This thesis analyses the common fund accounts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter, which run almost continuously between 1304 and 1386. These records contain a wealth of information on the administration and financial situation of a religious institution in the fourteenth century but have widely been neglected. This study highlights the potential of financial accounts to not only contribute to current understanding of the economic stability of an institution, but to provide an insight into the performance of the tenants and debtors who frequent the material. In a similar way to manorial records allowing the historian to access the lives of the peasantry, the common fund reveals much about the experience and stability of both the rural and urban inhabitants of the Lincolnshire diocese in the fourteenth century. In contradiction to the findings of Francis Hill, the common fund highlights the performance of Lincolnshire in the aftermath of the Black Death and suggests that the Chapter, city and wider settlements remained economically stable in the decades notorious for sustained population decline and economic collapse. The study uses the accounts to explore the relationship between Lincoln Cathedral Chapter and the outside world through an evaluation of its gift-giving practices. The accounts contain numerous examples of gifts both received and offered by the Chapter, which proved an effective way to establish alliances and to cement friendships. The thesis analyses trends in the value of gift-exchange throughout the turbulent and troublesome fourteenth century. Gift-exchange established reciprocal alliances between the rich and poor, and the living and dead. The study evaluates exchange between pilgrims and saints using shrine accounts, the rich and the poor using obit records, and gifts given directly by the Chapter to the poor of the diocese and members of both the secular and religious elite. Where one socio-economic crisis led to a reduction in gift-exchange, another increased the value of giving. This study is the first of its kind to use institutional ecclesiastical accounts to explore the economic performance of both rural and urban settlements. The availability of the data facilitates an exploration of long-term trends in gift-exchange and places gift-giving practices against a backdrop of significant social and economic change in an age of famine, deflation, and plague. The common fund accounts contribute to current knowledge on the place of unofficial saints, which benefit from extensive shrine account data. With eight regular openings of the shrine boxes throughout the year, this study adds further nuance to seasonal cycles in pilgrimage and allows for a comparison of the veneration of official saints and those who failed to secure papal recognition. For the first time, this thesis can compare the extent of charitable giving to the poor with other forms of expenditure to understand whether charity was motivated by the recipients' need to receive or the benefactors' ability to give. This thesis uses giftgiving behavior to highlight the potential of institutional accounts to further current knowledge on economic performance and the place of a cathedral in the urban space.

The passing of the Television Act in 1954 introduced commercial television to British screens for the first time; ITV was formed as a network of regional channels that broadcast content aimed specially at the regions they served. The arrival of regional television also coincided with mass immigration from Britain's former colonies, a significant proportion of which settled in the Midlands. Scholars of both twentieth-century British history and media history have tended to underplay regional variation. There is a growing but small field of historians who have examined race and media in the same frame but even they have generally not acknowledged the important role of local and regional media in shaping the public response to post-war immigration. This study addresses this absence by examining depictions of immigrants on ATV, ITV's regional Midlands channel, from 1960 to 1985, focusing primarily on ATV's news programme through a series of case studies, as well as the production of Here and Now, an ethnic minority arts and culture magazine programme broadcast by ATV (later Central Television) throughout the 1980s. It also examines the previously underexplored role of the local press in the formation of public responses to immigration, highlighting significant links between different forms of local and regional media in post-war Britain by arguing that ATV was, at times, influenced by local press reporting of immigration. ATV and the local press played a crucial role in forming local responses to immigration within the region, one that differed at times to that of the national press, television news and current affairs programming. Unlike the national television news, which reported immigration from a national perspective, ATV broadcast local content which focused specifically on local issues, for example the impact of immigration on local services, employment and housing. This content also crucially provided images of immigrants within the audience's towns, neighbourhoods and streets. Despite the large immigrant community in the Midlands during the period, ATV failed to properly represent black and Asian people. In doing so, ATV played an important role in defining the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion within Midlands communities. A comparison of regional and national television news and current affairs programming also indicates that ATV understood neutrality differently than the BBC and ITV, often resulting in far more negative representations of race and immigration. By examining the role of local and regional media in public responses to post-war immigration, this study adds depth to our existing understanding of the uneven development of race relations in post-war Britain.

This thesis examines the lives of independent women in small-town and rural England during the long nineteenth century. It takes as its focus never-married women who lived alone, or as heads of households, deriving income from a variety of sources, but not reliant on husbands or other family members. Previously under-acknowledged in the historiography, these women populated the pages of the nineteenth-century trade directories that document the economic, social, and civic life of the principal villages and market towns of provincial rural England; female landowners, farmers, property holders and business proprietors who possessed the resources to establish and maintain an autonomous identity, head their own households and, in some cases, act as titular head to their wider family and kinship network. On their own, the binaries of gender and marital status utilised in standard historical narratives, fail to explain the independent woman, those seen to occupy male subject positions but who also transcended the negative tropes associated with the category 'single'. Drawing on the work of feminist theorists Joan Wallach Scott and Judith Butler, this thesis sets out to understand how gender combined with other factors - class, family, property, and occupation - to position and empower these women. This thesis begins by considering the different sites where the independent woman was created. A sample of mid-nineteenth-century didactic literature and periodical articles - in which the debates about women's 'nature' and position were played out - is examined. It is argued that this literature shows that when ideology collides with economic reality, it creates a discursive space in which the idea of female independence became both possible and desirable. This translated into other discourse, thus this thesis will explore how influential fictional representations created by nineteenth-century novelists populated this discursive space, presenting a range of autonomous female characters - from modest householders to wealthy heiresses - who demonstrate that a woman in possession of property, occupation and/or wealth, can act independently in the nineteenth century. This thesis uses a range of sources to test the reality of these fictional portraits. Trade directories and census records reveal the spatial distribution of female-headed households and landed proprietorship in a sample of English rural counties. These statistical representations are fleshed out in a series of case studies, linking business and personal correspondence to other documentation, detailing women's independent lives in small town and countryside. The significance of household formation in the performance and articulation of an independent self is explored, including the relationship between household headship and enterprise. The ways in which women in rural areas - used power objectified through property and land - is shown. By foregrounding their occupational identities to run farming and estate enterprises, women demonstrated agency. Finally, the thesis explores how women used the status and reputation they derived from customary forms of power, to intervene in their neighbourhoods and further afield, transcending the traditional feminine sphere to construct houses, churches, and hospitals - showing the lasting impact that independent female agency had on the shape and function of space in both rural parish and small town.

This thesis is an exploration of the complex relationship between academic, popular and museum histories. A central theme to the research is that nostalgia currently keeps these categories of history quite separate from one another, as academic historians are critical of the use of nostalgia in presenting the past, whereas popular histories are often steeped in nostalgia, as are historical narratives presented in museums. I argue that nostalgia and nostalgic sources should not be viewed as problematic by historians, but embraced simply as another type of historical source. Popular histories, rich in nostalgia, and often reliant on memories should also be considered more favourably by academics as they serve to engage people with historical narratives as both contributors and consumers. The inclusion of nostalgic sources, such as memoirs and oral histories, in historical narratives can also result in the production of new or relative histories, which enrich the historical past presented to us, and open up fresh debates on well covered topics. Nor is nostalgia problematic in museums as it helps visitors relate to, and understand, the stories presented to them. Nostalgia can also motivate people to donate objects to museums, and therefore to have an active role in how the past is represented within museums. Once again this serves to produce a more complex narrative for the visitor that can broaden our understanding of the past. These ideas are presented through two case studies of agricultural change in Lincolnshire between 1850 and 1980, and a case study of museums in the county. The historical narratives were produced using a range of primary and secondary sources, including oral histories and memoirs. The inclusion of non- ii traditional sources aided in the production of new accounts of changes in the labour patterns of women and children, and of increased mechanisation during the period. Both chapters reposition agricultural modernity in history, demonstrating that the shift from traditional to modern practices did not occur immediately after World War Two, but over a period of 30 years from the 1930s to the 1960s. The museological case study explores how the past is represented in museums and the factors that shape this. Museums in Lincolnshire were surveyed, and professionals working in them were interviewed, to ascertain how they present historical narratives around agricultural changes, and how nostalgia relates to this. It was found that nostalgia had very little impact on how the past was presented in the museums, but the processes of donation and collection, the lack of specialist knowledge in the sector, and external political factors had a significant impact on the presentation of the past in these institutions. The thesis argues that those involved with academic, popular, and museum histories should work collaboratively to explore ways of incorporating nostalgic sources into historical narratives to develop new interpretations of the past. They should also work in partnership to move away from the traditional museological ‘nostalgia debate’ to resolve the issues that currently affect how the past is presented in museums.