Roger North Research Articles

Roger North: gentleman, accountant and lexicographer

Roger North's The Gentleman Accomptant (1714) stands out in the early English language accounting literature for a number of reasons. It applies double entry to landed estates, recommends a system in which the separate activities of an estate are treated in effect as divisions, with inter-divisional transfers, and includes an accounting dictionary. This paper analyses the contents of the book, sets it and its author in their respective contexts, and discusses the possible influences on North's text.

Music for lute and chitarrone

is a pity. Be that as it may, it is excellent finally to have their recording of the Consort of Fower Parts-music which Roger North in 1728 rated 'magnifick', adding with foresight that it 'will ever have a value, when any persons shall feel fit to prove it'. Fretwork have cleverly sought to ring the changes by varying the supporting harmony instruments: thus the first and fourth setts are left to the viols; in the second they are joined by Nigel North on the archlute; Paul Nicholson plays the third on the organ and the fifth on the spinet; and organ and archlute combine for the sixth. The archlute in Nigel North's skilful hands brings valuable definition to the consort; its contribution to the second sett's courante and sarabande is particularly telling. The two setts, Duos for two Basse Violls, complete the disc. I found the performance here efficient but perfunctory and missed the spirit of fantasy and 'Sublime discourses' so evident in the Kuijkens' recording of the sett in C (Music for a viol, Accent ACC 68014D), particularly in the extraordinary second C minor fantazie, which begins so shockingly with an arpeggiated augmented triad. David Pinto's liner notes to the Fretwork disc are a delight-and I enjoyed the Locke graffito!

The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-1691.

Introduction: the human factor. Part 1 The man of business: the apprentice the commission agent the general merchant lender and landlord the process of accumulation. Part 2 Public and private life: the reluctant politician the civil servant the urban gentleman the family man the political economist conclusion - self-help in action. Part 3 Economic works of Sir Dudley North: Discourse Upon Trade Principally Directed to the Cases of the Interest Coynage Clipping Increase of Money A Representation Intended to be Layd Before the Parliament in the Year 1683 the Bad Condition of the Mony Current in England and the Meanes to Remedy it Concerning the Values of Land and Fall of Rents Some Notes the Laws for the Poor Reflections on the Petition of Hogia Panos. Appendices: passages excised from the printed version of the Life of Sir Dudley Instructions for Dudley Foley for His Way of Living and Most Hopeful for His Advancement in the Way of a Merchant Which He is Now Entering Into, by Monague North currencies and exchange rates glossary of Turkish terms and institutions reconstructed balance sheets genealogies of the North and Cann families preface to the Discourses by Roger North.

The Bifurcated Economics of Sir Dudley North and Roger North: One Holistic Analytical Engine

The Bifurcated Economics of Sir Dudley North and Roger North: One Holistic Analytical Engine

Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c.1698-c.1703): A Physical, Psychological, and Critical Theory

Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c.1698-c.1703): A Physical, Psychological, and Critical Theory

Previously Undocumented Macroeconomics from the 1680s: The Analytical Arguments and Policy Recommendations of Sir Dudley North and Roger North

Previously Undocumented Macroeconomics from the 1680s: The Analytical Arguments and Policy Recommendations of Sir Dudley North and Roger North

Roger North's Examen: A Crisis in Historiography

JACOBITISM, A SUBJECT LONG CONFINED to only the more obscure and sluggish eddies of eighteenth-century history, has recently drifted into the main current. One result has been the complication of traditional accounts of eighteenth-century historiography. The following essay examines the argument between the Tory and Jacobite lawyer Roger North (1651-1734), and two of the early architects of the Whig interpretation of history, White Kennett and Laurence Echard. Central to this argument is Examen, North's massive refutation of Kennett's Complete History of England.' Against Kennett's account of the late seventeenth century North placed his own papers and memoirs of the times, and though Examen has often been sifted through by scholars searching for primary material on the Popish Plot, it has never received critical attention as a work of history in its own right. Rather North's critique has been dismissed as the dry austerities of fanaticism, mere Tory rhetoric, narrow and partial. Tory rhetoric it is indeed, as North himself admits, but as such it is crucial in understanding High-Tory reaction to the events of 168889. On a more general level however, Examen raises compelling questions about historiographical methods. North implicitly attacks

The elements of life: biography and portrait-painting in Stuart and Georgian England

List of plates List of abbreviations Representing historical character Iconic biography: Izaak Walton and John Evelyn Iconic pictures: Van Dyck and Stuart portraiture Brief lives and miniatures: John Aubrey and Samuel Cooper Double agents: Jonathan Richardson and Roger North Hogarth's dilemma Biography at mid-century: Acts of complicated virtue Reynolds and 'The Genius of Life' Boswell's Flemish picture Epilogue: Gainsborough's Butterfly Index

Roger North’sThe musicall grammarian and theory of sounds: Digests of the manuscripts

Abstract The musical essays of Roger North are amongst the most important writings of the eighteenth century on music. To date they have been ill-served by editors, who have been misleadingly selective in presenting his ideas to the modern reader. Edward Rimbault, who first published Memoires of Musik(London: Bell, 1846) from the manuscript in Hereford Cathedral Library, omitted completely the Musicall Grammarian, which occupies folios 1-102 of the same manuscript; Hilda Andrews, in her edition ofThe Musicali Gramarian [sic] (London: Oxford University Press, 1925) also omitted the text of The Musicall Grammarian, and published only the Notes of Comparison between the Elder and Later Musick, and somewhat Historicall of Both, which had been incorporated into the text of the first draft of The Musicall Grammarian in 1726, and separated in the final version of 1728 as a separate essay. The best known edition of North's works, Roger North on Music, edited by John Wilson, (London, Novello, 1959) reproduces more...

Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c. 1698-1703): A Physical, Psychological and Critical Theory. Roger North , Mary Chan , Jamie C. KasslerRoger North's Writings on Music to c. 1703: A Set of Analytic Indexes. Roger North , Janet D. Hine , Mary Chan , Jamie C. Kassler

<i>Roger North's Cursory Notes of Musicke (c. 1698-1703): A Physical, Psychological and Critical Theory</i>. Roger North , Mary Chan , Jamie C. Kassler<i>Roger North's Writings on Music to c. 1703: A Set of Analytic Indexes</i>. Roger North , Janet D. Hine , Mary Chan , Jamie C. Kassler

Brother Against Brother: Roger North's Life of Dr. John North

A neglected masterpiece in the genre of the brief portrait, Roger North's Life of Dr. John North is remarkable because it employs a unique narrative strategybased on what the subject might have accomplished had he lived longer—and illustrates the tension, present in nearly every life, arising from the conflicting aims of biographer and subject: one seeks to discover what the other has concealed.

The Man of Law in Eighteenth-Century Biography: The Life of Francis North

The Man of Law in Eighteenth-Century Biography: The Life of Francis North HAMILTON E. COCHRANE In his essay "Fictional Representations of the Law in the Eighteenth Century," David Punter studies how novelists of the period "repre­ sent the law, legal characters, and legal processes" in order "to un­ cover a set of attitudes" about the law, crime, and the English legal system.1 It is important to remember, however, that imaginative repre­ sentations of legal characters may be found in factual as well as fic­ tional narratives, in biography as well as the novel. One such repre­ sentation is Roger North's Life of Francis North (1742), the biography of his elder brother, a lawyer, judge, and finally, Lord Chancellor.2 Roger North is not only one of the earliest and most important theorists of biography, he is also one of its most accomplished practitioners, skilled in characterization, the art of presenting a convincing and rounded portrait of a personality through the judicious selection and arrangement of detail. North's version of Francis North's life is of inter­ est not only as history—it documents the life of a Restoration lawyer with enough minute details to satisfy even Samuel Johnson—but also as literature; it is an artful narrative and character sketch in which one may discover a set of attitudes toward a legal character and the law. The biography celebrates a certain kind of hero—the rational and le­ galistic man. At the same time, North's portrait is complete and com­ plex enough to suggest, implicitly at least, the limitations of this brand of heroism. 139 140 / COCHRANE I Just as Johnson realized that the "gradations" of an author's life are from book to book and organized his literary biographies ac­ cordingly,3 Roger North emphasizes the gradations of a seventeenthcentury lawyer's life—from case to case and from preferment to pre­ ferment. Early in the Life Roger explains his organizational method: "It will be hard to lead a thread in good order of time, through his lordship's whole life ... I shall therefore, for distinction sake, break the course of his lordship's life into four stages."4 These four stages are Francis North's youth and study of the law, his practice after being ad­ mitted to the bar, his career as a judge, and his term as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Francis North realized early in life that "his family was not in pos­ ture to sustain any of the brothers" and that it therefore "concerned him in the last degree to make the best of his profession" (1:18). He showed no special interest in the law; he was simply "designed" for the profession by his father. He did not find the study of the law pleas­ ant. "I have heard him say more than once," Roger writes, "that, if he had been sure of a hundred pounds a year to live on, he had never been a lawyer" (1:18). Yet he applied himself diligently, knowing that if he were to succeed in the world, it would have to be by his own labors. Roger tells little about his brother's early schooling, but one an­ ecdote is revealing: "Before he went to Cambridge, the master em­ ployed him to make an alphabetical index of all the verbs neuter; and he did it so completely, that the doctor had it printed with Lilly's gram­ mar, for the proper use of his own school. This, however easy to be done, (being only transcribing out of the dictionary) was commend­ able; because boys ordinarily have not a steady application, and, being required, seldom perform, industriously and neatly, such a task as that" (1:12). This performance, demonstrating diligence rather than brilliance, anticipates the way in which Francis studied the law after being admitted to the Middle Temple. He commonplaced all the right books, observed proceedings at the King's Bench and Common Pleas, notebook and pen in hand, and spent evenings with friends discuss­ ing what he had learned. Studying the law may have been no more agreeable than alphabetizing and transcribing neuter verbs, but Francis worked "industriously...

Roger north's writings on music to C.1703: A set of analytical indexes

Abstract The writings of Roger North on music have attracted attention since the publication of Memoires of Music by Edward Rimbault in 1846, The Musicall Grarnarian by Hilda Andrews in 1925, and Roger North on Music by John Wilson in 1959.1

Mikhail Bakhtin (review)

180 biography Vol. 9, No. 2 for his brother sometimes appears makes his account seem partial, his overall view of his brother, as Mr. Millard concludes, seems true. Mr. Millard's edition of the biography represents a substantial improvement over the earlier published versions. Millard presents an accurate, discretly modernized text, with extensive, well-informed notes. These includes some revealing passages which appeared only in the earlier manuscripts of the life. Millard's introduction is also admirable. It presents the best brief biography of Roger North, a fine essay on the "General Preface," which sets it in the context of eighteenth-century ideas and practices of biography, and a perceptive analysis of North as a biographer. Millard's writing is always lucid and his scholarship thorough. This volume represents an important part of the current reassessment of Roger North, who seems finally to be coming into his own as a biographer and man of letters . In recent years, there have been several significant scholarly editions of his works. John Wilson published Roger North on Music (1959), F. J. M. Korsten edited a collection of North's previously unpublished essays in 1981, and Howard Colvin and John Newman edited Roger North's writings on architecture in the same year. It is to be hoped that Mr. Millard will continue his efforts and give us new editions of the two other biographies, of Francis and Dudley North, and of Roger's autobiographical memoir, "Notes of Me." Robert W. McHenry, Jr. University of Hawaii Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984. pp. xvi + 398; $25.00. Even within our eclectic, uncertain and acutely self-conscious critical community, literary biography remains the one genre which can apparently still claim some kind of authority over its subject. Critical articles and books appear by the hundreds, but the scholarly biography generally holds a place of privilege as the most informed word on a writer's life and works. A number of valid reasons lie behind biography's special status. The sheer amount of time biographers spend researching and writing a life insures that if nothing else, they have thought for a while about their subject. The power of minutiae also has its effect. Despite the proverbial woods-for-the-trees, anyone who knows what Jack London was doing every day of his life develops a kind of intuitive understanding which almost has to pay off critically. Finally, literary biographers often have written as critics about their subject, gaining in the process a reputation solid enough to earn the essential help of various relatives, private collectors and publishers. All these credentials don't rule out the possibility of a dull, sloppy or stupid book, but for the most part, the biographer stands out as the one critic on an author whose judgment can't be ignored. As co-authors oÃ- Mikhail Bakhtin, a biography of the 20th Century Russian intellectual whose writings on language and literature have recently exerted a strong influence on scholars in a variety of disciplines, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist would seem to have all the credentials necessary to write a first-rate biography. Their expertise as translators and Slavic scholars gives them a certain immediate authority over those of us who like Paul de Man "ignore the Russian language" (100), and the many interviews Clark and Holquist conducted with Bakhtin's friends and disciples REVIEWS 181 grant their book that depth of familiarity with its subject which strictly critical works almost by definition lack. Clark, and particularly Holquist, were also well-known Bakhtin scholars long before writing his biography. As editor and co-translator of The Dialogic Imagination, editor of the forthcoming The Architectonics of Answerability and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, and indefatigable champion of Bakhtin's cause in critical introductions and critical essays, Holquist has become America's bestknown authority on the writer he calls "one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century" (xv). And yet, for all Clark's and Holquist's undeniable learning and enthusiasm, Mikhail Bakhtin is a frustrating, uneven, and at times virtually unreadable biography. Part of the problem lies in the Bakhtin phenomenon...

General Preface and Life of Dr John North (review)

Reviews Roger North, General Preface and Life of Dr John North, edited by Peter Millard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Pp. χ + 214. The publication of this edition of Roger North's "General Preface" and his "Life of Dr. John North" is an important event for students of biography and of eighteenth century literature. It contains the first complete edition of North's pioneering "General Preface" and a newly edited version of "Life of Dr. John North." Both works represent valuable additions to our understanding of North's role as one of the most important early biographers in English. North's "General Preface" had never been published at all until James Clifford printed excerpts in Biography as an Art: Selected Criticism, 1560-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 27-37. Clifford's selections stressed those ideas which seemed to anticipate Boswell and Johnson. And indeed North's anticipation of them is remarkable, for he particularly stressed the value of detailed lives of ordinary people; he rejected the notion that "low" details would lack interest or value for readers, or that only persons of great public importance should become the subjects of biography. He also insisted on the importance of the biographer's knowing his subject personally and on a rigid adherence to truth. All of these points may also be found in Johnson's Rambler, No. 60. As revealing as they were, Clifford's selections represent only about 25% of the whole, and there are bountiful rewards in having the complete version. However, because North was a digressive stylist, unable to resist an attractive "excursion" from the topic, the full text does not always represent new material on biography. Sometimes , one finds additional statements which merely reinforce, though in striking ways, the ideas familiar from Clifford's version. For example, we find North further explaining his notions of truth in biography; he knows that truth, if deprived of the proper context, can appear to be mere "romance" "and that pieces or scraps of truth are not in strictness truth, but rather enigmas." Thus North, a successful lawyer, concludes that, "if in biography one would not mislead folks into extravagancies, it is required that the truth be unfolded just as in a legal testimony, whole, sole, and nothing else" (p. 70). REVIEWS 177 Other passages not in Clifford are valuable for providing examples of North's satiric wit, which was often directed at his own time. His witty thrusts are important to understanding North as a biographer, for his impulse to write the lives of his brothers stems partly from his indignation at the treatment they received from their contemporaries. His writings are designed to redress the balance. And North, a staunch Tory, was frequently outraged during the Whig triumph of the early 18th century . He sardonically argues that "antique histories" are irrelevant as guides to modern morals because of changes in manners: "to give one instance, public spirit was the glory of the ancient grandees or heroes; now that is the character of a fool" (p. 63). Some of the most interesting of the "new" passages in the "General Preface" show North's attempts to place his new sort of biography—of private men, with attention to their everyday deeds and their domestic qualities—into the moral and artistic contexts of his age. A stern moralist, North naturally considered the moral effect of the "private " biographies he was advocating upon their readers, and this process led him to make a number of suggestive comparisons. He sees the effect of biography as similar to the educational events of travel, "in which method all the good that is gathered is historical," but unlike travel, biographies avoid the evils of "vicious company"—those "scoundrels and hang-bys that are leaguer [in seige] in every place, like spiders watching to seize upon raw gentlemen who come near their web" (p. 57). Unlike them, North maintains, "Books are always friendly, because they are not calculated to anyone 's particular humour, to meet with his foible, as rascally company, with their flatteries and treacherous insinuations" (pp. 57-59). North seeks to establish the value of biography by associating it with this ancient and popular...

The 'Long Gallery': Its Origins, Development, Use and Decoration

’But first I shall discourse somewhat of that noble accomplishment to an house, a gallery’. Roger North In the public eye the long gallery is a popular, often spectacular feature of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses and as such has been exclaimed at, described, measured, praised or criticized by generations of visitors. Considering this, and the obvious importance of the room in its period — noted and discussed by Gotch as long ago as 1901 — it is surprising that until Howard Colvin wrote his introductory chapter to Volume IV of the History of the King’s Works almost no enquiry had been made into its architectural or social origins and development. In his recent book, Renaissance Paris, David Thompson remarks that ‘the evolution of the gallery in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is a favourite matter for argument among architectural historians’, a comment which may apply to continental galleries and historians but not, generally, to their English counterparts. So that, whilst continental galleries of the Renaissance and seventeenth century have often been discussed and analysed, especially in terms of their classical prototypes and their sophisticated, frequently highly programmatic decorations, the English gallery has been neglected. Yet the English had a particular genius for galleries of varied design which, in response to practical architectural considerations, they incorporated into their house-plans with an originality and ingenuity seldom matched abroad (Figs 1–3).

General Preface &amp; Life of Dr. John North by Roger North

General Preface &amp; Life of Dr. John North by Roger North

Roger North (1651-1734) Virtuoso and Essayist: A Study of His Life and Ideas, Followed by an Annotated Edition of a Selection of His Unpublished Essays

Roger North (1651-1734) Virtuoso and Essayist: A Study of His Life and Ideas, Followed by an Annotated Edition of a Selection of His Unpublished Essays

Hovels or Helms: Some Further Evidence from the Seventeenth Century:

AbstractA clear description of the appearance and regional distribution of the hovel is given by Roger North in his MS 'Of Building' written in about 1698. In the west and north of England hovels were a preferred alternative to the storage of crops in barns. In stone areas the term was used to describe a rick raised off the ground on staddle stones. However in the Midlands a hovel was a properly framed timber structure standing some 15 feet high designed to carry a thatched rick on top and which provided open storage for carts and other implements below. Both types of hovel were illustrated by North in marginal drawings which are reproduced here. North also provides proof for the former existence in England of the Dutch Barn with an adjustable roof used for storage of hay.

Howard Colvin ed., Of Building. Roger North's Writings on Architecture; Hermann Muthesius, The English House

Howard Colvin ed., Of Building. Roger North's Writings on Architecture; Hermann Muthesius, The English House