The King of Asine,Makriyannis, Seferis and ourselves

Abstract

‘The King of Asine', one of George Seferis's best-known poems, is the subject of the present article, which falls into two parts. The first part follows the standard interpretation, but with an emphasis on aspects that have not (at least sufficiently) been commented on hitherto. The second part pursues a new approach and concludes by proposing another, parallel, reading whereby ‘The King of Asine’ is also seen as exploring the poetic experience.     

Apprentices,Goldsmiths, and the North in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

The story of King Edgar being rowed on the River Dee at Chester in 973 by eight subordinate kings was once well known. This article examines how it was used in popular history writing from the eighteenth century onwards, with greatest development in the mid nineteenth century, and subsequent decline into its present obscurity. It served English political and cultural ends, being used to demonstrate the natural superiority of that race over the others in the Union, particularly the Scots. Decline of imperial sentiment and ignorance of pre-Conquest history have relegated it to incidental mention in county histories.     

Sovereignty,mercy, and natural law: King James VI/I and Jean Bodin

ABSTRACT

The affinities between Jean Bodin's and King James VI/I's political theories have been recognized, and the fact that James had owned Bodin's Six livres de la république has been recorded, but Bodin's specific influence on James has remained nebulous. This article examines the evidence for James's direct engagement with Bodin, by studying James's copy of the Six livres alongside James's political treatises. It provides substantial new archival evidence for Bodin's influence on James's political thought and, thereby, on Scottish and English theories of sovereignty.     

‘A STUBBORN,INTRACTABLE BODY’: RESISTANCE TO THE WORKHOUSE IN WALES, 1834–1877

Abstract

Despite a recognition that Welsh poor law authorities were less than welcoming to many of the strictures of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834, historians have tended to downplay the importance of their resistance in the context of the wider anti-poor law ‘movement’ across England and Wales. Instead, a general consensus has arisen that Welsh boards of guardians tended to resist the New Poor Law on the grounds of financial expediency or provincial insularity, rather than because of any ideological or humanitarian hostility towards its provisions. This article presents compelling evidence that this consensus is quite wrong, and demonstrates in turn that, not only were Welsh guardians far more successful in their resistance to the new workhouse regime even the most recalcitrant English unions, but that that resistance was founded upon a long-standing and coherent antipathy to the punitive nature of the workhouse as an institution, rather than simply being founded on short-term financial or practical considerations.     

The Wortley Park Poachers and the Outbreak of the English Civil War

Abstract

On the eve of the Civil War, Sir Francis Wortley's deer park near Sheffield attracted the persistent attention of well armed plebeian poachers. The killing of Wortley's deer was an act of defiance that slighted his honour. His reputation was further undermined by the verbal abuse of several yeoman, prompting him into defending his reputation in the West Riding Quarter Sessions and the High Court of Chivalry. An examination of this litigation leads into a discussion of Sir Francis's concept of honour, distrust of popular politics and identification with the ideology of Charles I's personal rule. A micro-history approach to Sir Francis and his poacher enemies addresses the historiographical debate over whether deference or defiance defined plebeian attitudes to the ruling elite. It also impacts upon the formation of popular allegiance at the outbreak of civil war, and Wortley's brief notoriety as a national figure when he drew his sword for the King at York on 30 April 1642.     

‘Which Way?’ Big Man,Road Man,Chief: Bernard Narokobi's Multifaceted Leadership Career

ABSTRACT

Among the topics that Bernard Narokobi addresses in his numerous writings is the place of traditional Melanesian leadership styles in a modern Papua New Guinea. This article explores Narokobi's leadership status to show how far-reaching and multifaceted his leadership career was: he was at once a traditional Melanesian bigman, a chief, and a modern public figure. The actions he took in these roles were for him a matter of the highest principle, something that at times had severe political consequences. Because in Melanesia the scope of the ritual that takes place upon an individual's death is an index of their status, an analysis of the mortuary rituals undertaken upon Narokobi's death provides insight into the significance of his leadership at every level from his clan up to the national level of Papua New Guinean society.     

EDWIN SANDYS,ARCHBISHOP OF YORK 1577–88, ‘STIFF-NECKED,WILFUL AND OBSTINATE’: CONFLICT IN THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH

Abstract

This article examines the events that, as legend has it, resulted in the foundation of Balliol College (c. 1263) by John (I) Balliol (d. 1268). The Balliol family had long been at odds with successive bishops of Durham over certain lands in Sadberge, the homage of which the bishops believed they were owed. John (I) began his struggle just after his inheritance in 1229 and the dispute reached its height in 1255–60, at which time an intense argument broke out. Other factors, including his actions whilst serving as one of Henry III's English representatives in the Scottish government (1251–55), led to Balliol's ultimate submission to Bishop Kirkham (d. 1260) at Durham Cathedral in 1260 and the foundation of Balliol College at Kirkham's instance. The theory remains, as one historian argues, that Balliol's penance was to give the long delayed homage to the bishop for these lands and not to establish Balliol College. However, there are no surviving records of homage and other possibilities remain, including perhaps that the penance called for Balliol's youngest son, John (II), the future King of Scotland, to be educated at a Durham school.     

‘In gente Britanniarum,sicut quaedam nostratum testatur historia …’: national identity and perceptions of the past in John of Salisbury's Policraticus

This article examines the construction of national identity in John of Salisbury's Policraticus (c.1159). This well-known treatise has not been included in recent discussions of identities in medieval Britain. The focal point of the analysis is the author's contradictory representations of Britones. John of Salisbury emphasised the distinction and hostility between the Britons/Welsh and the English; at the same time, he claimed that the ancient Britons (Brennius and his companions-in-arms from Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum) were ‘compatriots’ and ‘ancestors’ of the ‘contemporary’ inhabitants of the English kingdom. Comparison with other twelfth-century texts reveals specific features of the model of national identity traced in the Policraticus: the appropriation not only of the British past, but also of the British name and identity, and the imagining of a unified people of Britain. This culminated in the invention of the unique term gens Britanniarum, which nevertheless did not exclude the ‘English’ as an alternative or even interchangeable name. The article discusses political agendas behind John of Salisbury's use of the language of ‘Britishness’, most importantly, support for the pan-British ambitions of the archbishops of Canterbury. The example of the Policraticus, with its combination of both conventional and original elements, nuances our understanding of how and for what ideological purposes national identity might have been constructed in twelfth-century England.     

The age of the Cambro-Britons: hyphenated British identities in the seventeenth century

ABSTRACT

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Welsh writers including the antiquary Humphrey Llwyd, the bard Gruffudd Hiraethog, and the epigrammatist John Owen began referring to themselves as Cambro-Britons. The term was quickly adopted and popularised by English writers, often in ways that show an imperfect grasp of the intentions behind the hyphenated phrase. Whereas the Welsh had hoped that the English and Scots would adopt similar hyphenated identities, English writers tended to interpret “Cambro-Briton” as an intensified and potentially comical expression of Welshness. Though Welsh writers largely ceased to employ the term after the 1620s, the use and misuse of “Cambro-Briton” in English texts continued unabated throughout the century.     

New evidence of noble and gentry piety in fifteenth-century England and Wales

There has been much recent examination of late medieval lay piety in order to understand the background to Henry VIII's reformation, notably Colin Richmond's studies of the ‘privatised’ religion of the English gentry. Such work has largely over-looked papal sources and the associated issue of relations between English and Welsh society and the papacy. This article seeks to remedy this neglect by presenting new evidence from the registers of the papal penitentiary. In the late middle ages the papal penitentiary was the highest office in the western Church concerned with matters of conscience and the principal source of papal absolutions, dispensations and licences. Petitions seeking such favours were copied in its registers, and this article especially concerns petitions from English and Welsh gentry seeking licences to have a portable altar or to appoint a personal confessor (littere confessionales). It also examines their requests for various other favours that illustrate their piety, notably regarding fasting, chastity and pilgrimage. The article contests Richmond's notion of ‘privatised’ gentry religion and similar distinctions between elite and popular or personal and collective religion. It appends translations of three significant documents from the penitentiary registers and a statistical table concerning requests for littere confessionales.     

Notes on contributors

Abstract

There are at least two options or approaches available to those who seek to evaluate Garibaldi's life in its entirety. The first option envisages Garibaldi as a revolutionary figure firmly devoted to the cause of the people and the advancement of human rights. The second sees him as putting his popularity in the service of a sovereign monarch, but managing nevertheless to salvage something of the ideals of his youth. There are indeed double aspects to Garibaldi, who was both republican and monarchist, simultaneously a rebel and a man of order. As a rebel he fought against kings, popes and emperors; as a man of order he relied on the effectiveness of temporary dictatorship (his own in Rome in 1849 and the king's dictatorship in 1860). He broke with Mazzini when he chose to pursue national unification in collaboration with the monarchy. That choice limited his freedom of action, and he felt betrayed when he became aware of the consequences in the last years of his life. Paradoxically, it is Mazzini's death in 1872 that released Garibaldi from his subjection to King Victor Emmanuel II, and allowed him to live out the last years of his life more or less at peace with himself as a socialist who put the well being of the people ahead of everything else.     

'They . . . shall no more be called Peaquots but Narragansetts and Mohegans': Refugees,Rivalry, and the Consequences of the Pequot War

Abstract

This paper argues for a series of complex dynamics and relationships between major indigenous groups within seventeenth-century New England and the English colonial authorities in the aftermath of the Pequot War, and argues for greater attention to these developments between the Mystic massacre and the outbreak of King Phillip's War almost forty years later.     

A “Theological Junto”: the 1641 Lords’ subcommittee on religious innovation

Abstract

The 1641 Lords’ sub-committee on religious innovation has never been the focus of a dedicated study, despite its acknowledged significance. This article presents the sub-committee as an attempt to control parliamentary discussion of the Church. Its membership was carefully selected to ensure that it would have an anti-Arminian bias. Its discussions addressed a wide range of doctrinal and liturgical questions. The Conformist members of the sub-committee were attempting to re-assert the Reformed identity of the English Church, and roll back the doctrinal and liturgical developments of the 1630s. However, despite the political crisis, they were not prepared to give much ground to Puritan opinion. The sub-committee therefore illustrates the strength of commitment, even amongst leading Reformed theologians, to the idiosyncratic aspects of the English Church Settlement. It is therefore a significant witness to the development of English Conformist opinion.     

Chivalrous models of Patriot Kingship: Gilbert West,Lord Lyttelton and The Idea of a Patriot King

This article examines two explorations of the theory expounded in Lord Bolingbroke's The Idea of a Patriot King (written 1738, published 1749), Gilbert West's 1742 dramatic poem The Institution of the Order of the Garter and Lord Lyttelton's The History of the Life of Henry the Second (1767–1771). Both were associates of Bolingbroke's in the Patriot movement and were committed to his ideological programme, understanding its potential and appeal. They both recognised the significant potency in Bolingbroke's last and final theorem, that of the Patriot King, whose miraculous function it was to stamp out corruption, reform the state and rule as a father to his people. Yet they both reframe the theory, by providing relatable models of Patriot Kingship. The models West and Lyttelton provide are two historical English kings, Edward III and Henry II. By portraying these monarchs as Patriot Kings, both writers construct a mythopoeic idealisation of the English and British past, in which the manners of chivalry form the basis of Patriot Kingship. Both these works should also be understood within the context of an eighteenth-century tradition of using the English and British past to extol monarchy and reflect of contemporary politics and society.     

The Continuity of Victorian Traces: A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

Both King Solomon's Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887) pursue a quest to regenerate the authority of the English gentleman as ‘the highest rank that a man can reach upon this earth’. The present essay focuses upon Haggard's construction of this ideal of masculinity through the combination of the qualities of the gentleman with those of the barbarian. The discussion follows both Laura Chrisman and Bradley Deane in attending to the relationship between the ideological structures of metropole and colony. This article, however, situates Haggard's masculinist ideology in relation to the wider cultural poetics of late-Victorian material culture, particularly as manifested in the imperial souvenir – a complicated category of thing that comprises artefacts, hunting trophies and human relics. Attention to their thingness entails reflection upon the complexity of textual representations of objects and practical encounters with them as constituent elements of late-Victorian material culture. In addition to examining the significance of hunting and battle trophies in Haggard's fiction, close attention is also paid to the keynote spectacle of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition at the South Kensington Museum in 1886, Rowland Ward's habitat diorama, ‘The Jungle’, and to Ward's subsequent forays into ‘animal furniture’. Through reflection on such formations of objects, the thingness of the imperial souvenir illuminates the ideological formations within which hegemonic masculinity and imperialism were articulated at this key moment in the mid-1880s.     

‘Symbols of Justice’: the Welsh Language Society's campaign for bilingual road signs in Wales, 1967–1980

In this paper we provide a critical evaluation of the campaign for bilingual road traffic signs in late 1960s and 1970s Wales, examining how Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society) came to see English language road signs as mundane, ubiquitous and oppressive symbols of anglicisation and of British/English government authority in Wales. We suggest a rethinking of Michael Billig's concept of ‘banal nationalism’, arguing that while English language road signs may appear as banal symbols and technologies of government authority and control, their banality is only ever experienced from particular perspectives by partial constituencies. For Welsh language campaigners, English language road signs were experienced and criticised as eruptive and disruptive symbols of oppression, rule and colonisation, and in the paper we trace the genesis of the bilingual road signs campaign, British government reactions to proposals for bilingual signs, and the shift in policy which followed the very public support of hundreds of respectable Welsh professionals for the campaign from December 1970. We conclude the paper by examining the work of the Welsh Office's Committee of Inquiry into Bilingual Traffic Signs (the Bowen Committee), and the subsequent disagreements between language campaigners, government scientists and politicians on the issue of language order. Throughout the paper we suggest that it was the ubiquity, functionality and materiality of road signs which made this one of the most effective campaigns carried out by the Welsh Language Society.     

Sir Charles Grandison,Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman

This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novel's fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the state's role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural law's circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorf's model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novel's eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.