This book is a classic study of a disease which had a profound impact on the history of Tudor and Stuart England. Plague was both a personal affliction and a social calamity, regularly decimating urban populations. Slack vividly describes the stresses which plague imposed on individuals, families, and whole communities, and the ways in which people tried to explain, control, and come to terms with it.

Paul Slack's incisive analysis shows how the English came to believe between 1500 and 1740 that piecemeal improvement was more likely to be achieved than total social reformation. He examines social policy and institutions such as workhouses and hospitals in order to illustrate how contemporaries tried to shape their social and moral environment, and how they defined the notion of welfare'.

This volume is a tribute to Sir Keith Thomas, one of Britain's greatest living historians, by distinguished scholars who have been his students. They describe the changing meanings of civility and civil manners since the sixteenth century, showing how the terms were used with respect to different people--women, the English and Welsh, imperialists, businessmen--and their effects in fields as varied as sexual relations, religion, urban politics, and private life.

A multi-disciplinary analysis of the evolution of water politics and policy by an international team of distinguished experts. Water management in the Middle Ages in Europe, its evolution in the USA, the elaboration of the European Water Framework Directive, the British experience of water management, the over-exploitation of African aquifers, and the evolution of the water situation in Southern Africa are all examined.
This volume underlines the fact that only an integrative and interdisciplinary understanding can lead to genuinely improved water management practices that will not...

First published in 1972, this work in English urban history covers a period which has been called 'the Dark Ages in English Economic History'. The essays range from a discussion of the role of ceremony in the civic life of Coventry at the end of the Middle Ages to the influence of war on London Merchant class at the end of the seventeenth century.

The Poor Law had a profound impact on English society. Designed to reform the poor as much as to relieve poverty, it also shaped institutions of government and determined people's expectations and assumptions about social welfare. The English Poor Law, 1531-1782 provides a concise synthesis of recent scholarly work together with full references, explaining the origins of this unique system of welfare, and showing how it played a central role in English social and political development from the Reformation to the Industrial Revolution.

Rebellion, riot and popular unrest have been the theme of a succession of stimulating and influential articles in Past and Present. This selection shows how the various forms of popular protest in England from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been reinterpreted by modern scholars. Topics range from the great Tudor rebellions of 1536 and 1549 to the urban disorders in London and the food riots of the eighteenth century. Behind this variety, however, there were important continuities and similarities. Gathered in a single volume, the essays show how detailed studies of popular protest...

This collection of essays in English urban history covers a period which has been called 'the Dark Ages in English Economic History', on which it directs a revealing light. The essays range from a discussion of the role of ceremony in the civic life of Coventry at teh end of the Middle Ages to the influence of war on London Merchant class at the end of the seventeenth century. This book was first published in 1972.