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The importance of landownership in pre-industrial society has never been in dispute. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the evidence of a single region - Cumbria - in the light of the current debate about the pattern of landownership and its underlying causes. Chapter one reviews the debate as it has developed over the past three decades, and is followed by three chapters analysing the social groups - peers, gentry and yeomanry - and six case studies. In the conclusion the trends which have emerged in Cumbria are compared and contrasted with the pattern of English landownership established in chapter one. It is argued that the drift of property was towards the greater gentry and the 'new' gentry - who included Whitehaven merchants - partly because the peers virtually abdicated from the market, and partly because of a decline among the lesser gentry. Although this appears to conform to established patterns at 'national' level, the reasons for it do not, and might be peculiar to Cumbria. Indeed the dangers of generalising over the whole country have been stressed because of the variations in prevailing economic conditions. It has been shown, for example, that the Land Tax had little real impact. The strict settlement, the increased availability of mortgage facilities and the tenure of government office all had some affect, but were not crucial for the pattern in Cumbria, while efficient estate management and agricultural improvement were significant on very few estates. Far more important were the difficulties of obtaining credit and the cost of mining ventures. It has not been claimed that a study of one region invalidates the general arguments, merely that it represents one piece in a jigsaw which is perhaps more complicated than historians have suggested.

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In 1642, the Long Parliament denounced Queen Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, for hatching ‘popish plots’ and giving ear to ‘evil counsellors’. They feared the queen’s influence at the Caroline court, made possible by Charles’ deep affection for Henrietta Maria. Commentators have debated her influence on Charles I and his policies, particularly in light of the Civil War and his ultimate beheading at the hands of Parliament. Nevertheless, little has been done to examine the powerful ‘evil counsellors’ feared and denounced by Parliament. Building on the work of R.M. Smuts and Caroline Hibbard, my thesis examines the membership, ideology, and activities of the ‘queen’s party’ (so-named by Archbishop Laud in 1637) from Henrietta Maria’s arrival in England in 1625 until her exile in 1642. To do so, I have focussed in particular on the careers of Henry, earl of Holland, Sir George Goring, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry Jermyn, and Walter Montagu, who became powerful courtiers at the queen’s court, engaging in politics at home and abroad. By examining the domestic and foreign activities of these men within the context of their relationship with the queen, we can see a clearer picture of Henrietta Maria’s political agenda (often obscured by the restricted movements of the queen at the English court). The breadth of this research has led to the conclusion that the queen actively sought to involve herself in English and continental politics from the earliest years of her reign by gathering a group of English courtiers with French political connections and directing their actions in a coherent strategy to advance her political and religious goals.

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The aim of this thesis is to contribute an un-researched strand to the analysis of local government reform in the nineteenth century. The 1883 Municipal Corporations Act (MCA) has not attracted the attention of historians. It was a minor local government statute; the objective being to sweep away a rump of 110 undemocratic borough corporations in small market towns. The 1883 MCA had a differing impact on these ancient corporations. It forced twenty-eight of them to reform and allowed three more to remain in existence but stripped them of municipal powers. Four more towns were specifically granted permission to elect an ‘honorary’ mayor but that position held no municipal responsibilities. In addition, seventy-six corporations were summarily abolished on or before 29 September 1886. In thirty-one of these abolished boroughs, the corporations owned no property or trading rights; in the other forty-five, however, they did. In eight of these towns, their corporation’s assets and rights were transferred into local government bodies and they were subsumed into the county, district and parish councils established by the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894. In the remaining thirty-seven towns, charitable trusts were created as the repositories for the assets and rights of their abolished corporations. It is these trusts that are the focus of the thesis. They were created as charities and they possess public assets; the third (voluntary) sector therefore owning what should be (in today’s terms) in the second (public) sector. With the creation of parish councils shortly after their foundation, these trusts quickly became a halfway house between the undemocratic ancient borough corporation and the full local democracy that was introduced at parish level in 1895. Their structure is ‘semi-democratic’, with both elected councillor involvement but also volunteers acting as co-opted trustees. There is no accountability to the tiers of local government; they report to the Charity Commission. It is these ambiguities that have caused, and in some cases still cause, local governance problems in the some of the towns affected. The 1883 MCA has had a long reach; thirty-five of these charitable trusts still exist and they are having a differing impact on the local governance of the towns concerned. The aim of this thesis is to establish what that impact has been and what it is is today.

Much of the earlier writing on this subject has depicted the expansion in the proportion of illegitimate births in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England as one component of a more widespread change in the demographic regime of the period. In particular, historians have attempted to account for the rise in illegitimacy using various simplistic socio-economic and cultural interpretations; this is particularly true in the context of metropolitan illegitimacy. This thesis demonstrates the multiplicity of causes and archetypal illustrations of illegitimacy in eighteenth-century London. The initial starting point for this thesis has been to give equal emphasis to the various economic, social, and demographic characterisations of both the mothers and putative fathers of illegitimate children. Within the historiography of illegitimacy the latter group have often had scant, if any, attention paid to their role in the illegitimacy process. From this beginning it has become obvious that there was no one pan-metropolitan cause or representation of illegitimacy. It was dependant on the socio-economic, cultural and demographic mix within each individual community that coexisted within the greater London area. Intense examination of the social settings of illegitimacy reinforces the diversity of causation and multiplicity of forms sociosexual encounter. The thesis gives an account of the social, economic, demographic and cultural identities of those parents whose illegitimate children were born or conceived within pseudo-marital relationships. Recusant marriage, bigamy, cohabitation and more informal, long-term, illicit relationships feature conspicuously in this study. The comparative and contrasting characters of both maternal and paternal attitudes towards illegitimate children are traced and grounded within the attitudinal regime of the extended paternal families, and that of the wider plebeian communities.

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The population question in the long eighteenth century is explored and investigated further by using the demography available from the 30 year study by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, together with an understanding of the impact of ergot contamination of diet on female fertility. The hypothesis presented is that the staple rye diet at the end of the 17^th century was contaminated with ergot which acted as a contraceptive and abortive agent and in addition could have had an influence on both the survival of women and children if given accidentally or deliberately during labour. Within this thesis it is argued that when the ingestion of ergot on rye was reduced within the diet from around the third decade of eighteenth century onwards this would have removed or released these fertility constraints and therefore it would have allowed women to become more fertile, while improved midwifery practice curtailed the negative effects of ergot ingestion during childbirth. These findings and their timing closely parallel the demographic changes reported by the Cambridge Research Group. Sufficient accumulated circumstantial evidence was found to support the hypothesis to suggest that ergot could have been a factor in both the fertility changes during the long 18thcentury and the perinatal mortality rate. The conclusions of this thesis need to be taken forward in additional local parish research by others to further substantiate these findings.

No description available.