This thesis explores the potential influence of 'Lollardy' and reformist ideas on English legislation in the period c.1376 to c.1422. It focuses on a comparison between the ideas expressed in a variety of Wycliffite works, most especially the tracts that were reportedly presented to parliament, and the ideas contained within parliamentary legislative activity. The aim of the thesis is to shed light on the extent to which the political community shared the ideas expressed in 'heterodox' works and the extent to which the debate over 'Lollardy' informed the debates over other issues within parliament. It begins with an introductory section which explores the nature of 'Lollardy', the potential of the parliamentary and statute rolls as sources for the impact of reformist ideas, and an examination of what can be gleaned from other sources as regards the attitudes of the political community to reform. It then moves on to explore legislative activity on a variety of issues including papal provisions, vagrancy, appropriation, non-residence and pluralism, hospitals and fraternal recruitment practices - on a primarily chapter by chapter basis, exploring the ideas and arguments as they developed chronologically and mapping these, as far as possible, against the known chronology of 'Lollardy'. It also makes comparisons between the petitions and the government's response, in order to determine the dynamics of 'Lollardy's' influence. Did the commons have an underlying programme of reform? If so, did this programme bear any relationship to the programme of reform advocated by the Wycliffites and the protagonists of disendowment? How committed were the commons to the ideas they espoused? Did the Church accept a level of parliamentary interference to stave off the threat of 'Lollardy'? What was the government's attitude to reform? These are some of the central questions of this thesis.

Since 1801 the British government has counted the population once every ten years. Only the Second World War has interrupted this practice, making the census one of the most enduring administrative institutions of the modern British state. This dissertation is about why legislators and political economists first sought to quantify demographic change in the early nineteenth century. The first chapter explains the administrative organisation of census-taking under John Rickman, who directed the first four censuses. The second chapter examines the legislative origins of census-taking in eighteenth-century Britain. It compares the efforts of two backbenchers, Thomas Potter and Charles Abbot, to establish a national census in 1753 and 1800. The third chapter analyses the pre-census empirical basis of fiscal policy during the 1790s, paying patticular attention to William Pitt the Younger's use of political arithmetic to estimate the yield of Britain's first income tax. The fou1th chapter examines the function and limitations of the population data used by four national accountants - Benjamin Bell, Henry Beeke, J. J. Grellier and Patrick Colquhoun - in their responses to Pitt's new tax. The fifth chapter re-assesses the economic and social thought of Robet1 Southey, whose opposition to T. R. Malthus's Essay on the pr;ndple of populahon, and especially its commitment to poor law abolition, arose from a fundamental disagreement about the state's role in welfare provision. The sixth and seventh chapters consider the relationship between information gathering and state formation. Chapter six quantifies the number and range of printed accounts and papers produced by the House of Commons in the early nineteenth century. It challenges previous analyses which have used public expenditure and statute-making as measures of state formation. The final chapter explores how census data was used to determine the redistribution of parliamentary representation that took place as a result of the 1832 Reform Act. Employing a diverse range of methodologies and sources, this study contributes to histories of economic thought and state formation by revealing the extent to which political arithmetic converged with Smithian political economy during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This convergence proved sho1t-lived, however, and early nineteenthcentury political arithmetic was consigned to historical oblivion by the world 's first professional economist, John Ramsay McCulloch. Nonetheless, reasoning by 'number, weight, or measure', paiticularly in respect of population, challenged and transformed the conduct of parliamentary business in this period, leading to the legislative dissolution of the existing electoral system in 1832.

LD2668 .T4 1966 A637 / Master of Science

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