Accounts of the Feoffees of the Town Lands of Bury St Edmunds, 1569-1622

Accounts of the Feoffees of the Town Lands of Bury St Edmunds, 1569-1622
Author: Margaret Statham
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780851159218

In the absence of borough status and after the winding up of the guilds, the townsmen of Bury St Emunds experiment with town government. In 1569, thirty years after its abbey had been dissolved, the large town of Bury St Edmunds remained unincorporated. These accounts show how the feoffees (still essentially the medieval Candlemas guild) experimented with town government. The pre-Reformation landed endowments were increased throughout the period. This enabled the feoffees to address many aspects of town life. In addition to payments for housing and clothing the poor, and the provision of medical care, they also contributed to the cost of providing clergy (whose theology was akin to their own) for the two town churches. To encourage trade, they built the town's first covered Market Cross, while the acquisition of theShire House enabled the assizes and quarter sessions to move into the town. After the turn of the century, the Charitable Uses Act of 1601 was used to recover land which had long ago been alienated. At the same time some of the up and coming men successfully petitioned for a charter of incorporation for Bury St Edmunds, so that in 1606 the town acquired the borough status which had eluded it for centuries. Unless new sources are discovered, these accounts, though inevitably slanted to the feoffees' activities, are the most revealing source for the work of the new corporation in its early years.

Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547-1600

Poor Relief and Community in Hadleigh, Suffolk, 1547-1600
Author: Marjorie Keniston McIntosh
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 1907396918

At the cutting edge of new social and demographic history, this book provides a detailed picture of the most comprehensive system of poor relief operated by any Elizabethan town. Well before the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, Hadleigh, Suffolk--a thriving woolen cloth center with a population of roughly 3,000--offered a complex array of assistance to many of its residents who could not provide for themselves: orphaned children, married couples with more offspring than they could support or supervise, widows, people with physical or mental disabilities, some of the unemployed, and the elderly. Hadleigh's leaders also attempted to curb idleness and vagrancy and to prevent poor people who might later need relief from settling in the town. Based upon uniquely full records, this study traces 600 people who received help and explores the social, religious, and economic considerations that made more prosperous people willing to run and pay for this system. Relevant to contemporary debates over assistance to the poor, the book provides a compelling picture of a network of care and control that resulted in the integration of public and private forms of aid.

The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII

The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII
Author: Steven J. Gunn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198802862

War should be recognised as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII. Henry fought many wars throughout his reign, and this book explores how this came to dominate English culture and shape attitudes to the king and to national history, with people talking and reading about war, and spending money on weaponry and defence.

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility
Author: Scott McDermott
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785274740

The Puritan Ideology of Mobility: Corporatism, the Politics of Place, and the Founding of New England Towns before 1650 examines the ideology that English Puritans developed to justify migration: their migration from England to New England, migrations from one town to another within New England, and, often, their repatriation to the mother country. Puritan leaders believed firmly that nations, colonies, and towns were all “bodies politic,” that is, living and organic social bodies. However, if a social body became distempered because of scarce resources or political or religious discord, it became necessary to create a new social body from the old in order to restore balance and harmony. The new social body was articulated through the social ritual of land distribution according to Aristotelian “distributive justice.” The book will trace this process at work in the founding of Ipswich and its satellite town in Massachusetts.

The Accommodated Jew

The Accommodated Jew
Author: Kathy Lavezzo
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2016-10-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501706705

England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.

Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England

Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England
Author: Robert Tittler
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2022
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1783276630

A rare examination of the political, social, and economic contexts in which painters in Tudor and Early Stuart England lived and workedWhile famous artists such as Holbein, Rubens, or Van Dyck are all known for their creative periods in England or their employment at the English court, they still had to make ends meet, as did the less well-known practitioners of their craft. This book, by one of the leading historians of Tudor and Stuart England, sheds light on the daily concerns, practices, and activities of many of these painters. Drawing on a biographical database comprising nearly 3000 painters and craftsmen - strangers and native English, Londoners and provincial townsmen, men and sometimes women, celebrity artists and 'mere painters' - this book offers an account of what it meant to paint for a living in early modern England. It considers the origins of these painters as well as their geographical location, the varieties of their expertise, and the personnel and spatial arrangements of their workshops. Engagingly written, the book captures a sense of mobility and exchange between England and the continent through the considerable influence of stranger-painters, undermining traditional notions about the insular character of this phase in the history of English art. By showing how painters responded to the greater political, religious, and economic upheavals of the time, the study refracts the history of England itself through the lens of this particular occupation.Engagingly written, the book captures a sense of mobility and exchange between England and the continent through the considerable influence of stranger-painters, undermining traditional notions about the insular character of this phase in the history of English art. By showing how painters responded to the greater political, religious, and economic upheavals of the time, the study refracts the history of England itself through the lens of this particular occupation.Engagingly written, the book captures a sense of mobility and exchange between England and the continent through the considerable influence of stranger-painters, undermining traditional notions about the insular character of this phase in the history of English art. By showing how painters responded to the greater political, religious, and economic upheavals of the time, the study refracts the history of England itself through the lens of this particular occupation.Engagingly written, the book captures a sense of mobility and exchange between England and the continent through the considerable influence of stranger-painters, undermining traditional notions about the insular character of this phase in the history of English art. By showing how painters responded to the greater political, religious, and economic upheavals of the time, the study refracts the history of England itself through the lens of this particular occupation.

Making Publics in Early Modern Europe

Making Publics in Early Modern Europe
Author: Bronwen Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2011-07-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135168938

The book looks at how people, things, and new forms of knowledge created "publics" in early modern Europe, and how publics changed the shape of early modern society. The focus is on what the authors call "making publics" — the active creation of new forms of association that allowed people to connect with others in ways not rooted in family, rank or vocation, but rather founded in voluntary groupings built on the shared interests, tastes, commitments, and desires of individuals. By creating new forms of association, cultural producers and consumers challenged dominant ideas about just who could be a public person, greatly expanded the resources of public life for ordinary people in their own time, and developed ideas and practices that have helped create the political culture of modernity. Coming from a number of disciplines including literary and cultural studies, art history, history of religion, history of science, and musicology, the contributors develop analyses of a range of cases of early modern public-making that together demonstrate the rich inventiveness and formative social power of artistic and intellectual publication in this period.

Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England 1540-1640

Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England 1540-1640
Author: Robert Tittler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2013-09-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199685967

In this, the first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English portraiture, Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. He breaks new ground in placing portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and in distinguishing between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and metropolis, which tended towards the formal and 'polite'. Tittler describes the burgeoning public for portraiture of this era as more than the familiar court-and-London based presence, but rather as a phenomenon which was surprisingly widespread, both socially and geographically, throughout the realm. He suggests that provincial portraiture differed from the 'mainstream', cosmopolitan portraiture of the day in its workmanship, materials, inspirations, and even vocabulary, showing how its native English roots continued to guide its production. Innovative chapters consider the aims and vocabulary of English provincial portraiture, the relationship of portraiture and heraldry, the painter's occupation in provincial (as opposed to metropolitan) England, and the contrasting availability of materials and training in both provincial and metropolitan areas. The work as a whole contributes to both art history and social history: it speaks to admirers and collectors of painting as well as to curators and academics.

English Historical Documents 1558-1603

English Historical Documents 1558-1603
Author: Ian W. Archer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 1530
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040248586

Praise for the series:‘Perhaps the most important historical undertaking of our age... one of the most valuable historical works ever produced.’ Times Literary Supplement‘A landmark in the field of historical endeavour... the most admirable collection of sources on English history that exists.’ American Historical Review English Historical Documents is the most ambitious, impressive and comprehensive collection of primary documents on English history ever published. The volumes have each become landmark publications in their own fields. This long awaited volume covers 1558-1603, the reign of Elizabeth I, when government, culture, religion and foreign policy all underwent profound change. This volume includes informative introductory pieces for the parts and sections and editorial comment is directed towards making sources intelligible rather than drawing conclusions from them. Opening with an introductory section which contextualises the accession of Elizabeth to the throne, the volume covers all key aspects of the Elizabethan period, including:InstitutionsSocial and economic structuresThe marriage question and the problem of the successionFamily and householdCultural lifeThe Church and religious affairsElizabethan warsOverseas trade and explorationCrime and disorderThe format of the series has been updated and the documents gathered here encompass the most up to date approaches to the material.