‘The Outhwaite controversy’: a micro-history of the Edwardian land campaign

The concept of micro-history has not yet been well explored within historical geography. This paper employs the idea but with a more overtly spatial emphasis, by relating the national discourse surrounding the land question in Edwardian Britain to one of its local manifestations. In particular, we consider the attacks made by the radical ‘single-taxer’ Liberal MP R.L. Outhwaite upon the Duke of Norfolk and his estate at Arundel, Sussex. Outhwaite levelled charges of feudal land monopoly leading to poor housing and rural depopulation on the Duke's Sussex estate, and contrasted this with the wealth being transferred from the Duke's extensive properties in Sheffield to reconstruct the castle at Arundel. The Duke and his agent, Mostyn, responded fiercely to the allegations. This local struggle for political power and capital is set against the wider situation during the tense years leading up to the Great War. The intersection between the two scales of enquiry demonstrates how the national level of political debate became more complex and fractured at the local level, how actors at the local level were also moving on wider stages, and the interconnecting processes. Further questions about the utility of micro-history are raised as a result.     

William Gould,Land Agent and the Rural Community in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire 1783–1788

The land agent played an important role in community relationships. His position was frequently one of mediator and liaison between landowner and tenant, although his role often extended to settling disputes more generally. These relationships are often hidden in estate correspondence but in the case of William Gould agent to the Duke of Portland are more readily available through his diaries. This article will utilise this valuable resource to explore how the land agent of a large estate which was entering a period of industrialisation interacted with both agricultural and industrial communities.     

The Rural Estate through the Eyes of the Land Agent: A Community in Microcosm c1812 – 1844

This article explores how the Castleman/Anglesey archive forms a micro-study of an estate and its associated rural community at work. It will survey the type of data which can be found within the land agent’s estate vouchers and diurnal correspondence and why they are important. It will begin by examining the concepts and ideology of the rural community and seek to explain why it is so hard to define. The article will then investigate how a micro-study can assist in understanding the ways in which estates reacted to periods of economic difficulties. This will include: why landowners left rent arrears to accrue, the types of petition which the local populace presented, the reasoning behind improving landscapes and the ways an estate contributed to the relief of the labouring poor. The Castleman archive reveals the multi-layered, complex nature of the rural community and the diverse role of the land agent in balancing the relationships which existed within it. In effect it acts as an historical prism.     

Credibility in the Court of Chancery: Salesbury v. Bagot, 1671-1677

ABSTRACT

Between 1671 and 1677, William Salesbury of Rhug fought a bitter legal battle in Chancery against his cousin, Dame Jane Bagot, and her family. William contested Jane’s inheritance of the Bachymbyd estate, Denbighshire, which once belonged to their shared paternal grandfather. According to the Chancery records, their grandfather wrongfully disinherited William’s father. The Lord Chancellor judged five out of six points in William’s favour. However, the estate archives demonstrate that William’s father had no lawful claim to Bachymbyd and William built his suit on forgeries and half-truths. In a case where a daughter inherited an estate from a younger son, William manipulated the contemporary social norms of gender and primogeniture. The suit provides a unique opportunity to understand how credibility was constructed in the seventeenth century. This article suggests that credibility depended on social norms and played a larger role in the law, and perhaps wider society, than evidence-based truth.     

Ein Katalog chinesischer Bücher aus dem Jahre 1804, zum Verkauf angeboten durch Antonio Montucci

In this bibliographical note, the author presents the first European, i.e., 1804 sales catalogue of Chinese books, provided that we do not count the booksellers catalogues of scholars’ private libraries in which Chinese language material consisted of few items only. The owner remained anonymous, but the agent was Antonio Montucci (1762–1829) – an early Sinologist who described the collection in a letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1804. The books were acquired by the Duke of Devonshire. Their present location, however, has not been established. Montucci, who planned on editing a major Chinese dictionary for Europeans and had thousands of wooden types cut for this purpose at his own cost, was not given a chance neither in Paris nor in St. Petersburg where such projects were in preparation. His own Chinese library was sold to the Holy See before his death.     

Radicals,Tories or Monomaniacs? The Birmingham Currency Reformers in the House of Commons, 1832–67*

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood's Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood's brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early‐ and mid‐Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People's Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. George Frederick Muntz's death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham's radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasized Birmingham's contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers' views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.     

The dynastic triangle in international relations: Modena,England, and France, 1678–85

This article is a case study of how dynastic marriages in the early-modern period were wont to disappoint the participants. In this era, ruling dynasties frequently sought to marry suitable members of their family networks to well-placed clients in other states. These marriages were frequently intended to cement friendship or bind political wounds caused by previous conflicts. In 1673, the marriage between James Stuart, Duke of York, and Maria Beatrice d’Este, sister to the Duke of Modena, was sponsored by Louis XIV, King of France, thus giving rise to what one might term a ‘dynastic triangle’. This article, written from the Este perspective, demonstrates how the Duke of York and the King of France each subsequently failed, on two occasions, to support Francesco II d’Este's geopolitical objectives in northern Italy. For York, and his brother King Charles II, the failure to assist the Duke of Modena was as a result of their political inability to do so. On the other hand, Louis XIV's refusal to help Modena was because of conflicting French objectives in Italy. The negative Este reaction was both an indication of the Italian states’ fear and distrust of France, and a reminder that small states had ambitions and goals which were difficult to attain when not sponsored by a larger power. But these goals were often pursued when such sponsorship appeared likely, and were often unrealistic. The strains in dynastic relationships usually resulted from realisation that certain goals were irreconcilable.     

Before and after the Grenville Act: The House of Commons and the Morpeth Elections of 1768 and 1774

The Grenville Act of 1770 was designed to prevent justice being ‘sacrificed to numbers’ when election petitions came before the Commons. The fate of the petition following the Morpeth election of 1768 illustrates how ministerial and other powerful influences, as well as prejudice, could determine the result, the votes of freemen who had gained their rights by peremptory writs of mandamus from the court of king's bench being declared invalid because they had not been admitted to their freedom in the customary manner. At the 1774 election, the partisan returning officers rejected many votes, but a riot forced them to return the candidates having a majority with these votes. When petitions complaining of a forced return and counter petitions alleging bribery and corruption came to the Commons, a party succeeded in postponing to a distant date a hearing on the merits of the election, and in restricting the remit to the committee chosen under the Grenville Act. One of the sitting members was unseated but allowed to petition on the merits, but parliament was prorogued before his petition was heard. On renewing it in the next session, he made substantial alterations which were challenged and a committee was appointed to investigate. All who came to the committee were to have voices, and, realising that his cause was thereby rendered hopeless, the petitioner withdrew his petition. Thus a party in the House was still able to exert influence and, on this occasion, to bypass the Grenville Act, which, however, in other cases evidently proved satisfactory.     

Making Real Estate Markets: The Co-Production of Race and Property Value in Early 20th Century Appraisal Science

Analysing the standardisation of appraisal alongside the development of modern real estate markets in the early 20^th century, this article demonstrates that the construction of a racialised proper(tied) economic subjectivity was pivotal for realtors’ ability to secure legitimacy and profit as a burgeoning profession. Appraisal embedded racial logics within real estate markets such that their routine functioning could generate the submarket differentiation necessary for the realisation of class-monopoly rent. This study’s focus on appraisal before federal redlining addresses key lacunae in the historiography of segregation by foregrounding markets’ historical function as infrastructures that produce and spatialise the social difference crucial for profit in real estate. This article also seeks to inform engagements with contemporary processes of land speculation, commodification, and financialisation shaping US cities by advocating attention to the specific mechanisms that constitute race as a modality for the appropriation of surplus by real estate capital.     

The Social and Legal Status of Jews in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and its Influence on the Status of Tatars and Karaites

Abstract

At the end of the fourteenth century, when Lithuania was baptized, three non-Christian communities — Jews, Tatars, and Karaites — began to settle in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and their legal and social status began to take shape. The segregation of Jews from Christians was legitimized in the first privilege granted for the Jews of Brest in 1388 by the Grand Duke Vytautas (Witold, Vita&?t) the Great. This privilege, which adapted Western variations of the Judenrecht to Lithuanian realities and introduced some local improvements, began the process of the formation of the legal and social status of non-Christians in the Grand Duchy. The expulsion of Jews to the margins of the estate system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the establishment of the incumbency of the iudex iudeorum and internal community court, and the fully formed relations between the Jews and the legal system of the Grand Duchy were used as reference points in trying to define the legal status of the Tatars and the Karaites. In the case of Karaites, Magdeburg law, which was already known in Lithuania, was adopted. Grand Duke Casimir Jagiellon granted such a privilege to the Trakai (Troki) community in 1441, and the Karaite community’s life was organized according to the principles of the existing model of urban self-government. For some time the legal status of the Karaites differed from that of the Jews. Despite its uniqueness, Magdeburg law was not applied to the community’s everyday life, and the Karaites gradually absorbed the privileges granted for the Jews (especially that of 1646). The Tatars, who were socially stratified within their community and thus had different interests, were never granted a common privilege. Those ‘Jewish’ legal and social models, which were adapted for the Tatar community, were best revealed in the Third Lithuania Statute of 1588, which contained more regulations for non-Christians than its two predecessors. The content of its articles shows similarities of the social and legal status of non-Christians and the entrenchment of the social strata of non-Christians. The features of the model applied for regulating the state’s relations with the Jewish community might also be observed in the state’s relations with the Roma (Gipsy) community, which, although Christian, was considered unacceptable in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania because of its way of life.     

工业化时期英国地产代理制度透视——兼与中世纪庄官组织相比较

工业化时期,英国形成了以大地产为主的土地结构。由于享受城市生活、参与政治、处理地产上日益增多的事务的需要,地主因袭中世纪以来土地管理方面的庄官制度,发展出地产代理制度。一般而论,代理人负责勘查地产,管理地产经济,定期向地主汇报地产事务,参与教区社会活动。地主则选拔代理人选,干预代理人的经营策略,对地产事务发挥间接的影响。代理人、地主相互协调,使工业化时期英国农业经济的运行趋于高效。     

United in revolt and discourse: urban and noble perceptions of ‘bad government’ in fifteenth-century Brabant (1420–1)

This case study on the Brabantine uprising of 1420–1 reveals common ground between noble and urban political values, calling into question the dominant historiographical cleavage between noble and urban ideologies. In 1420, one of the most severe political conflicts in Brabantine history caused a coalition of members of the upper nobility and Leuven city councillors to remove Duke John IV from the throne and convict his councillors. Preceding these drastic events, both parties had written texts together to legitimise their political position and attract supporters. By analysing the writings of the insurgents, this article illustrates how these noblemen and urban councillors combined their political ideas in practice to create a coherent discourse that supported their claims to power. The analysis also emphasises the insurgents’ appropriation, interpretation and use of key notions, such as the ‘common good’, to criticise Duke John’s government and promote their cause.     

Surveying the surveyors: Richard Thornton and his publishers

Richard Thornton produced two outstanding large-scale plans of Manchester as the pinnacle of his work as a map surveyor. Yet, like the vast majority of nineteenth-century surveyors, little is known about him. This reflects the fact that most private surveyors were held in very low esteem, although the quality of Thornton’s work should have exempted him from any such scorn. His two plans, published in 1832 and 1851, are shown to be valuable and accurate depictions of the rapidly expanding town as it flourished as the groundbreaker of industrialization. Some new evidence about Thornton’s life and work has been unearthed, yet even the most assiduous searches have produced relatively little to flesh out his skeletal details. What is clear, however, is that the impact of Thornton’s two plans owes much to the respective support of Thomas Bancks - a local bookseller - and Joseph Adshead - estate agent, social campaigner and local politician - both of whom took the risk of publishing and promoting Thornton’s surveys in the very uncertain market for commercial maps.     

The Patronage of Rembrandt's Passion Series: Art,Politics, and Princely Display at the Court of Orange in the Seventeenth Century

This article sets out a new reading of a neglected poem by Sir Robert Howard, The Duell of the Stags (1668). It places the poem in the political context of the fall of Clarendon and rise of Howard’s friend and ally the Duke of Buckingham, and of Howard’s concurrent falling-out with his brother-in-law John Dryden. It explores the influence of Thomas Hobbes’ political theory on Howard’s poem, especially refracted through Sir William Davenant’s Hobbesian epic Gondibert (1651). The author argues that Howard’s poem implicitly attacked Dryden’s mode of panegyric for the Restoration regime by offering a radically alternative reading of Hobbes, casting royal power as fragile and contingent.     

王夫之及俞樾“邹元标论”之异同浅析

邹元标为晚明东林党“三君”之一,早年曼以新进士身份,力劾首辅张居正“夺情”之议而廷杖远谪,直声震中外。仕途淹蹇,家居讲学三十年后,再返之天启之朝。于其行迹,同时及晚问人多以其人为晚明“士气”之所标尚,而王夫之与俞樾论邹元标之则于众人颇有不同处。王认为其再立朝为助晚明君臣道丧之势,俞则认为其好名,立身亦有非明智处。二人论有同而有异。     

The Surfing Tommy Tanna

A Pacific Islander known only as Tommy Tanna, who was employed as a servant in Sydney in the late 19th century, is widely credited with introducing body surfing to Australia. Along with the better-known Alick Wickham and Duke Kahanamoku, Tanna represents the contributions of Pacific Islanders to the development of Australian aquatic sport and is racialised and mythologised in memory. This paper examines Tanna via the lenses of race and performance. It aims to situate Tanna within the context of other Pacific Islanders in the aquatic ‘show spaces’ of Sydney and the reinvigoration, development and reification of a Nimble Savage stereotype which ascribed aquatic prowess to some Islanders, and to assess his surfing activities as performative of race. This discursive context assists in analysing the ways that Tanna has been represented in varying acts of social memory, which themselves are performative acts that link his contributions with his Pacific origins.     

新见小邾国有铭青铜器探析

近年来追缴的小邾国青铜器中,邾寿父鼎、邾眉父匜被盗于距东江小邾国墓地仅1.5千米的横岭埠遗址,器主是小邾国宗室贵族。郳公戈被盗于大韩墓地,年代为春秋晚期偏晚,是小邾国君郳公克父的自作器,综合文献记载和郳公镈铭文,推知克父应即小邾国春秋末期的国君恭公或惠公。两件邾季簠是小邾国君之幼弟为其妻仲娸作的媵器。     

P.H. Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh: a literary friendship

ABSTRACT

Tracing the relationship between P.H. [Patrick Henry] Pearse (1879–1916) and Thomas MacDonagh (1878–1916), this essay explores the impact their friendship had on their careers as writers and critics. Their work together in St Enda’s, the school for boys founded by Pearse in 1908, provides a significant context for this exploration. There, while working with MacDonagh, Pearse made drama an important part of school life and started writing plays for public performance. Meanwhile, their collaboration in putting together the St. Enda’s school journal, An Macaomh (1909–1913), helped to hone MacDonagh’s skills as a literary critic and to prepare for his later editorial role at the Irish Review (1911–1914). Attention then turns to how MacDonagh’s views on Irish literature and his translations from Old Irish influenced his friend’s development as both a critic and poet. Paticular consideration is paid to “Mise Éire”, one of Pearse’s best-known poems. Finally, similarities are considered between MacDonagh and the hero of The Wandering Hawk (1915–1916), Pearse’s unfinished, English-language, school story for children. Taken together, these various investigations reveal that, despite differing temperaments and at times divergent approaches to Irish writing, Pearse and MacDonagh enjoyed a mutually stimulating friendship that impacted positively on their literary careers.     

‘We Help our Husbands!’ Negotiating the Household Budget in Rural Burkina Faso

This article addresses the intra‐household division of responsibilities among the Bisa and Mossi in south‐eastern Burkina Faso. Based on a detailed village study of the land use which revealed that women cultivated 31 per cent of all the land in 1997, gendered practices in household budgeting are investigated. Although the proportion of women’s own‐account agriculture suggests that they contribute substantially to household consumption, the majority of women maintain that they only help their husbands when contributing in areas that, ideologically, are his responsibility, for example by providing food and by paying school fees and materials. In this way, women keep within the norms of showing respect for the husband but, at the same time, they may press him to fulfil his obligations.     

Achilles or Adonis: Controversies Surrounding the Male Body as National Symbol in Georgian England

This paper analyses the controversy that arose when a monumental bronze nude statue of Achilles was unveiled at Hyde Park Corner (London) in 1822 as a monument to the Duke of Wellington and his army. The neoclassical statue (made by Richard Westmacott) perfectly embodied the ‘modern male stereotype’. According to historian George Mosse, this masculine image was a powerful and stable symbol of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century bourgeois societies. Intended by the commanders and artist as just such a symbol, the statue in practice was unable to express these high ideals. Ever since its unveiling, the statue has elicited laughter and ridicule. The uneasiness created by male public nudity is an aspect that Mosse missed in his history of masculine imaginary, in which he focused on certain moments of ‘spectacular’ masculinity in modern Western history. Ultimately, the failure of Westmacott's Achilles can best be understood from the well‐known feminist framework on the gendered ‘economy of the gaze’, a framework that is all too often absent in the historiography on masculinities.