A Lost Frontier Revealed
A Lost Frontier Revealed

Author: Alan Fox

Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9781902806976

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A traveller through the length and breadth of England is soon aware of cultural differences, some of which are clearly visible in the landscape. The eminent English historian Charles Phythian-Adams has put forth that England, through much of the last millennium, could be divided into regional societies, which broadly coincided with groups of pre-1974 counties. These shire assemblages in turn lay largely within the major river drainage systems of the country. In this unusual study Alan Fox tests for, and establishes, the presence of an informal frontier between two of the proposed societies astride the Leicestershire-Lincolnshire border, which lies on the watershed between the Trent and Witham drainage basins. The evidence presented suggests a strong case for a cultural frontier zone, which is announced by a largely empty landscape astride the border between the contrasting settlement patterns of these neighbouring counties.

Tales from the Big House: Normanby Hall
Tales from the Big House: Normanby Hall

Author: Stephen Wade

Publisher: Pen and Sword

Published: 2017-06-30

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1473893410

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Tales from the Big House: Normanby Hall tells the story of a place known perhaps today mainly as the home where Samantha Cameron grew up, but historically it has been the seat of the Sheffield family, whose most famous member was arguably the Duke of Buckingham in the seventeenth century. As with most country houses, the Hall was used as a military hospital in the Great War, and in the Second World War there were military personnel based there again. It stands just a few miles from the great steelworks on the Brigg Road, which have always defined Scunthorpe, so it played its part in the history of steel-making also.The book includes biographies of the famous but also tells of the lives of the ordinary people who kept the house and the estate going, from the gamekeepers to the gardeners, and the cooks to the stable hands. All this is set against the social background through the centuries of its existence, up to the sale of the Hall to Scunthorpe Borough Council in 1964. The lives familiar to us today from Downton Abbey and similar family sagas are at the heart of Stephen Wades history. But along the way, the reader will meet such characters as Sir Berkeley Sheffield, model railway enthusiast, Walter Brierley, architect, Thomas Sumpter, the schoolmaster, John Fletcher, machine-maker, and perhaps most charismatically of all, Lady Arthur Grosvenor, an expert on gypsy caravans.

Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832
Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832

Author: Robert G. Ingram

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1351904639

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Through a series of studies focusing on individuals, this volume highlights the continued importance of religion and religious identity on British life throughout the long eighteenth century. From the Puritan divine and scholar Roger Morrice, active at the beginning of the period, to Dean Shipley who died in the reign of George IV, the individuals chosen chart a shifting world of enlightenment and revolution whilst simultaneously reaffirming the tremendous influence that religion continued to bring to bear. For, whilst religion has long enjoyed a central role in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British history, scholars of religion in the eighteenth century have often felt compelled to prove their subject's worth. Sitting uneasily at the juncture between the early modern and modern worlds, the eighteenth century has perhaps provided historians with an all-too-convenient peg on which to hang the origins of a secular society, in which religion takes a back-seat to politics, science and economics. Yet, as this study makes clear, in spite of the undoubted innovations and developments of this period, religion continued to be a prime factor in shaping society and culture. By exploring important connections between religion, politics and identity, and asking broad questions about the character of religion in Britain, the contributions put into context many of the big issues of the day. From the beliefs of the Jacobite rebels, to the notions of liberty and toleration, to the attitudes to the French Wars, the book makes an unambiguous and forceful statement about the centrality of religion to any proper understanding of British public life between the Restoration and the Reform Bill.