Social Pretensions in Architecture and Ancestry: Hall House, Sawbridge, Warwickshire and the Andrewe Family

1996 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
N. W. Alcock ◽  
C. T. Paul Woodfield

That architecture makes social statements is obvious in grand buildings from Norman castles to country houses. In smaller houses, such statements are often muted by our ignorance of their historical context and their date. This paper examines a small but sophisticated medieval house in which the combination of precise dating and informative documentation surmounts simple architectural analysis, to reveal something of its social importance to the family who built it. In the early nineteenth century, the status of Hall House, Sawbridge, was the lowest possible. It belonged to the Sawbridge Overseers of the Poor and was rented to families receiving parish support; later it became farm labourers' cottages. Most of the stages in the decline of the elegant medieval house to this lowly state can be documented, and links established to the only family in fifteenth-century Sawbridge with pretensions to sophistication. These clues lead to the identification of John Andrewe as the builder of Hall House in 1449, and to the recognition of it as a concrete expression of a family pride that was also being fostered by the invention of a distinguished ancestry.

2002 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ellis

The story of Conrad Martens begins in London in the early nineteenth century, when on 21 March 1801, a third son and fourth and youngest child was born to a merchant of German origins, J. Christopher Heinrich Martens, and his English wife, Rebecca née Turner. The family lived above their premises in the crowded old trading quarter of the city in a street called Crutched Friars, near the present day site of Fenchurch Street Station. ‘Having no taste for mercantile pursuits’, as Conrad Martens put it many years later, all three Martens boys became artists, despite the family's European traditions as merchants going back to the fifteenth century. Influenced by his older brothers, Conrad, at the age of sixteen, became a pupil of the well-known English landscape painter and teacher Anthony Van Dyke Copley Fielding.


1991 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stephen Taylor

“Speenhamland” is a word popularized by late nineteenth-century historians as a derogatory term for the systematic subsidization of laborers' wages by allowances paid from the poor rates. This system was thought to have flourished in southern and agrarian England in the early nineteenth century, the size of the allowances determined by the size of the family and the price of bread. The unwitting “villains” were the Berkshire justices who met at the Pelican Inn, located in a tithing of Speen Parish. Moved by corn dearth and a terrible winter, the justices on May 6, 1795, set in train the fatal hemorrhaging of the Old Poor Law that, in turn, led to the draconian Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.Myth this may largely be, and it has been explored elsewhere; however, no one questions that subsidizing the employed from the poor rates, including allowances in aid of wages, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in this sense that “Speenhamland” is used here, but to suggest a radically different and mainly constructive consequence for British economic and social development.For subsidizing the employed poor, when it took the form of nonresident relief, could function as a kind of “Industrial Speenhamland” (freshly coined), to wit: a system of parochially funded labor migration that promoted a work force for expanding industries. This subsidization could include allowances in aid of wages as well as other welfare benefits in times of sickness and unemployment—all at the expense of the home parish or township, not of the places in which the factories and industrial workshops were located.


1984 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
H.O. Danmole

Before the advent of colonialism, Arabic was widely used in northern Nigeria where Islam had penetrated before the fifteenth century. The jihād of the early nineteenth century in Hausaland led to the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate, the revitalization of Islamic learning, and scholars who kept records in Arabic. Indeed, some local languages such as Hausa and Fulfulde were reduced to writing in Arabic scripts. Consequently, knowledge of Arabic is a crucial tool for the historian working on the history of the caliphate.For Ilorin, a frontier emirate between Hausa and Yorubaland, a few Arabic materials are available as well for the reconstruction of the history of the emirate. One such document is the Ta'līf akhbār al-qurūn min umarā' bilad Ilūrin (“The History of the Emirs of Ilorin”). In 1965 Martin translated, edited, and published the Ta'līf in the Research Bulletin of the Centre for Arabic Documentation at the University of Ibadan as a “New Arabic History of Ilorin.” Since then many scholars have used the Ta'līf in their studies of Ilorin and Yoruba history. Recently Smith has affirmed that the Ta'līf has been relatively neglected. He attempts successfully to reconstruct the chronology of events in Yorubaland, using the Ta'līf along with the Ta'nis al-ahibba' fi dhikr unara' Gwandu mawa al-asfiya', an unpublished work of Dr. Junaid al-Bukhari, Wazīr of Sokoto, and works in English. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information in the Ta'līf by comparing its evidence with that of other primary sources which deal with the history of Ilorin and Yorubaland.


Author(s):  
Steven King

This chapter foregrounds the concept of pauper agency. Using the largest corpus of letters by or about the poor ever assembled, it argues that sickness was the core business of the Old Poor Law by the early nineteenth century. Rather than paupers being simply subject to the whim and treatment of the parish, the chapter argues that they had considerable agency. Despite problems of moral hazard and the idea that sickness could be faked, paupers and officials agreed that ill health and its treatment was an area of acceptable contestation.


2003 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
B.J. Barickman

Since the late 1960s, a growing number of studies have drawn on local manuscript censuses, also known as household or nominal lists, to reshape the historiography of late colonial and early nineteenth-century Brazil. While many of those studies focus on family or household composition, manuscript censuses have also been used to explore topics ranging from proto-industrialization and demographic trends to patterns of slaveholding and the status of women. In working with this documentation, scholars have generally restricted themselves to quantitative analyses; they have seldom devoted much explicit attention to the format of censuses and to the categories found in them. As a result, the ideological assumptions and political concerns that census-takers in late colonial and early nineteenthcentury Brazil brought to bear in enumerating, classifying, and ordering the population have remained largely unexplored topics. To detect those assumptions and concerns, we need to go beyond quantification and to read Brazilian manuscript censuses for the qualitative information they contain. At the very least, reading censuses qualitatively holds out the possibility of raising questions that complement and enhance the findings from the more familiar quantitative studies.


Hawwa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-228
Author(s):  
Kobi Peled

AbstractThis essay focuses on the relationship between form and culture. It demonstrates how architectural evidence can be used in the historical reconstruction of social and cultural processes. In this research, the architectural metamorphosis of the kitchen in the Palestinian Arab society in Israel is outlined from the end of the Ottoman rule to the late twentieth century. Beginning in late nineteenth-century rural Palestine, when preparation of food was an integral part of the agricultural way of life, this essay traces the kitchen's departure from the interior space during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel; its return to the house in the sixties; and the subsequent changes in the design of the kitchen during the last quarter of the previous century. This socio-architectural analysis seeks to examine forms of life in a broad historical context of social, economic, and political transformations, and to carefully draw significant insights about the status of women in the domestic sphere from the architectural history of the kitchen.


1985 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-10
Author(s):  
Stephanie Charlesworth

Many professional people working with families are frustrated by the fact that there is still a marked differentiation made between children of married parents and children of non-married parents in the courts. This division has persisted in spite of legislation to remove the status of illegitimacy and the reasons for this are far from obvious to those who are not lawyers. This paper traces the historical background of this split in jurisdiction between State and Federal Courts (i.e., the Family Court) and concludes that it is based on an anachronistic view of State’s rights which no social group or political party would support today.


2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
WILLIAM D. GODSEY

ABSTRACTIn 1808, an Estate of the lesser nobility of the Lower Austrian diet approved a statute barring from membership persons of Jewish descent in the ‘third degree’ regardless of confession. It is the only documented instance in Europe for the revolutionary era of such a paragraph that, in its rejection of Jewish ancestry in both the paternal and maternal lines, resembled the early modern Spanish statutes of ‘blood purity’ and the twentieth-century Nuremberg laws. The Josephian patent of toleration of 1782 had not allowed Jews to become members of the corporate nobility (the first Jew was only ennobled in 1789), but had relieved some of the worst aspects of discrimination. By the early nineteenth century, the archduchy of Lower Austria (including the imperial capital at Vienna) contained the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident Jewish community in the Hapsburg Monarchy. The statute of 1808 was a reaction to Jewish acculturation to the upper class (including conversion, intermarriage, concessions of property-rights, the existence of salons in which Jews and new Christians mixed with the nobility) that presented a perceived threat to the status of its marginal members (lesser landed nobles, ennobled officialdom, and ennobled professionals). The statute was also a product of the politically and nationally charged atmosphere in Vienna between the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and the renewed war against France (1809). No simple ideological continuum connects the Lower Austrian paragraph to either the early modern Spanish or the late modern Nazi ordinances. But it was the first such statute to take shape in a political context fraught with recognizably late modern concepts of ‘nation’. The statute of 1808 furthermore evidences the continuing fractured nature of public authority and lack of thorough-going state-formation in Austria.


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