By the time of Domesday Book the shire was the basic unit of administration throughout the West Midlands and most of England, fulfilling important military, administrative, judicial, and fiscal functions. But we know very little from reliable documentary sources about the origins of the West Midland shires as territories owing to an almost complete absence of them. This study therefore investigates afresh the territorial origins of Staffordshire. It assesses how much can be said about the layout of the shire's hundreds in 1086, and compares the layout of its Domesday hundreds and that of its early parochial landscape. The study also examines what the course of the shire's boundary reveals about its origins, and considers how the roles that Staffordshire served may have influenced its original geographical extent. A multi-disciplinary approach has been used, employing a wide range of topographical, archaeological and place-name evidence as well as the sparse available written material. The thesis argues that explaining the origins of the West Midland shires is far less straightforward than previous studies have proposed, and shows that many of our sources for the origins and development of the English medieval administrative landscape are more difficult to interpret than is usually believed.

This thesis is an attempt to use manorial court rolls for a demographic, social and economic study of the rural population of the parish of Ha1esowen from 1270 to 1400. As peasants' surnames were unstable before the Black Death and as the court records include the names of many outsiders, it was necessary to find effective methods of identifying the peasants and of excluding the non-residents. Only then it was possible to conduct a census-like enumeration of the peasants ,noted in the court rolls every ten years and to establish the demographic trend from 1270 to 1400. In addition it was possible to trace the course of mortality and of marriages; to estimate the expectation of life of males at twenty, the male replacement rate, the age of marriage, the size of families according to their economic status, the age specific mortality in the Black Death and the age distribution of the adult male population; and to study the settlement patterns of young peasants, the incidence of illegitimacy, the social mobility and the supply and market in land. The da~a obtained from the court rolls explain how, despite an acute land shortage the population of Ha1esowen managed to maintain a slow growth from 1270 to 1349; how life in the parish could have returned to normal so rapidly in the 1350's, although the Black Death killed about 43% of the villagers; and why the population stagnated and declined in the second half of the 14th century despite the improvement in the economic conditions of the villagers. The thesis includes 54000 words without tables and figures.

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The concept of governance is used to construct an urban biography of Wolverhampton between incorporation in 1848 and achievement of County Borough status in 1888. Intensive manufacturing is shown to have generated a sharp polarisation between eastern and western districts, which was accentuated by an explosive increase in population and limited availability of building land. The result was overcrowding with unhealthy slum areas in the centre and east of the town. The council elected in 1848 was slow to address questions of public health. Until the mid-1860s government was controlled by manufacturing interests and by the resistance of ratepayers to accept the cost of municipal improvement. After the mid-1860s, the council became increasingly converted to the cause of municipal reform. This change was stimulated by civic pride, greatly enhanced by the visit of Queen Victoria in 1866. The idea of civic duty became influential, particularly among the powerful group of Nonconformist council members who initiated many cultural and recreational projects. However, leading Nonconformists came into conflict with the townspeople over their attempts to control public space. The council is shown to have been permeable and open to influence from articulate individuals and from the increasing number of paid officials. Latterly, reform-minded local elites admitted to unease over the disparity in living conditions between east and west. Nevertheless, the council in 1848-88 had a record of municipal achievement which was creditable, not only on a national basis, but also in comparison with the paradigm of Birmingham. The way in which this urban biography is assembled assuming that governance resulted from the interaction of variables, which were essentially economic, ideological, political, social and spatial, is proposed as a technique with general applicability. It provides a framework not only for study of individual towns but also for comparative evaluation of different urban genres.

Recent decades have seen proliferating debate about charity and welfare provision. Passing beyond a satisfaction with the welfare state in its mid-twentieth century form, such discussion has been associated with the contested revision of state welfare, with the ways in which public sympathies were drawn to third-world famine and related crises, and with the possible effects of national lotteries upon charitable giving. Historians need to set such modern concerns into perspective, and this thesis is a historically focused contribution towards that. It explores the changing legal, structural and social aspects of charity in Warwickshire. Warwickshire was chosen partly to redress the generalised or metropolitan bias of many previous studies. The county comprised the ancient city of Coventry, the burgeoning conurbation of Birmingham and a varied rural hinterland. It thus provides three very different socio-economic contexts within which to examine the operation of charitable institutions and organisations. The thesis takes a long perspective on charity - bearing in mind the ancient origins and legal forms of charity - although the main focus is on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The period under closest consideration straddles the pivotal decades in English history from the mid-1780s to the mid-1830s, during which there was a major reassessment of social responsibility. This was manifested by much debate on the role of public welfare and private charity, with the poor law enquiries resulting in important legal revisions. At the same time, there was a shift in the foundation of new charities from the endowed to the voluntary form. This transitional period has been little studied by historians of charity, and the present work goes some way towards filling this lacuna. The thesis begins with a review of the historiography of charity and of the theoretical writing on the subject, both historical and modern. Chapter 2 explores the development of the law governing endowed charities, which itself reflected changing attitudes towards charity and its recipients. The next two chapters are detailed analyses of the structures of endowed and voluntary charities, and of the incidence of the two types in Warwickshire. Having drawn out the distinctiveness of these forms of charity, the following two chapters examine their similar objectives. An investigation is made of the ways in which these objectives were pursued by endowed and voluntary charities, organised under the headings of the promotion of religion, the advancement of education, the relief of poverty, and other objects of public utility. Among the concerns here are whether certain objects were more likely to be supported by one form of charity than another, and whether there were any changes over time in the kind of support given. The way in which voluntary and endowed charities interacted with each other and with agencies of the state, sometimes in co-operation and sometimes in competition, emerges from this examination. The final chapter examines the motivations for and meanings of the charitable impulse, and discusses patterns of localism and tradition which informed charitable acts even at the end of the nineteenth century.

Under the 1834 New Poor Law Act, three parishes, Stoke, Burslem, and Wolstanton, became two unions: Stoke Poor Law Union, consisting of the towns of Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton, and Wolstanton and Burslem Union, consisting of the parishes of Wolstanton and Burslem. Wolstanton and Burslem Union workhouse was situated to the north of the city at Chell, and Stoke to the south, bordering the town of Newcastle-under-Lyme. Both workhouses lay within the industrial area known as the Staffordshire Potteries. However, at its broadest extent the aim of this thesis is to establish if two Poor Law Unions covering one industrial area (the Staffordshire Potteries) with similar socio-economic characteristics treated their poor identically or differently and if so, what influences, either internal or external can be attributed as the cause. This wide-ranging study covers various aspects of the experiential dynamics of welfare – vagrancy, the treatment of children and the elderly, religion, and health – none of which have received any detailed coverage in secondary literature relative to the North Midlands. With the aid of Local Government Board (LGB) correspondence and press reports, this thesis endeavours to investigate the authority of the LGB and their Circulars both locally and regionally. It asks how far, and with what variations two contiguous workhouses only six miles apart governed themselves within the framework set by the LGB and its directives. The study focuses on the policy adopted by the LGB considering the Crusade against outdoor relief, and will attempt to determine if this was stringently applied or otherwise. For a period from the inception of the LGB in 1871-1901 when workhouses became almost a refuge for the elderly and infirm – thinly covered by the burgeoning historiography of the New Poor Law, this case study will afford a detailed insight into the nature of pauper life-cycle experiences on relief whilst also considering the factors driving (and differentiating) the complexities of official practice.

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This thesis considers the definition of elite identity and its relationship to the constitution of power structures through the manipulation of material culture. The following discussion will assess the nature of identity and how it is comprehended within contemporary archaeological theory. Thereafter the formation of medieval and early modem elite identities will be considered with reference to the manipulation of ideals of piety through the funerary material culture of Gloucestershire c.1350-1700. This study will consider how monuments that proposed a link between worldly wealth and divine favour might articulate elite selves in relation to each other and in opposition to those unaccustomed or unable to erect a monument to themselves or their kin. Funerary evidence will be analysed alongside the ideal of dying well as presented in the Ars Moriendi texts. It will be found that the ideological potential of 'dying well' was exploited to its fullest potential during the period under study. The idealised pious death provided the affluent with a focus for competition, the significance of which can only be fully comprehended if the texts are analysed alongside other forms of material culture.

The Harleys were the only major Herefordshire gentry family to give their committed support to Parliament in 1642. The personal papers of both Sir Robert Harley and his wife, Lady Brilliana, allow a detailed study of the modes of thought which led the Harleys to oppose the King. The Harleys were guided primarily by their religious beliefs. They were puritans, who hoped that the Long Parliament would undertake sweeping Church reforms, and they perceived the war as a struggle by the godly for true religion. The Harleys' stand in the 1640s was directly linked to their anti-pathy towards Arminianism. Sir Robert's fear that the Arminians would subvert the State and Church to Catholicism is evident in his speeches in the 1628 Parliament. By 1641 the Harleys believed that only the abolition of episcopacy could rid the Church of Arminian and Catholic influences. Before 1640 the Harleys' puritanism had not entailed overt political opposition to the Crown, as is illustrated by Sir Robert's parliamentary career in the 1620s and by his achievement of court office in 1626. The Harleys were also accepted within the official and social networks of the Herefordshire gentry community". Thus in 1640 Sir Robert was returned as senior knight of the shire to both the Short and the Long Parliaments. After 1640 the Harleys became increasingly isolated from the most influential Herefordshire gentry, many of whom would be either committed Royalists or moderates in 1642. The Harley papers illustrate how differing long-term perceptions and beliefs combined with immediate issues to split the county "gentry community" in 1642. Although the Harleys were genuinely concerned by county interests, their puritanism involved them in an alternative set of loyalties, which were stronger than their loyalties either to the local "gentry community" or to the county community.