prison hand crank

Reformative rhetoric and the exercise of corporal power: Alexander Maconochie’s regime at Birmingham prison, 1849–51 by J. M. Moore

In March 1849 Alexander Maconochie, the former superintendent of the Norfolk Island penal settlement in colonial Australia and inventor of the ‘mark system’ of reformative penal discipline, was appointed by the Birmingham magistrates as the governor of the borough’s newly constructed prison. This article tells the story of the two years Maconochie spent at Birmingham prison, highlighting the illegal and abusive practices that he introduced there. It argues that, despite the reformative rhetoric portraying his approach to penal discipline as benevolent and humanitarian, Maconochie’s regime relied heavily on coercion and corporal punishment.

 

A matter of trust: the royal regulation of England’s French residents during wartime, 1294–1377 by Bart Lambert and W. Mark Ormrod

This study focuses on how the English crown identified and categorized French-born people in the kingdom during the preliminaries and first stage of the Hundred Years War. Unlike the treatment of alien priories and nobles holding lands on both sides of the Channel, the attitude to laypeople became more positive as the period progressed. In particular, the crown was prepared to grant wartime protections to French-born residents based on evidence of local integration. Analysis of the process reveals the flexibility with which the government considered national status before the emergence of denization at the end of the fourteenth century. [Open Access article]

 

17th-century-fire-hooks-e1394124680655

 

The representation and experience of English urban fire disasters, c.1580–1640 by John E. Morgan

Fire disasters were a perennial threat to urban life in early modern England, but are yet to receive sustained attention from historians. By analysing popular literature, charitable collections and relief distribution this article reveals how urban fires were interpreted and what effect they had on individuals and specific communities in England between 1580 and 1640. Some aspects of the experience of fire disasters in early modern England are illuminated through detailed contextual readings of contemporary news reports, quantitative analyses of the collection and distribution of charitable funds, and attention to the fortunes of individual survivors of fires.

 

The parliamentary mind and the mutable constitution by Catherine Chou

Utilizing a handful of succession treatises from the first decade of Elizabeth I’s reign, this article analyses the multiplicity of ways in which early modern Englishmen and Scotsmen conceived of parliament’s fundamental characteristics and decision-making processes, as well as the relationship between the changeability of the law and parliamentary authority. It argues that Elizabeth’s refusal to allow her parliaments to discuss the succession opened up a discursive space in which resurrected and potential future parliaments served as logical, forward-thinking arbiters of this sensitive issue, and both pro- and anti-Stuart tract writers could identify at least one version of the Lords, Commons and crown that either had endorsed or supposedly would endorse their respective positions.