Wealth In Britain Research Articles

The Medieval Tournament as Spectacle: Tourneys, Jousts and Pas d’Armes, 1100–1600 ed. by Alan V. Murray and Karen Watts

Reviewed by: The Medieval Tournament as Spectacle: Tourneys, Jousts and Pas d’Armes, 1100–1600 ed. by Alan V. Murray and Karen Watts Jo Conde de Lindquist alan v. murray and karen watts, eds., The Medieval Tournament as Spectacle: Tourneys, Jousts and Pas d’Armes, 1100–1600. Woodbridge, U.K.: The Boydell Press, 2020. Pp. 265. isbn: 978–1–78327–542–7. $99. Alan Murray and Karen Watts present an edition of scholarly articles about tournaments in the Middle Ages. The content focuses on tournaments, weapons, armors, and physical layouts of the fields. In the introduction, bibliography, and analysis on the tactics and ethos of German tournaments, Murray, using literary works, concentrates on German tournaments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Early on, two teams of knights fought in fields to avoid killing or injuring each other without armor and with blunt lances. The objective was to train knights for warfare while earning money, prizes, and fame. Tournaments later included themes such as ‘Arthurian-themed Round Tables and the pas d’armes, which showcased the prowess of individuals through jousting and offered a greater level of entertainment for spectators’ (pp. 42–43). Tournaments offered jousts, melees, and hand-to-hand combat where participants, promoters, and spectators profited from the spectacle. James Titterton proves that a knight’s goal was to distinguish himself above others, gain honorable recognition, have the right to bear arms, and obtain a hereditary coat of arms. Besides martial skills, a knight also needed manners, refinement, modesty, courtesy, and largesse. The knight, as member of a social group, a region, a kingdom, or a national team, could compete for a particular lady. Titterton shows that noblemen like William Marshal, Ulrich von Liechtenstein, Boucicaut, or King Francis I valued their honor above material gain. James Beswick reports that the much-despised Richard II used the patronage of the Smithfield tournament (1390) as a political weapon just like Edward I and Edward III used the tournaments to expand their political hold and solidified their power with the creation of the Order of the Garter (1349). Beswick believes that Richard II used the Smithfield tournament to show ‘domestic and international audiences a [End Page 110] spectacle that demonstrated the power and wealth of England’ (p. 67). Richard’s goal was to show unity in the aftermath of the Peasant Revolt of 1381 and the Wonderful Parliament incident of 1386. Scholarly consensus is that Richard was eager for peace, but Beswick believes that Richard showcased his magnificence and used the white hart device as symbol of loyalty to the king. Ralph Moffat relies on wills, inventories, household payments, and literary texts to present the evolutionary overview of the knight’s armor, weapons, and saddle. He relies on the documents of five prominent members of the court, the Duke of Lancaster, Henry, the chronicler Jean le Bel, the Earl of Salisbury, William Montague, the Dominican friar, John Bromyard, and the bishop of Burgos, Alonso. Moffat also hopes that the appearance of more documents will expand this field of study. To avoid fatal injuries, the lance was modified with the coronel, the grapper, and the vamplate to protect the knight against the opponent’s strikes. The armorers soon added the manifer and polder-mitton to safeguard the arm. The helm was modified according to the type of venue.Marina Viallon addresses the differences between the war saddle, the first tournament saddles, the high saddle, and the low saddles. In early tournaments knights used war saddles. When using a lance, the quick maneuverability of the war saddle endangered the rider and the horse. The war saddle was redesigned with a winged cantle to secure the knight’s hips, provide balance, keep the knight on the horse, and protect vital organs. In Germany, the high saddle appeared in 1360. The knight rode in a standing style, which means that the rider was standing on the stirrups, showing off his physique. This was a cumbersome situation because the knight could not mount the horse without help, and squires had to finish arming the knight while seated on the horse. It became obsolete by 1500. German low saddles, on the other hand, appeared in the mid-fifteenth...

A New Feudalism: Selfish Genes, Great Wealth and the Rise of the Dynastic Family Trust

Today’s record levels of economic inequality are infecting our future as the top 0.01% bequest vast wealth to their descendants. With the death of the Rule Against Perpetuities (RAP), this inequality has the potential to harden social class lines not just for a generation or two but forever. Although it may sound implausible, interviews with estate lawyers serving very high net worth clients reveal that some of the wealthiest tier of testators are already exploiting the RAP’s elimination, along with a tax loophole, to establish dynasty trusts that will financially empower their bloodline as long as it continues. Evolutionary biologists will not be surprised by this finding. Recent work in their field shows a universal and powerful human drive for high status descendants — a drive for “quality” progeny so powerful that it appears to trump the usual desire to maximize quantity of offspring. Coupled with the long history of dynastic family wealth in England, this science suggests that today’s wealthiest testators will utilize powerful modern legal institutions (e.g. well-developed laws of contract and trust; deep and efficient capital markets) to forge a new sort of trust that I dub a Dynastic Family Trusts (DFT). These DFTs will be larded with innovative provisions leveraging a founder’s wealth to maximize descendants’ status for generation after generation. For those fearing the pernicious effects of concentrated wealth on democracy and equal opportunity, the rise of the DFT is alarming. Fortunately there is a very easy fix: simply reinstate the Rule Against Perpetuities. Given a race-to-the-bottom dynamic among the states, national legislation from Congress is necessary.

Susan Rose, The Wealth of England: The Medieval Wool Trade and its Political Importance, 1100–1600. Oxford, Oxbow Books, 2018, 238 pp., £40, 9781785707360 hb

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The Wealth of England: The Medieval Wool Trade and Its Political Importance 1100–1600 by Susan Rose

Reviewed by: The Wealth of England: The Medieval Wool Trade and Its Political Importance 1100–1600 by Susan Rose Sybil M. Jack Rose, Susan, The Wealth of England: The Medieval Wool Trade and Its Political Importance 1100–1600, Oxbow Books, 2017; hardback; pp. 304; b/w and colour illustrations; R.R.P. £40.00; ISBN 9781785707360. Susan Rose has recently published a number of nicely illustrated books, initially on the wine trade and the history of Calais, intended to bring together various aspects of English trade and the sea during the Middle Ages and early modern period. This is a further work in what is effectively a series. Her coverage in all these books can be described as comprehensive and thematic. In The Wealth of England, Rose relies heavily on surviving monastic material to cover the management of sheep farming, including the types of sheep involved, and the size and location of the flocks. She goes on to the role of the Crown and the ways in which it exploited the dependence of other countries on English wool as well as taxes on the product. She concludes with a survey of the behaviour of merchants and clothiers at different periods and the reasons why, towards the end, the English wool trade was in decline. Rose does not, however, attempt to assess the relative importance of the trade of one of the smaller more peripheral countries of Europe compared to that of the wealthier, more sophisticated states, nor does she attempt to set the trade in wool [End Page 233] into the overall English trade in all goods. This is a pity, as to appreciate fully the total wealth of any country it would be necessary to consider how each item of both outgoing and incoming product contributed to the well-being of the land. And yet, to judge the individual importance of one source of state finance, the whole structure of the taxation department including customs and excise would need to be evaluated. This would be a massive research undertaking and Rose understandably confines herself to the one or two contemporary attempts made by royal servants to calculate crown resources. Rose leaves unresolved the reasons why English wool was so highly regarded, avoiding commitment in the long-running debate about the early existence of distinctive sheep breeds despite the increasing evidence that material from archaeology and parchment are making available. In order to link the production of wool to its final use she seeks to draw together aspects of the subject that have elsewhere been treated separately by researchers. Her strength lies in the recounting of specific examples that illuminate the way in which the business was carried on. In some cases these descriptions, such as that of the experiences of the Johnsons in the 1540s, could have usefully been extended, as they reveal all too well the pitfalls of the dealer’s life. Rose confines herself fairly narrowly to trade, treating the manufacturing of cloth in England as a side issue, so that the percentage of the wool produced that was employed locally at any given period remains unclear. The possible level of owling in the period is not discussed. Unfortunately, she does not repeat in the present book material she used in her history of Calais about the structure and role of the merchants of the Staple, which would improve the current reader’s understanding of the political and military role of the institutions involved in managing the English wool trade. She focuses on the long-term official bodies such as the staplers, who claimed a monopoly over the trade, largely ignoring other major players such as the Italian traders who came to Southampton with private royal grants. This means that the role of the local ports in the trading patterns is not examined. The overall result, while she develops some interesting details, is somewhat unbalanced. For instance, she refers in various places to the problems of exchange without fully clarifying what these were and how the system worked. As she fully acknowledges, she has drawn much of her material from the work of T. H. Lloyd, but she restricts herself narrowly to the trade in wool and...

Life path and scientific work by William Petty

The article is devoted to the scientific and practical activities of the prominent representative of the school of political arithmetic W. Petty. He was a well-known English economist, physician, inventor of copying equipment, doctor of physics, professor of astronomy, founder of English classical political economy, statesman, one of the founders of the Royal Society of London.
 In the article the biography of W. Petty is outlined and his role in the formation of scientific statistics is considered. The main works of the scientist such as: “Political arithmetic”, “A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions”, “Verbum Sapienti posthum”, “Political anatomy of Ireland” are analyzed. The views of the scientist on a wide range of socio-economic problems of the time and directions of their solution are considered
 Petty’s contribution to the development of methodological foundations of statistical science is determined. The article emphasizes the historic merit of the scientist in creating the basis of the statistical- economic method of research. The focus was made on W Petty’s application of the methods of collecting, processing, systematization and generalization of statistical information. W Petty first calculated the magnitude of the national wealth of England and Wales and made calculations of the national income, as well as differentiated these concepts and paid attention not only to the monetary form, but also material. In essence, from these calculations we can speak about the emergence of the foundations of the modern system of macroeconomic national accounting.
 It was also a great achievement of W Petty that he identified his main task of studying the laws of social phenomena. He was the first to raise the issue of the necessity of establishing a state statistical service and outline outlined its main activities. His achievements of the scientist concerning forecasting and comparative characteristics of the population of large cities of Europe are also considered.
 The article reflects the thoughts and statements of the descendants of W Petty, well-known researchers in the history of statistics, who highly appreciated the role and contribution of the scientist in the formation of statistical science.

Domesday Book and the transformation of English landed society, 1066–86

AbstractThis article presents the first fruits of a long-term project which aims to identify all the landholders named in Domesday Book, and to build up a picture of English landed society before and after the Norman conquest. The first part describes the project's methods and illustrates them with a selection of short profiles of individuals whose careers add distinctive colour to the emerging picture. The second offers firstly an analysis of the social distribution of landed wealth in England in 1066 and 1086, quantifying the numbers of landholders in different groups defined by the amount of the land assigned to them in Domesday. We then turn to a spatial analysis of landed society, using maps to illustrate the geographical distribution of landholding. In doing so, we offer fresh perspectives on the transformation of English landed society in the aftermath of conquest.

Lifetime Receipt of Inheritances and the Distribution of Wealth in England

AbstractWe investigate the impact of inheritances and gifts received on the distribution of wealth. Whereas previous work has looked only at marketable wealth, we consider broader measures of wealth including state and private pensions. We find that once pension wealth is included, inheritances and gifts no longer have an equalising impact on the distribution of wealth. Without pension wealth, including wealth transfers reduces the Gini coefficient for wealth from 0.57 to 0.52. With pension wealth, the impact is negligible. We argue that this latter effect gives a better indication of the impact of inheritances on the distribution of lifetime income.

Comparing Retirement Wealth Trajectories on Both Sides of the Pond

AbstractWe use comparable data from the US and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households aged 70 and over. We find that in the US assets on average decline gradually with age, while in England older households actually accumulate wealth. These differences appear to be driven largely, though not entirely, by housing wealth: over the period we consider, house price growth drove increases in housing wealth in England that more than offset the slow drawdown of non‐housing wealth. This suggests the illiquid nature of housing is likely to be an important factor in explaining wealth drawdown at older ages. We also consider the potential importance of bequest motives and savings to insure against the risk of medical and long‐term care expenses.

Annuity choices and income drawdown: evidence from the decumulation phase of defined contribution pensions in England.

We provide new empirical evidence on the importance of defined contribution pension wealth in England, and the nature of annuitization decisions taken by older adults who retire with such sources of wealth. Other things equal, financial literacy, and numeracy in particular, are important factors governing individuals' choices over whether to shop around for an annuity as opposed to taking the 'path of least resistance' option and purchasing from their original pension fund provider. This has important policy and welfare implications given that buying an annuity on the open market has significant financial benefits for most people. In the context of the increasing reliance on private provision for retirement, the importance of individuals having the financial literacy to successfully navigate complex financial decisions late in life should not be underestimated.

Comparing Retirement Wealth Trajectories on Both Sides of the Pond

We use comparable data from the US and England to examine similarities and differences in the level and trajectories of assets among households aged 70 and over. We find that in the US assets on average decline gradually with age, while in England older households actually accumulate wealth. These differences appear to be driven largely, though not entirely, by housing wealth: over the period we consider house price growth drove increases in housing wealth in England that more than offset the slow draw down of non-housing wealth. This suggests the illiquid nature of housing is likely to be an important factor in explaining wealth drawdown at older ages. We also consider the potential importance of bequest motives and savings to insure against the risk of medical and long-term care expenses.

Os Lusíadas na tradução de William Julius Mickle: a reencenação de uma translatio studii et imperii

The Lusiad; or, The Discovery of India, a tradução de Os lusíadas de Camões feita pelo poeta escocês William Julius Mickle, publicada na Inglaterra em 1776, fez sucesso em sua época e no século que se seguiu, sendo até hoje a mais lida e citada entre todas as traduções poéticas de Os lusíadas para o inglês. Este artigo procura demonstrar que a tradução de Mickle (e os elementos paratextuais que a acompanham) são uma reencenação da teoria medieval da translatio studii et imperii (a transferência não apenas do poder imperial, mas também do conhecimento e da cultura do leste para o oeste). Mickle adaptou a epopeia camoniana para o público britânico do final do século XVIII, rotulou-a como "A Epopeia do Comércio" e acrescentou paratextos de cunho ideológico. Manipulando o poema original tanto poética quanto ideologicamente, Mickle transformou Os lusíadas em uma narrativa a serviço do Império Britânico e contribuiu, como outros "poetas do comércio" que celebraram o crescimento da riqueza e poder da Grã-Bretanha, para forjar uma identidade poética e cultural para o Império Britânico.

Evaluating empire and confronting colonialism in eighteenth-century Britain

1. 'The principal cornucopia of Great Britain's wealth': the languages of commerce, liberty, security, and maritime supremacy and the celebration of empire 2. Outposts of 'loose vagrant people': the language of alterity in the evaluation of empire 3. 'A fabric at once the dread and wonder of the world': the languages of imperial grandeur, liberty, commerce, humanity, and justice and the American challenge to empire 4. Arenas of 'Asiatic plunder': the languages of humanity and justice and the excesses of empire in India 5. Sites of Creolean despotism: the languages of humanity and justice and the critique of colonial slavery and the African slave trade 6. 'A fruitless, bloody, wasting war': the languages of imperial grandeur. Liberty, humanity, and commerce in the American conflict 7. 'This voraginous gulph of Hibernian dependence': the languages of oppression, corruption, justice, liberty, and humanity and the identification of imperial excesses in Ireland 8. A 'shadow of our former glory'?: The discussion of empire in the wake of American secession 9. Epilogue: 'against every principle of justice, humanity, and whatever is allowed to be right among mankind': standards of humanity and the evaluation of empire.

The “Sticky Sediment” of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity, and the Problem of Wealth in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.

Britain's wealth explosion

Britain's wealth explosion

The Destructiveness of Pre-Industrial Warfare: Political and Technological Determinants

This article is concerned with the demographic impact of warfare in pre-industrial Europe and the consequences of the adoption of firearms from the early 16th century. The scale of warfare and its costs both increased, but the demographic impact depended on rulers’ strategies for meeting or evading these costs, rather than the scale of warfare itself. War-induced mortality was almost entirely due to epidemic disease precipitated by economic and social disruption. The impact was primarily regional, but diseases such as bubonic plague could trigger supraregional crises, as they did in 17th-century Germany. Gunpowder weapons initially reduced military costs, but this trend was reversed as warships and fortifications became more expensive and armies acquired more sophisticated sub-unit organization. Rulers cut their outgoings by using ‘military brokers’ to raise mercenary units who lived off the resources of the war zones, resulting in extreme damage to civilian life and property. As a reaction, highly organized, well-disciplined standing armies with their own supply organizations emerged after 1670. These were much less destructive to civilians but were very expensive to maintain, partly because the new level of organization allowed larger forces to be coordinated effectively. European rulers became increasingly indebted, and in France, the ancien régime collapsed as a result. Its revolutionary successor sustained campaigns of predatory expansion with a military system based on mass conscription. The result was an increase in the scale and destructiveness of warfare, before France succumbed to a hostile coalition financed by the wealth of England’s industrializing economy.

The lay subsidies and the distribution of wealth in medieval England, 1275–1334

This article examines the evidence that between 1275 and 1334 the lay subsidies provide a yardstick with which to measure the English economy. It compares their evidence with the chronological and geographical pattern of wealth obtainable from the Statute Merchant records of debt and concludes that the main discrepancies can be explained by the progressive exclusion from the tax valuations of wool, coin, and credit. Accordingly, from c. 1300 the lay subsidies cannot be used as a guide to the distribution of wealth in England and they can offer only a limited comparison with the wealth revealed by the Tudor subsidies.

A Privileged Pole? Diversity in Women's Pay, Pensions and Wealth in Britain

Is gender on its own becoming redundant in the analysis of employment experiences? There is a growing interest in economic diversity amongst women within the social sciences, with commentators suggesting, firstly, that a polarization in women's labour market experiences is occurring. Secondly, economic diversity amongst women may even be so distinct that a privileged pole is faring substantially better in wage and occupational terms than most men. This article uses data from the Family Resources Survey to explore these two suggestions. It concludes that the success on the labour market that has been achieved by an economically privileged pole amongst women supports the decline in the power of gender to explain variation in occupational patterns and wages, but it is clear that gender (tempered with awareness of the ways that it is cross‐cut by class, ethnicity and other social divisions) remains an invaluable explanatory variable for our understanding of economic security in its fuller sense, not least in the pension positions of women.

Wealth Making in Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Britain: Industry v. Commerce and Finance

This paper refutes the hypothesis put forward by W.D. Rubinstein that a disproportionately large share of Britain's wealth makers were active in commercial and financial trades in London. We use a data set of businessmen active in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and quantitative methods to show that the pattern of wealth holding was much more diverse than supposed by Rubinstein. A large fortune could be made in a variety of regions and occupations. Big industrialists active in the provinces were equally capable of generating wealth similar in size and significance to the City elite. More generally, London was not the centre of wealth making in this period. Neither was there a subordination of industrial and manufacturing to commercial and financial wealth.

The equalizing of wealth in Britain since the Second World War

Journal Article The equalizing of wealth in Britain since the Second World War Get access C Feinstein C Feinstein All Souls College, Oxford, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 12, Issue 1, March 1996, Pages 96–105, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/12.1.96 Published: 01 March 1996

Gregory King's analysis of clerical livings for John Chamberlayne and the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty

This paper places before the reader a document by Gregory King. The document is an analysis of the value of clerical livings in England and Wales and is dated I 5 November I 7 I 0. King prepared the document for the secretary to the governors of the bounty of Queen Anne for the augmentation of the maintenance of the poor clergy. The document is of considerable value for the light that it throws upon the affairs of the bounty in i 71O. The document is also of value as a late example of King's political arithmetic. For these reasons the document deserves to be more widely known by historians. King's work on clerical livings is a piece of political arithmetic. The phrase 'political arithmetic' was in general use in Britain by the early eighteenth century.' The phrase was of seventeenth-century origin, but the idea that statesmen should make wise use of arithmetic was a very old commonplace. The seventeenth-century phrase 'political arithmetic' denoted a conduct of policy by statesmen who took care to know the numbers of people and of wealth.2 The phrase meant the policy itself, the work of statesmen, and not the collection of data. That last was the work of lesser hands. The distinction between policy, on the one hand, and the collection of data, on the other, was important to Gregory King and was reflected in his remark in the present document that policy is not his province, but the distinction is seldom made by later writers. Twentieth-century writers do not usually retain the distinction between policy and discourse. 'Political arithmetic' names now the writing or discourse produced by those who collected data on wealth and population. In this later sense, Gregory King was one of the most important British practitioners of political arithmetic. King was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in i648 and died in London in I 7I 2. He was a herald and government servant. He assisted Robert Harley in a number of capacities in the early I 6gos, and in I 696 King produced for Harley the now famous Natural and political observations on the state and condition of England. This document was an attempt at a comprehensive estimate of the numbers of people and of wealth in England in i 688. King did not publish his work. Some of King's data were