British Social History Research Articles

Reviews

Book reviewed in this articleREVIEW OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE, 1984A selective survey of periodical literature on British economic and social history published in other journals.GREAT BRITAINT. F. T. Baker (Ed.)‐ The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Middlesex, Vol. VIII.K. J. Stringer. Earl David of Huntingdon, 1152‐1219: A Study in Anglo‐Scottish History.Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran. The Growth of English Schooling, 1340‐1548: Learning, Literacy, and Laicization in P re‐re formation York Diocese.Mary Prior (Ed.). Women in English Society, 1500‐1800.Philip Riden (Ed.). George Sitwell's Letterbook, 1662‐66.Philip Riden. History of Chesterfield, Volume II, Part I, Tudor and Stuart Chesterfield.Margaret Spufford. The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century.Patrick McGrath. (Ed.). A Bristol Miscellany.Roger Burt. The British Lead Mining Industry.John Cannon. Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth‐century England.L. E. Cochran. Scottish Trade with Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.Jeffrey G. Williamson. Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality?Richard Dennis. English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography.Royden Harrison and Jonathan ZeitlinRoger Penn. Skilled Workers in the Class Structure.David J. V. Jones. The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839.M.J. Daunton. House and Home in the Victorian City: Working‐Class Housing, 1850‐1914.Martha Vicinus. Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850‐1920.Alun Howkins. Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1870‐1923.Michael Sanderson. From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession in England, 1880‐1983.R. P. T. Davenport‐Hines, Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior.Jim Tomlinson. British Macroeconomic Policy since 1940Alec Cairncross. Wars of Recovery: British Economic Policy, 1945‐51.B. A. Holderness. British Agriculture since 194S‐L. S. Pressnfxl and John Orbell. A Guide to the Historical Records of British Banking.GENERALL. A. Clarkson and E. M. Crawford. Ways to Wealth: The Cust Family of Eighteenth‐century Armagh.William H. Sewell. Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseilles, 1820‐70.Arndt Fleischer. Patentgesetzgebung und Chemisch‐Pharmazeutische Industrie im Deutschen Kaiserreich, 1871‐1918.Hknry Ashby Turner Jr. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler.Manuel Martin Rodriguez. Pensamiento ecónomico espaol sobre la Poblacidn.Kathleen Burk. Britain, America and the Sinews of War, 1914‐1918.Hal S. Barron. Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth‐century New England.Charles W. Cheape. Family Firm to Modern Multinational: Norton Company, a New England Enterprise.Norman B. Wilkinson. Lammot du Pont and the American Explosives Industry, 1850 84.Steven Hahn. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850‐90.James C. Cobb. Industrialization and Southern Society, 1877‐1984.Gilbert C. Fite. Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865‐1980.Richard B. Sheridan. Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680‐1834.Jean Stubbs. Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860‐1958.Srinivasa Ambirajan. Political Economy and Monetary Management: India, 1766‐1914.Peter Greenhalgh. West African Diamonds, 1919‐83: An Economic History.J. C. Russell. Late Ancient and Medieval Population Control.R. J. Holton. The Transition, from Feudalism to Capitalism.Robert I. Rotberc and Theodore K. Rabb

The English Family 1450–1700. By Ralph A. Houlbrooke. (Themes in British Social History.) Pp. vii + 272. Longman. 1984. £5.95 (paper).

The English Family 1450–1700. By Ralph A. Houlbrooke. (Themes in British Social History.) Pp. vii + 272. Longman. 1984. £5.95 (paper).

Honor for Old Age:

Pious writings have rarely becn used in the telling of English social history. A sample of pious literature from 16th century Tudor England is examined here for attitudes towards old age. In general, a deep-seated negativism seems to permeate the genre although paired with a repetitious insistence on honor for older persons. The second section of the paper bricfly surveys the several, currently unexplored, areas of study which seem to indicate that veneration for the elderly may not, in fact, have been the case.

Attitudes, Issues, and Labour Party Decline in England, 1974-1979

This article critically examines the argument that the Labour party's poor performance in the 1979 general election reflects a long-term decline that is largely the result of its own natural support groups, Labour identifiers and the working class, developing political attitudes that serve increasingly to estrange them from the party's traditional principles. This argument further holds that issues emerged in the 1979 campaign that, deriving from these same principles, compounded the tendency for Labour supporters to defect at the polls. We argue that these findings are conceptually and methodologically flawed and that the evidence does not, in fact, support this explanation of Labour party decline. We conclude, instead, that what the evidence does suggest is that Labour suffered from a widespread voter “backlash” as a result of having been in office during a particularly difficult period in British social, economic, and political history.

Culture and the environment in Britain

The British pride themselves on their long tradition of landscape management rooted in the aristocratic and landowning classes of the 18th and 19th centuries. The British also emphasize that the rise of modern pollution control began in the Victorian industrial era with the emergence of the national Inspectorates and the local Commissioners of Sewers. All these traditions are rooted in British social history, which was heavily influenced by class, power, and the changing shape of industrial and agricultural development. In modern Britain, affected by industrial recession, where concern over jobs and growth appears to dominate public and political attention, as well as public spending cuts that sap the morale and effectiveness of the major regulatory agencies, attitudes toward, and the execution of, environmental protection are undergoing a subtle but profound revolution. It is slowly but agonizingly being recognized that economic growth and social well-being cannot be disconnected from environmental processes and the limits these impose on management and technological intervention. A 21st century Britain will have to integrate conservation with development in order to survive.

The English Landed Elite, 1540–1879: A Review

Few historians have equalled Lawrence Stone as a collector of facts and a maker of big books. Take but three of his books especially relevant to this essay. The Crisis of Aristocracy amounted to 841 pages, Family, Sex, and Marriage to 800 pages, and the most recent of the three, An Open Elite?-which is written jointly with Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone'-falls off to a mere 566 pages. This mountain of historical fact and exposition is a monument to Stone's prodigious energy, thought-provoking ingenuity, and relentless curiosity. Although this essay begins with, and concentrates upon An Open Elite?, it will be led also to consider Stone's earlier works. In this latest book Stone returns to ground travelled over before. He has again much to say about the history of the family and the role of strict settlement, but his view is not quite the same as it once was. The accumulated baggage of earlier travels is, as it were, heaped together with baggage from his latest journey. A close look at An Open Elite? inevitably entails some looking at the corpus of Stone's work on the English aristocracy and gentry. Logically An Open Elite? falls into two parts. As the title indicates, the book discusses whether the English landed elite was open to newcomers, a question of importance in English social history. The book goes beyond this, however. Attempting to explain the stability of the core of the elite, it sets out salient features of the class, laying particular stress on its inheritance practices. This review accordingly also falls into two parts. The first-written by David Spring-discusses the question the title raises. The second-written by Eileen Spring-discusses inheritance practices as Stone sees them and has seen them, and also discusses related family matters to which he returns.

Rosemary O'day. <italic>Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain</italic>. (Themes in British Social History.) New York: Longman. 1982. Pp. xiv, 324

Rosemary O'day. <italic>Education and Society, 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain</italic>. (Themes in British Social History.) New York: Longman. 1982. Pp. xiv, 324

The Structured Essays in English Social History

The Structured Essays in English Social History

Laboring People in Eighteenth-Century England

These three books are important contributions to 18th century English social and labor history. They conveniently summarize a large amount of material, and each in its own way provides something of an interpretation of the period. Let us discuss each in turn. The single greatest strength of Dobson's study is that it has chronicled to an extent not done before the record of disturbances and disputes between employees and employers in 18th century England. Against those older historians such as the Hammonds, the Webbs, and G.D.H. Cole as well as the more recent tendency which stresses the harmony of paternalist relations between the social classes, Dob son's chronical is a useful corrective. It should be enlightening to all of those who regard the wage struggle as belonging only to the period of factory production. Dobson is a numerologist. His chronicle is most succinctly presented in the Appendix which lists all the labor disputes that he's discovered between 1717 and 1800. The list is a summary of his reading of the London press available in the Burney collection of the British Library. The list should not be taken to be compre hensive, suggestive though it is, because Dobson does not tell us how he read the press (what newspapers? what periods? how systematically?) nor if he searched many of the provincial newspapers such as Berrow's Worcester Journal, The Sher borne Mercury, or Jackson*s Oxford Journal, all of which often contained news of strikes not mentioned in the London press. Exhaustive quantifiers may moan about this and then go and add to his list. Perhaps they will add to it significantly. Let us hope that they do. Meanwhile, some of his findings may be mentioned. In tables interfoliated with his text he analyzes the disputes by occupation, by twenty-year periods, by the primary issue at dispute, and by region. A table of

The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History. Harold Perkin

<i>The Structured Crowd: Essays in English Social History</i>. Harold Perkin

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

A Grammatical Miscellany of 1427–1465 from Bristol and Wiltshire

English grammatical miscellanies, of which numerous examples survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are a major source of the history of education in later medieval England. We mean, by miscellanies, collections of treatises and exercises relating to the study and teaching of Latin. Works of this kind were compiled for their use by university scholars, members of the religious orders, and the masters and pupils of ordinary grammar schools. The study of such works today, most of whose contents have yet to be printed, adds greatly to our knowledge of medieval English life and thought. The Latin treatises on grammar which they contain reveal the history of the study and usage of Latin in England. They make it possible to reconstruct the grammar curriculum of the English schools and universities, for which other evidence is rarely available. They contain the earliest grammatical treatments of the English language, too, in the form of English glosses and translations of Latin grammatical works, long before the publication of the first definitive grammar of English in 1586. Of wider interest still, the miscellanies contain numerous school exercises which aimed to teach Latin to pupils through references to the speech, activities, and surroundings of everyday life. Such texts are especially valuable, since they preserve many illuminating details of English social history that have not survived elsewhere.

Ursula R. Q. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain, Themes in British Social History, Longman, Harlow, 1979. 294 pp. £4.50.

Ursula R. Q. Henriques, Before the Welfare State: Social Administration in Early Industrial Britain, Themes in British Social History, Longman, Harlow, 1979. 294 pp. £4.50.

Knights and Retainers: The Earliest Version of Daden-Powell's Boy Scout Scheme

While historians have recently begun to find in the ideology and workings of the Boy Scout movement in England a rich source of material for early twentieth-century British social history, our detailed knowledge of the origins of Scouting has come totally from the ranks of the Scout Association itself. Without exception, the authorized version of the evolution of the Scouting idea, which has by now more or less hardened into sacred dogma, has been written by those intimately connected with the movement.' Although affiliation with an organization does not necessarily distort any attempt to produce an account of its development, in this case all the established sources omit a vital piece of evidence which sheds new light, not only on Baden-Powell's own view of the meaning and importance of the Scouts, but also the way his vision of Scouting progressed from rough impulse to finished form. The licensed accounts of the immediate beginnings of Scouting, accepted without reservation as complete, generally start with the date of 30 April 1904, when Baden-Powell attended, as inspecting officer, the Annual Drill Inspection and Review of the Boys' Brigade in Glasgow. It was here, amidst the legions of welldisciplined marching boys, that the classical moment of inspiration occurred. As Baden-Powell notes in his diary, William A. Smith, founder of the Brigade, told him with pleasure of the Brigade's healthy membership, over

The Origins of English Individualism.

In a work entitled The Origins of English Individualism, which will appear at roughly the same time as this article, I have assembled the evidence to support a new thesis concerning the nature of English social and economic structure between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Since the results of this work have implications for those who would not normally read a book on English social history, it is worth repeating them to a wider audience here. I will first briefly summarize the argument and proof in my book and then turn to the implications. Detailed argument and references on specific points are contained in the book.

Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914. By Alan D. Gilbert. (Themes in British Social History.) Pp. x + 252. London: Longman, 1976. £3.50.

Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914. By Alan D. Gilbert. (Themes in British Social History.) Pp. x + 252. London: Longman, 1976. £3.50. - Volume 29 Issue 4

G. E. Mingay, The Gentry. The rise and fall of a ruling class, Londres, Longman, « Themes in British social history », 1976, 216 p.

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REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

British Social History

British Social History

Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History, edited by R. H. Hilton

<i>Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History</i>, edited by R. H. Hilton