The Essex village of Earls Colne boasts one of the most comprehensive collections of historical documents in Britain, and has been the subject of an intensive and ongoing research project to collate and computerise the surviving records. As such, Earls Colne is undoubtedly one of the most studied parishes in England. Yet whilst much is now known about the village and its inhabitants, little work has been done on the social relationships that bound the community together within its mental and physical landscape. As such, scholars will welcome Dr MacKinnon’s investigation into the social, political and cultural world of early modern England as represented by Earls Colne. The book provides a fresh approach to the study of the landscape of a seventeenth-century village by focussing on the relationships between political power and cultural artefacts. It examines how private, public and communal spaces within society were generated, gendered and governed, and how this was recorded and perpetuated in the records, names, and monuments of the parish and surrounding landscape. Yet whilst the ’elites’ tried to represent a select social landscape through their control of the local records and documents, these attempts were always counterbalanced by the less powerful members of the community who occupied and contested these spaces. By reconstructing the dynamics of Earls Colne through a careful reading and cross-referencing of the surviving documents, buildings and place names, this book offers a fascinating insight into how the sights and sounds of early modern society were imbued with the social relations of parish politics. As well as deepening our understanding of Earls Colne itself, the book offers historians the potential to revisit other local studies from a fresh perspective.

The Experience of Neighbourhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe contributes to nascent debates on concepts of neighbourliness and belonging, exploring the operation of the pre-modern neighbourhood in social practice. Formal administrative units, such as the manor and the parish, have been the object of much scholarly attention yet the experience and limits of neighbourhood remain understudied. Building on recent advances in the histories of emotions and material culture, this volume explores a variety of themes on residential proximity, from its social, cultural and religious implications to material and economic perspectives. Contributors also investigate the linguistic categories attached to neighbours and neighbourhood, tracing their meaning and use in a variety of settings to understand the ways that language conditioned the relationships it described. Together they contribute to a more socially and experientially grounded understanding of neighbourly experience in pre-modern Europe.

While grief is suffered in all cultures, it is expressed differently all over the world in accordance with local customs and beliefs. Music has been associated with the healing of grief for many centuries, with Homer prescribing music as an antidote to sorrow as early as the 7th Century BC. The changing role of music in expressions of grief and mourning throughout history and in different cultures reflects the changing attitudes of society towards life and death itself. This volume investigates the role of music in mourning rituals across time and culture, discussing the subject from the multiple perspectives of music history, music psychology, ethnomusicology and music therapy.

For a number of years scholars who are concerned with issues of poverty and the poor have turned away from the study of charity and poor relief, in order to search for a view of the life of the poor from the point of view of the poor themselves. Great studies have been conducted using a variety of records, resulting in seminal works that have enriched our understanding of pauper experiences and the influence and impact of poverty on societies. If we return our gaze to ’charity’ with the benefit of those studies' questions, approaches, sources and findings, what might we see differently about how charity was experienced as a concept and in practice, at both community and personal levels? In this collection, contributors explore the experience of charity towards the poor, considering it in spiritual, intellectual, emotional, personal, social, cultural and material terms. The approach is a comparative one: across different time periods, nations, and faiths. Contributors pay particular attention to the way faith inflected charity in the different national environments of England and France, as Catholicism and Calvinism became outlawed and/or minority faith positions in these respective nations. They ask how different faith and beliefs defined or shaped the act of charity, and explore whether these changed over time even within one faith. The sources used to answer such questions go beyond the textual as contributors analyse a range of additional sources that include the visual, aural, and material.

This case study of two rural parishes in County Durham, England, provides an alternate view on the economic development involved in the transition from medieval to modern, partly explaining England's rise to global economic dominance in the seventeenth century. Coal mining did not come to these parishes until the nineteenth century; these are an example of agrarian expansion. Low population, favourable seigniorial administration, and a commercialised society saw the emergence of large farms on the bishopric of Durham soon after the Black Death; these secure copyhold and leasehold tenures were among the earliest known in England. Individualism developed within a strong parish and village community that encouraged growth while enforcing conformity: tenants had freedom to farm as they wished, within limits. Along with low rents, this allowed for a swift expansion of agricultural production in the sixteenth century as population rose and then as the coal trade expanded rapidly. The prosperity of these men is reflected in their lands, livestock, and consumer goods. Yet not all shared in this prosperity, as the poor and landless increased in number simply by population growth. Through reformation and rebellion, these and other parishes prospered without experiencing severe disruption or destruction. In north-eastern England, agrarian development was an evolution and not a revolution. This study shows England's economic development as a single narrative, woven together from a collection of regional experiences at different times and at different speeds.

A great deal has been written about the acceleration of English agriculture in the early modern period. In the late middle ages it was hard to see that English agriculture was so very different from that of the continent, but by 1750 levels of agricultural productivity in Britain were well ahead of those general in northern Europe. The country had become much more urban and the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture had fallen. Customary modes of behaviour, whilst often bitterly defended, had largely been swept away. Contemporaries were quite clear that a process of improvement had taken place which had seen agriculture reshaped and made much more productive. Exactly what that process was has remained surprisingly obscure. This volume addresses the fundamental notion of improvement in the development of the British landscape from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Contributors present a variety of cases of how improvement, custom and resistance impacted on the local landscape, which includes manorial estates, enclosures, fens, forests and urban commons. Disputes between tenants and landlords, and between neighbouring landlords, over improvement meant that new economic and social identities were forged in the battle between innovation and tradition. The volume also includes an analysis of the role of women as agricultural improvers and a case study of what can happen when radical improvement failed. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of landscape studies, rural and agrarian history, but will also provide a useful context for anybody studying the historical legacy of mankind's exploitation of the environment and its social, economic, legal and political consequences.

The Stuart Age provides an accessible introduction to England's century of civil war and revolution, including the causes of the English Civil War; the nature of the English Revolution; the aims and achievements of Oliver Cromwell; the continuation of religious passion in the politics of Restoration England; and the impact of the Glorious Revolution on Britain. The fifth edition has been thoroughly revised and updated by Peter Gaunt to reflect new work and changing trends in research on the Stuart age. It expands on key areas including the early Stuart economic, religious and social context; key military events and debates surrounding the English Civil War; colonial expansion, foreign policy and overseas wars; and significant developments in Scotland and Ireland. A new opening chapter provides an important overview of current historiographical trends in Stuart history, introducing readers to key recent work on the topic. The Stuart Age is a long-standing favourite of lecturers and students of early modern British history, and this new edition is essential reading for those studying Stuart Britain.

Joan Thirsk is unquestionably the leading English agricultural historian of her generation. In a writing career extending over half a century, she has made an individual and influential contribution to rural history and our understanding of the economic history of early modern England. As she enters her ninth decade (and her sixth decade of writing and publication), her capacity to lead her collegues into new areas of research is undiminished. This volume arises from a conference held in September 2002 to celebrate Joan's eightieth birthday. It addresses a number of characteristic Thirsk preoccupations - a concern for people and their lives; with landscape, region and peculiarity; and a fascination with alternative agriculture. The contributors are drawn from amongst Joan's former students and friends.

In this innovative, micro-historical approach to law, empire and society in India from the Mughal to the colonial period, Nandini Chatterjee explores the dramatic, multi-generational story of a family of Indian landlords negotiating the laws of three empires: Mughal, Maratha and British. This title is also available as Open Access.

English rural society underwent fundamental changes between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries with urbanization, commercialization and industrialization producing new challenges and opportunities for inhabitants of rural communities. However, our understanding of this period has been shaped by the compartmentalization of history into medieval and early-modern specialisms and by the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism and landlord-tenant relations. Inspired by the classic works of Tawney and Postan, this collection of essays examines their relevance to historians today, distinguishing between their contrasting approaches to the pre-industrial economy and exploring the development of agriculture and rural industry; changes in land and property rights; and competition over resources in the English countryside.