chartism and print to focus primarily on the selling and reading of the Northern Star and to underestimate the importance of almanacs, pamphlets and ephemera (such as posters and advertisements). In this article I take as my subject Chartist print in its multiplicity of forms and argue that Chartist bookshops affected the production, circulation and the reading of texts in several different ways. As retailers and publishers, Chartist booksellers provided the working classes with a diverse mix of cheap publications, Chartist and non-Chartist alike, in…

Abstract This article transports the reader imaginatively into the early modern sickchamber, a space that has rarely attracted much historiographical attention. Focusing on England c.1600–1720, it reconstructs the patient’s sensory and emotional experiences of this environment. To do so, a material culture approach is adopted, which involves the analysis of six objects from the sickroom: a physic vessel, bedcurtains, clock, mattress, sheets, and blankets. The central argument is that sickness radically altered the way people related to the things around them. When seriously unwell, the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations of the items which, during health, gave rise to feelings of comfort, became sources of distress. Through this research, the article showcases the mutual benefits that an object-driven approach can bring to the twin fields of medical and material history. For the former, it sheds fresh light on the very meaning of disease in this period, showing that it was conceived as a form of dis-possession. A focus on objects also reveals a number of hitherto…