Legal Change, Customary Right, and Social Conflict in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The Origins of the Great Gleaning Case of 1788

1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter King
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Legal Change ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Legal Precedent ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Law Reports

In 1788 the Court of Common Pleas, after lengthy deliberations, came to a judgment in Steel v. Houghton et Uxor, concluding that “no person has, at common law, a right to glean in the harvest field.” Gleaning was of considerable importance to many laboring families in the eighteenth century; therefore, both the provincial and the London-based newspapers reported the 1788 judgment at length, as well as covering the 1786 case of Worlledge v. Manning on which it was partly based. The 1788 case not only stimulated a widespread public debate over the gleaners' rights, but also established an important legal precedent. From 1788 onward, every major legal handbook from Burn's New Law Dictionary of 1792 to the early twentieth-century editions of Wharton's Law Lexicon used it as the standard caselaw reference. It is quoted in a wide variety of law books written for farmers such as Williams's Farmers' Lawyer and Dixon's Law of the Farm, as well as inspiring long footnotes in the post-1788 editions of Blackstone's Commentaries. By 1904, it was being referred to in the law reports as “the great case of gleaning.”

Maritime labour and economic opportunity: Shetlanders and the Dundee Arctic whaling trade during the late nineteenth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-368
Author(s):  
Matthew Ylitalo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Economic Opportunity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shetland Islands ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

From the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, British Arctic whaling vessels called at the Shetland Islands to hire additional crew members. Whalers valued Shetlanders for their boat-handling expertise, and Shetlanders benefitted from earning cash wages. After 1872, local documentation on Shetlanders in Arctic whaling becomes scarcer. This article traces social, economic and environmental factors to contextualise Shetland’s involvement in Arctic whaling during its last decades. It draws information from British merchant marine crew agreements to identify prosopographical characteristics of Shetlanders joining the whalers, and it links this information to other Shetland sources to understand how whaling influenced Shetland’s society and economy. The article also demonstrates the value of using crew agreements to develop alternative perspectives of social, economic and labour histories across a multiscalar range of local, regional and transoceanic histories.

Common Law Confrontations

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (03) ◽  
pp. 763-786
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Common

This symposium essay contends that the image of the common law drawn by the Supreme Court in the Confrontation Clause context is both distorted and incomplete. In particular, the Court and scholars defending originalist positions rely almost entirely on English sources in their reconstruction of the common law basis for the Confrontation Clause, thereby neglecting the diversity of American common laws from the time of the Founding, a diversity that has already been unearthed by a number of legal historians. By drawing on hitherto untapped sources to furnish a bottom-up reconstruction of how testimony was treated in local criminal courts within mid- to late-eighteenth-century New Jersey, this essay demonstrates that, in at least some jurisdictions, the originalist vision of common law did not apply. The common law cannot, therefore, furnish a univocal answer to questions about the original meaning of the Confrontation Clause.

scholarly journals Fantasy Flowers and Mysterious Cities: Winter Carl Hansson and Dalecarlian Folk Art circa 1800

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 169
Author(s):  
Barbro Klein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Folk Art ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Concerns ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Many

During the late eighteenth century, folk art developed in new and intriguing ways in several Scandinavian regions. This essay concentrates on the developments around Lake Siljan in Dalarna, primarily as they were expressed by Winter Carl Hansson, one of the most accomplished of the artists. In his renditions of biblical topics such as the Workers in the Vineyard and the Descent from the Cross, one may observe a skilful blending of religious mystery and mundane life, as well as complex contrasts between floral arrangements and imposing cities. Through his remarkable ability to enhance common features of Dalecarlian folk art, this unschooled artist communicates striking powers of presence. Ultimately, the new artistic energies - in works by Winter Carl and others - must be understood in light of the influence of the many printed texts and images that were then available. Thus, to the extent that a general breakthrough into new cultural and social concerns took place during the late eighteenth century, this is true also of folk art. Furthermore, the folk art that was shaped at this time had a profound impact in the twentieth century, when it came to signify the most appealing aspects of Sweden's national cultural heritage.

Universalizing Dignity in the Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mika LaVaque-Manty
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
United Nations Declaration

This chapter traces some of the conceptual history from the late eighteenth century, when arguments about equal, intrinsic, and universal human dignity became politically important, to the mid-twentieth century, when the idea of universal human dignity was enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The chapter argues that this universalization process primarily took place in the nineteenth century, in political controversies around gender, race, and labor. The chapter argues that a particular Christian conception about the dignity of labor, expressed by Pope Leo XII, helped cement the value of inherent human dignity while at the same time weakening its more radical political potential.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

Lyric Cousins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

Manilamen and seafaring: engaging the maritime world beyond the Spanish realm

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Filomeno V. Aguilar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

AbstractAlthough the Philippines is hardly known for sending out migrants prior to the twentieth century, and even among seafarers only the galleon age is remembered, this article provides evidence of transcontinental maritime movements from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century. These migrants were known in the English-speaking world as Manilamen. Most were seafarers, but some became involved in pearl-shell fishing, while others engaged in mercenary activities. They settled in key ports around the world, their numbers in any one location fluctuating in response to changing circumstances. Despite relocation to distant places, the difficulties of communication, and the impetus toward naturalization, Manilamen seem to have retained some form of identification with the Philippines as homeland, no matter how inchoately imagined.

scholarly journals Salondiplomati og politisk selskabelighed

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 99-124
Author(s):  
Kristine Dyrmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Research ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This article traces the historiography of an elite woman and salonnière from late eighteenth-century Denmark, Charlotte Schimmelmann (1757–1816), arguing that the publication of her letters at the turn of the twentieth century has impacted contemporary historical writing on her salon and elite women’s political agency in Denmark. The article places the case of Charlotte Schimmelmann’s correspondence within the wider context of salon historiography and new diplomatic history, arguing that we must take the international research on not only the eighteenth-century salon, but also aristocratic sociability and new diplomatic history into account in order to understand Charlotte Schimmelmann’s late eighteenth-century sociability. Through examples from a reading of Charlotte Schimmelmann’s and her female circle’s full correspondence, their political and diplomatic involvement is highlighted. Several of these examples have been excluded from the published collection, prompting the second part of the article to investigate how and why the letters presented in the collection were selected for publication. Drawing on material from Louis Bobé’s personal archive, this part of the article uncovers Bobé’s basis for publishing the letters, leading to a discussion of how the publication’s emphasis on literary aspects of elite sociability has contributed to contemporary understandings of their agency.

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