First published in 1984. The Victorian clergy occupied a uniquely prominent position in English society. Their church generated continual and often rancorous debate and they played an important part in the local provision of education, welfare and justice. Politically, also, they were never negligible. But, while in 1830 the clergy still constituted England’s largest and wealthiest professional body, by 1914 their position was increasingly marginal. This title examines these changes and the issues in which the clergy was facing during this transition. The Victorian Clergy will be of particular interest to students of history.

Enlightened Oxford aims to discern, establish, and clarify the multiplicity of connections between the University of Oxford, its members, and the world outside; to offer readers a fresh, contextualised sense of the University's role in the state, in society, and in relation to other institutions between the Williamite Revolution and the first decade of the nineteenth century, the era loosely describable (though not without much qualification) as England's ancien regime. Nigel Aston asks where Oxford fitted in to the broader social and cultural picture of the time, locating the University's importance in Church and state, and pondering its place as an institution that upheld religious entitlement in an ever-shifting intellectual world where national and confessional boundaries were under scrutiny. Enlightened Oxford is less an inside history than a consideration of an institutional presence and its place in the life of the country and further afield. While admitting the degree of corporate inertia to be found in the University, there was internal scope for members so inclined to be creative in their teaching, open new research lines, and be unapologetic Whigs rather than unrepentant Tories. For if Oxford was a seat of learning rooted in its past - and with an increasing antiquarian awareness of its inheritance - yet it had a surprising capacity for adaptation, a scope for intellectual and political pluralism that was not incompatible with enlightened values.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the enormous increase in agricultural production, unmatched by technical advance in harvesting, drew vast numbers of rural and migrant workers into the harvest that lasted from June to October. This book, first published in 1982, examines the technology, conditions and customs of the harvest and, through that, the life of the rural population of central England from the 1840s until the end of the century when hand tools finally gave way to mechanisation. The economic framework of the period in agriculture is set out and there flows a detailed analysis of hand tools and work methods in the harvest. The population of harvesters, agricultural labourers and their entire families, townspeople and the gangs of migrant workers are studied, as are the crops they harvested.

An engaging account of the life of a nineteenth-century priest.

Anti-Catholic sentiment was a major social, cultural, and political force in Victorian England, capable of arousing remarkable popular passion. Hitherto, however, anti-Catholic feeling has been treated largely from the perspective of parliamentary politics or with reference to the propaganda of various London-based anti-Catholic religious organizations. This book sets out to Victorian anti-Catholicism in a much fuller and more inclusive context, accounting for its persistence over time, disguishing it from anti-Irish sentiment, and explaining its social, economic, political, and religious bases locally as well as nationally. The author is principally concerned with determining what led ordinary people to violent acts against Roman Catholic targets, violent acts against Roman Catholic petitions, joining anti-Catholic organizations, and reading anti-Catholic literature. All too often, English history, and even British history, turns out to be the history of what was happening in the West End. One of the special distinctions of this book is that it shows the interplay between national issues and their local conditions. The book covers the period ca.

This is the first history of English public schools founded by Evangelicals in the nineteenth century. Five existing public schools can be traced back to this period: Cheltenham College, Dean Close School, Monkton Combe School, Trent College, and St LawrenceÕs College. Some of these schools were set up in direct competition with new Anglo-Catholic schools, while others drew their inspiration from and, to a greater or lesser extent, were modelled on their rivals. Harris documents, for the first time, the rise of Evangelical societies such as the influential Church Association and the little-known Clerical and Lay Associations. An extensive bibliography and useful biographical survey of influential Evangelicals of the period completes this groundbreaking study.

Whilst in certain quarters it may be fashionable to suppose that there is no such thing as society historians have had no difficulty in finding their subject. The difficulty, rather, is that the advance has occurred through such an outpouring of research and writing that it is hard for anyone but the specialist to keep up with the literature or grasp the overall picture. In these three volumes, as is the tradition in Cambridge Histories, a team of specialists has assembled the jigsaw of recent monographic research and presented an interpretation of the development of modern British society since 1750, from three complementary perspectives: those of regional communities, of the working and living environment, and of social institutions. Each volume is self-contained, and each contribution, thematically defined, contains its own chronology of the period under review. Taken as a whole they offer an authoritative and comprehensive view of the manner and method of the shaping of society in the two centuries of unprecedented demographic and economic change.