‘Aspiring at Independence’: Protest, Petitions and Assertiveness in Badenoch c. 1730–1830

Visitors who dcribed the Lake District in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw its society as distinctively different from the rest of England and were struck by the survival of a numerous group of small, independent owner-occupiers. These farmers were often called ‘statesmen’, a term applied by outsiders rather than locals and not of great antiquity. Lakeland owner-occupiers preferred to use ‘yeomcn’. A good deal has been written about this social group. However, much of this relates to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or has focused on problems of nomenclature. Research on parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has established some general trends regarding changing numbers of small proprietors, while census enumerators' books have provided the basis for work on Cumbrian owner-occupiers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to, how this society changed in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the Lake District was drawn into the mainstream of English society and economic life. The use of the term ‘peasant’ in the title of this article is deliberately contentious as there has been considerable debate on whether the term can be justified for English society after medieval times. Marshall has suggested that one has to go back to the early eighteenth century to find a real peasant society in the Lake District. but Searle has claimed that a peasantry with a near subsistence economy, little penetration of market forces, much mutual assistance and collective regulation of assets survived until the end of the eighteenth century.

Until the eighteenth century in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, one general pattern of landholdings and settlement predominated. Land was organized either as single large grazing farms or tacks, or in a form of communal openfield agriculture comprising restricted infield and outfield, and predominant common pasture. The associated settlement was clustered in clachans.1 Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to a lesser extent in the present century, various changes have taken place in this landscape. The pattern has become essentially one of enclosed fields, often with regular lines, and settlement throughout the region is now predominantly dispersed, with only occasional relict or adventitious clusters. Only in a few areas, near the fringes of the Lowlands, do non-agricultural villages form a significant part of the landscape. The nature of the enclosure, moreover, differs considerably from one area of the Highlands to another. In the Inner Hebrides and along the southern fringes of the Highland seaboard, single small holdings and single farms of varying sizes are the predominant elements; crofting townships are few and far between. On the seaboard of the West Highland mainland, large grazing farms alternate with crofting townships. But in the Outer Hebrides, crofting townships of several types form the most important element in the landholdings pattern.2 These internal differences within the broad West Highland region are rarely the result of purely physical factors. More usually the different patterns have been the result of individual initiative. Scotland's Enclosure Acts3 enabled any landlord to enclose lands without the need to obtain an enabling Act of Parliament as was required of his English counterpart. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such initiative by individual landlords gave rise to various social, technical and agrarian changes. In turn, the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen the introduction of changing policies of land settlement and other agrarian changes which have been instigated both by private individuals and by Government bodies. The different changes have resulted through time in the present pattern of landholdings and settlement, not only according to the different ideas of the various landlords, but lso to the degree of isolation from, or accessibility to, the centres of these ideas, the timing of the changes, and to the length of period over which changes took place. In the Inner Hebrides, the Clyde Islands and the Lowlands (Fig. 1) the impact of the Agricultural Revolution was felt much earlier than elsewhere in Highland Scotland. The changeover in these areas from common to individual farming, together with a drift of population from the land to the villages, occurred in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was at a time when pressure of population on resources was less than it was when changes subsequently affected the West Highland mainland and many of the islands. In Islay in the Inner Hebrides, for example, migration to the rising industrial centres of Lowland Scotland had been taking place gradually from the eighteenth century onwards. This migration aided the enlightened policy of the major landlord, Campbell of Shawfield, and his relatives. The policy aimed at a gradual reduction in numbers of people on the land, through the creation of non-agricultural villages. In these villages, agricultural day-labourers, craftsmen, fishermen, foresters, lead-miners and distillery workers feued land4 and built houses to a definite plan of the landlord. In Islay there were always relatively fewer people dependent on the land than elsewhere in the region. This in itself assisted reorganization of landholdings, whether planned or informal, not only in the earlier

Virtual Citizenship and Revolutionary Transatlantic Republicanism in the Musical Lives of Exiled United Irishmen

Parliamentary enclosure was one of the most important socio-economic changes to affect English communities in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, affecting up to 8.4 million acres (3.4 m ha) in England and Wales (Turner 1980). In midland, southern and eastern England much of this was open field arable and lowland commons. Enclosure in these areas had considerable social impacts. The nature and scale of these have been widely debated since the nineteenth century with opinions oscillating between Marxist and classical economic stances. Marxist interpretations have portrayed parliamentary enclosure as an instrument for oppressing the rural proletariat, with loss of common rights forcing smallholders to sell out because of the heavy costs that enclosure demanded, and turning cottagers and smallholders into biddable full-time wage labourers for the larger farmers, a form of social engineering. The alternative view is that the process was reasonably fair and did not severely disadvantage most of those in the lower strata of rural society with the main phase of decline of small farmers occurring well after parliamentary enclosure had occurred (Chambers and Mingay 1966; Mingay 1997; Neeson 1993; Snell 1985). Over much of northern England, however, parliamentary enclosure involved mainly upland common pasture. In the early nineteenth century, Cumberland and Westmorland had the highest proportion of their areas in unenclosed common of any English counties (Williams 1970). Open fields had mostly been removed before the later eighteenth century by piecemeal enclosure (Winchester 1987). In North West England (here taken as comprising the pre-1974 counties of Cumberland and Westmorland together with north Lancashire), over 500,000 acres (202,342 ha) were enclosed under parliamentary act, much of it in upland or upland marginal areas (Whyte 2003). There was an initial burst of enclosure in the 1770 s involving mainly smaller lowland commons which were capable of conversion to arable. A second major phase of enclosure occurred in the early nineteenth century during the period of high wartime food prices and included more marginal pasture at higher altitudes. The third surge of activity took place in the mid nineteenth century, especially following the General Enclosure Act of 1845, again involving land of relatively poor quality (Whyte 2003). It is important to appreciate, however, that not all common pasture in north-west England was enclosed by parliamentary act. There had been a good deal of piecemeal enclosure associated with population increases in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, either for cultivation (Appleby 1978) or as stinted cow pastures shared between small groups of farmers (Winchester 2000b). Equally much land completely escaped enclosure. In Westmorland for example, c.100,000 acres (40,468 ha) of land were enclosed under parliamentary act, but 129,000 acres (52,204 ha) remain as open common pasture today (Humphries 2008). The poor quality of some of the land involved probably helps to explain the failure to enclose at least some other commons.

When it is said that a defendant to a criminal charge is presumed to be innocent, what is really meant is that burden of proving his guilt is upon prosecution. This golden thread ... runs through web of English criminal Unhappily Parliament regards principle with indifference - one might almost say with contempt. The statute book contains many offences in which burden of proving his innocence is cast on accused. (Glanville Williams, The Proof of Guilt: A Study of English Criminal Trial (1955)) No principle in Anglo-American criminal law is more vaunted than so-called of innocence: doctrine that prosecution must both produce evidence of guilt and persuade fact-finder beyond a reasonable doubt. The claim that every man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved has been described as dear to hearts of Englishmen and as an omnipresent feature of English criminal In 1895, United States Supreme Court declared of innocence in favor of accused to be the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary - a protection that lies at foundation of administration of our criminal law. Befitting its lofty stature in Anglo-American legal culture, presumption has become associated, over time, with that most famous of Blackstonean maxims: [I]t is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer. Recently, Allyson May has argued that presumption developed in eighteenth century along with a series of procedural and evidentiary protections benefiting defendants tried at London's Old Bailey, including right to counsel, notion of prosecution's case, and beyond-reasonable-doubt standard of proof. But how robust was presumption of innocence in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century English criminal law? This article argues that many English criminal defendants in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not benefit from a presumption of innocence but, rather, struggled against a statutory presumption of guilt. In starkest cases, defendants labored under a presumption of guilt when charged with violating one of numerous statutes passed by Parliament during eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries designed to combat various forms of misappropriation. Under these statutes, persons detected in possession of goods such as metal, rope, textile materials, or wood who failed to account adequately for their possession could be convicted by magistrates of misdemeanors in proceedings, which dispensed with certain important procedural and evidentiary protections applicable in cases of larceny tried in higher courts. Unfortunately, historians still know comparatively little about summary proceedings - this, despite their critically important role in administration of criminal justice in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England (and beyond). This article advances two principal claims: first, English criminal justice administrators from roughly 1750 to 1850 routinely resorted to summary proceedings in cases of suspected petty theft because of challenges of securing convictions in higher courts for felony of simple larceny; and, second, English criminal justice administration in this era is best viewed as a two-tiered system, in which heightened procedural and evidentiary protections for defendants tried for felonies in higher courts coexisted with a system of reduced protections for defendants tried summarily for misdemeanors.

Artifacts have long been markers of wealth, status, self-identity, or taste. As a result, most studies of social distinction in British and American material culture have tended to focus upon the consumption/possession perspective. To explore the production side of material culture distinction, this chapter focuses upon furniture history, examining the structures of furniture making in colonial British society. Comparative exploration of America in the eighteenth century, India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Australia in the early nineteenth century provides a sense of how the social structure of production operated, how it affected the look of the objects, and how it has continued to influence contemporary understanding of these objects. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the backgrounds of cabinetmakers had a direct impact on the possibilities of their work and prospects. These period distinctions have subsequently fostered a different sort of distinction today wherein the skills and legacy of nonwhite and convict cabinetmakers, the artisanal “other” in the British Empire, continue to be undervalued or ignored. Beautiful collected objects often distract us from the analysis of the systems of their production or an ethical critique of those systems.

Scholars, the general public, and special collections libraries are increasingly aware of the importance of visual images in examining the past. With the proliferation of sophisticated digitization technologies, researchers now have the opportunity to "see" images in new ways. No longer considered secondary to text and used merely to illustrate the written word, visual materials are taking their rightful place as primary evidence that document the past and influences our understanding of the present. The Library Company of Philadelphia supports this continuing focus on the historical importance of visual culture.

REVIEWS

Naturalism and William Paley

Rüdiger Schultka and Josef N Neumann (eds) in collaboration with Susanne Weidemann, Anatomie und Anatomische Sammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert. Anlässlich der 250. Wiederkehr des Geburtstages von Philipp Friedrich Theodor Meckel (1755–1803), Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Band 1, Berlin, Lit Verlag, 2007, pp. 516, illus, €49.90 (hardback 978-3-8258-9755-9). - Volume 53 Issue 3

I. Introduction: Catholic Enlightenment and Popular Catholicism One of greatest paradoxes of modern Catholic history is that a seemingly moribund Old Regime Church gave way to a broad-based popular Catholic revival in nineteenth century. How can this reinvigoration be accounted for? Miracles, of course, are always a possibility, but historians are required to look for more prosaic explanations. The Catholic revival has received a fair share of scholarly attention. As a multi-faceted phenomenon, scholars have focused on questions ranging from diocesan organization and clerical training, to in-depth studies on religious experience of common people. For all this interest in nineteenth-century Catholicism at local and popular level, however, it remains to be explained how Old Regime Church could accommodate its traditional distrust-when not outright repression-of popular religious practices, enabling popular Catholicism in fact to become one of key aspects of Church's political and social power. For all emphasis on nineteenth-century developments, then, it remains to be shown how Roman Catholicism in eighteenth century underwent a fundamental revision in its approach to popular religion. While it is certain that social, economic, and institutional factors had an important role in shaping of popular Catholicism, can it also be said that there were intellectual roots as well? The remainder of this article addresses this question by describing intellectual context of eighteenth-century revolution in Catholic moral theology that enabled institutional Church to align itself with practices of popular Catholicism. This essay also hopes to demonstrate that intellectual components of popular Catholicism must be understood on their own terms, and not merely reduced to social or political factors. I propose to demonstrate that new moral system outlined below overcame certain intellectual barriers that would otherwise have stood in way of Church's enthusiastic embrace of popular religious practices and attitudes.1 The central question of this essay, therefore, is how aristocratic-minded Church of Counter-Reformation adapted to social transformations of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to become, in words of Louis Châtellier, the religion of poor.2 Rather than seeing this new identity as a late reaction to changes of revolutionary era, I will suggest how its roots extend back into early eighteenth century, specifically to disputes over laxism, probabilism, and rigorism. Social historians like Châtellier have shown how, around eighteenth century, missionaries in Europe shifted their efforts away from trying to force peasants to completely abandon their so-called superstitious beliefs. Instead, missionaries embraced what they now accepted as genuine piety, and sought instead only to strengthen connections between popular piety and institutional Catholic Church. In my view, this shift in pastoral practice should be seen in concert with revolution in moral theology that-while not abandoning concept of original sin-downplayed strongly negative Augustinian condemnation of human nature and embraced a generally more optimistic view of human moral capability. The figure of Neapolitan moral theologian and founder of popular Redemptorist Congregation Alphonsus Maria di Liguori (1696-1787) stands at center of this transformation. Liguori not only authored one of most widely circulated tracts on Marian devotion-the queen of superstition to Enlightenment Christians and rational skeptics alike-the Glories of Mary. He also succeeded in elaborating a system of moral theology which postulated that in cases of doubt about existence of a moral law, human liberty was anterior to law.3 More clearly than others, Liguori overcame negative Augustinian view of human nature that had led Jansenists to follow their rigorist tendencies in moral theology. …

How southern New England Indians fared in the business of whaling in the early nineteenth century and the long-term consequences of whaling for Native American communities are subjects that deserve closer examination. 1 This essay is primarily a study of the post-American Revolution Mashpee Wampanoag community of Cape Cod and focuses on the group's ties to the whalefishery. It makes two interrelated arguments: Wampanoags from the Cape, like other men from southern New England, were an important source of whaling labor into the early nineteenth century; and early American whaling transformed the lives of Mashpee whalers and their families. Examining Mashpee's intimate relationship with the whaling business, this work reconsiders the roles played by Indians in the maritime world and the influence of wage labor on one Native American group. Nantucket accounting papers pertaining to the Mashpees permits for analysis of these Indians as whalers. Historians have already learned from colonial whaling contracts, court records, and merchant accounts that for the Native men of southern New England, America's whaling trade was an exploitative arm of colonial labor relations. The primary route into whaling in the eighteenth century, which was the practice of indenturing, threatened Native ways as Indians remained caught in cycles of labor exchange for credit, goods, and money. New research in Nantucket merchant house account papers dated to the early republic period reveals that white trading networks between the island and the mainland maintained control over Mashpee whaling labor. 2 The first section of this essay tracks the development of whaling as a labor system in which, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, state-appointed guardians and local merchants maintained authority over the lays (earnings in fractions of the total catch of a whaling voyage) and the accounts of Mashpee whalers. The Massachusetts government dissolved the guardianship system in 1763 with the creation of the district of Mashpee but reversed this decision in 1788 by reinstating three guardians. In 1789 the legislature replaced [End Page 165] the three guardians with a five-member board of white male overseers, two of whom acted as guardians and attempted to wield power over the affairs of Mashpee's proprietor Indians. (Proprietors were those community members "entitled to legal rights in the plantation through inheritance or adoption into the tribe," and only proprietors had rights to the group's common land.) The board included the Congregational minister Gideon Hawley (missionary to the Mashpees from 1756 to 1807) who was treasurer and overseer. The board was given the power to oversee the distribution of Mashpee resources as well as to monitor the employment of Indians and their contracts with white merchants. With Hawley as a member, the board also helped support education and religious worship. They also used funds to care for the indigent. Hawley died in 1807, and one year later the Massachusetts government reduced the number of overseers to three. The new overseers were given the duty to choose one guardian. By 1818, the legislature replaced the three overseers with two, but they were also granted the powers of guardians, and this system remained in place until 1834. The approximately twelve thousand acres in Mashpee ultimately was to serve as a reservation for proprietor Indians. 3 Among other duties, the guardians tried to put an end to the abuses that had plagued Mashpees who joined the whaling business by trying to ensure fair wages and a way for proprietor whalers to collect their earnings. 4 With the guardianship system affording some "protection" to members of the group, Mashpee proprietors enjoyed the chance of making a decent living from whaling. Nantucket merchants would notify Mashpee's overseers of upcoming voyages, and guardians, acting on their behalf, offered lays to the reserve's employable proprietors. The guardians, in correspondence with the leading merchant houses of Nantucket, also managed the contracts, debts, and sale...

Anne-Louise Germaine de Stael devoted her works to the idea of freedom, particularly for women and slaves. As an intellectual and a writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in France, she judged not only her community but its political regimes according to the principles of feminism and abolitionism. As a woman, she had only two possible ways to play a public role: to hold a salon like her mother, or to publish books. She did both, and through these acquired considerable influence. De Stael was a feminist whose work queries the subordination of women to men, and her strong liberal position led her to equate the condition of women with that of slaves. De Stael's liberalism was a product of the Enlightenment and early Romanticism. Although she never departed from the Enlightenment's principles, she displayed a more Romantic attitude when she promoted 'enthusiasm' and emotion, which were reflected in her art, politics and love life. Feminism De Stael's most important struggle was her fight for the rights of women to education and freedom of thought. She was a feminist who questioned the organisation of society and the place of women in it. During the French Revolution, despite claims advocating gender equality and social justice, the status of women regressed rapidly. Like her feminist contemporaries, she advocated that women ought to be judged by the same liberal code as men while she also praised the positive aspects of female gender roles. De Stael was a moderate feminist who celebrated the feminine. She believed that if educated women retained their traditional female values, they could play an effective role in society. Slavery The European slave trade peaked in the eighteenth century, and feminists were among those campaigning for its abolition. Probably initially influenced by her father's stand against slavery, de Stael fought against it in life and in many of her writings. She took a pragmatic and political position when she addressed the subject in her literature, when she supported the campaign of William Wilberforce, and the fight of the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture. Intersection of Feminism and Slavery in Madame de Stael's Writings There is a strong link between abolitionism and feminism in de Stael's work, as in the works of other turn of the nineteenth-century feminists. Feminism was closely related to abolitionism as married women, especially from the upper classes, could identify with slaves because they too lacked certain civil rights and were treated as property. While de Stael fought for women to be treated fairly, she also introduced the notion of 'enslavement' to strong emotions which was as distressing as the physical and cultural restrictions enforced on women, and could be used to reinforce those restrictions. In her novels and treatises, she demonstrates that to be in the throes of passion is destructive, causing a loss of autonomy, identity and self-control, the same predicament suffered by slaves. While numerous biographers of Madame de Stael have noted the impact her work has had on a range of political, social and historical matters, few have considered the way her feminism and abolitionism interacted and intersected in her work. This study analyses de Stael's work in the context of her times and demonstrates that not only did she advocate passionately for abolitionism and feminism, but that she saw how the repression of women and enslavement of Africans were linked in the society of eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries France.

Reviewed by: Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century by Christina Lupton Alexander Creighton (bio) Christina Lupton. Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. ix+199. $49.95. That Christina Lupton’s Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century is best read slowly and carefully testifies to its achievement as both a rigorously researched history and a philosophy of reading for the present. Investigating the reading practices of a variety of eighteenth-century individuals—“actors, clergy, professional novelists, translators, housekeepers, and politicians” (3)—Lupton asks whether, in the modern history of the book, we have ever really had more time to read. Although the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a proliferation of printed materials, the era also saw the rise of longer and more regular work days with less free time, what E. P. Thompson famously calls “time-discipline.” When, under these conditions, did people find time to read books? In what ways did book reading challenge the growing predominance of work schedules and clock time? Lupton suggests that there is no one answer to these questions, and her book unfolds as an analysis of the relation between reading and “making time” in two senses: 1) how these readers made time for books; 2) how the act of reading fashioned alternative relations to time. “In the stories I tell,” Lupton writes, “people pick up books, reread them, and postpone reading them in ways that are often out of kilter with the idea of modernity’s commitment to regularity and speed” (8). Lupton’s central argument is that over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reading books was seen as a means of negotiating with, rather than capitulating to, an emerging cultural time-consciousness centered around efficiency and speed. “Book reading develops its own character as an activity valued because it can offset newer and faster kinds of reading,” such as the reading of “newspapers, periodicals, almanacs, and sermons” (6). From a bustling early life in the theater that admitted little leisure, novelist Elizabeth Inchbald, in the 1790s, began a calmer life with more time for leisure reading—a progression dramatized in her most famous novel, A Simple Story. The notebooks of William Wyndham Grenville, Prime Minister of the U.K. after William Pitt the Younger, reveal a careful reader who scheduled his readings and rereadings of Demosthenes and Aristotle. In letters to her friend and fellow Bluestockings member [End Page 265] Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Talbot laments her lack of time to read, always interrupted “with a thousand little errands and employments” (40). Talbot’s 1770 Reflections, which takes the form of short homilies to be read on each day of the week, preserves Sundays as a time of leisure—a time for slower reading. Lupton’s readers include fictional characters as well as real people; they range from the mid-1700s through the Romantic period; and all, in their own ways, make time for reading and through reading. The richness of ideas in Lupton’s book comes from her drawing into seamless dialogue several different but related fields, including a variety of kinds of reading and writing, such as epistolary exchange, translation, the study of classics, and the promise of future reading; specific, high-stakes questions about the structure and use of time; and an impressive range of modern theorists and literary scholars, from book historians to philosophers of time to social theorists such as Bruno Latour and Niklas Luhmann. The result is that each of the book’s four chapters unfolds as a lucid progression of ideas. Meanwhile, brief autobiographical asides, interspersed throughout the whole, not only formally underscore the argument that books need not accord with any one tempo, but in content, they address the problem of finding time to read in the age of the internet. At a time when reading is increasingly instrumentalized as a means toward some professional end (or else deemed unworthy of our time), Lupton argues that a reevaluation of reading profits from understanding the history of reading and the temporal politics involved. Rather than capitulate to speed-reading or skipping pages, “I want to promote...

Editors’ Introduction