Settlement In Britain Research Articles

Ritual and rationality: some problems of interpretation in European archaeology

This paper argues that the conception of ritual employed in both archaeology and anthropology is a product of post-Enlightenment rationalism. Because it does not meet modern western criteria for practical action, ritual is frequently described as non-functional and irrational; furthermore, this designation is employed as the primary way of identifying ritual archaeologically. However, this evaluation of ritual action must be questioned. Contemporary modes of categorizing human practice are not untainted by socio-political interest but enable the reproduction of certain forms of power. It is argued that many other societies do not distinguish ritual from secular action. In fact, what anthropologists identify as ritual is generally considered practical and effective action by its practitioners. This is because different conceptions of instrumentality and causation inform such activities. For archaeologists, use of the concept of ritual has resulted in a serious misapprehension of prehistoric rationality such that ‘secular’ activities (for example subsistence practices) are assumed to be governed by a universally-applicable functionalist logic. In order to address this problem, what is required is an approach that explores the essential difference between prehistoric rationality and our own notions of what is effective action. A discussion of some finds from middle Bronze Age settlements in southern England will provide a working example of how one might begin to move towards this goal.

J. N. L. Myres (1902–1989)

The following conversation with Dr J. N. L. Myres was conducted in July 1974. Myres was Bodley's Librarian from 1947 to 1965, President of the Society of Antiquaries since 1970, Librarian of Christ Church, Oxford, 1937–1947, Chairman of SCONUL for three years, and President of the Library Association in 1963. He supervised excavations at Caerleon, Colchester, and Winchester, and his publications included Roman Britain and the English Settlements (1936), and a fundamental study, Anglo-Saxon pottery and the settlement of England (1969).

“The Fishacre Tribe”: the Family Origins of Richard Fishacre OP

The starting point of the enquiry described here was a direct result of discussions at the Fishacre Colloquium. The existence of a Martin de Fishacre who was a witness in the early 1240’s to the Inquisition, now called Testa Nevill was identified. The place-name enquiry to find the Fishacre where Martin lived began with scrutiny of current Ordnance Survey maps and identified three places all with the element, Fishacre, in the name within a few miles of each other in the hundred of Haytor in South Devon. They are Fishacre Barton, a farm, in the parish of Broadhempston; Combefishacre, a string village settlement in a small deep valley about four and a half miles to the east; and Coleton Fishacre, a very small settlement above the cliff top between Kingswear and Brixham. Examination of the publications of the English Place-Name Society showed that there are no other settlements in England and Wales with this unusual element of “fishacre” in the name. This part of South Devon with the streams flowing towards the river Dart on its east bank and the coastal peninsula between Dartmouth and Torbay contains the origin of the name, Fishacre. So far, it is uncertain which place was the first to have the name Fishacre. In the Exon. Domesday Book Combefishacre is recorded as Comba while Coleton Fishacre is recorded as Coletona. Broadhempston is referred to in the Exon Domesday but not Fishacre Barton, which is about two miles southwest of the village.

"Where Religion and Profit Jump Together": Commerce and Piety in Puritan New England

Decrying the declension of his day, Eleazar Mather urged his auditors to recall the purity of the first generation of New England settlement when there was Less Trading, Buying, Selling, but more Praying, more watching over our own hearts, more close walking.' Historians of Puritan New England tend to take such jeremiads at face value, ascribing a decline in spiritual fervor after the middle of the seventeenth century to a rising ethos or worldliness. In the last fifteen years, however, this view has been challenged by a small but influential body of scholars. Christine Leigh Heyrman (Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750 [1984]) has shown that the growth of trade and a ethos in Gloucester and Marblehead actually promoted social cohesion and spiritual commitment. John Frederick Martin (Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century [1991]) has demonstrated that the institutional paradigm of Puritan communitarianism, the New England Town, was organized with an eye to speculative and gain. More recently, Stephen Innes has persuasively argued along neo-Weberian lines that Puritanism promoted a fully commercial, and indeed capitalist, social and economic order in New England, albeit one restrained from anti-social excesses by the communitarian notion of stewardship in Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (1995). Mark A. Peterson's intriguing study draws on this scholarship and, in many ways, pulls it together in what appears to be a new commercial paradigm of Puritan development in New England that has far-reaching implications. In his introduction, Peterson proffers two theses. First, rather than a conflict between piety and trade, development actually supported and promoted orthodox religion. Puritan religiosity was an expensive business-what with the cost of clerical salaries, meetinghouses, public

The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton

Focusing on Ireland and the New World -- the two central colonial projects of Elizabethan and Stuart England -- this book explores the emergings of a colonialist consciousness in the writing and political workings of the English Renaissance. The literary production of the period engaged England's settlement of colonies in the New World and its colonial designs in Ireland by offering multiple perspectives in constant collision and negotiation.

Ritual and Rationality: Some Problems of Interpretation in European Archaeology

This paper argues that the conception of ritual employed in both archaeology and anthropology is a product of post-Enlightenment rationalism. Because it does not meet modern western criteria for practical action, ritual is frequently described as non-functional and irrational; furthermore, this designation is employed as the primary way of identifying ritual archaeologically. However, this evaluation of ritual action must be questioned. Contemporary modes of categorizing human practice are not untainted by socio-political interest but enable the reproduction of certain forms of power. It is argued that many other societies do not distinguish ritual from secular action. In fact, what anthropologists identify as ritual is generally considered practical and effective action by its practitioners. This is because different conceptions of instrumentality and causation inform such activities. For archaeologists, use of the concept of ritual has resulted in a serious misapprehension of prehistoric rationality such that ‘secular’ activities (for example subsistence practices) are assumed to be governed by a universally-applicable functionalist logic. In order to address this problem, what is required is an approach that explores the essential difference between prehistoric rationality and our own notions of what is effective action. A discussion of some finds from middle Bronze Age settlements in southern England will provide a working example of how one might begin to move towards this goal.

Black Minority Ethnic Concentration, Segregation and Dispersal in Britain

This paper examines the post-war migration and settlement in Britain of black minority ethnic groups originating from countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the West Indies. The processes underlying the pattern of minority ethnic concentration and segregation over the past four decades are reviewed and provide a framework for interpreting the uneven pattern of deconcentration and dispersal evident over the past 10-15 years. The paper draws on evidence from the labour market and the housing market to argue that there are forces for both minority ethnic inclusion and exclusion from competition for economic rewards and social status in Britain. These forces, it is argued, produce different outcomes for different groups and a variable experience within minority ethnic groups according to generation, gender and class. A picture of fragmented social and spatial change emerges, with those of Indian origin in particular following a different trajectory from other black minority ethnic groups.

Crusoe Among the Maori: Translation and Colonial Acculturation in Victorian New Zealand

Crusoe Among the MaoriTranslation and Colonial Acculturation in Victorian New Zealand Shef Rogers (bio) The role of print as a force for historical change is perhaps most explicit in colonial and missionary uses of printed texts to convey the social, political, and economic ideals of the dominant, literate society. Print culture played a significant role in the establishment of the vast British Empire, particularly in the settlement of Britain’s most distant territory, New Zealand. After an initial contact period during which a written alphabet was developed for the language of the indigenous Maori, printing presses were quickly established in the new colony, and works were published in both English and Maori. Among the early European translators into Maori, pride of place goes to Henry Tacy Kemp, both because he was an exceptionally good translator and because his works formed part of an explicit government policy of Maori acculturation. 1 Kemp’s translations fall into two categories: nonfiction (a medical treatise, language primers, an introduction to capitalism, and a spiritual biography), and fiction (Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim’s Progress). While the distinction between fact and fiction may have mattered more to the colonial Europeans than to their intended readers, the decision to move from one mode to the other reveals alterations in the European perception of Maori. The texts themselves and the historical and social contexts surrounding Kemp’s selection of his texts tell us a great deal about European and Maori attitudes toward print, and they may also suggest why government-sponsored translation was suspended after 1854. [End Page 182] I Henry Tacy Kemp was born in 1821, the son of English missionaries, at Kerikeri. With William Yate in 1834 he sailed to England, where he studied for two to three years, but he returned to New Zealand, in part because of a shortage of funds. 2 By 1837 he was apparently back at Kerikeri helping his father run the family store, 3 and was teaching in the mission school’s first class by June 1838. 4 Sometime around 1842 Kemp accepted a position as Protector of the Aborigines and then served successively as Native Secretary for the South in Wellington and Native Secretary in Auckland. Thereafter he held a few other less prestigious government positions and, due to complex governmental changes, ended his career pensionless after more than twenty-five years of service. He lived the final years of his life near his children in Onehunga, attempting through diligent correspondence to interest the government of the day in a second edition of his translation of The Pilgrim’s Progress. He died in 1901. 5 II Before turning to Kemp’s translations, we should briefly review the quite distinct Pakeha and Maori responses to reading from the period of about 1830–60. 6 The first crucial differentiation is that, until sometime in the mid-1850s, when the number of colonists increased and Maori interest in reading declined, the literacy rate in Maori among Maori was higher than the literacy rate in English among the colonists. 7 Maori ability and desire to read is a constant topic of comment by itinerant missionaries; as B. Y. Ashwell noted in his journal of a visit to the Taupo area in 1841, “There is not a pa [fortified Maori village] I have passed through but some of the natives can read and only one pa in which I did not find a Testament.” 8 Numerous instances attest to the Maori desire for printed material. C. J. Parr, in two important articles on Maori literacy, documents the demand for books and points out that by 1860 the various missionary societies had distributed roughly one printed Bible for every adult Maori. In addition, there were about 110,000 copies of much shorter works in Maori printed locally, ranging from broadside proclamations to sermons to school primers. 9 Why did Maori want all these books? One obvious reason was their novelty value. Books could serve as a status symbol, as George Angas explicitly acknowledged in his 1852 portrait of Tamihana Te Rauparaha, who is shown with his arm resting beside an open book. 10 Angas also wrote in his [End Page 183] Savage Life and Scenes...

Village, hamlet and field: changing medieval settlements in central England

Why is the countryside in some parts of England and Continental Europe dominated by large villages, while in many regions looser groupings of houses in hamlets, or isolated farms, provide the main forms of settlement? The answer lies in the period c.850-1200, when the settlement pattern which still survives was created. This volume sets out to provide explanations of the process behind that great formative movement in the fabric of our culture. Using a combination of archaeological and documentary evidence, the authors show that there is no single, easy reason for the development of villages and hamlets, but that they grew out of a complex combination of social, agricultural and political influences. The text explores the origins and developments of villages, hamlets and farms in the Middle Ages, using the landscape of four East Midland counties as a focus. It provides a basis for understanding early settlement.

Comparing bird bones from Saxon sites: problems of interpretation

Bird bones from Saxon settlements in England provide evidence for considerable exploitation of birds, especially domestic poultry. This paper discusses some of the problems of analysing the relative importance of birds and of the ratio of fowls and geese. Detailed comparison of the results from sites in Southampton suggest that the first questions the faunal analyst should be asking concern methods of recovery and quantification. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Comparing bird bones from Saxon sites: problems of interpretation

Bird bones from Saxon settlements in England provide evidence for considerable exploitation of birds, especially domestic poultry. This paper discusses some of the problems of analysing the relative importance of birds and of the ratio of fowls and geese. Detailed comparison of the results from sites in Southampton suggest that the first questions the faunal analyst should be asking concern methods of recovery and quantification. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American puritanism; The saving remnant: Religion and the settlement of New England

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American puritanism; The saving remnant: Religion and the settlement of New England

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American puritanism; The saving remnant: Religion and the settlement of New England

Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American puritanism; The saving remnant: Religion and the settlement of New England

Multiculturalism and political integration in Birmingham and Bradford

Abstract The article discusses multiculturalism and political integration in Birmingham and Bradford, two cities that are amongst the main urban areas of immigrant settlement in England outside London. The article focuses especially on the subject of ethnic mobilization, and describes for each ethnic community in each of the two cities the type and character of their organizations and their role in multi‐culturalist politics. On the basis of the evidence presented for each city it is concluded that despite some negative indications about the success of multiculturalism, there are also very many positive signs which speak in favour of a limited claim for multiculturalism, as delineating the creation of a political situation in which relatively new ethnic minorities are able to have the protection of a cultural home and the resource of ethnic culture to provide solidarity as they fight for their rights. This limited claim for multiculturalism is far from being incompatible with democracy. It may even serve ...

Almost Chosen People: Oblique Biographies in the American Grain

Few historians are bold enough to go after America's sacred cows in their very own pastures. But Michael Zuckerman is no ordinary historian, and this collection of his essays is no ordinary book. In his effort to remake the meaning of the American tradition, Zuckerman takes the entire sweep of American history for his province. The essays in this collection, including two never before published and a new autobiographical introduction, range from early New England settlements to the hallowed corridors of modern Washington. Among his subjects are Puritans and Southern gentry, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Spock, P. T. Barnum and Ronald Reagan. Collecting scammers and scoundrels, racists and rebels, as well as the purest genius, he writes to capture the unadorned American character. Recognized for his energy, eloquence, and iconoclasm, Zuckerman is known for provoking--and sometimes almost seducing--historians into rethinking their most cherished assumptions about the American past. Now his many fans, and readers of every persuasion, can newly appreciate the distinctive talents of one of America's most powerful social critics.

The Uprooted or 'Worlds in Motion': East Anglian founders of New England 1629-1640

The Uprooted or *Worlds in Motion': East Anglian founders of New England 1629-1640 During the seventeenth century somewhere between a third and a half of a million people left Britain and settled overseas. The bulk of these emigrants went to Ireland, the West Indies and North America. In the long run, this amazing diaspora of English-speaking people must rank alongside the domestic political, social and economic developments within the realm as a crucial, though often neglected, event in early-modern English history.1 This essay is concerned with the contribution of one English region, the Greater East Anglian counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire (the heartland of the Parliamentary Eastern Association of the 1640s) to one aspect of the British diaspora, the justly named 'Great Migration' to N e w England during the 1630s. This decade saw a rising surge of up to 20,000 men, women and children pouring across the North Atlantic and settling towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, N e w Hampshire and Maine. N o other colonial plantation could match such a powerful initial current of emigration. In 1640 the tide stopped abrupUy, never to regain its previous flood. This was in marked contrast to the steady flow of British emigration throughout the century to such colonies as Virginia. Yet such was the social cohesion of most of these N e w England settlements, that their 1700 population, largely replenished by later immigrants, equalled or even outstripped that of Virginia, founded a generation earlier.2 1 M y interest in this topic arose from research in the court records of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, for the latter half of the seventeenth century. The clerk and later magistrate of the county court from 1649 to 1699 was Thomas Danforth of Cambridge, M A . H e had emigrated from Framlingham in eastern Suffolk in 1635 with his father Nicholas Danforth and five siblings, as a devoted follower of Rev. Thomas Shepard, a sufferer from the Laudian persecution of puritan ministers. Investigation of the Danforth family in England revealed that the family home, N e w Street Farm, still survives and that from its chamber windows can be seen the village of Saxtead where Thomas's mother (who died in 1629) had been born and raised. The Danforth family, on the evidence of 1 H. A. Gemery, 'Emigration from the British Isles to the New World', Research in Economic History 5 (1980), 179-231. 2 R . Archer, 'New England Mosaic', William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ) 47 (1990), 477-502. P A R E R G O N ns 11.2, December 1993 2 R. Thompson probate and local records had been resident in the Framlingham neighbourhood since before 1512, and they left behind in the area a tangled web of kinsfolk. This evidence of ancestral longevity in one neighbourhood and of persistent local intermarriage conflicted with the picture of English society that American colonial historians were painting. The opening chapter of Bernard Bailyn's Peopling of British North America, entitled 'Worlds in Motion', typified this portrait. It described early modern Englishmen as restlessly mobile from place to place and suggested that the move across the Atlantic was 'nothing extraordinary' given emigrants' prior rootlessness. Recently Jack Greene depicted the average English parish as a place through which people flowed. This view of N e w Englanders' antecedents has been widely accepted.4 In trying to check on the typicality or atypicality of the Danforth family history, I quickly discovered that little large-scale, systematic research had been done on the English backgrounds and roots of emigrants to N e w England.5 I therefore decided to undertake an inquiry into the personal and ancestral histories of as many members of the Great Migration contingent from the eastern counties as I could find. I set myself three questions: (i) H o w geographically mobile or stable were the prior personal experiences of the emigrants? (ii) H o w long or short a time had their families been settled before emigration in their neighbourhoods (defined as an area ten miles in radius, a small cluster of parishes)? (iii) How, once transported across the Atlantic, did these new arrivals...

Structured Settlements of Damages Awards in Britain and Canada

THIS article examines the recent development of structured settlements in Britain against the longer Canadian experience of such awards of damages for personal injury. The comparison is particularly important given that many of the problems presently encountered in Britain have also been faced in Canada, where solutions have been found to some of the difficulties that can be caused. The Law Commission is presently examining the subject as part of its overall review of damages for personal injury, and it has issued a consultation paper on the subject.' The comparison is therefore particularly timely and apposite. With the assistance of the Canadian Department of External Affairs the author was able to spend several weeks in Canada reviewing the literature,2 interviewing academics, lawyers, insurers and, in particular, the brokers involved.3 The brokers interviewed arrange approximately 85 per cent of the structures in Canada. During the past few years the author

Caste — A Personal Perspective

The author, a member of the Dalit caste of Chamars, describes and analyses his own experience of caste. He recalls that a sense of his own low caste identity was impressed upon him at a very early age, especially at school. Yet the practice of the high castes was not always consistent and inflexible – a low caste person who has influence or whose skills are sought after might be offered hypocritical respect. In any case the high caste view of the low castes is not internalised by the latter, especially those who have been influenced by the modern Dalit movement. Caste consciousness and behaviour pervades all communities in India in some form; it is not a monopoly of Hindus. When the author came to Britain at an early age he was initially more concerned by the effects of racism, but soon found that castism was as strong among Indians living in Britain as in India. This is not always made explicit, but most Asian organisations are in fact caste-based. If anything, this castism is stronger than it was in the early days of Indian settlement in Britain when migrants were more inclined to share facilities with each other. Even those who did not practise caste openly effectively support the institution by marginalising the issue of caste intellectually and politically. The only explanatory model which can make sense of the contradictions in Indian society is a model of groups with conflicting interests which however survives because of the capacity of the thin cement of Brahminism to hide the rifts in the structure.

“A for Abolition”: Hawthorne's Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery

In his 1862 essay Chiefly about War-Matters Hawthorne, in the guise of Man, devotes as much of his attention to the plight of poor Southern whites as he does to the immediate motive for war: the condition of enslaved blacks. In fact, he writes that [t]he present war is so well justified by no other consideration as by the probability that it will free this class of Southern whites from a thraldom in which they scarcely begin to be responsible beings.1 The Civil War is represented as a sign of the imminent regeneration of the entire brutalized Southern race and, further, as ushering in the long-promised age of genuine American democracy. This essay, in which Hawthorne's sentiments are so deeply buried beneath layers of irony, signifies unambiguously, if nothing else, the pervasiveness of a pro-slavery mentality that has little to do with the geographical division of North and South. His Peaceable Man takes pains to establish the historical status of American slavery as a phenomenon of very long standing and so makes us privy to historical circumstance, known to a few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way. From the first settlement of New England, alternative destinies have been foreshadowed for the New World: in contrast to the Cittie upon a Hill which Puritan leaders interpreted as the glorious destiny of their experiment, ominous tokens of human depravity have suggested an American destiny that is no more than a repetition of Europe's mistakes. Hawthorne uses the vocabulary of typology to stress the historical determination of these alternative visions of national identity and to underline the inescapable nature of the consequences that follow from the choice between them. Together with his concern over the psychological enslavement of white Americans by the ideology of slavery, this passage sets out Hawthorne's attitude towards slavery as a national evil which demands a national penance.

Ethnicity Constructed and Reconstructed: the role of Sikh women in cultural elaboration and educational decision‐making in Britain

Abstract The paper deals with the increased consciousness of the British Sikhs of their ethnicity as defined through their religious and cultural values—which have gone through a process of effervescence with increased settlement in Britain and especially after the army action at the Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984. The thrust of the paper is that the construction of Sikh identities is not based on a single premise and a simple process, but that identities are formulated continuously in a process of negotiation with a number of economic and political forces that shift over time and space. In particular, the focus is on the role of Sikh women in the re‐establishment of sikh cultural and religious values, and in the elaboration of certain facets of them on the British scene, as a result of Sikh women's entry into the waged labour market and increased command over economic resources since migration. The paper explores Sikh educational beliefs which have their roots in an egalitarian religious background that exercised a considerable impact in shaping them. They do not remain static but change in response to the socio‐economic forces in which they are situated, in concert with the cultural patterns from which they emanate, and which further interact with the structural forces operative in the British economy and society.