Illustrations of Domestic Manners During the Reign of Edward I

Abstract

A small ivory head of a tonsured man, expertly carved in relief, was found in 1991 during excavations at the great eighth-eleventh century Lombard monastery at San Vincenzo al Volturno. The head was excavated with other fragments of carved ivory, antler and bone, in the vicinity of the collective workshop of the monastery, and was doubtless carved in this workshop. The head-type is a variant on an early Byzantine formula which was employed in Rome by the sixth century and subsequently, in the eighth century, was adopted by artists working for noble Lombard patrons in northern Italy. The painters responsible for decorating the churches and claustral buildings of San Vincenzo in the first half of the ninth century also used this type, and in details of its carving the new ivory head seems to show the direct influence of painted heads of early ninth-century date from the walls of the monastery. The relief was probably intended for the embellishment of a small casket or the cover of a book. The new head, besides being a significant addition to the tiny corpus of surviving carvings in ivory from early medieval Italy, shows the craftsmen in the monastery's workshop had at their disposal a material which was both rare and prestigious in the period.     

The Extra‐Parliamentary Organisation of the Whig Junto in the Reign of William III

There is much evidence for the parliamentary organisation of the whig junto in Queen Anne's reign, but little for its extra‐parliamentary organisation. This note gives evidence for such extra‐parliamentary organisation late in the reign of William III from letters by both James Vernon and Robert Harley, which describe meetings of the junto and some of its supporters in the country houses of followers in the summers of 1698, 1699 and 1700.     

The Parliamentary Organisation of the Whig Junto in the Reign of Queen Anne: A Further Note

The parliamentary organisation of the whig Junto in the reign of Queen Anne was far superior to that of the tory party. At the centre were the meetings in which three or four of the five members of the Junto were present together with some of their followers. Evidence of such meetings is rare but here is presented a letter giving the details of a meeting of all five in April 1713 at the home of Lord Somers, together with their ally, the tory earl of Nottingham, probably to discuss the forthcoming peace proposals, to end the war of the Spanish Succession, and the protestant succession to the British throne.     

‘But Private Notes for My Own Memory’? Parliamentary Diaries,Parliamentary History and the Politics of Information in Early Stuart England*

Early modern parliamentary diaries are a standard source for historians, and have long been used as a supplement to the official journals in reconstructions of debates and business at Westminster. This article adopts a contrasting approach and examines what diaries – viewed as sources in their own right – reveal about parliament and its members, methods of contemporary note-taking, and the circulation and readership of political information. It begins with a review of the evidence for why, how, and to what ends members kept parliamentary diaries, before exploring the extent of their dissemination in early Stuart England. While recent literature has emphasized the circulation of materials relating to Jacobean and especially Caroline parliaments during the early 17th century, the article recovers the existence of a simultaneous interest in the parliamentary proceedings of the Elizabethan era. At a time when the future of parliament seemed uncertain, it argues that the evident market for, and readership of, Elizabethan material reflects contemporaries’ increasing recognition of parliament's significance within the English state and their changing attitudes towards parliamentary history. Moreover, while Elizabethan parliamentary diaries and journals seemingly reinforced memories of a past ‘golden age’ of parliamentary rule, the article contends that contemporaries’ production, dissemination, and reading of that material was a conscious form of political action in response to the constitutional crisis of their day.