The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2022

Abstract Historians of both the medieval and early modern eras have characterised the governing structures of rural communities as being dominated by local elites. However, interpretations are hampered by a lack of clear criteria against which to evaluate whether a village-governance regime was ‘open,’ and characterised by wide participation, or ‘closed’, and characterised by the narrow restriction of office to an elite group, making it difficult to draw comparisons across time and space. This article uses a set of quantitative methodologies to solve this problem. It examines presentment juries in the manorial court, a governing institution which straddles the late medieval and early modern period, in three case-study communities for the period from 1310 to 1600. By applying four measures of participation, the article reveals that post-Black Death juries were characterised by a nuanced system of restriction. They were open in the sense that a large proportion of the male population, drawn from a wide range of families, acted as jurors and there was a continuous turnover in jury…

Abstract The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 was the most important piece of environmental legislation passed by a British government since the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. It sought to enhance the protection of listed flora and fauna, prevent further damage to existing habitat and resolve issues that had arisen with respect to rights of public access to the countryside. Although the bill was long and complex, many of its provisions sought to rationalise existing statutes or extend existing provision rather than create new powers. Provisions seeking to protect habitat proved highly contentious. The proprietary interest resented what it saw as an unjustified interference in private property rights; statutory bodies were alarmed that the centralising aspects of the Act would empower ministers at the expense of their ‘scientific’ independence; and the emergent environmental lobby, increasingly frustrated by the cautious approach of the statutory bodies, was determined that the bill’s habitat protection provisions be strengthened. This article examines the…

Abstract This article refutes a fundamental assumption behind the Western powers’ ‘long-war strategy’ in 1939, and casts doubt on the conventional wisdom regarding the alleged unpreparedness of Nazi Germany for a longer war. It does so by re-examining Germany’s war-preparedness through the lens of those raw materials that were of vital importance for the production of all armaments: non-ferrous metals. Contemporaries believed that these metals were the Achilles heel of the Nazi war economy because Germany had to cover its consumption predominantly with imports from overseas, which meant that it was extremely vulnerable to a sea blockade. But this article challenges these assumptions and shows that the Nazi war-planners were prepared for a longer war because of the lessons learned from the Great War, which they had carefully and covertly studied. The statistics compiled in this article demonstrate that it was the preparations based on these lessons rather than contingencies and non-predictable events, such as the access to occupied Europe due to unexpected victories, that were…

Abstract It is commonly supposed that all Anglo-Saxon laws were composed in Old English. This article argues that the law-code in the name of King Ine of Wessex (r. 688–726) was written in Latin in his reign and only assumed its surviving Old English form in the ninth century when it was translated from Latin and appended to King Alfred’s law-code. Linguistic evidence indicates that Ine’s language is that of a ninth-century translator, possibly working with Alfred’s law-code, while its legal content is that of seventh-century Wessex. There are also several close parallels to continental legislation in Ine’s laws, both in language and in content. This article suggests that these may be the result of Frankish legislation serving as a model for or inspiration to the makers of Ine’s laws. The translation theory presented here explains many of the notorious linguistic peculiarities and problems of this text and its role within Alfred’s code.

Abstract This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples.…

Abstract William Tennent (1759–1832) was a successful businessman and banker, who made his mark in Belfast as one of the city’s richest men. He was also a father and, later, a husband. By the time of his marriage in March 1805, Tennent had fathered at least thirteen illegitimate children, with at least four women. The child he would have with his wife, a daughter named Letitia, would be his only legitimate heir. Through this series of illicit sexual relationships, William Tennent created a complex family unit that consisted of legitimate and illegitimate children, half-siblings, step-siblings and step-parents, all of whom were united through a network of unmarried mothers. The example of the Tennent family therefore offers historians the unique opportunity not only to extend knowledge about the making of the family in Ireland, but also to refine ideas about contemporary attitudes to illegitimacy. Using the Tennents as a case-study, this article furthers understanding of the family in Ireland by considering the horizontal relationships which characterised family life, drawing…

Abstract It is common knowledge that, under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher, economic inequality and poverty in the United Kingdom rose dramatically, but it is often overlooked that during the 1980s knowledge about movements in poverty and inequality was much less certain and was subject to political battles over statistical policies, measurements and figures. This article connects the historiography on Thatcherism to the growing scholarship on the politics of statistics. Based on recently declassified government records and other archival and published sources, it explores government interventions in official statistics and their impact on public discourse on issues of economic inequality. The Thatcher government endeavoured to transform the social-democratic knowledge regime inherited from the 1970s by cutting back existing statistical series on income and wealth distribution and by gearing the low income statistics towards the concept of absolute poverty, as favoured by the New Right. Moreover, the government made extensive use of statistical artefacts for government public…

Abstract This article examines Ulster Unionist political thought, in its widest sense, against the backdrop of the Northern Ireland Troubles. During this period, Ulster Unionists sought to resist nationalist and republican arguments for the unification of Ireland and to articulate their position to supporters and wider audiences. As Direct Rule from London followed the suspension of the unionist-dominated Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont in 1972 and its abolition the following year, internal unionist debate intensified over the constitutional future of Northern Ireland. Defining Ulster Unionism broadly, at a time when its organisational forms were proliferating, the article considers the Ulster Unionist Party and its offshoot Vanguard, as well as the Democratic Unionist Party and the paramilitary organisations, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association, and their affiliated political bodies. The article analyses, in turn, the four competing unionist visions of the future: a return to majority-rule devolution; independence; closer integration with Great…

Abstract Although there was no complete census in England until 1801, there had been counts of people for various purposes in towns and villages since the sixteenth century, and by the end of the seventeenth century political arithmeticians were trying to calculate the total population and its demographic characteristics from a range of documents, old and new. There had even been projects to collect new data from parish registers which in some respects anticipated the civil registers of vital events finally established in 1837. The aim of this paper is to look again at the invention in the sixteenth century of the sources later used for demographic investigation, especially parish registers and bills of mortality; to demonstrate that their value for such purposes was appreciated by contemporaries earlier than has often been assumed; and to show why, when their utility declined in the eighteenth century, it proved impossible to reform them. Pressure from political arithmeticians and a growing sector of the medical profession to redesign the established machinery of registration had…

Their slaves are apprentices. Their purchases redemptions. Surely this contemptible system needs only to be exposed to cease to exist. Thomas P. Thompson (1809)1 With regard to many of the apprenticed children, there is very great reason for anxious fear as to what becomes of them; little or no notice being taken of them officially after they have been put out. It is well known, that many of the poor natives who take them as apprentices, imagine that the money which they pay for the indenture, constitutes a kind of purchase of the child, and that they are then at liberty to do with him or her whatever they please. There is ground to fear that not a few are by some means taken away from the colony, and again made victims of the horrid trade in human beings. Hannah Kilham (1830)2 Unbeknown to British abolitionists, the passage of the 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade instigated the forced migration and colonisation of tens of thousands of African children. Following the passage of the Act, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron diverted more than 500 intercepted slave…