In the first detailed history of All Souls College under the Wardenship of Bernard Gardiner, Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth offers a character driven story that addresses scheming, duplicity, and self-righteousness projected against some of the most important political and religious episodes of the early eighteenth century and the people who animated them. Throughout this book, Wigelsworth illuminates the ways in which All Souls and its warden were caught between competing visions of what England, and consequently Oxford, would look like in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Pevsner calls it 'marvellous'. Yet the reredos of the fi fteenth-century chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientifi c investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume traces for the fi rst time the entire history of the reredos in its architectural and religious context - from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering andrestoration in the 1870s. The book provides a novel and revealing vantage point on the artistic, cultural and ecclesiological history of Britain across four centuries.

Edition, with full notes and apparatus, of a text which sheds much light on university affairs at the time. The Warden's Punishment Book is a record of punishments imposed on the Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for minor infringements of the statutes and of College discipline, from its inception in 1601 until 1851. It is a uniquedocument in terms of its scope and detail among the College records of Oxford and Cambridge and provides significant insights into the daily life and personal relationships of such an institution during the early modern period. This volume presents an edition of the text of the Punishment Book, with a substantial biographical register detailing the careers of those mentioned as punishers or punished. An introduction explains the significance and context of the Punishment Book within collegiate, university, and social history. Scott Mandelbrote is Fellow, Perne Librarian, and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was formerly Fellow and Sub-Warden of All Souls College, Oxford; John H.R. Davis is an Honorary Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, of which he was Warden between 1995 and 2008. He is an anthropologist and was Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universityof Oxford, and, before that, at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685-1720 uses the experiences of Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) to examine what life was like in the Church of England for Tory High Church clergy. These clergy felt alienated from the religious and political settlement of 1689 and found themselves facing the growth of religious toleration. They often linked this to a rise in immorality and a sense of the decline in religious values. Samuel Wesley's life saw a series of crises including his decision to leave Dissent and conform to the Church of England, his imprisonment for debt in 1705, his shortcomings as a priest, disagreements with his bishop, his marriage breakdown and the haunting of his rectory by a ghost or poltergeist. Wesley was also a leading member of the Convocation of the Church during the crisis years of 1710-14. In each of these episodes, Wesley's Toryism and High Church principles played a key role in his actions. They also show that the years between 1685 and 1720 were part of a 'long Glorious Revolution' which was not confined to 1688-9. This 'long Revolution' was experienced by Tory High Church clergy as a series of turning points in which the Whig forces strengthened their control of politics and the Church. Using newly discovered sources, and providing fresh insights into the life and work of Samuel Wesley, William Gibson explores the world of the Tory High Church clergy in the period 1685-1720.

The essays in Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150-1900 all reflect the wider concept of legal history - how legal processes fitted into the social and political life of the community and how courts and other legal processes were used by contemporaries. In doing so they aim both to justify the study of legal history in its own right and to show how legal records, including those of a variety of central and local courts, can be used to further our understanding of a wide range of social, commercial, popular and political history.

This special edition of History of Universities, Volume XXXV/1, studies and reappraises the often ignored history of eighteenth-century Oxford, caught as it is between the upheavals of the Stuart century and the reformation of the Victorian era.

This book investigates the part that Anglicanism played in the lives of lay people in England and Wales between 1689 and 1750. It is concerned with what they did rather than what they believed, and explores their attitudes to clergy, religious activities, personal morality and charitable giving. Using diaries, letters, account books, newspapers and popular publications and parish and diocesan records, Dr Jacob demonstrates that Anglicanism held the allegiance of a significant proportion of all people. They took the lead in managing the affairs of the parishes, which were the major focus of communal and social life, and supported the spiritual and moral discipline of the church courts. He shows that early eighteenth-century England and Wales remained a largely traditional society and that Methodism emerged from a strong church, which was central to the lives of most people.