The residential Royal Hospital of Chelsea for ‘old, lame and infirme’ soldiers was founded in 1681. Within a decade, this small hospital rapidly became the centre of one of the most extensive and efficient occupational and disability pension systems that has ever existed in Britain: the Chelsea Out-Pension. Over the course of the long eighteenth-century, the Hospital conducted over 80,000 investigations into the medical problems and service histories of poor and sickly men, setting contemporary standards of male fitness and pensionable physical infirmity. This thesis is the first modern study to explore and contextualize this complex pension system in detail. It locates their experiences in wider social debates about the Poor Law, philanthropy, and the perceived implications of continuous welfare relief in early modern society. A detailed account of the development and bureaucracy of the pension administration is given, exploiting original research into the Hospital’s vast surviving archive. The pension system was based on a system of legally enshrined regular medical examinations designed to avoid accusations of improvidence. Surgeons and civil servants were in effect offering a legal guarantee about the aetiologies of men’s long-term disabilities. In practice, however, Chelsea’s rigid admission structures were frequently undermined by prevailing notions of paternalism, social status, and patriotic philanthropy. This study highlights how a small number of Pensioners responded to this system and the attitudes which surrounded it. The demographic characteristics of the Out-Pensioners between 1715 and 1793 are analysed, demonstrating the fluid nature of the concept of total physical impairment. Finally, the thesis surveys the evolving cultural identity of the ‘veteran’ old soldier. The maimed body of the aging soldier became an unlikely exemplar of British masculine national identity, wherein personal narratives of familial domesticity compensated for emasculating disability and declining physical health.

This thesis explores the presentation of the war over the Rhine Palatinate in British printed pamphlets of the 1620s, looking at the relationship between writing and reading about the conflict and notions of religious and civic duty. It examines how printed news pamphlets, sermons and polemics dealt both with developing events in the Palatinate and with changes in British foreign policy. The importance of this conflict to British culture and politics has been widely debated. However, there has not been a study specifically charting the development of discourse about the Palatinate in cheap print. This thesis explores such texts within multiple contexts: political and military developments, Calvinist theology, and the British print market. It argues that pamphlets dealing with the Palatinate articulated subject positions which challenged royal notions of decorum, and promoted a model of active Protestant subjecthood. The first chapter contextualises the significance of the Palatinate to British Protestants, through an overview of the relationship between the two countries: from the 1613 marriage of the Elector Frederick V to Elizabeth, daughter of James I and VI, through Frederick's doomed bid for the Bohemian crown and the resulting battle to recover his ancestral lands. James's attempts to deal with the crisis through diplomacy met with dissatisfaction from many British subjects, who pushed instead for direct military action. The two central chapters deal with the period 1620-23, in which the defence of the Palatinate was largely in the hands of British volunteers; first examining the connection forged through printed 'news from the Palatinate', and then the ways in which polemical texts and printed sermons relate the conflict both to Calvinist eschatology and notions of subjecthood. The fourth and final chapter considers how these ideas developed through preparations for war with Spain in 1624, and the military and domestic upheavals during 1625-26.

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This thesis is a study of the creation of the English commonwealth from a provincial perspective. It seeks to understand the processes undertaken by the state and populace during the creation of a new and unpopular regime. It examines the impact of the republic on the personnel of local government, and also the impact of the provinces on the creation of the republic. Ultimately, it shows that local government was effective and efficient under the republic. The first chapter assesses changes to the personnel of local government after the revolution, finding that large numbers of men suspected to be hostile to the republic withdrew or were removed from all branches of local government. Chapter two demonstrates that Lancashire's magistrates were still governing the county effectively under the Commonwealth. It also finds that the republic presented godly magistrates with an opportunity to pursue a reformation of manners. The third chapter examines the reorganisation of the county's military forces after 1649, finding that the militia was wholly remodelled. It also assesses the implications of the successful imposition of the Engagement oath within Lancashire. Finally, it considers the consequences for the state of the heavy burden of large numbers of soldiers in Lancashire. Chapter four finds that tax collection was efficient in Lancashire, but that the administration of sequestration in Lancashire was a constantly impeded by local concerns. It considers the uses to which sequestration revenues were put in Lancashire, finding that the money successfully endowed many of Lancashire churches with much improved livings. Chapter five examines the state of the church within the county, finding that the Presbyterian ministers were a constant impediment to the peace of the republic, but were themselves hindered by divisions within their own congregations. The creation of the republic brought to an end the effective running of the Presbyterian classis system created in Lancashire, even though many congregations were using the Presbyterian Directory. The thesis concludes that the republic was governing Lancashire successfully, and that there is no evidence in the county of structural problems that made the collapse of the republic inevitable.

Though an occasional feature of society and politics prior to the late-seventeenth century, it is only after the Restoration that news became a more permanent aspect of British culture. Through the 1660s to the early 1700s, regular news emerged and developed, consumed enthusiastically by an increasingly-politicised public. Historians of the era and genre have looked to this period to explain how the news press developed its modern characteristics – its periodicity and claim to authenticity; its structure and style. In so doing, the focus of their attentions have overwhelmingly looked to the emergence and development of the print periodical, and its effect on society. The examination of periodical news across the later seventeenth century has taken on a Whiggish perception of print news development, largely neglecting the significance of more ‘traditional’ news forms. Older forms of news dissemination, such as scribal, pamphletary, and oral news, in fact offer an earlier representation of the characteristics that have been attributed to print – and often to a greater extent than their contemporary printed counterpart. Whether it is in terms of accepted accuracy of content, extent of coverage, or contemporaneity, these older forms of news provide a level of stability and modernity that can only rarely be seen in the print papers of the day. As such, their contribution to the development of news is deserving of further consideration. Using a case-study approach to examine specific time-frames and current events within the chosen period, this thesis considers the impact of news on politics and society, and how the ‘traditional’ forms of news, particularly manuscript, offer a comparatively more ‘modern’ approach to the provision of news information across the later-seventeenth century.

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This thesis presents a new edition of the major recensions of the Historia Brittonum. It is the first to depart from the pattern of conflated texts which has been followed by editors since 1691. Each may now be read as a text in its own right. I have argued that the 'Harleian' recension is the primary version of the Historia Brittonum and belongs to the year 829/30, and have shown that the attribution of the work to one 'Nennius' is late and unacceptable. The complicated textual tradition has been examined, from this early-ninth-century origin, throughout its mediaeval history; the fullest development is seen in the 'Sawley' recension of the beginning of the thirteenth century. I have also considered the early modern tradition of the work, represented by a large group of paper manuscripts prepared by or for the antiquaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as no printed text was available until 1691. In addition to detailed studies of manuscripts and textual tradition, I have prepared a literal modern English translation of the primary recension and have made a detailed preliminary study of its latinity. My remarks on the later recensions concentrate on establishing the filiation of the manuscripts and on placing each new version within the context of the textual tradition as a whole. This has seemed to be the primary requirement in any new investigation of the Historia. Work can now go forward, from a secure textual base, on the implications of this important series of texts for historical and literary studies.

Since the study of aging merged out of Second-wave feminism during the 1960’s, aging has been associated exclusively with the time of old age. In this study I will revisit the assumptions which have underpinned the exclusive nature of this relationship in recent historiography through an analysis of a wide-range of primary sources addressing aging as a physiological and psychic process. Whilst aging was a much contested concept; a matter for speculation and fundamentally unquantifiable, it was also in the final analysis an unregulated process which could begin at any time of life. Whilst ideas of aging were constituted in a number of contexts: medical, theological and philosophical dominate this study, I will also illustrate ways in which practices and discourses of age were interrelated, each informing the other. Historians of age have in their own ways paraphrased Joan Scott’s definition of gender, statements have however been qualified by the prefix that a certain age; either childhood or old age is a useful category of analysis. My study eschews such an approach, arguing instead that for age to become a useful category of analysis we must firstly attempt to fully understand the process which gives rise to the value judgements that certain ages are a more useful category of analysis than others. Understanding aging will make are per se a useful category of analysis in the same way that studies of masculinity, in addition to studies of femininity, have made studies of gender a useful category o analysis.