scholarly journals ‘That memorable parliament’: medieval history in parliamentarian polemic, 1641–42

2018 ◽  
pp. 194-210
Author(s):  
Jason Peacey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
Important Shift

This essay examines how England’s medieval parliamentary history – from Henry III to Henry IV – was deployed for polemical purposes in the months surrounding the outbreak of the Civil Wars. In particular, the aim is to both acknowledge and move beyond the ‘baronial context’ of the English Civil Wars, in which reflections on medieval history were used to justify a form of ‘parliamentarian’ rhetoric that afforded the peerage a decisive role. By examining a range of neglected popular pamphlets that appeared in print during the months leading up to conflict, the essay demonstrates instead how evidence relating to the fourteenth century began to be used to reflect on parliamentary power and on the House of Commons, and to discuss the possibility of deposing and executing ‘unprofitable’ kings and of electing and binding their successors. Attention is drawn to an important shift in parliamentarian rhetoric regarding the king and parliament. It is argued that the treatment of medieval parliaments reveals incipient political radicalism in the opening weeks and months of the Civil Wars.

PARLIAMENT AND THE CROWN JEWELS IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION, 1641–1644

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-835
Author(s):  
JACK DAVID SARGEANT
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
And Control

AbstractThis article argues that parliamentary debates over the access to and control of the crown jewels from 1641 to 1644 were intrinsic to the emergence and proliferation of revolutionary ideas about political sovereignty in the earliest stages of the English Civil Wars. In combining the methodologies of parliamentary history with theoretical scholarship on the material foundations of power, it demonstrates that shifting attitudes toward the royal regalia were indicative of more general developments in parliamentary thinking on the origins and limits of monarchical authority. In so doing, it contributes to recent scholarship on the problem of ‘ideological escalation’ at Westminster, demonstrating how quickly an initially radical proposal for access to the crown jewels became sufficiently popular in the House of Commons to authorize the melting down of the royal regalia only a year later. By emphasizing the centrality of the crown jewels to ongoing debates over the ‘ancient constitution’, it suggests that their destruction was understood as a step towards the abolition of monarchy per se.

John Redmond and federalism in 1910

2001 ◽  
Vol 32 (127) ◽  
pp. 343-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Court Proceedings ◽  
Weekly Journal ◽  
Political Radicalism

In early August 1910 readers of Reynolds’s Newspaper, a radical weekly journal noted as much for its detailed coverage of divorce court proceedings as for its political radicalism (and in 1911 one of the ‘immoral’ English Sunday papers targeted by Irish ‘vigilance committees’), may have perused the weekly political column written by T.P. O’Connor. ‘T.P.’, the M.P. for Liverpool Scotland, was anything but a disinterested columnist, and with John Redmond, John Dillon and Joseph Devlin formed the inner leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party and Ireland’s nationalist movement.Throughout the political crisis of early 1910 O’Connor had been the main London-based conduit for communications between the Irish Party and Asquith’s cabinet, and in particular Lloyd George and the Liberal chief whip, the Master of Elibank. The outcome of the January 1910 general election, which had given the balance of power in the House of Commons to the Irish nationalists, and John Redmond’s use of that power to force Asquith to act to end the veto powers of the House of Lords over parliamentary legislation, had enhanced both Redmond’s status in Ireland and the importance of home rule as an issue that had to be resolved.

The Duchy of Lancaster Council and Court of Duchy Chamber The Alexander Prize Essay

1941 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 159-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Somerville
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English History ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ex Nihilo ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Prize Essay ◽  
Dividing Line

The origin of that court of equity which sat at Westminster as the court of duchy chamber has prompted more than one guess, but none of the guesses has reached the truth. Their authors, in applying the Lucretian principle ex nihilo nihil fit and by searching for a definite act of creation, have forgotten an equally profound truth so well emphasised in medieval English history, that few of our great institutions were created all at once, or sprang into life completely armed like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus. Most of these writers have seen in Henry IV's accession to the throne a sharp dividing line in the history of the duchy of Lancaster, which in fact it was not. The charter by which Henry IV regulated the status of the duchy in 1399 expressly provided for a continuance of the existing administration.Another factor in obscuring the origin of this court has been a confusion with the chancery court of Lancashire. This chancery was set up by a definite act in the middle of the fourteenth century and revived soon after; in the course of time it acquired an equity jurisdiction similar to that exercised by the royal chancery. But its jurisdiction was, and still is, limited to Lancashire, whereas the court of duchy chamber had a much wider range. This confusion is apparent in legal works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Coke continued the misconception, with the result that even modern writers of repute have been led astray.

scholarly journals The idea of civil war in thirteenth and fourteenth-century - Byzantium

2012 ◽  
pp. 243-256
Author(s):  
Savvas Kyriakidis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Religious Background ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Byzantine Period

This paper discusses thirteenth and fourteenth-century Byzantine perceptions of civil wars, which were a common feature in the late Byzantine period. It investigates how the most important authors of the period understood and defined the idea of civil war. It explores the Byzantine understanding of the differences between military conflicts which were fought between subjects and employees of the emperor and wars the empire fought against its external enemies. In addition, it examines the views the imperial authorities and the authors of the period express about wars against enemies with whom the later Byzantines shared a common cultural, ethnic and religious background.

The Registers of Common Letters of Pope Urban V (1362–1370) and Pope Gregory XI (1370–1378)

2000 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-508
Author(s):  
P. N. R. ZUTSHI
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Medieval History

The importance to scholars of the papal registers and other records in the Vatican Archives as a source for later medieval history scarcely needs to be emphasised. From the thirteenth century onwards, the different series of records proliferated. They begin with registers of outgoing correspondence, known as the Vatican Registers, in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) and financial accounts of the apostolic chamber under Nicholas III (1277–80). For the fourteenth century, there are new series of registers of outgoing letters (the Avignon Registers and the Lateran Registers) and a vast increase in the quantity of surviving records of the apostolic chamber. However, with the increasing abundance of such records, the proportion to have been published diminishes. It is in the fourteenth century that the sheer wealth of the surviving sources (there are, for instance, sixty registers of papal letters from the pontificate of Gregory XI, which lasted seven years and three months) first becomes a serious problem for those pursuing the publication of papal records.

Legislation, Foreign Policy, and the “Proper Business” of the Parliament of 1624

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
Proper Functions ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Parliamentary Politics

A dozen years ago Conrad Russell initiated a major historiographical debate when he rejected the traditional interpretation of seventeenth-century parliamentary history expounded in the classic studies of S. R. Gardiner and Wallace Notestein, whose work on early Stuart parliaments dominated the field for three quarters of a century. According to Russell, Gardiner's and Notestein's conviction that Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were the scene of escalating constitutional conflicts between the Crown and the House of Commons was the result of the two historians' failure to understand either the nature of early Stuart politics or seventeenth-century notions of Parliament's proper functions. Politics in general and parliamentary politics in particular were devoid of ideological content, and the provincial gentry who filled the benches of the House of Commons were as certain as the rest of their countrymen that the “proper business” of Parliament was the passing of bills, not the debating of issues of national or constitutional significance. Russell, of course, did not suggest that the conflicts so crucial to the traditional interpretation were made out of whole cloth, but he did deny that disagreements between Crown and Parliament were due to the emergence of a constitutional opposition. Instead, such disagreements were the inevitable product of the pervasive tension that marked the relationship between the royal government in London and the local communities in the provinces. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Crown's incompetent parliamentary management made it more difficult than usual for local gentlemen to reconcile their obligations to their king with their loyalties to their communities. The result was some remarkably unhappy parliaments, but since no important issue of principle divided parliamentary leaders from privy councilors or officers of state, there could be no organized, ideologically based opposition, no constitutional crisis leading inexorably to civil war.

A Seventeenth-Century ‘General Crisis’ in East Asia?

1990 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Williams S. Atwell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Food Shortages ◽  
Yi Dynasty ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
The Impact

Approximately ten years ago now, several colleagues and I were discussing Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith's then recently-published volume on the ‘Seventeenth-Century Crisis’ when a specialist in Byzantine history told us that in his opinion at least, Parker, Smith, and the others who had contributed to their jointly-edited work had gotten it all wrong. The reallyimportant‘general crisis’ in pre-modern times, he believed, had occurred not in the seventeenth century but rather in the fourteenth. As he went on to discuss the impact of climatic change, food shortages, epidemic disease, monetary fluctuations, and military operations on fourteenth-century Europe and the Middle East, I began to think about some of the great and terrible events that had occurred in East Asian history during that same century: the fall of the Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1330S) and the political turmoil of the Northern and Southern Dynasties (Nambokuchō) period (1336–92) in Japan; the economic and military disasters surrounding the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) in China; and the food shortages, ‘Japanese pirate’ (wakō) raids, and civil wars that paved the way for the founding of the Yi dynasty (1392–1910) in Korea. In subsequent readings I added economic and political strife in fourteenth-century Southeast Asia, the decline of the Delhi Sultanate in India, the collapse of the Ilkhanate (1256–1335) in Persia, and the destructive rise of Timur (1336–1405) in Transoxania. Surely a case could be made, I came to think, for a 'General Crisis of the Fourteenth Century,' one much broader in scope than even our Byzantine specialist had been considering.

The Lives of Painted Bowls at Ancestral Pueblos in East-Central Arizona

2015 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Van Keuren ◽  
Grace E. Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Ancestral Pueblo ◽  
East Central ◽  
Central Arizona ◽  
Important Shift ◽  
Large Corpus

AbstractThe appearance of iconographic-style pottery at fourteenth-century Pueblo villages in east-central Arizona marked an important shift in the decoration of pottery. These polychrome containers were painted with elaborate imagery that contrasts with earlier geometric-style traditions. Remarkably, though the type was circulated and copied throughout the region, we still know very little about how it was used. This paper addresses that issue by analyzing surface abrasions on a large corpus of White Mountain Red Ware whole vessels. Our research not only examines changes in the uses of Ancestral Pueblo ceramics during the late prehispanic period, but underscores the importance of use-alteration studies to interpreting the biographies of ancient objects.

Thomas Arundel and the Baronial Party Under Henry IV

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-149
Author(s):  
John W. Dahmus
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Revolution

In July 1399, the exiled Henry of Lancaster returned to England with the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, and a few followers and successfully wrested the English throne from Richard II. Historians have long debated the events of the revolution of 1399 and Henry's subsequent reign. In the last century Stubbs argued that Henry “had risen by advocating constitutional principles” and had “made the validity of a parliamentary title indispensable to royalty.” Lapsley, on the other hand, claims that it was Henry's followers, not Henry, who promoted parliamentary power; they tried to force a parliamentary title on him, but to no avail. McFarlane agrees with Lapsley that Henry was not inspired by constitutional principles; rather Henry “duped” and “outwitted” his followers in his successful usurpation of the crown.McFarlane goes on to describe a baronial opposition to Henry which was led by Thomas Arundel. In his Cambridge Medieval History article on the Lancastrian kings, he writes: “At the beginning of the new reign he [Thomas Arundel] seemed to stand with the Percies and other noble supporters of the revolution for the preponderance of the baronage in the affairs of the realm.… In Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights this interpretation is somewhat qualified: If we may judge from the speech with which he [Arundel] opened the first Parliament of the new reign he stood for what may be called the traditional baronial theory of government. The government he said, would not be “by the voluntary purpose or singular opinion” of the king alone but by “the advice, counsel and consent” of “the honourable wise and discreet persons of his realm.” This was as much a warning to Henry as a manifesto on his behalf.McFarlane adds that Arundel was “evidently not altogether happy at the way the new king was already behaving.” He and Henry “only gradually … came together.”

Checklist of Holdings of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History

1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-39
Author(s):  
Maija J. Cole
Keyword(s):  
Primary Task ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
Parliamentary History

The Yale Center for Parliamentary History (YCPH) was organized in 1966 by Professor J. H. Hexter to continue the work begun by Professor Wallace Notestein in the study of English Parliamentary History. Aside from the primary task of editing the proceedings in the House of Commons in 1628, the Center, at its inception, undertook to collect and make available to scholars all known accounts (published and unpublished) of the proceedings in the English parliaments from 1558 to 1660, and relevant materials relating to the M.P.s who sat in those parliaments.The YCPH's collection of manuscript materials is composed principally of photographic reproductions: microfilms, photostats, and xeroxes. We are indebted to various English archival repositories for having permitted us to film these materials. There are, however, certain restrictions on their use. The Center has agreed with the archival institutions not to make copies of the photographic reproductions supplied to the YCPH. In accordance with the 1956 Copyright Act scholars must secure permission from the owners of the original manuscripts if they desire to publish in toto or to quote extensively from filmed manuscripts studied at the Center. The situation vis a vis transcripts is somewhat different. In some cases the Center has made transcripts of manuscripts in the course of its editorial work. These transcripts are the property of the YCPH and, with permission, may be quoted in scholarly works, cited as “Transcripts), YCPH.” Certain of these transcripts are also available on loan from the Center (postage and, if necessary, xerox costs to be assumed by the requester). In other cases scholars working elsewhere in the country in Tudor-Stuart history have generously deposited copies of their transcripts for use at the Center. Permission to quote from these transcripts deposited at the Center must be obtained from the individuals who made them.

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