This study traces the transition of treason from a personal crime against a monarch to a more modern crime against the impersonal state. Prior to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, English jurists construed the law of treason largely as a personal crime against the monarch. The book reveals how the events of the 1640s challenged pre-existing interpretations and led to a revised understanding of treason as a crime committed against "the state" as an impersonal entity.

During his brief political career, Archibald Campbell, 5th earl of Argyll (1530-73) played a crucial role in the mid-century upheavals in Scottish and British politics. This definitive study on Argyll is a major contribution to Scottish political history, and a significant new contribution to the history of the reign of Mary, Queen of Scots. The study of his career changes significantly the axis of mid-Tudor studies as well as the study of the dynamics of Scottish history. Important European contexts and resonances are also explored.

Using a wide range of legal, administrative and literary sources, this study explores the role of the royal pardon in the exercise and experience of authority in Tudor England. It examines such abstract intangibles as power, legitimacy, and the state by looking at concrete life-and-death decisions of the Tudor monarchs. Drawing upon the historiographies of law and society, political culture, and state formation, mercy is used as a lens through which to examine the nature and limits of participation in the early modern polity.

This book provides a new approach to the history of social conflict, popular politics and plebeian culture. Based on a close study of the Peak Country of Derbyshire c. 1520-1770, it has implications for understandings of class identity, popular culture, riot, custom and social relations. Important insights are offered into early modern social and gender identities, civil war allegiances, the appeal of radical ideas and the making of the English working class. Above all, the book challenges the claim that early modern England was a hierarchical, "pre-class" society.

An interesting interpretation of the arcane world of the early modern legal community.

This book completes the study of the life and political thought of Algernon Sidney (1623-1683), which began with Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677 (1988). In the process it offers a reinterpretation of the major political crisis of Charles II's reign, and of its European and seventeenth-century contexts. Like its predecessor, the book spans the disciplines of intellectual and political history. Its twin focus is the last six years of Sidney's life, which culminated in the famous public drama of his trial and execution for treason in 1683, and in his major political work, the...

Urbanising Britain brings together the work of some of the leading British historical geographers of the younger generation to consider nineteenth-century urbanization as a process, emphasizing the dimensions of class and community. The essays in this collection reflect the increasing use of social science concepts within the field of historical geography, and are organized to follow urbanization from its origins in migration, to its consequences in urban culture and public health. The contributions combine conceptual sophistication with original empirical research to present a series of...

The Common Peace traces the attitudes behind the enforcement of the criminal law in early modern England. Focusing on five stages in prosecution (arrest, bail, indictment, conviction and sentencing), the book uses a variety of types of sources - court records, biographical information, state papers, legal commentaries, popular and didactic literature - to reconstruct who actually enforced the criminal law and what values they brought to its enforcement. A close study of the courts in eastern Sussex between 1592 and 1640 allows Dr Herrup to show that an amorphous collection of modest property...

Criticism and Compliment examines the poems, plays and masques of the three figures who succeeded Ben Jonson as authors of court entertainments in the England of Charles I. The courtly literature of Caroline England has been dismissed by critics and characterised by historians as propaganda for Charles I's absolutism penned by sycophantic hirelings. Kevin Sharpe questions the assumptions on which these evaluations have been based. Challenging the traditional argument for a polarity between court and country cultures in early Stuart England, he re-reads the plays, poems and masques as primary...

This study of the political attitudes of ordinary Londoners during the reign of Charles II examines not only the manifestations of public opinion - for example, riot and demonstration - but also the manner of its formation - religious experience, economic activity, and exposure to mass political propaganda. Professor Harris shows to be misleading the conventional view, that the whigs enjoyed the support of the London masses, and the tories were essentially anti-populist. Both sides had public support during the exclusion crisis, and this division stemmed from fundamental religious tensions...