Social

Martin Holmes describes how, when Henry VIII was aged twenty-six, the Easter sermons of 1517 provoked riots in London against the wealth and power of aliens at Court.

David Francis Jones describes how, among primitive peoples encountered by the Romans, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Celts made a particularly deep impression.

A.L. Rowse meets the grandfather of Shakespeare’s beloved patron, a characteristic Henrician, and a man to whom the English Reformation brought unrivalled opportunities.

Charles Chevenix Trench explains how, from the reign of William the Conqueror until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poacher was restrained by savage penal laws.

E. Mary Smallwood asserts that when trouble broke out between rulers and subjects, the fault did not always lie with the Roman administration.

Although Pepys often refers in his Diary to Thomas Hill, he remains a somewhat shadowy figure. It is now possible to reconstruct his portrait. Hill emerges as a man after the diarist’s own heart—learned, inquisitive, sociable, garrulous. D. Pepys Whiteley recalls their friendship, which had begun in 1664 and continued until the merchant left England for Portugal.

During the Wars of the Barons in the reign of Henry III, writes Margaret Wade Labarge, everyday life and tastes are recorded in the household rolls of Eleanor de Montfort.

Maurice Ashley describes how, divided by a vast gulf from the prospering gentry, seventeenth-century cottagers and labourers lived a poor and harsh life. After 1660, their standard of welfare seems to have declined.

Resolved to examine the prospect before his younger brother emigrated, Shirreff undertook an arduous perambulation of the United States and Canada. G.E. Mingay describes events.

By the close of the fourteenth century the English system of surnames had come into general use, many of them deriving from the trades and crafts followed by their bearers.