Crimes in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were both committed and judged differently, depending on whether the culprit was male or female. Based on a wide range of primary material, this book follows the journeys of men and women implicated in the capital crimes of shoplifting, pickpocketing and distributing forged banknotes, through their trials and on to death, transportation, imprisonment or even to complete freedom. This study of the English judicial system in London provides a detailed view of its complex workings, with particular attention to the role, and apparently...

Here is a richly detailed account of the relationship between Lollard heresy and orthodox religion before the English Reformation. Robert Lutton examines the pious practices and dispositions of families and individuals in relation to the orthodox institutions of parish, chapel and guild, and the beliefs and activities of Wycliffite heretics. He takes issue with portrayals of orthodox religion as buoyant and harmonious, and demonstrates that late medieval piety was increasingly diverse and the parish community far from stable or unified. By investigating the generation of family wealth and...

This book offers the first regional study of women in thirteenth-century England, making pioneering use of charters, chronicles, government records and some of the earliest manorial court rolls to examine the interaction of gender, status and life-cycle in shaping women's experiences in Lincolnshire. The author investigates the lives of noblewomen, gentlewomen, townswomen, peasant women, criminal women and women religious from a variety of angles. Not only does she consider how far women were partners alongside men, especially within the family, but she also explores whether they might have...

Like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey has been remembered not just as a romantic poet but also as a political apostate. In the 1790s he was fired by enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and was known as a radical and a republican. By the 1820s, however, he was not only the poet laureate, but a fierce conservative who opposed the reform of Church and State. Yet at the same time his reactionary politics were mixed with anxiety about the effects of industrialisation and the growth of poverty, leading some commentators to view him as a precursor of socialism and...

Winner of the Royal Historical Society's 2009 Whitfield Book Prize. George Canning, one of the most charismatic and divisive figures in British political history, was at the centre of Hanoverian politics for nearly four decades. This study looks at how Canning emerged in the years between 1801 and his death in 1827 as the leading exponent of a distinctive form of Liberal Toryism in parliament and in the country at large. In contrast to the majority of works on Canning and his impact of British foreign policy, it concentrates on Canning's domestic career: his emergence from the shadow of Pitt...

'Pentland's work promises to fill a major hole in Scottish historical writing, and to do so in an exciting and innovative way.' COLIN KIDD Awarded the Senior Hume Brown Prize 2010 The passing of the 'Great Reform Act' of 1832 retains a central place in British history. Historical debate, however, has focussed on whether reform represented the end of the ancien regime or a conservative holding action by political elites. Little critical thinking has been devoted to investigating the passage of the three different Reform Acts as a renegotiation of the relationship between England, Scotland and...

Cardinal Bendinello Sauli died in disgrace in 1518, implicated, rightly or wrongly, in a conspiracy to assassinate the then Pope, Leo X. This book, based on extensive archival research in Genoa and Rome, traces Sauli's rise and fall, setting one man's life and career against a background of political turmoil and intrigue, and offering new perspectives on the patronal links which bound pope, cardinals and their family and courtiers so closely together. It plots his elevation to ecclesiastical eminence through the efforts of his family who were financiers to the pope; and it examines his apogee...

From the sixteenth century onwards, medical strategies adopted by the seriously ill and dying changed radically, decade by decade, from the Elizabethan age of astrological medicine to the emergence of the general practitioner in the early eighteenth century. It is this profound revolution, in both medical and religious terms, as whole communities' hopes for physical survival shifted from God to the doctor, that this book charts. Drawing on more than eighteen thousand probate accounts, it identifies massive increases in the consumption of medicines and medical advice by all social groups and...

Two separate legal jurisdictions concerned with family relations held sway in England during the high middle ages: canon law and common law. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe, kinship rules dominated the lives of laymen and laywomen. They determined whom they might marry (decided in the canon law courts) and they determined from whom they might inherit (decided in the common law courts). This book seeks to uncover the association between the two, exploring the ways in which the two legal systems shared ideas about family relationship, where the one jurisdiction - the common law -...

Fruitfully combining approaches from economic history and the cultural history of commerce, this book examines the role of interpersonal trust in underpinning trade, amid the challenges and uncertainties of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. It focuses on the nature of mercantile activity in two parts of Spain: Cadiz in the south, and its trade with Spain's American empire; and Bilbao in the north, and its trade with western and northern Europe. In particular, it explores the processes of trade, trading networks and communications, seeking to understand merchant behaviour, especially the...