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This paper gives a history of the Oxford Ethnography Conference. Over more than three decades, a regular conference of sociologists of education and ethnographers has met and produced a series of academic writings. The paper describes some of the interrelationships between developments that occurred within the conference and external changes to the academic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to contribute to the study of the early twentieth-century English provincial press by examining the ways in which the newspapers in one English town, Wolverhampton, covered the arrest, prosecution and acquittal of a well-known local businessman for the murder of his mistress. It shows that the papers in the town adopted a number of the strategies which are associated most often with the sensationalism of the national, popular press. It suggests therefore that Wolverhampton's newspapers—and possibly provincial newspapers more generally—were prepared to personalise, to denounce and to celebrate in their efforts to remain competitive in the face of the political, technological and commercial challenges which confronted them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In seventeenth-century England, many religiously devout people believed they had an obligation to immediately stifle any sinful thought that entered their minds. As some prominent clerics during the time period recognised, however, the effort to subdue unwelcome thoughts often can increase the thoughts. Indeed, recent cognitive science research bears out the counterintuitive phenomenon that trying to suppress an undesired thought can boomerang. With this in mind, just how effective was the endeavour in seventeenth-century England to purify thoughts? The paper argues that it was frequently counterproductive. The paper also explores a disagreement among mental health professionals, historians, and literary scholars regarding how to interpret the numerous seventeenth-century English autobiographical descriptions of tormenting, uncontrollable sinful thoughts. For instance, were the ungovernable blasphemous thoughts that Pilgrim's Progress author John Bunyan (1628-1688) recounted experiencing the product of a bodily illness equivalent to obsessive-compulsive disorder? The question presents methodological challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memorials of the lay dead in late medieval English churchyards were constructed from perishable materials, with the exhumation and reuse of burial plots suggesting that a timely forgetting of the individual was an accepted part of the commemorative process. From the 13th century onward, remains exhumed from old graves were increasingly redeposited in specific structures known as charnel houses. The collective redeposition of disarticulated skeletal remains in charnels anonymised the deceased, generating mortuary spaces which foregrounded communal rather than individual memory. In this paper, charnelling and its relation to memory in late medieval England is theorised and explored. Following this, early modern developments are investigated, employing the charnel of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, as a central case study. As the country's largest late medieval charnel, its extreme treatment following the Dissolution of the Monasteries renders it a potent example of how religious reform affected mortuary practice during the period. Through the violent ejection of its contained remains and the structure's secular repurposing as a print shop, treatments of the ancestral dead were employed to enact and manifest ideological change. This produced changes in London's mortuary landscape which in turn memorialised the reformatory process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a fundamental aspect of policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers gender and social class in relation to teacher education through an episodic study of the development of adult educational institutions in Huddersfield. It briefly discusses nineteenth-century mechanics' institutes in the town before moving to a consideration of school teacher training college students in the twentieth century, highlighting aspects of the gendered and cultural ethos of teacher training. Local efforts to establish teacher training, and the wartime presence in the town of an evacuated women's teacher training college, provide a prism for the examination of transitions in social attitudes towards teaching as a profession, as do the educational aspirations of local working-class grammar school girls and boys during the 1940s/1950s. The paper then focuses on the establishment in 1963 of a 'new kind' of non-residential teacher training college and, in particular, on its introduction in the late 1960s of part-time provision designed specifically for 'married women'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses how we might access, understand and analyse the sounds of a landscape that are lost to history; unless captured or recorded in some way, the sounds of a landscape disappear as they appear. This paper argues that we can re-enliven such momentary sonics through the practice of resounding. Herein sonic acts are performed, as the landscape is encountered, which attempt to collapse the time between the now and the past in order to conjure imaginative and affective connections to a landscape’s historical freight. The plague village of Eyam in Derbyshire, UK, is practised in this manner and the affective-imaginative rendering of its landscape of loss and heroism is documented. Through a sonic attunement to the village and its environs, the paper argues that resounding offers productive ways of thinking, sensing and listening to a landscape’s past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the distinctiveness of the professional doctorate in education (EdD). To deliver on this aim the paper contextualizes the local and particular EdD by locating it within its wider perspective. First the development of Higher Education (HE) in England is considered. Next the historical development of the EdD is examined. Finally the paper argues that the EdD is distinctive and challenges the university tradition. Moreover the paper begins to provide tentative suggestions to the way in which practitioners and researchers doing the EdD might act as knowledge workers, knowledge producers and work for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of this paper, social pedagogy concerns how a person trained in social pedagogy can take up the role of a trusted and caring adult to help, support and empower troubled and vulnerable pupils to meet the demands they face in their lives so that they are better able to lead fulfilling and satisfying lives and can, in their turn, contribute to the betterment of society. This paper describes the nature of social pedagogy, highlights its origins and practice in mainland Europe, considers some key developments within the current context in England and outlines its implications for pastoral care in schools. There has been a marked growth in social pedagogy as an aspect of professional practice amongst the pastoral care community in England. Its further development will depend on an increasing recognition that pastoral care needs to follow the pupil into the different social settings they inhabit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is a case-study analysis of methylated spirit drinking in England in the 1920s and 1930s, focussing in particular on moral panic about deviant consumption and the development of policy-making. During the interwar years there emerged a statistically minor, but socially significant, culture of drinking methylated spirit - an industrial denatured alcohol - in socio-economically deprived urban communities. In the wake of (often hyperbolic) discourse about the considerable physical damage caused by methylated spirit consumption, and associated concerns about the perceived moral deviancy of drinkers, policy-makers developed a variety of regulatory strategies aimed at curbing consumption. Overall, this paper reveals the complex matrix of legislative, judicial and administrative regulation which framed responses to this widely vilified form of alcohol consumption, and in doing so points to some of the varied pressures and influences which informed harm-reduction policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the socio-political implications of a series of closely spatially and temporally related early medieval cemeteries from England and how they might be read as charting the emergence of both individual communities and of collective supra-local society. The case study is from early post-Roman Britain in a region that during the sixth century AD became the historically documented Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent. Four distinct communities appropriated an earlier burial landscape, arguably by a process of negotiation, reflecting the formation of a small-scale, supra-local society based around a site of occasional gathering. A key notion is that periodic gathering and local stability could be core features of large-scale polity formation. Overall, a case is made for the long-term cohesion of a local territory, reliant on an ancient mode of social organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the origins of trade secrecy law from the beginning of the seventeenth century untilMorisonvMoat(1851), described by theOxford History of the Laws of Englandas ‘foundational’. The paper reveals something of a conundrum. The first part shows that although the prevalence of guild ordinances would have familiarized many with the concept of ‘lawful secrets’, these provisions could no longer be enforced in the guild courts by the late seventeenth century, or within the wider jurisdiction of the courts of the City of London. Instead, as the second half of the paper shows, it was the law courts proper that came to provide succour to those working trade secrets, allowing them to both restrain employees from using secrets for their own benefit and/or to sell secrets to other parties. This was a halting process, but one that had certainly begun prior to Morison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Focuses on topics of discussions on J.P.D. Dunbabin's paper 'Labourers and Farmers in the Late Nineteenth Century--Some Changes,' published in the September 1965 issue of the 'Bulletin for the Society of the Study of Labour History.' Associations between railwaymen and agricultural laborers; Political attitudes of laborers; Advantage derived by Liberals from their educative political work among the laborers.

Since the mid-1990s third-sector professionals and organizations have come under increasing pressure to help enforce restrictive and punitive policies towards refugees and asylum seekers. This paper presents one response, using an empirical case study to develop an Independent Anti-Racist Model for asylum rights organizing. This combines data from a three-year study comparing four organizations in a major city in England and reflections on the author's experience as a member of the case study organization, contextualized in the literature. The paper identifies a related set of features distinguishing this model from other types of organization and the conditions making it possible, and concludes that it offers wider lessons for work with groups in a conflictual relationship with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the history of parent advocacy in the UK on behalf of and with people with learning disabilities since the mid-twentieth century and reflects on the role of the academy in illuminating and documenting its story. It argues that parent advocacy has flourished at times of change and challenge, and has seen a revival since austerity began to bite. In the twenty-first century parent advocacy has mutated into working with, rather than for people with learning disabilities, a development to be welcomed, given the cuts to services, and the impact of 'welfare reform'. This once more united voice is manifested in the launch of Learning Disability England in June 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the contrasts between the pastoral and arable areas within the county of Wiltshire. Starting from consideration of the geology and historical expressions of these contrasts, the implications for the related agricultural practices and the associated buildings are considered. The results from a project to map the county’s farmsteads provide an analysis of the dating, survival and arrangement of farm buildings in Wiltshire. Two case studies are then described, one from the pastoral area and the other from the arable area. The paper provides evidence suggesting that the distinction between the two areas is not as clear-cut as previously indicated and the need for further research is identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance-based management is a recurring and controversial strategy for education reform. This paper examines a nineteenth-century English experiment in paying schools by results and uses concepts from personnel and behavioural economics to understand its decline. Like many recent education reforms, payment-by-results sought to bring schools and teachers under the ‘laws of supply and demand’. The unintended outcomes of the policy, which ultimately led to its end, included narrowing of the curriculum, cheating and manipulation by schoolteachers and managers, and increased risk and uncertainty in the teaching profession. The paper begins by exploring the role of economics principles in the drafting of the policy. It continues to explore how the programme unravelled, with special attention to issues of perverse incentives, teacher motivation, risk, and uncertainty. Building on recent studies of analogous modern experiments in performance-based management, this paper finds important parallels to current policy concerns. The lessons learned address the fundamental relationship between incentives and teacher motivation and the role of economic theory in education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though there is a well-established body of research in the field of teacher professional development, it is characterised by a real dearth of any detailed historical analysis. This paper seeks to address this gap, by offering a new historical analysis of a case study of the evolution of organised teacher professional development in England and Wales during the twentieth century. Its approach is hoped to open up the wider debate and to contribute to a fuller understanding of the basis for those questions and dilemmas about teacher professional development that have long exercised teachers, professional educators and policy-makers – questions which turn on fundamental issues of priorities and purpose, funding, scale of teacher engagement, control and reach. The paper is in three main parts. Firstly, the scope of the case study is outlined with key stages in the evolution of teacher professional development in England and Wales identified. Secondly, four themes from the data which characterised this evolution are discussed. These include the restricted engagement of teachers relative to the whole teacher population; limited funding; the highly centralised control over provision for teacher professional development through Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI); and a highly selective and restrictive access to provision by teachers. It is argued that these key characteristics helped to shape a particular culture and ideology of teacher professional development which was dependent on a select cadre of elite teachers for the dissemination and modelling of what was regarded as good practice, so as to improve their colleagues’ performance – the elite excelled while the majority needed to be saved from mediocrity. The particular ideology underlying this model is conceptualised as one of ‘excellence and salvation’. Finally, it is argued that the key issues identified in this story (the restricted engagement of teachers; limited funding; highly centralised control; and ideologies of excellence) raise important generic questions for the field of teacher professional development more widely as well as framing future historical analysis of teacher professional development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores why leadership, especially senior leadership in British organizations, is persistently nearly always white. The paper contends that beneath the veneer of our apparent commitment to equal opportunities, primitive often unconscious factors operate to ensure that leadership remains white, thus reproducing a racial hierarchy in the workplace. It argues that the barriers to black and minority ethnic people getting appointed to leadership positions in organizations today are largely invisible and are hidden within the psyches of decision makers, the cultures of white organizations, and their combined impact on the confidence of black and minority ethnic staff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1868, an article in the Yorkshire Post about the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum drew attention to Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of mental health care. It was because of this history, it was claimed, that Yorkshiremen had a special interest in the treatment of the insane. The purpose of this paper is to explore critically this assumption in light of the recent work on the Poor Law's relationship with the asylum. The growth and development of two asylums in the neighbouring North and West Ridings of Yorkshire will be compared and contrasted. The first part of the paper offers a brief explanation of Yorkshire's pivotal role in the history of the institutional approach to the problems of mental health and the growth of institutions in the counties. Central to the paper will be an examination of how each county responded to the differing demands on its resources and how this impacted on the nature of care at each institution. Ultimately, this paper aims to show how Poor Law finances contributed significantly to the development of each institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In postwar England, the 'inner city' has loomed large in urban discourse and policy, serving as an important site through which 'race' has been rendered socially and spatially meaningful. Drawing on insights from history, geography and sociology, this paper traces the material and symbolic processes through which the 'inner city' has been the subject and object of socio-political knowledge and action. The article examines what shifting understandings of the 'inner city' and related policy responses reveal about the racialisation of space and bodies, and the role of the state in rationalising and enacting specific urban imaginings and interventions. In historicising dominant conceptions of the 'inner city', we identify three periods revealing key transformations within this formation: firstly, we consider how the idea operated as a spectre, in which the American 'ghetto' was seen as a predictor of 'race relations'; secondly, we contend that during the 1970s and 1980s, the 'inner city' came to be 'territorialised' as a pathological, racialised space subject to particular modes of institutional regulation; finally, we examine the relative fragmentation of the 'inner city' in recent decades, through urban regeneration and changes in the spatialisation of 'race' and ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European volunteer workers have received comparatively little attention in the history of British post-war immigration, with greater coverage given to, for example, demobilised members of the Polish Resettlement Corps. This paper is based upon oral history interviews with a group of European immigrants, predominantly European volunteer workers, and local Lancastrians who started work in the Lancashire cotton industry between 1946 and 1951, and examines perceptions of how they integrated into British life in a variety of domains. The paper emphasises that 'blending-in' was context-dependent, with a sense of being welcomed and fitting-in applying to certain domains and in certain situations but not necessarily in others. It argues that migration fosters particular cultural attitudes and practices amongst both migrants and hosts as social identities are produced and reproduced, changed and challenged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the magnitude of urban-rural differentials in infant mortality in England during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and also compares the timing of decline for a selection of towns of varying size, and their immediate rural hinterlands. Most towns continued to experience short-term fluctuations in infant mortality until the very end of the nineteenth century; however, in some of the adjacent rural communities - where levels of infant mortality were much lower - conditions were sufficiently favourable to allow a continuous decline in infant mortality from at least the 1860s, if not before. The final part of the paper considers the causes of these patterns and their implications for explanations of infant mortality decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the driving forces acting upon the Warwickshire land market between 1284 and 1345, utilizing the feet of fines of this period as its key source. Previous historiographical inquiry has either focused primarily on external factors or else the 'family-land bond', neglecting the concept of individualized property management as an explanation, something this paper seeks to rectify. Firstly the article examines exogenous forces in the form of grain prices to test the popular hypothesis as to whether the land market was 'harvest-sensitive'. Comparative analysis of these prices with land transfers recorded in the fines determines that outside forces played a key role, although this was primarily during periods of economic crisis. The paper then explores the role of the period's most prolifically active individuals, reconstructing their lives through cross-referencing of the feet of fine evidence with other relevant sources. This clearly reveals the powerful influence these property magnates exerted on the land market, often fluctuating according to their personal needs and desires. The result is to build a clear picture of land market dynamics, which draws on both external and internal forces, defining their roles in relation to periods of stability and crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his monumental treatment of class formation inThe Making of the English Working Class(New York: Vintage Books, 1966), E. P. Thompson presented a view of class as a ‘happening’ and attacked the liberal and ‘orthodox’ Marxist views of class as a ‘thing’. This paper argues that Thompson's book was primarily attempting to answer political questions of his own time, and more specifically the question of modern socialism. Exploring the theoretical arguments of class formation that influenced Thompson's oeuvre, the paper will also explore the connections between Thompson and ‘orthodox’ Marxism and challenge those who see Thompson's work as only a counterargument to scholars who treated class merely as an economic structure. For Thompson,The Makingwas not only a historical treatise, but an answer to both ‘Old’ and New Leftists who saw the working class mainly as an economic and cultural phenomenon, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the Waller tomb monument that has an inscription which ostensibly dates it to 1525. The exceptional quality of the work, and its architectural sophistication, suggests close connections to work created in Winchester cathedral, through the patronage of bishop Richard Fox. Through comparative work, this paper proposes the attribution of the Waller monument to Thomas Bertie, the bishop of Winchester's master mason from c. 1515, and makes a case for a revision of the dating of this tomb and the tomb's place in the development of decorative architectural styles in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The secondary school system in England has undergone a radical transformation since 2010 with the rapid expansion of independent academies run by private companies (‘academy trusts’) and funded directly by central government. This paper examines the development of academies and their predecessors, city technology colleges, and explores the extent and nature of continuity and change. It is argued that processes of layering and policy revision, together with austerity measures arising from economic recession, have resulted in a system-wide change with private, non-profit-making companies, funded by central government, rapidly replacing local authorities as the main providers of secondary school education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The thesis of this paper is that collaboration with the Interregnum regimes in the northern counties of England was widespread and varied in form. People utilised far more options in their relations with the regime than the resistance or inertia that historians have usually considered to be their lot. The paper is based on the unpublished York assize depositions covering the counties of Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, and through the qualitative study of these depositions offers a window into acts of collaboration with the republic. It identifies three main types of collaboration which are illustrated in the depositions; those that use the language of loyalty to the republic to influence how a crime is presented; those where an effort at collaboration with policy oversteps the line into criminality; those where a crime is caused by a dispute over republican loyalty. Having considered these collaborative responses which were open to the people, the paper then considers what this suggests about the interaction between the mass populace and national politics more broadly. In particular, it focuses on the way national political issues could influence people’s identities and everyday mental universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a history of Hampshire and Thames Valley (HTV) Circles, an organisation which recruits, trains and supports volunteer members of the public who are formed into small groups meeting weekly to provide support and monitoring of post-conviction sex offenders (Core Members) in the community. It describes the origins of Circles of Support and Accountability in Canada and gives an account of its implementation in the UK and a summary of the findings of the previous study of the first 16 HTV Circles Core Members in 2006 and some discussion about the challenges inherent in evaluating this kind of community-based and volunteer-led intervention. It describes demographic data on 60 Core Members followed-up for an average period of 36.2 months, including offence and sentence category, treatment history and statistically assessed risk of reconviction. It provides evidence of progress by these Core Members across a range of dynamic risk factors, as well as information on sexual reconviction, recall to prison and dropout from Circles. Three case studies provide details of Circles practice in community risk management of sex offenders. The paper discusses proposed areas of further research into Circles work, as well as the development of new techniques for measuring and managing dynamic risk factors displayed by Core Members in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first work to explore the cases of the small number of identifiable Jewish women tried for infanticide at the Central Criminal Court between 1890 and 1918. Although the Jewish population of London (and indeed Britain) was facing increasing anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cases discussed here were treated with equivalent leniency to those of other women charged with newborn child murder and concealment of birth in this period. Despite the very different circumstances of each case, the defendants were able to fit the story of their crime into a highly recognizable script that dovetailed neatly with the dominant discourse of 'the infanticidal' shared by both popular and elite British society. In examining these trials, a forgotten aspect of Jewish metropolitan life is revealed, and new light is thrown on the complicated way in which ethnicity might - or might not - play out in criminal justice proceedings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that English education policy has come full-circle – from the first constitution of a state system of education in 1870 to the beginning of the end of state education in 2010 – and that this circularity can be understood in relation to the reluctant state. That is, in the nineteenth century, the English state hesitantly and slowly moved from a patchwork education system of many providers to a national system locally provided. In the twenty-first century, the English state is moving back towards a patchwork of many providers with enhanced institutional autonomies and marginalising the role of local delivery and coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pollard and Robertson thought that the smaller, northern ‘company town’, in which the employers had greater control over employees and their wage rates, particularly suited the shipbuilding industry. The prosperity of all these towns was greatly affected by the fortunes of the local shipyard and some would have hardly existed at all but for the firms concerned. Employment in Palmers Brothers (later Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Co. Ltd) yard, early pioneers of the vertical integration of iron production and shipbuilding, was central to the spectacular growth of Jarrow, on the southern bank of the Tyne, between 1851 and 1921. Palmers was Britain’s largest shipbuilders by the 1880s, and they specialised in the construction of ships for the Admiralty before and during the First World War. They remained a major firm in the early post-war period yet, by 1933, had failed so badly that the town’s name would become synonymous with industrial decline and distress. Using a wide range of archival sources, the paper examines the factors that made Palmer’s initially so successful and those that were later to bring about its failure as a business and to have such major effects on the town in which they operated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palliative and end-of-life care in England has undergone some remarkable transformations across the course of less than half a century and can be seen as a useful case study with which to understand international trends and challenges. This paper examines some of the long term influences which led to the emergence, for the very first time, of an End-of-Life Care Strategy in England. It revisits the critical contribution of Cicely Saunders to the development of a theoretical framework for palliative care before examining the gradual and as yet incomplete transformation of ‘palliative care’ into ‘end-of-life care’ which is occurring internationally. The paper then turns to examine two key challenges in contemporary end-of-life care, looking at how these are being addressed in England and forecasting the possible direction of travel in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will explore 'maternalistic' forms of governance in a 19th century female reformatory. The ideological foundations and operational practices of the reformatory movement have predominantly been analysed within a theoretical framework that prioritises their paternalistic construction. Yet overwhelmingly it was female matrons who took daily custody of these institutions. I argue here that an examination of this female presence disrupts the notion of paternalistic supremacy with regard to institutional power relations. However, this is not to suggest the complete elimination of paternalistic primacy. Rather, the paper will highlight how the matrons attempted to negotiate and manage the complex relations that emerged for themselves in their roles as both 'governing' and 'governed' women. The paucity and nature of the data available poses particular methodological issues and therefore the paper will also advocate a more 'imaginative' contextualised approach which embraces the 'art' as well as the 'science' of archival excavation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of learned societies in knowledge exchange and dissemination. It attempts to 'map' the organisations that are considered to reside under the term and discusses how they have developed through history. In doing so, it seeks to highlight that whilst several types of organisations inhabit the landscape of learned societies, they all share a commitment to knowledge exchange and dissemination. The paper then discusses the modern learned societies that were founded in twentieth-century Britain and now exist alongside their organisational predecessors. It raises questions of whether these organisations exist for the benefit of their members or wider society. The paper then discusses change and development in learned societies in relation to its case study, the Regional Studies Association. The paper concludes by arguing that 'learned society' is an umbrella term for knowledge exchange and dissemination organisations whose functions are contextually specific and inextricably tied to the needs of their respective discipline, sub-discipline or field of intellectual enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a new method to gauge eighteenth-century crime. It counts the crimes committed against metropolitan London's justices noted in newspapers and in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, and finds crime more prevalent than current historiography acknowledges. The article contests current claims that the manner in which newspapers noted crime constructed their readers' perception of crime, making their readers believe crime was much more horrific, and the judicial system much more just, than readers would otherwise have thought they were. The article also argues that some crimes were attacks on the powerful because they were powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of educational institutions and buildings in one slice of a big city over a long timescale. The city is London and the slice Battersea, an inner suburb of mixed character and volatile fortunes. The narrative explores the shifts and interactions between state and voluntary provision, local community needs and architectural fashion. Though the specifics of the story are naturally unique to the district, it is likely to be representative of the record of other British metropolitan areas during the same years. The paper is constructed in such a way as to draw out these potentially common strands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A brief introduction to gun making in Birmingham in the 18th century and the Farmer and Galton gun-making businesses and their military products is presented. The collections of Galton Papers held by Birmingham Archives and Heritage and University College London are used to focus on the Farmer and Galton experience in relation to key matters associated with military gun making: the feast and famine phenomena in the supply of arms for the many wars of the 18th century; and standards of inspection including the use of gauges and proof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London's Great Stink of 1858 has been seen as the event that forced MPs to instigate large-scale sanitation improvements, which remain the basis of the city's sewer system to the present day. This paper re-examines the Great Stink by investigating attempts to mitigate stench before 1858 through architectural intervention. Parliamentary ventilation systems were initially designed to withstand surrounding miasma through the application of metabolic concepts of organization, the building being conceived as a body that was in danger of becoming poisoned by its environment. Yet construction was beset by difficulties that led to the disintegration of system ideals and the adoption of a new ventilation philosophy that was highly susceptible to external pollution: when environmental degradation reached its zenith in 1858, MPs were left unprotected. Since the ventilation systems can therefore be said to have played a part in creating the Great Stink, we argue that their history — which emphasizes a complex relationship between technoscience, the socio-political, the built environment, and nature — is crucial in understanding the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a larger research project, this paper was originally written in the context of the "Framing Time and Place: Repeats and Returns in Photography" conference held at the University of Plymouth in April 2009. This research investigated how contemporary German photography relates to, or contextualizes, a history of place on the periphery of understanding. In my research on post-war German photography of place, I argue that photographs of the urban landscape reveal a multiplicity of histories and memories that challenge perceptions of knowing and seeing. I argue that such images indicate and speak about events, memories and histories that form part of the fractured space that sits outside of, or adjacent to, the events that they reference. In this paper, the literary Denkbild, as practised by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and others, is used as a means by which to analyse both photography and re-photography of place in the context of post-war urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1908, London hosted the fourth Olympic Games. A centrepiece of the Olympics, still in a nascent form after their creation in 1896, was the marathon, a foot-race of approximately 40 km. The race was run from Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium at Shepherd's Bush in July 1908, and quickly became famous for its controversies, such as the judges' assistance that helped Dorando Pietri over the line, and the questionable amateur status of Canadian runner Tom Longboat. This paper will concentrate on the route of the race: on how it was planned by the Polytechnic Harriers, how it was managed on the day, how it contributed to the development of 'marathon fever' after the Olympics, and what it tells us about the growing suburban landscape of Edwardian London and its hinterlands. The paper will end with a survey of the route today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-industrial countries, folk dance may be considered as an embodied performance of a perceived tradition and is representational of values attached to an imagined past. The English Country Dance is one such form of folk dance, having been revived, or re-invented, in the early twentieth century by Cecil Sharp who claimed it to be a national dance of England. However, Sharp re-defined it not as a popular and spontaneous leisure activity but as a serious middle-class art form representing an English sensibility and the virtues of a pre-industrial pastoral collectivism. After the hiatus of the First World War, the English Country Dance continued to offer a resistance to the modern, this time in the form of a burgeoning popular dance culture which embraced urban sophistication and jazz dance. Using the concept of performativity, this paper attempts to demonstrate that the leisure context of the English Country Dance, in terms of spatiality, style, consumption and gender, enabled a continuity of resistance to the modern in a changing socio-cultural environment. The paper draws upon primary research in the archive of the Manchester Branch of the English Folk Dance Society and upon records of contemporary dance in the Mass Observation archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to identify, over a period of 500 years of English history, the architectural development of the kitchen in the English country house. Seven periods of architectural design; Medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration, Palladian, Neo-Classical, Gothic and Picturesque, are included in this study. Each period has been assigned an appropriate English country house beginning with Bodiam Castle in 1315 and ending with Cragside House in 1884. The review of each house includes, where appropriate, a discussion of the role of the kitchen in the overall architectural design of the house, period design influences on the determination of the kitchen location and architectural changes in the kitchen that are a reflection of social change occurring during the specified period. Architectural periods and houses are presented in the following order: • Period I Medieval: Bodiam Castle, 1385 and Knole House, 1456 • Period II Elizabethan: Hardwick Hall, 1597 • Period III Restoration: Belton House, 1684 • Period IV Palladian: Holkham Hall, 1734 • Period V Neo-Classical: Kedelston Hall, 1763 • Period VI Gothic: Ashridge, 1808-1817 • Period VII Picturesque: Cragside House, 1864-1870. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Millon argued in a 1989 article that medieval and early modern legal historians had been beguiled into supposing that civil litigation in these periods was decided in accordance with the ‘official’ legal doctrine found in law reports, plea roll arguments and Inns of Court readings when in reality their outcome was generally determined by juries exercising their own normative discretion in reaching their verdicts. This paper challenges this pessimistic conclusion, at least for the period around 1300. It demonstrates from evidence drawn from plea rolls and mainly manuscript law reports the degree of judicial control over juries exercised within the courtroom and the way in which jury verdicts were considered, and not just accepted, by courts. It also argues that the application of substantive legal rules by judges for the decision of litigation was a more important phenomenon than Millon supposed and that legal rules were also regularly invoked and applied in the preliminary pleading in cases and thereby shaped and determined the issues which went for jury decision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses early years education policy in England from 1918 to 1972, applying the theoretical ideas of John Kingdon. Throughout this period, the educational needs of young children were a low political priority, but they did occasionally rise on the agenda. When the issue gained prominence, politicians considered two key policy alternatives for potential investment: the expensive, self-governing nursery school, orientated towards promoting children’s physical health, and the cheaper nursery class, attached to an infant school, perhaps better at easing transition to formal education. After an initial period of damaging indecisiveness, the choice fell first on nursery schools and then on nursery classes. The reason that such fundamental changes in approach were possible was that an underlying lack of political commitment meant policies were only ever partially implemented. This chaotic pattern of development has had a damaging effect on the coherence of early years services offered today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lay participation in the form of the jury has been integral to the administration of justice in England at all levels and in both civil and criminal arenas since the Middle Ages and is popularly regarded as a legacy of Magna Carta by dint of the constitutional significance attributed to the Great Charter over the centuries. Arguably juries provide a bastion against the potential harshness of the state and a buffer against arbitrariness on the part of the judge as well as injecting an element of amateurism to combat the increased professionalism of the legal system. Yet, for all the perceived benefits, serious inadequacies in jurors and even in the apparent fairness of the system have been exposed. Jury decisions, too, have come under scrutiny. This paper examines the paradox of the jury in criminal trials and compares their role in the modern legal system with the historical past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contract for the construction of the chapel of the Blessed Virgin in the cemetery of Holy Trinity, Southchurch, Essex, is probably the earliest surviving building contract in England. It dates from 1293 and recounts the instructions of Sir Peter de Southchurch for the construction of a large, freestanding chapel for his father's burial. The chapel does not survive, if it was ever built, and the contract has been almost entirely disregarded by scholars, including L. F. Salzman, with the exception of some local historians of the 1920s–40s. Its significance for our understanding of contracting for building work, gentry culture and the construction of detached chapels has been wholly overlooked. This paper includes a new transcription and translation of the document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 1837, the sporting landscape of England was populated by a number of professional pedestrians who competed in a range of events that were extensively covered in the sporting press. These men distinguished themselves from their competitors through their use of ‘colours’ and a range of different athletic clothing. In the later stages of the nineteenth century, the dominance of the professional athlete was challenged through the formation of clubs and associations by a public-school- and university-educated middle class. The somatotype and clothing strategies of the Victorian athlete altered as a result. Their assumption of an innate physical superiority, allied to a preference for the all-rounder with his elegance and style, rather than the muscular, specialized sporting bodies of working-class professionals, were important features of an amateur ethos which drew much of its references from the Classical world. Through a discussion of how middle-class amateur athletes used Classical precedents, science and clothing to create the ‘university athlete’ and the ‘university costume’, in order to reinforce the distinctions between their own bodies and those of the professionals, this paper explores the transition from pedestrianism to organized athletics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]