This thesis challenges existing diocesan histories of Cork, Cloyne and Ross. Its local focus provides an invaluable opportunity to explore the successes and failures of the reformations in the region. The arguments are split into four chapters, which are divided between the upper and lower clerical orders, the secular and religious clergy, both before and during the eras of the Tudor reformations. The argument uses antiquarian sources, Irish annals and English state papers to narrate the formation of diocesan, parochial and monastic structures in the region. The quality of each is then assessed for both the late medieval and reformations periods, with direct reference to the effects of the peculiarities of Co. Cork’s religion upon the progress of reform. The thesis argues that the secular elites of Cork, Cloyne and Ross were intrinsically wedded to its church, involved heavily in the creation of the parish and monastic networks. Following the contraction of the crown polity in the medieval periods, local families took on increasing levels of influence. During the Tudor period, the crown sought to expand its power in the region. However, the agents of reform failed to engage with the Irish and Anglo-Norman elites. Instead, their work would be accomplished at the expense of the traditional political and religious structures. This failure was based in the pervasive economic and polical connections between the secular and religious elites of Co. Cork, but was reinforced by the particular weaknesses of the Anglican reformation strategy.

This account of British interest in Egypt in the late 18th century, whilst not attempting to be exhaustive, aims to suggest the many-sided importance and interrelation of British interest in Egypt during 1775-1798. Topics include: British interest engendered by the Levant company; antiquarian research; British conceptions of Arab life and literature; British travellers’ impressions of Egypt (political and commercial interest); the Indian factor; the importance of Egypt on an envisaged new route to India; international competition for trade via Egypt; the decline of British interest in Egypt; and the growth of British policy towards the Ottoman Empire.

This thesis demonstrates the significance of Food Vessel pottery and burial in Northern England during the Early Bronze Age (c.2200 to 1800 cal BC). It represents the first original and sustained study of this burial tradition for several decades. It is argued that the interwoven relationships between Food Vessels, other ceramic types, and trade and exchange networks are both a reason why the tradition has posed interpretative problems for prehistorians, and a central component of its significance during the Early Bronze Age. The chronological relationships between British Food Vessels and other ceramic and funerary traditions are reviewed using the first comprehensive and critically assessed dataset of radiocarbon determinations. Previous approaches to Food Vessel typology are critically reviewed and a new approach based on the ‘potter’s perspective’ and contextual studies is proposed. A contextual approach is applied to Food Vessels from three regions of Northern England: the Northern Counties; North-East Yorkshire, the central lowlands and North-West England; and South-East Yorkshire. Each study reveals significant inter- and intra-regional similarities and differences in how Food Vessels were used and understood. The significance of Food Vessel pottery and burial is then discussed at a national scale.

The history of the British Army in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars is generally associated with stories of British military victory and the campaigns of the Duke of Wellington. An intrinsic aspect of the historiography is the argument that, following British defeat in the Low Countries in 1795, the Army was transformed by the military reforms of His Royal Highness, Frederick Duke of York. This thesis provides a critical appraisal of the reform process with reference to the organisation, structure, ethos and learning capabilities of the British Army and evaluates the impact of the reforms upon British military performance in the Low Countries, in the period 1793 to 1814, via a series of narrative reconstructions. This thesis directly challenges the transformation argument and provides a re-evaluation of British military competency in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Over the last twenty years, the analysis of social networks has become an increasingly significant tool for sociologists, anthropologists and historians alike. Network analysis has not yet, however, been adopted extensively by historians of ducal Normandy or the Anglo-Norman realm. Although there has been some useful work on specific families or political groups, these have tended to artificially isolate networks from one another and from their broader social milieux. It has become clear that these problems can only be addressed by both inter and intra network analysis over a broader time frame, and that those networks themselves must also be conceived in broad terms. This thesis therefore considers three aristocratic kin-groups of significant contemporary and subsequent importance; the Clares, Giffards, and Tosnys, and includes both their cadet branches and their in-laws. All three groups are examined in terms of their kinship structures, their roles as lords and vassals, and their relationships to the church. While much of the material is Anglo-Norman, the chronological range extends from c.940 to c.1200. The aim has been to produce a fuller picture of how all three great family enterprises were constituted, developed, interacted with one another and were embedded within society, and to acknowledge that no man, and indeed, no kin-group, is an island entire of itself.

Robert Leighton (1610/11-1684) was a significant Scottish churchman of the seventeenth-century. He has been the subject of religious confessional history-writing which continues to skew our understanding of him. This thesis offers a radical reassessment of the first fifty years of Leighton’s life based upon the available primary evidence. The formative influences of Leighton’s Puritan anti-Episcopal father and his student years at the Town College of Edinburgh are re-evaluated. The possibility that he studied in Huguenot France in the 1630s is posited. Using his relationship with the Earl of Lothian to illuminate his involvement in the Covenanting movement, he is placed in Scotland from 1638. Leighton’s commitment to the Covenant and to Presbyterianism is reconsidered by charting Leighton’s career as minister of Newbattle (1641-1653) and his appointment as Principal of the Town College by the English occupiers in 1653. His decision to become a Restoration bishop in 1661 is reviewed having regard to a new understanding of his journey towards Episcopacy and by careful attention to his own words and actions. This study concludes that our comprehension of the Church of Scotland during the Covenanting, Interregnum and Restoration periods is heightened by re-discovering the real Leighton.

No description available.

The essential object of the thesis is to examine the demands made upon differing royalist leaders during the Great Civil War, and the responses of those communities to them. By doing so, it is intended to provide answers to one of the great unanswered problems of the war, the question of whether the royalists lost because they were defeated in the field or because they forfeited the sympathy of the local people upon whose support they depended. The region chosen for study comprises twenty counties within Wales, the Marches and the West Midlands, the area in which the king first gathered an army and in which his supporters staged their last stand. The first section traces the delivery and impact of the royalist Commissions Of Array, the raising of the royal field army and the slow organisation of local communities for a prolonged war in the winter that followed. The second describes the completion of this process with the appointment of peers as regional generals. The third section is devoted to describing the machinery of royalist wartime government and the problems it faced. The fourth recounts how the noble generals came to be replaced by nore experienced soldiers, led by Prince Rupert. The fifth examines the challenge offered to these men in the winter of 1644-5 by a now war-weary local population, and the manner in which the military men overcame this challenge. The last section is devoted to showing how the destruction of the royal army at Naseby freed the local population to oppose any further demands by the royalist war machine and thereby destroy the machine itself.

In 1919 the number of British officials employed by the Egyptian Government reached a peak of over 1,600, a substantial figure in relation to a colonial administration like the Indian Civil Service. However, due to the anomalous nature of Britain's occupation of Egypt, the workings of British administration there were left deliberately ambiguous. Thus although we have an extensive knowledge of imperial policy with regard to Egypt, we have little understanding of how British rule there actually functioned, certainly nothing to compare with numerous local studies of the Raj or Colonial Service at work. By studying the British administrators of the Egyptian Government, this thesis casts new light on Britain's middle years in Egypt, which saw formal imperial control succeeded by informal hegemony. We begin by analysing the Anglo-Egyptian administrative structure as a product of its historical development. We examine how well this muted style of administrative control suited conditions in Egypt and Britain's requirements there, considering the fact that by 1919 the British officials had become a major source of nationalist grievance. This loss of reputation caused the Milner Mission to select the British administration as a principal scapegoat in its proposed concessions. Moreover, it was the belief of certain leading officials that Britain's responsibility for Egyptian administration was no longer viable which finally helped precipitate the 1922 declaration of independence. The Egyptian Government now took actual rather than nominal control of its foreign bureaucrats, yet even in 1936, over 500 British officials were still employed in finance, security, and in technical and educational capacities. The changing role of these officials within an evolving mechanism of British control illuminates one of the earliest experiences of transfer of power this century.

The study of the war against Revolutionary France (1793-1802) has always been rather overshadowed in British history by the attractions of the second part of the struggle with France, the more successful Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). This is to see events out of perspective. Moreover, in both wars attention has usually been concentrated on the actual military operations rather than on the factors influencing the formulation of war policy and on the essential position of international diplomacy in this struggle. Although four (arguably five) European coalitions were organized against France in theSa wars, only the final, successful, combination has been studied in detail, yet, as this last coalition proved, the only way to defeat France was by such combinations. This thesis therefore examines both the handling of the Revolutionary War by the government of the Younger Pitt between 1793 and 1801, and the course of its diplomacy through its attempts to form a workable combination with the European Powers against France. It does this through a detailed study of British relations with Austria in particular. Austria was chosen because the connection with Vienna provides the key to British policy on the continent throughout the war. Although Ministers desired a general European Coalition, they came to realize that in practice their best hope of success lay in close co-operation and alliance with Austria, the Power with whom they appeared to have most in common and who possessed the largest and most efficient army facing France. Moreover, even in the period of disagreement with Austria between 1797 and 1799 the fact of this disagreement had a decisive effect on British policy and its execution. Such a study also has a wider perspective in that it marks the final revival of the Old System: the union of Britain, Austria and (to an ever decreasing extent) Holland, the efficacy of which as a barrier against France constituted one of the basic tenets of British foreign policy in the eighteenth century. The System had been in existence from 1689 to 1756, at which date the Austrians had dropped it, but British governments had never lost faith in it, and successively they had vainly attempted to restore it ever since. Its revival and failure in the 1790s therefore represents the passing of an era in British foreign policy, and the reasons for its passing are fully considered in this thesis. In order to place the Austrian alliance of the 1790s in its proper setting, both as an integral part of British war policy and as the major factor in British diplomacy, it has been necessary to consider Britain's relations with the other major European Powers besides Austria, and also the close relationship of diplomacy with three other factors: military considerations, finance, and public opinion. Attention has therefore been paid not only to diplomatic archives, but also to private correspondence among members of the government, to the state of the money market and foreign exchanges, to parliamentary debates and political pamphlets. Finally, in order to understand the path taken in Anglo-Austrian relations it has also been necessary to investigate policy and reactions to British policy in Vienna. Such a study reveals the immense difficulties faced by British Ministers in trying to pursue a coherent foreign policy in this war. Not only did they have to satisfy public opinion at home, but they also had to reconcile their natural wish to engage as many Powers as possible in the war with the obvious fact Austria was the most necessary Power to the implementation of their plans. The need to steer a delicate balance between a grand coalition and an Austrian alliance, at a time of conflicting interests in central and eastern Europe, was an insurmountable problem. Equally, the difficulties, both physical and personal, in trying to cooperate with an ally whose capital was anything from two weeks to two months away were immense. Moreover, even the best-laid plans were at the mercy of events elsewhere and of chance on the battlefield. As a result Ministers very rarely held the initiative and were often hurriedly reacting to ever-changing situations and problems. It was as a result of these factors that diplomatic needs in Britain's relationship with Austria dominated British strategy in the 1790s, constantly forcing Ministers away from their original intention of pursuing a maritime war. The truth of Dundas's observation that 'all modern wars are a contention of purse 1 is also apparent: from 1794 onward finance was at the heart of Anglo-Austrian relations and it held British policy in a straight-jacket. The legend of the limitless flowing of 'Pitt's gold' cannot be sustained when the paucity of British resources and the government's caution in using them is seen, but neither can the more recent myth of Pitt's niggardliness towards Austria. Pitt was quite willing to subsidize Austria, but having burnt his fingers on the disastrous Prussian subsidy of 1794, he wished to impose strict conditions which Austria was unwilling to accept. Consequently it was Austria, wishing to retain some freedom of action, and not Pitt, who insisted on the policy of loans which so much plagued Anglo-Austrian relations. The thesis begins -with, an examination of the factors which drew Britain and Austria into a close cooperation in the first year of the war. It shows that Britain became committed to Austria because of the circumstances in which the war began. The British government wished to ensure its dominance over that of Holland, it wished to protect its trade and security interests in the Netherlands, and it believed that the best way to attain these ea££ was by keeping the latter independent of France through their continued possession by Austria. In order to encourage the reluctant Austrians to retain the Netherlands, it had politically to hold out the hope of enlarging them at France's expense and militarily to commit its forces to a 'Flanders war' to obtain such an enlargement. Austria, which wished in any case for a British alliance to escape from its diplomatic isolation, took the bait and so assumed the leading part in the war on the continent. Despite difficulties caused by Britain's attempts to hold the rest of the Coalition together and by Austria's sudden financial demands in the summer of 1794, this cooperation developed into alliance because the British Ministers came to realize that of all the European Powers Austria was the most earnest in the war, contributed the largest and most effective army, and constituted the best barrier to France on the continent. In Vienna the Austria Foreign Minister, Baron Thugut, wanted the alliance because he hoped for conquests from France and needed British money to continue the war, and also because he saw the chance of a Triple Alliance of Austria, Britain, and Russia which would isolate Austria's rival Prussia and enable it to make gains in Poland at Prussia's expense. The thesis goes on to show that one of the basic reasons for the failure of the alliance, as in 1756, was Austria's rivalry with Prussia. For Britain the alliance was directed exclusively against France; for Austria it was directed as much against Prussia as France. Thugut became increasingly disstisfied when British Ministers not only refused to accept this interpretation but actually began to negotiate with Prussia to bring it back into the war. British Ministers became both annoyed and alarmed when they realized that Thugut, in his rivalry with Berlin, was neither interested in the Netherlands nor devoting his whole attention to the French war. As the war went from bad to worse the alliance fell apart because all bonds of common rnterest and mutual trust disappeared.