In both 1715 and 1745 there was a major military challenge in Britain to the thrones of George I and George II, posed by Jacobite supporters of the exiled Stuart claimant. This book examines the responses of those loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty, whose efforts have been ignored or disparaged compared to the military perspective or that of the Jacobites. These efforts included those of the clergy who gave loyalist sermons, accompanied the volunteer forces against the Jacobites and even stood up to the Jacobite forces in person. The lords lieutenant organized militia and volunteer forces to support the status quo. Official bodies, such as the corporations, parishes, quarter sessions and sheriffs, organized events to celebrate loyalist occasions and dealt with local Jacobite sympathisers. The press, both national and regional, was uniformly loyal. Finally, both the middling and common people acted, often violently, against those thought to be hostile towards the status quo. The effectiveness of these bodies had limits, but was at times decisive, and showed that the dynasty was not without popular support in its hours of crisis. This volume is essential reading for all those interested in the Jacobite rebellions and the early English Georgian state, church and society.
Discover the extraordinary diaries of the real Anne Lister: the inspiration for Gentleman Jack and Emma Donoghue's new novel Learned By Heart 'Engaging, revealing, at times simply astonishing' SARAH WATERS '[Anne Lister's] sense of self, and self-awareness, is what makes her modern to us . . . The diaries gave me courage' JEANETTE WINTERSON 'The Lister diaries are the Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history' EMMA DONOGHUE When this volume of Anne Lister's diaries was first published in 1988, it was hailed as a vital piece of lost lesbian history. The editor, Helena Whitbread, had spent years painstakingly researching and transcribing Lister's extensive journals, much of which were written in an elaborate code - what Lister called her 'crypthand', which allowed her to record her life in intimate, and at times, explicit, detail. Until then, Anne Lister's lesbianism had been supressed or hinted at; this was the first time her story had been told. Anne Lister defied the role of nineteenth century womanhood: she was bold, fiercely independent, a landowner, industrialist, traveller and lesbian - a woman who lived her life on her own terms. These diaries include the years 1816-1824. The second volume, continuing Anne's story, THE SECRET DIARIES OF MISS ANNE LISTER: NO PRIEST BUT LOVE, is now available.
Reconstructs the distinctive relationship between the house and masculinity in the eighteenth century; adds a missing piece to the history of the home, uncovering the hopes and fears men had for their homes and families. Reveals how the public identity of men has always depended, to a considerable extent, upon the roles they performed within doors.
This book charts the history of gin from its arrival in England in the sixteenth century to the present day. In doing so it uses a range of perspectives: economic, social, cultural and political to give a rounded picture of how the spirit developed in the way it did over some 400 years. It looks at how gin’s popularity has ebbed and flowed over the centuries among different groups in society. It is therefore concerned with the drinkers of gin and why they chose it and at the meanings which they attached to its consumption. Gin was particularly popular with women and the spirit is often associated with them, in phrases like Mother’s Ruin. This also alerts us to the fact that gin has often had a bad press, never more so than in the infamous Gin Craze of the first half of the eighteenth century, so vividly depicted in Hogarth’s Gin Lane. The book attempts to tell something of the real history of gin beneath the frequent condemnation. It ends with the resurgence of gin’s popularity with the emergence of so-called designer gins in the twenty-first century.
The eighteenth-century English game laws have long been synonymous with petty tyranny. By imposing a property qualification on sportsmen, they effectively denied all but country gentlemen the right to take game or even to possess a gun. Those who challenged the gentry's monopoly were fined or imprisoned, usually after only a summary hearing by the local justice of the peace. In the early nineteenth century, it was claimed that one out of every four inmates in England's prisons was an offender against the game laws. Bitterly denounced at the time, they have continued to be condemned by historians as arbitrary, savage and unjust. This book is the first full scholarly examination of the English game laws. Based on material drawn from over two dozen archives - including judicial records, estate correspondence and personal diaries - it attempts to explain what the laws actually were, why they were passed, how they were enforced and why they were eventually repealed. The picture which emerges from this investigation challenges the conventional wisdom about the game laws in a number of important respects.
The essays in this collection consider the diaries And journals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Diaries and journals took many forms -depending on the occupation, gender, social status, and religious commitment of the writer. They ranged in their forms from brief notes. Related to family business, and national events In preprinted almanacs or the pages of a family Bible, to examinations of spiritual and material States in books dedicated to that purpose. Both Domestic and foreign travel afforded women And men reasons for keeping a diary, and these Varied from highly scientific accounts to more. Personal considerations of the pleasures and discomforts of travel Generically, the diary is situated uneasily, yet fascinatingly between literature and history. Once considered as a pure form of unstructured personal truth telling, the diary is now recognized as a form of writing created by historic conditions, governed by cultural imperatives, and based on literary models, and therefore reflects powerfully on its historical moments and the relationship between life as lived and life as represented in texts.
In this book Linda Colley explores the fate of the tory party which has dominated both Parliament and the constituencies throughout of the reigns of William III and Anne.