Extortion Of Money Research Articles

Popular Festivity and Consumer Protest: Food Price Disturbances in the Southwest and Oxfordshire in 1867

This article will explore the interplay between a traditional fête in Devon and Oxfordshire, the celebration of the Fifth of November, and the last significant wave of English food price disturbances in 1867. Both popular culture and collective action mutated, of course, as underlying economic and social structures changed; but even in those regions where the pace of change was rapid, to neglect the factors of persistence and survival would lead to a history written according to a too simplistic formula. To say that culture and collective action changed in the nineteenth century as society and the economy changed can even become a truism, telling little about the processes through which these relationships worked themselves out. Without overdrawing the case, an effort has been made here to focus precisely upon persistence and survival, and to show how, in regions such as the southwest or Oxfordshire—and by implication, many other regions of Britain as well—the pace of nineteenth century cultural, economic, and social change was more leisurely than studies based exclusively on the industrializing north might lead one to conclude.Besides remaining the celebration of the failure of the Popish Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes acquired a number of new meanings for those involved in nineteenth century Fifth of November manifestations, and some other novel “uses” as well. Annual celebrations all over the south were frequently organized and mounted by secret or semi-secret societies of “bonfire boys” or “Guys.” Members of the bonfire gangs usually concealed their identities with masks or soot and appeared in uniform or grotesque costumes to preside over the collection of wood and other combustibles, the begging or extortion of money from the wealthy, and the fabrication of suitable effigies to be ritually consumed on the bonfire.

Another Side of “Thorough”: John Cosin and Administration, Discipline, and Finance in the Church of England, 1624–1644

The policy of “Thorough,” the effort at greater efficiency in church and state during the reign of Charles I, is usually regarded as a leading cause of the dissatisfaction that led to civil war. Lawrence Stone has described its objective as “a deferential, strictly hierarchical, socially stable, paternalist absolutism based on a close union of Church and Crown.” To G. E. Aylmer, the king's principal ministers, archbishop Laud and the earl of Strafford, were trying to achieve “more efficient government, and more effective central authority.” Both scholars agree that the methods used to accomplish these goals were of questionable legality. Aylmer credits the two leading protagonists of “Thorough” with good intentions, “cleaner as well as more efficient and absolute government”; but Stone points to the exasperating effect of the policy by noting that “Every aspect of economic life suffered from the feverish interference of bureaucracy whose sole objective seemed to be the extortion of money by the imposition of petty and irritating regulations.” Though these scholars discuss “Thorough” only in terms of its secular aspect, Christopher Hill has devoted considerable space to its ecclesiastical adherents, or to the possible impact that “Thorough” might have had at particular levels of the church bureaucracy.