I’ve been working on the ‘lived experience’ of early modern religion: what it was actually like to be a Protestant in 16^th or 17^th century Britain. And I’ve become more and more convinced there’s a crucial element of the story almost completely missing from the standard accounts: children.

Read most histories of early modern religion and you could be forgiven for concluding that there were no children in this period. But we are dealing with huge numbers of people: perhaps a third of the population of early modern England was under 12. And while every adult had of course been a child at some point, large numbers of children never became adults.

The sources are very thin. Most early modern Protestants saw childhood as a period of mere depravity, needing only correction. The period’s most popular devotional work, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, asked, “what is youth but an vntamed Beast? … Ape-like, delighting in nothing but in toyes and baubles?” But a few patterns do emerge. Saying grace at table was, almost routinely, a child’s role in a family. Children’s patterns of prayer can be glimpsed sometimes – learning prayers by rote, or making vows. And we do have occasional testimonies of children’s actual religious experience – a seven year old finding “unexpressible joys” in reading and prayer, a four year old stargazing and meditating on God’s power.

A unique image of a Protestant family at prayer, from Auckland Castle, County Durham. As usual, the children are there only as an afterthought.

But we would be stuck with these glimpses if it not for two extraordinary accounts written in the 1630s. Richard Norwood and Elizabeth Isham had both read Augustine’s Confessions, newly translated into English, and had learned from it that it was worth paying close attention to how God had worked in their lives before their actual conversions. So Norwood described his schoolboy psalm-singing, and how, aged seven or eight, he was “taken with great admiration of some places” in the Bible. He remembered (and counted as a sin) “at several times reasoning … about whether there were a God”. Adults assured him that God loved him, but he was not sure “how they could know it was so”. And when he tried to share his enthusiasm for Scripture with his parents, “they made me little answer (so far as I remember) but seemed rather to smile at my childishness”. This made him wonder whether what the preachers taught was true, “or whether elder people did not know them to be otherwise, only they were willing that we children should be so persuaded of them, that we might follow our books the better and be kept in from play.” Norwood was that rare thing: an adult who could remember what it was really like to be a child.

Or again, the Northamptonshire gentlewoman Elizabeth Isham described how her religion took shape in counterpoint to her mother. She was taught to pray from infancy, but when she was eight years old, “I came to a fuller knowledge of thee”, through praying earnestly “to avoyde my mothers displeasure”. Her mother’s wrath was no joke: in her rages, Judith Isham had a servant hold her daughter down, the better to beat her. Elizabeth recalled that “in these dayes feareing my parents I had no other refuge but to flie unto thee”.

It was her grandmother who showed her another way. When the old lady was ill, and the nine year old Elizabeth was caring for her, she was struck by the delight her grandmother took in her devotional reading. For Elizabeth, as for so many other children before and since, books were her liberation. As her reading accelerated from her tenth year, her religion blossomed. It also brought greater peace with her mother, who took advice from a clergyman friend and developed a new way of dealing with her daughter. When she saw Elizabeth misbehave, instead of flying into a rage, she would “holde her fan afore her face”, praying for patience and judgement. This gave Elizabeth time to reflect on her error, so that as soon as the fan was lowered she would go and ask forgiveness, and would be set a penitential task, “which I performed with the more dilligence she having delt so well with mee”. We rarely come so close to a happy ending.

These are very individual stories, and that is part of the point: children are individuals, and neither happy nor unhappy families all resemble one another. But they do remind us that children take their own lives, including their religion, immensely seriously, and can be very finely attuned to managing the loving, unpredictable, condescending, inattentive and sometimes incomprehensibly punitive adult world.

They also suggest to me that there is much more to be done here. We have long learned the importance of gender to any serious historical analysis. It is time to pay attention to this equally pervasive division, and to this even more forgotten slice of humanity.

Alec Ryrie studied History and Theology at the universities of Cambridge, St Andrews, and Oxford. He is now Head of Theology and Religion and Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. His most recent book, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain, published in April 2013. His previous books include The Age of Reformation (2009), The Sorcerer’s Tale (2008), The Origins of the Scottish Reformation (2006) and The Gospel and Henry VIII (2003).

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Image credit: Courtesy of Alec Ryrie. Do not use without permission.

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When the first Eurovision Song Contest was broadcast in 1956, the BBC was so late in entering that it missed the competition deadline, so it was first shown in my native England in 1957. Nonetheless, it seems as if this curious example of pan-European co-operation, which started with seven countries and is now up to 40, has been around forever. Certainly as the 1950s gave way to the ’60s, the contest created a degree of national fervour in Britain, and I suspect in most other parts of Europe. At its peak, it’s estimated to have drawn in around 600 million viewers worldwide.

The competition’s only seldom been part of the pop mainstream, and at the time when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were becoming world famous in the 1960s, Britain entered the bland sounds of Kathy Kirby and Matt Monroe instead. It took Britain’s first two wins, by Sandie Shaw in 1967 and Lulu in 1969 to bring about a convergence of pop culture and the more mainstream vocal entertainment of the contest. Meanwhile 1950s heart-throb and subsequent film-star Cliff Richard was controversially beaten into second place in 1968 with “Congratulations” — a song that has stood the test of time rather better than Spain’s winning “La La La,” (sung in Spanish by Massiel after the original Catalan entry by Joan Manuel Serrat was withdrawn by the Franco regime). Abba’s success with “Waterloo” in 1974 marks one of the few genuine moments when the contest reflected wider international taste. They aimed squarely at winning and did so, bringing their distinctive sound and utter professionalism to a vastly greater audience through their success in the competition. Some other acts were successfully launched on the world stage as a result of first being seen by an international audience during the finals, including early appearances by Julio Iglesias and Céline Dion.

Yet that is one of the reasons the contest is so fascinating. At a time when European monetary and political convergence is a burning question for governments, the Eurovision contest demonstrates just how varied approaches are to popular songs and entertainment across the continent, from Portugal to Azerbaijan, and from Norway to Israel. Dance moves, costumes, gestures, lyrics, and language convey insights into how other European countries go about the business of entertainment in a far more insightful way than almost any other television spectacular. Ukranian drag queen Verka Serduchka’s antics and lyrics upset Russia in 2007, but in 2006 Finnish heavy metal band Lordi took the world by storm in an over-the-top performance with latex masks, prosthetic beards and horns. Amazingly, they managed to convey rock and roll as a religion without alienating too many special interest groups.

Even back in the 1960s as we crouched round the flickering image of our black and white televisions, the voting system seemed arcane. It still does. The results can sometimes be skewed by blocs of countries who vote together for, one suspects, not entirely artistic reasons. Announced first in French and then English, the underdogs who only score “nil points” often become popular with the viewing audience for that very reason. Poor old Jemini gave the UK its first “nil points” in 2003, but in 1997 Portugal and Norway shared the ignominy of no votes at all, and in 1983 the same fate befell Turkey and Spain. Norway still holds the record for the greatest number of “nil points”. The term has entered the European vernacular, in many countries, describing a competitor who tries hard but with no hope of winning.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now this year’s contest is under way in Malmö, Sweden, what can we expect? The sheer number of competing countries now means two nights of semis before the final, which takes place this Saturday, 18 May 2013. The bookies are backing Denmark and Norway to triumph in this very Nordic contest, but I have a hunch that after Engelbert Humperdinck’s not entirely satisfactory entry last year, the Scandinavians will be given a run for their money by British entry Bonnie Tyler. A legend of 80s pop with her great hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Tyler is a Welsh singer who has the rare distinction of also topping the charts in France. She has also had hit records in Norway, Austria, Switzerland and Germany. When it comes to tactical voting, she’s potentially got a lot of different countries on her side! At least the title of her entry is a little more modest than Cliff Richard’s from 1968: it’s called “Believe In Me”.

Alyn Shipton is the author of Nilsson: The Life of a Singer Songwriter, to be published on July 18. He is also a critic for The Times in London and presents jazz programmes on BBC Radio.

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14 May 1948

The following is a brief extract from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad.

From the beginning of the Nazi persecution the numbers of Jews who wished to settle in Palestine rose. As the extermination policies began to unroll in the war years, they made nonsense of British attempts to restrict immigration, which was the side of British policy unacceptable to the Jews; the other side – the partitioning of Palestine – was rejected by the Arabs. The issue was dramatized as soon as the war was over by a World Zionist Congress demand that a million Jews should be admitted to Palestine at once. Other new factors now began to operate. The British in 1945 had looked benevolently on the formation of an ‘Arab League’ of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and Jordan. There had always been in British policy a strand of illusion – that pan-Arabism might prove the way in which the Middle East could be persuaded to settle down after post-Ottoman confusion, and that the co-ordination of the policies of Arab states would open the way to the solution of its problems. In fact the Arab League was soon preoccupied with Palestine to the virtual exclusion of anything else.

Proposed UN partition of Palestine 1947 (c) Helicon Publishing Ltd

The other novelty was the Cold War. In the immediate post-war era, Stalin took the view that Britain and the United States would rival each other for world dominance, and that the Soviets would be served by stirring the pot. Verbal attacks on British positions and influence therefore followed, and in the Middle East this, of course, coincided with traditional interests … The Americans struggled with making out their position. There was major public support in the United States for Zionist views, fueled by the terrible revelations that were coming out of the Nazis’ death-camps.

Thus beset, the British sought to disentangle themselves from the Holy Land. From 1945 they faced both Jewish and Arab terrorism and guerrilla warfare in Palestine. Unhappy Arab, Jewish and British policemen struggled to hold the ring while the British government still strove to find a way acceptable to both sides of bringing the mandate to an end. American help was sought, but to no avail; Truman wanted a pro-Zionist solution. In the end the British took the matter to the United Nations. It recommended partition, but this was still a non-starter for the Arabs. Fighting between the two communities grew fiercer and the British decided to withdraw without more ado.

On the day that they did so, 14 May 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed. It was immediately recognized by the United States (sixteen minutes after the foundation act) and the USSR; they were to agree about little else in the Middle East for the next quarter of a century.

Reprinted from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2013 by O.A. Westad.

J. M. Roberts CBE died in 2003. He was Warden at Merton College, Oxford University, until his retirement and is widely considered one of the leading historians of his era. He is also renowned as the author and presenter of the BBC TV series ‘The Triumph of the West’ (1985). Odd Arne Westad edited the sixth edition of The History of the World. He is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among them ‘The Global Cold War,’ which won the Bancroft Prize.

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The high-profile marking of John Snow’s bicentenary on the fifteenth of March would have surprised the great man. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the WellcomeTrust, and The Lancet were among the august UK organisations to honour him with events including an exhibition, three days of seminars, and a gala dinner. The physician was also celebrated in the United States where he has a large fan base.

By the time of his death, on 16 June 1858 at the age of 45, Snow was convinced beyond doubt that his theory on the mode of transmission of epidemic cholera was correct but had little expectation that any credit would accrue to him. His friend, the Soho curate Henry Whitehead, said Snow predicted that he might not live to see the day when great cholera outbreaks were in the past — which was true — and also that his name would be forgotten when that day came, which was not. On the contrary, he is now widely regarded as the father of the science of epidemiology, with his life and work the subject of countless books, articles and web pages, while 200 years after his birth his legacy remains the focus of lively academic debate.

But it’s an unfair world. Achievement alone isn’t always enough to ensure that an individual, however deserving, secures a place in history and in Snow’s case, myth had a role to play. Not that Snow appeared at all interested in fame, posthumous or contemporary. Another friend, Josuah Parsons from his student days, remarked: “The naked truth for its own sake was what he sought and loved. No consideration of honour or profit seemed to have the power to buy his opinions on any subject.” That was just as well, for both honour and profit were in short supply, at least where his groundbreaking work on epidemic disease was concerned.

By the mid-1850s when Snow published his seminal work on cholera he was enjoying some success in the fast-developing specialism of anaesthesia, even attending Queen Victoria at the birth of two of her children. His thinking on disease was largely ignored, however, mainly because he rejected the then widely accepted belief that foul air, or miasma, was to blame. He reasoned, correctly, that cholera was spread when some of the matter thrown off by a victim — the vomit or the massive cloudy discharges from the bowels — found its way into a healthy person’s mouth. He also explained the disease’s frightening habit of striking hundreds of people simultaneously without warning: the cause was infected sewage leaking into the water supply, a common occurrence in the first half of the 19th century. He was not believed.

In the summer of 1854 in order to test his theory Snow carried out what become known as the Grand Experiment, tramping the streets of South London while the country was in the grip of its third cholera epidemic, knocking on doors and asking which of two water companies the householder used. He discovered that customers of the company that took its supplies untreated from the Thames, right next to where the sewers of London were discharged, were between eight and nine times more likely to die of cholera than those whose supplier had recently moved its source upriver, out of reach of the filth.

It was as Snow was putting the finishing touches to this work that he became involved in the Broad Street episode. His serious academic reputation is largely based on the South London research, but it is Broad Street that has contributed most to his enduring reputation, linking as it does a compelling story with two icons — a “death map” and the image of a street pump — with the addition of a little fiction along the way.

Overnight on Thursday, 31 August 1854, 200 people in a tiny part of Soho around Broad Street and Golden Square were struck down by a massive explosion of cholera, the fastest and most deadly ever seen in Britain. Whole families were carried off together. The epidemic continued for 10 days, still confined to a few streets, before petering out. The eventual death toll was over 600.

When Snow heard what was happening, he first looked at the addresses where the fatal cases had occurred and then went on to pioneer what is now a vital tool in epidemiology, disease-mapping, marking the deaths, house by house, on a street plan. The map showed just how local the outbreak was; all the deaths clustered in and around Broad Street. What interested Snow, however, was that those deaths either plummeted or stopped altogether at every point where it was easier to go to another pump than the one in Broad Street.

On the night of 7 September then, a week into the epidemic, Snow gate-crashed a parish meeting at St. James’s church, Piccadilly, where the Board of Guardians responsibly locally for public health were discussing the outbreak. Polluted water from the Broad Street well was to blame, he told the Guardians. They must put the pump out of action.

So far, all true. At this point in some accounts though a little creative licence creeps in. After a bitter row with the recalcitrant authorities, we are told, Dr Snow then storms off, either to chain up the pump handle himself or wrench it off with his own hands. In fact while the authorities were far from convinced, they did take Snow’s advice and the pump was disabled.

The next piece of fiction is that the deaths then stopped in their tracks and, hey presto, overnight John Snow was vindicated. Truth was, the epidemic had already peaked of its own accord; putting the pump out of action proved nothing. The longer, more complex story of how John Snow was proved right is actually more interesting but it’s easy to see why such a satisfying ending to the tale has evolved. And if myth has proved helpful in ensuring that a brilliant man who was dismissed and reviled during his lifetime is now so rightly celebrated, it’s no bad thing.

Sandra Hempel is a writer and editor who specialises in health and social issues. Her book The Medical Detective – John Snow, Cholera and the Mystery of the Broad Street Pump won the British Medical Association book award for the public understanding of science and the Medical Journalists’ Association book award. Her next book The Inheritor’s Powder, which looks at arsenic poisoning and forensic toxicology, is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on 13 June 2013. She recently gave a talk at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine about John Snow.

Throughout the year, the International Journal of Epidemiology will be publishing special reprints marking John Snow’s bicentenary, including The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell and Cholera, with reference to the geological theory: A proximate cause – a law by which it is governed – a prophylactic by John Lea. The IJE is an essential requirement for anyone who needs to keep up to date with epidemiological advances and new developments throughout the world. It encourages communication among those engaged in the research, teaching, and application of epidemiology of both communicable and non-communicable disease, including research into health services and medical care. OUP publishes the journal on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association.

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Image credits: (i) John Snow, seated, resting right arm on table, anon. (ii) ‘A cholera patient’, caricature of a cholera patient experimenting with remedies (Robert Cruikshank’s random shots No. 2) (iii) Street Map of Soho, around Golden Square, illustrating incidences of cholera deaths during the period of the Cholera Epidemic, 1853. All three images are used with permission from the Wellcome Trust. Do not reproduce without express permission.

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According to the Daily Mail, Oi! records were ‘evil’. According to the Socialist Worker, Oi! was a conduit for Nazism. According to the NME, Oi! was a means to inject ‘violent-racist-sexist-fascist’ attitudes into popular music.

The year is 1981, and on 3 July the Harmbrough Tavern is set ablaze in the London borough of Southall. Trapped inside the pub are three bands aligned to the Oi! movement initiated the previous year from within the pages of the Sounds music weekly. Therein, by contrast, Oi! is defined as a form of ‘working-class protest’, a ‘loose alliance of volatile young talents, skins, punks, tearaways, hooligans, rebels with or without causes united by their class, their spirit, their honesty and their love of furious rock ‘n’ roll’. Oi!, for most of those involved with it, was punk without the art school pretensions; a street-level music that sought to align working-class youth cults in the face of welfare cuts and growing unemployment. And there lay the rub. For Oi! comprised skinheads; and by 1981, skinheads were being recruited as foot-soldiers for the British far right, both the National Front and the British Movement. An Oi! gig in Southall, therefore, where a large Asian community had previously felt the brunt of cowardly racist attacks and witnessed the violent aftermath of an NF election rally in 1979, was a red-rag to a community fed up with being on the defensive and ready to respond. And respond the community most certainly did.

Covers of the first four Oi! compilations, released 1980–2. Source: “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” by Matthew Worley in Twentieth Century British History

The events of July 1981 have forever tainted Oi! Caught in the reductionist media snare, Oi! fell into an equation the broadly read: Oi! = skinheads = racism. In truth, however, Oi! was a rather more complex phenomenon. Though its lyrics and imagery tended to combine social resentment and patriotism in a way that provided a potential pathway to and from the far right, Oi! also contained a class awareness and a cultural heritage that suggested it was far more than a musical wing of the NF or BM. Indeed, many involved in Oi! actively (and literally) fought back against right-wing attempts to appropriate their music, a struggle that led eventually to the NF setting up its on ‘white power’ scene circa 1983. Rather, Oi!’s focus and lyrical preoccupations reflected tensions inherent within the socio-economic and political realities of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Like the punk culture from which it emerged, Oi! provided a contested site of critical engagement that allowed voices rarely heard in public debate to articulate a protest that cut across existing notions of ‘left’, ‘right’ and formal political organisation. More specifically, it revealed and articulated processes of political and socio-cultural realignment directly relevant to the advent of Thatcherism and collapse of the so-called ‘consensus’ that informed British politics from 1945.

As this suggests, an analysis of the bands, audience and ephemera associated with Oi! reveals much about class identity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, offering a snapshot of working-class youth in a period of significant socio-economic change. Notably, too, the debates that surrounded Oi! were informed by realignments on-going within British politics, both in terms of youthful disengagement from the political mainstream and the ‘cultural turn’ generated by a growing emphasis on ‘new’ spheres of struggle (race, gender, sexuality, youth, culture, language, consumption). Put bluntly, the politics of class were being overtaken by what some on the left called a ‘consciousness of oppression’ located in personal identity. This, in turn, shifted attention from the socio-economic to the cultural and, in the process, served to scramble some of the class and racial certainties that had once underpinned the politics of left and right. As the left became associated with students and ‘minority groups’ that made headway on questions of race and identity, so sections of the far right set out to ensure that the ‘grass-roots movement of workers and leadership of the working class does not rest with the communists and left but with the right’. In amidst all this, Oi! was caught in the crossfire: a medium for working-class protest interpreted as a recruiting ground for fascism.

Oi! then was not a vehicle for ‘evil’, Nazism or any other sort of ‘ism’. Its protest was made in primarily class terms, with its working-class origins serving as a common denominator across those associated with it. True, politics – along with youth cultural identities and, on occasion, football rivalries – provided points of tension. But the bands, poets, writers and audience associated with Oi! forged a class-conscious version of punk that sought for a political and cultural impact that looked beyond the rarefied confines of the students’ union, Daily Mail and NME.

Matthew Worley is a professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He is the author of several books and articles on British politics, and is currently writing a study of British youth culture and politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His article “Oi! Oi! Oi!: Class, Locality, and British Punk” is available free in Twentieth Century British History for a limited time.

Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century.

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By John Randolph Fuller

From April 1888 to February 1891, history’s most infamous cold case emerged when a series of 11 murders ripped through London’s working-class Whitechapel district. All of the murdered were women, and most were prostitutes. Whitechapel was one of the poorest areas in London and by the 1880s some of England’s grimiest industries, such as tanneries and breweries, had become established there. Poor Londoners, rural English folk, and immigrants crowded in looking for work, but the district’s poverty was so overwhelming, many of the women who found themselves there became prostitutes, living and dying in squalid anonymity.

These conditions made Whitechapel the perfect hunting ground for killers. Of the 11 murders committed, five murders of prostitutes were attributed to a person called Jack the Ripper. The Ripper probably killed more than five women, but only these could be directly connected to him. The crimes were shocking and fascinating: the shock brought attention to the plight of Whitechapel’s poor which led to some transitory social reforms, but the fascination brought attention to the crimes of Jack the Ripper into the 21st century.

Jack the Ripper’s murders have been the subject of a slew of fiction and non-fiction books, films, short stories, graphic novels, and web pages. The murder even got his own “ology,” with people studying the murders calling themselves “Ripperologists.” Every few years, it seems, someone arrives with a new theory about the Ripper’s identity or some “startling new” evidence. In 2002, crime novelist Patricia Cornwell published a controversial book offering up artist Walter Sickert as Jack the Ripper. In 2012, author John Morris insisted Jack was a woman. Another researcher insists the Ripper was an American murderer named H.H. Holmes. The suspect list doesn’t end there. Lewis Carroll is on it, along with the Duke of Clarence, Sir John Williams, and on and on.

Why do we still care? Serial killers and murderers are at work somewhere in the world every day. For example, since 1993, hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico have been routinely killed, with some being dumped into mass graves. The explanations are prosaic: jealousy, drugs, domestic violence, gang wars, robbery, rape. Some may be the product of a serial killer, but so many women have been murdered, it’s hard to tell. The police make arrests, but the murders continue. This story and others like it have been repeated for a couple of decades, but those murders don’t seem to have the appeal of Jack the Ripper. Why?

Is it the lack of a catchy moniker for the killers? “Jack the Ripper” does have a ring to it. Is it the gruesomeness of the murders? The Ripper not only killed his victims, he eviscerated them with surgical precision. Whoever the Ripper was, he knew his way around a human corpse. Is it the era? Victorian London was certainly an evocative place, and Victorian Whitechapel is stuck with all the sooty baggage the term “Dickensian” couldn’t carry. Whitechapel was much as one Ripper suspect was described: “of shabby genteel.”

The scores of years that separate us from the Whitechapel murders might make the whole business seem gloomily romantic to us, but it was terrifying to those who lived through it. Although serial murder had doubtless been committed prior to 19th-century England, the Ripper murders were systematic and one of the first times the public could really get its hands on all the juicy details. News about the murders were not just passed by word of mouth, they were printed in newspapers along with photographs of the victims. Both the murderer and the victims became individuals in the minds of the public. It was just the killer that they couldn’t put a face on.

It can be argued that the traditional systems of English—and by extension, American—justice has something to do with the Ripper’s popularity. These systems evolved to focus on the individual offender and his or her rights: the police are under pressure to arrest the person who is actually responsible, not just anyone. (The police in London arrested several people for the murders, but had to let them go.) The courts are under pressure to convict the correct suspect. Everyone looks foolish when suspects are in jail, and the slaughter continues. These factors, combined with a freewheeling media that publicizes any new information it can get, tend to individualize the offender.

Recall that 11 women were murdered between 1888 and 1891, but only five were attributed to Jack the Ripper. Who killed the other six women? Many Ripperologists say those, too, were the work of Jack, but others disagree. Two or more killers might have been at work separately, or “Jack the Ripper,” might have been several people working together. But the public likes to imagine the killer as a single person, an individual. It is much easier to put a face on, and a personality into, one person rather than many. It is thrilling to imagine one person bursting with that much evil.

We will never fully understand the Ripper’s methods or motive, or why the murders stopped, although most criminologists would say that serial killers only stop when they can no longer kill. They are either dead or incarcerated. It is unlikely that Jack the Ripper chose to stop killing. Something stopped him, but nothing will stop us from wondering who he was.

John Randolph Fuller is Professor of Criminology at the University of West Georgia and author of Juvenile Delinquency: Mainstream and Crosscurrents, Second Edition.

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Image credit: Jack the Ripper’s “Dear Boss” letter (part 1) postmarked 25 September 1888. (National Archives MEPO 3/142). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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There’s a lot we still don’t know about the Vikings who raided and then settled in England. The main documentary source for the period, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, simply tells us that Viking armies raided Britain’s coastline from the late eighth century. Raiding was followed by settlement, and by the 870s, the Vikings had established a territory in the north and east of the country which later became known as the ‘Danelaw’. Here, the Chronicle famously records, Scandinavian armies ‘shared out the land… and proceeded to plough and to support themselves’.

Despite over 50 years of research, many fundamental questions about the Scandinavian settlements remain unanswered: which areas of England saw the greatest settlement? How many settlers were there? Did they get on with the locals? Were they all men? Until recently, there was little in the physical record to provide answers. Archaeological traces of Scandinavian settlement were notably few: just a handful of Scandinavian-style burials and rural settlements have been found in England, for instance, while the Scandinavian contribution to urban development and certain strands of material culture, such as stone sculpture, remains elusive.

Within the last 20-25 years, this picture has changed dramatically. Thanks largely to metal-detecting, there has been an explosion of new finds of Viking-Age metalwork recovered from areas of known Scandinavian settlement. Surprisingly prominent within the new finds is female jewellery in Scandinavian styles: brooches and pendants worn by women in everyday dress. To date, over 500 such items have been found, scattered across large swathes of rural England.

The date of the jewellery chimes exactly with written accounts of the settlement (c. 870-950). Its careful study reveals that while some items were made locally after a Scandinavian fashion, others are likely to have been imported from the Scandinavian homelands, probably on the clothing of female settlers. Although Anglo-Saxon women also wore brooches, they were of a very different style to those favoured by Scandinavian women, so it’s clear that the new jewellery finds represent a distinctly ‘foreign’ dress element. The jewellery being unearthed in England is strikingly similar to that found in Scandinavia, particularly its southern regions: there are disc, trefoil, lozenge, oval, and bird shaped brooches decorated with animals and plants from the Scandinavian art styles of Borre, Jellinge, Mammen and Urnes. Encountering women on a walk around tenth-century Norfolk, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were in Denmark.

Viking-Age Scandinavian-style brooches from England

The discovery of such artefacts is unexpected, not only because such jewellery was unknown in England a generation ago, but also because it helps to elucidate a population group with has, until now, been largely invisible. Faced with a dearth of both archaeological and written evidence for Scandinavian women in England, historians have tended to assume that settlement was carried out entirely by men, who took wives among the local population. The jewellery offers the first tangible archaeological evidence for a significant female Scandinavian population in Viking-Age England, potentially numbering in the thousands. In this way, it is revealing the presence of women we never expected to see.

Women were not merely participants in the settlement process; they were active agents in negotiating relationships with the existing, Anglo-Saxon population. Their jewellery became a platform for the expression of cultural values, usually in a way that maintained Scandinavian traditions. One observable trend is that female dress in the Danelaw preserved Scandinavian preferences for particular brooches long after they had fallen out of fashion in the homelands. This deliberately archaising suggests that articulating historical ties via jewellery was important in a new settlement context, when cultural memories were likely to be challenged. The fact that it was done through women’s dress highlights a role for women as bearers of cultural tradition in Danelaw society.

The jewellery also provides a fresh perspective on one of the most elusive of topics regarding the Viking settlements, namely, their location. We tend to think of Yorkshire and the north-east Midlands as Viking hotspots, due in part to the areas’ Scandinavian-style place-names and stone-sculpture (as well as the success of the Jorvik Viking centre). Yet female jewellery here is rare, being concentrated instead in rural Norfolk and Lincolnshire. These areas are not commonly associated with Viking activity, but it is clear that they were exposed to strong Scandinavian cultural influence, at least in terms of female dress. Of course, the distribution pattern has to be interpreted with care: jewellery is eminently portable, and levels of metal-detecting can vary from county to county. Nonetheless, it does seem that East Anglia and Lincolnshire were vibrant centres of Scandinavian culture in ninth- and tenth-century England, to an extent not previously recognised. Once again, the jewellery shines new light on this historically dark period of British history, revealing the presence of peoples in areas we never knew were there.

Jane Kershaw is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at University College London. Jane Kershaw is the author of Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (OUP, 2013).

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On 24 April 1993, the city of London was brought to a standstill. A massive terrorist bomb exploded at the NatWest tower, killing one person and injuring at least 40 more. The truck bomb, planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was designed to strike at the financial heartland of London, and it succeeded. In addition to the human casualties, what has since become known as the Bishopsgate bomb caused $1 billion in financial damages.

Twenty years later, the IRA is no more. Its members have laid down their arms and its leadership committed to a hard-fought peace process that has since brought stability and prosperity to a region of the world that has suffered four decades of terrorism. Perhaps the most visible signal of that progress came with the official visit of Queen Elizabeth II to the Republic of Ireland in 2011.

In a week in which terrorism came to the streets of Boston and was foiled in Canada, the past several years has seen the slow rise of terrorist activity on the streets of Northern Ireland.

The problems in Northern Ireland are mostly over. However, despite the extraordinary progress made via a hard fought peace process, the legacy of Northern Ireland’s Troubles is still deeply felt. Many people remain disaffected, disillusioned, and impervious to the prosperity brought by the stability of the peace process. Sectarian tensions occasionally bubble to the surface, and communities remain deeply divided with polarized identities. Visitors to Northern Ireland today will see a great change from the region’s darker days, but visitors will also see even greater signs of attempts to keep those communities separate via the increase in intimidating ‘peace walls’ (large structures that keep those divisions alive and visible). Given how deeply affected Northern Ireland has been from the Troubles, inter-community tensions will understandably take generations to fully heal, and that road will not ever be an easy one. But there are those who would quickly see that healing process stopped in its tracks.

Though the Irish Republican Army is no more, several small groups have split away from the ‘mainstream’ Republican movement, shunning the peace process and condemning the IRA leadership for compromising on the core ideals of traditional Irish Republicanism – to gain a United Ireland. The result has been a prolonged attempt at developing and sustaining campaign of low-level terrorism, characterized by intermittent though influential and impactful attacks.

These groups have many names. Known collectively as “dissident Republicans,” they comprise several small militant splinter groups. The “Real IRA” and the “Continuity IRA” are probably the most well known of these, though both of these entities have given rise to what my colleague Dr. John Morrison once called serial splintering, spawning several further sub-groups. They operate both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland. What unites them is their hatred for the Sinn Fein leadership, their rejection of the authority of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and their equally abject rejection of the various peace agreements that emerged in recent years. The differences between the various dissident factions will seem inconsequential to onlookers, but carry immense significance to respective followers. The various groups are as divided by personalities, jealousies, and petty rivalries as they are divided along geographical, ideological, and strategic lines.

Aside from a clichéd call to “uniting Ireland,” what they want is never entirely clear because their aims are often lofty and obscure when you examine the respective groups’ ideological statements. On a day-to-day basis, what drives and sustains them is their utter hatred for Sinn Fein and the IRA leadership for what the dissidents feel is a ‘sell-out’. The dissidents view the peace process as an abject failure, a compromise that hasn’t delivered the Irish Republican fantasy of a 32-county Irish Republic. They want a united Ireland, but won’t engage in democratic means of achieving that. They take great psychological solace from their ‘outsider’ status, with one faction reveling in what they call a state of ‘noble isolation’.

There are some important tactical differences between the various factions, but in a nutshell, they engage in low-level terrorist tactics in an attempt to grab attention. They’re aware of their ability to carefully choreograph media attention and they commit semi-regular acts aimed at disruption (e.g. by leaving a pipe-bomb in a public place) and targeted killings. They have killed prison officers and police officers, and have increasingly threatened members of Sinn Fein. Though their ranks include former senior members of the IRA, they have attempted to recruit adolescents and young children in recent years. They are adept at social media. They engage in public displays of strength, marching and protesting, and in intelligence gathering on future potential targets. They are aware of the fact that they are heavily monitored by the security services but view this as a badge of honor, affirmation of their importance.

These dissidents are characterized by remaining a heterogeneous and divided cluster of small groups. There is always the danger, however, that a highly symbolic act of violence could serve to unify them in ways that will appear obvious only with hindsight. Entrepreneurial dissidents have made multiple attempts to form a coalition, but these have failed to gain much traction. There is a sense, however, that the forthcoming 100th anniversary of the 1916 Irish Republican rebellion may ultimately serve to focus the dissidents in ways we haven’t seen before. We should not rule out the possibility of a high profile, targeted attack in the next two years.

Nobody is overestimating the dissident Republican threat, but it would be very dangerous to underestimate them. They continue to recruit and train, and they are deeply embedded in crime, especially in the Republic of Ireland. A single successful attack (especially if the target is psychologically significant to them) could serve to unify their otherwise divided elements and re-energize their (albeit small) base of supporters. Their small size and lack of popular support should not be taken as a measure of their weakness. Instead it points to their unpredictability given their insensitivity to the broader community consensus that the dissidents are fighting a fantasy war that nobody wants. But unpredictability and insensitity to the broader public make for very dangerous conditions in the context of terrorist threat assessment. The current consensus is that the dissidents may well be infiltrated by police and intelligence agents given a fairly persistent track record of foiled and failed bomb plots in recent times. But they have often found inspiration from high visibility targeted attacks, and given that the 2016 anniversary may well be their last opportunity to prove relevant, it would be wise to keep a close eye on their efforts.

John Horgan is author of Divided We Stand: The Strategy and Psychology of Ireland’s Dissident Terrorists. He is Director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also Associate Professor of Psychology. He is a member of the editorial boards of multiple journals, including Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, Behavioral Science of Terrorism and Political Aggression, and Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict. Dr. Horgan is a member of the Research Advisory Board of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC).

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“GIGANTIC FLOWER–NEW DISCOVERY!” “A Vegetable Wonder!” “A Vegetable Prodigy!” “A plant of most extraordinary beauty, fragrant, and of dimensions previously unheard of in the whole vegetable kingdom!”

With headlines and taglines and raves such as these fanning out from Fleet Street in the autumn of 1837, it would be hard to overestimate the sensation surrounding the immense water lily found earlier that year in the remote South American colony of British Guiana and subsequently named Victoria regia in honor of the empire’s newly crowned queen. Within days of Victoria’s introduction to members of a small botanical society, particulars about the plant began appearing in leading learned publications. Within weeks, respectable periodicals were picking up the story and spreading the news. And within months, the press itself was marveling over the “great interest” that reports about the water lily were exciting–and then repeating those reports yet again so that “a plant of such magnificence may be generally known.” No doubt about it, Victoria regia was celebrity–but a singularly invisible one.

Growing profusely on wide open surfaces of inaccessible, alligator-infested swamps all over the vast, uncharted Amazon basin, the plant had been sighted by only a couple of European explorers before Robert Schomburgk stumbled upon it while attempting to map terra incognita for the Royal Geographic Society. Since his eye-witness account is the one that was recounted over and over, it’s worth reproducing again here:

It was on the 1st of January of this year [1837], while contending with the difficulties nature interposed in different forms to our progress up the river Berbice, that we arrived at a point where the river expanded and formed a currentless basin; some object on the southern extremity of this basin attracted my attention; it was impossible to form any idea of what it could be, and animating the crew to increase the rate of their paddling, we were shortly afterwards opposite the object which had raised my curiosity—a vegetable wonder! All calamities were forgotten: I felt as a botanist, and felt myself rewarded. A gigantic leaf, from five to six feet in diameter, salver-shaped, with a broad rim of light green above, and a vivid crimson below, resting upon the water: quite in character with the wonderful leaf was the luxuriant flower, consisting of many hundred petals, passing in alternate tints from pure white to rose and pink. The smooth water was covered with them; I rowed from one to another, and always observed something new to admire.

He also collected specimens (which disintegrated) and produced colored drawings (which didn’t) and these, along with this account and some additional botanical details, are what eventually arrived in London, where the buzz about the plant got going and the line between publicity and puffery blurred.

Take, for example, the size of the water lily: Schomburgk measured leaves as large as “six feet five inches in diameter” and flowers “fifteen inches across.” That’s big. But when subsequent versions stated that “its leaves measure above eighteen feet, and its flower nearly four feet in circumference,” the plant seemed even bigger. Amplified by epithets like “stunning,” “stupendous,” and “astounding,” ideas about the “vegetable wonder” could keep growing and growing, unchecked.

Schomburgk’s drawings didn’t much help put the scale of Victoria regia in perspective–at least not beyond the tiny, elite social and scientific circles where the original life-size drawings were initially displayed. Until the water lily was successfully cultivated in Britain, which didn’t occur for another dozen years, Schomburgk’s were the sole images on which all others were based-including the incredibly overblown rendering of Victoria regia that’s reproduced here. Published in early 1838, in the best-selling Penny Magazine, the picture looks like something straight out of the National Enquirer. But the fact that The Penny Magazine was issued by the earnestly educational Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge gives one pause. With articles on natural history, political economy, exemplary individuals, improvements in hygiene, and other such solid stuff, the illustrated weekly was intended to edify the working and lower-middle classes, not titillate or mislead them. And with Schomburgk’s account of the plant reprinted on the very same page as the picture, it doesn’t appear that the SDUK was attempting to sensationalize Victoria regia any more than it already was.

Instead, maybe it was a sense of wonder that the illustration was aiming to capture and to convey. Confronted with the Lilliputian explorers coming upon the water lily, ordinary Britons might begin to apprehend what only a few extraordinary travelers ever saw. Alexander von Humboldt was one of them, and the first to undertake a deliberately scientific expedition to equatorial South America. There, he said, “man and his productions disappear, so to speak, in the midst of a wild and outsize nature.” Charles Darwin was also overwhelmed. On first seeing the verdant riot of vegetation of Brazil, he wrote that “while viewing such scenes, one feels the impossibility that any description should come near the mark,–much less be overdrawn.” And when a plant-collector named Robert Spruce came across the “vegetable wonder” over a decade after Schomburgk’s encounter, he too was awed: “The aspect of the Victoria, in its native waters, is so new and extraordinary,” he said, “that I am at a loss to what to compare it.”

So perhaps the representation of Victoria regia in The Penny Magazine isn’t so overblown. Oversized, yes — at least as far as the plant is concerned. But overdone, no — not so far as the impression it made. Just imagine, then, the reaction when the water lily was finally successfully cultivated in Britain and the press started describing “the flowering for the first time in the old world, of one of those vegetable productions whose existence has so long been considered to have its basis only in the inflated fancies of moonstruck travelers.”

Tatiana Holway is an independent scholar and academic consultant with a doctorate in Victorian literature and society. She is the author of The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created and several studies of Dickens and popular culture. She also serves on the advisory board for the Nineteenth-Century Collections Online archive. Currently, she lives outside of Boston, where she pursues a passion for gardening.

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Image credit: The Penny Magazine, January 20, 1838. Public domain.

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For many years, answering polite enquiries about my current book project was relatively easy: I could explain that it was about Milton, or the Bible, or Renaissance art and architecture, or the decorative arts, or whatever might be the topic, and the conversation could happily proceed to more interesting subjects. For the past few years, however, I have had to say that I was writing a book about ornamental hermits in eighteenth-century gardens. A few – very few – interlocutors have been able to say “ah yes”, either because they were good at bluffing or because they actually knew a little about garden hermits, but most have assumed politely that I had fallen off my trolley and was descending from cultural history into incoherent mutterings.

The hermitage at Brocklesby Park is of the type known as a root house.

I became interested in the subject some 40 years ago, when I chanced upon Edith Sitwell’s essay on “Ancients and Ornamental Hermits”. The idea of keeping an ornamental hermit in one’s garden was entirely new to me, and I certainly could not afford to engage one, but I did resolve to learn what I could about this phenomenon when I had time to do so. A professional career intervened, and so the idea marinated in my mind for decades before I could clear the space to undertake the requisite research. Finding the hermits and their hermitages was challenging, as ornamental hermits tend not to appear in the usual records, and hermitages are often overlooked in architectural histories. Mere facts, however, can often be uncovered by the dogged researcher. Understanding the phenomenon of the garden hermit has been a much more difficult task. At one level, ornamental hermits seem merely frivolous, but their existence hints at a complex and serious strain in Georgian culture.

Garden hermits were variously real people, automatons and wholly imagined people who had perpetually stepped out for a minute, leaving their eyeglasses and a book on the table of the hermitage. The most substantial material remains of these hermits are their hermitages, which are scattered across Britain and Ireland. At Brocklesby Park, the Lincolnshire seat of the Pelham family, the hermitage is of the type known as a root house, and what seems to be the original furniture survives inside, including a table made from a bole, a rustic hermit’s chair formed from branches, and four visitors’ chairs carved out of solid tree trunks. At Killerton, the Devonshire home of the Acland family (now National Trust), there is a luxury three-room hermitage known as the Bear’s Hut (which once accommodated a pet black bear brought from Canada); one of the rooms is the (imaginary) hermit’s chapel, which has a full-length lancet window inserted into a shaped tree trunk and fitted with Netherlandish painted glass panels.

The Bear’s Hut at Killerton.

Aspiring hermits could advertise their availability for employment. Similarly, landlords could advertise for hermits, though as Lady Croom (in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia) comments, “surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence”.  One of my favourite hermits is the Reverend Henry White, whose day job was that of rector and schoolmaster at Fyfield, near Andover (Hampshire), but whose vocation as a young man was that of hermit to his brother Gilbert White, the author of The Natural History of Selborne. Henry was, like Gilbert, a naturalist and diarist, but he also happily donned the costume of a hermit to entertain Gilbert’s guests while they munched on the cantaloupe that he grew in his garden. In the summer of 1763 Gilbert White entertained the three daughters of an eminent physician at Selborne, and Henry the Hermit was regularly in sociable attendance. When one of the sisters had to leave, Henry lamented her departure in verse:

The hoary hermit in his calm retreat,
No longer safe from her resistless charms;
With trembling hand, dim eye, and faltering feet,
Sighs out his dotage o’er her snowy arms!

Henry so enjoyed playing the part of the ornamental hermit that he had himself painted in front of the hermitage; the painting now hangs at Dunham Massey, a National Trust property in Cheshire.

The fashion for the ornamental hermit has faded, but we still have human figures in our gardens. Indeed, one of the figures had has filled the void left by the ornamental hermit is the humble garden gnome, which has for many years suffered the ignominy of exclusion from the Chelsea Flower Show (gnomes are far too working-class for Chelsea), but nonetheless embodies a quiet dignity that recalls its heroic past as a human figure in the eighteenth-century landscape garden.

Gordon Campbell is Professor of Renaissance Studies at University of Leicester. His books for OUP include Bible: The Story of the King James Version, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought, and The Grove Encyclopedia of Northern Renaissance Art. His most recent book is The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome.

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Mark Roodhouse speaks with BBC Wiltshire’s Mid-Morning Show about the history of the black market.

[See post to listen to audio]

(c) BBC Wiltshire

Dr Mark Roodhouse is a Lecturer in History at the University of York. He studied history at Cambridge and Oxford before arriving at York, where he teaches modern British history. Mark is currently writing his second book about organised crime in mid-twentieth-century Britain. His first book is Black Market Britain: 1939-1955, published by Oxford University Press. Read his previous blog post “Eating horse in austerity Britain.”

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In 1903, the motto “Deeds not Words” was adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst as the slogan of the new Women’s Social and Political Union. This aimed above all to secure women the vote, but it marked a deliberate departure in the methods to be used. Over fifty years of peaceful campaigning had brought no change to women’s rights in this respect; drastic action was, Emmeline decided, now called for. The “deeds” encouraged by the WSPU, such as stone-throwing, arson, window-breaking, and parliamentary deputations, would all be widely reported over the ensuing years. In the collective memory, it was however not deeds but words — and one word, suffragette, in particular — which came to epitomise this period and its aims.

The (UK) National Archives Catalogue Reference: AR 1/528

-ette and the conflicts of meaning

Suffragette neatly evokes the conflicted history of this time. If some women (and men) campaigned for the female right to vote, others campaigned against it. Even among those who supported female suffrage, there could be marked divides. First used, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,  in the Daily Mail in 1906, suffragette was not only new but a deliberate (and deliberately negative) coinage, intended to divide the suffragists, whose campaigns remained peaceful, from those who, as Pankhurst urged, should henceforth adopt more ‘militant’ methods. Suffragette, as a compound of suffrage (“The casting of a vote, voting; the exercise of a right to vote,” as the Oxford English Dictionary would confirm) plus the suffix -ette, was by no means complimentary. On one hand, -ette was a diminutive and was often seen as trivialising in intent, as well as distinctly patronizing; a lecturette (first used in 1867) was “a short lecture,” a meteorette “a small shooting star.” Both were very different from their non-diminutive counterparts.

-Ette had moreover another meaning which had become familiar in recent years. This, as in leatherette, first used in 1880 and cashmerette, used in 1886, signalled the idea of imperfect imitation, as well as inauthenticity. As a result, just as leatherette was a fake version of leather, so too, by implication, were the suffragettes ‘fake’ — and profoundly improper — versions of the suffragists. Densely polysemous, -ette was also starting to emerge as a specifically female suffix, a use which can be seen in forms such as poetette. Defined as “A young or minor poet; (sometimes esp.) a young female poet” in the Oxford English Dictionary, this already indicates the transitions at work, as the diminutive shades into the specifically female — a semantic development which was undoubtedly aided by the prominence of suffragette itself. Here too, notions of true and false, norm and other, intervene. ‘True’ women, as anti-suffrage writers regularly stressed, would never engage in militant activities of this kind. “Woman—or suffragette?” the writer Marie Corelli demanded in 1907. One could not, at least in anti-suffrage rhetoric of this kind, be both.

Lashing the wind

Trying to control meaning, as Samuel Johnson long ago affirmed in his Dictionary of 1755, is, however, rather like trying “to lash the wind.” One might feel better, but little result will be achieved. Suffragette, in fact, offers a precise illustration of Johnson’s point. Intended as a term of derision, it was nevertheless swiftly appropriated by the suffragettes themselves. Rather than a mark of stigmatization, it became a positive badge of identity — of shared aims and aspirations. A magazine was launched, named The Suffragette (copies of which were often left at sites of militant activity). In 1911, Sylvia Pankhurst published a history of the campaign so far. She called it The Suffragette: the History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement, 1905-1910. Even the pronunciation could be hijacked for positive ends. Writing in the Observer in 1906, Lady Hugh Bell stressed the genuine appropriacy of the word. The dismissive -ette could, she argued, be converted into -gette, conveying not powerlessness but the “jet of enthusiasm” which united action for the vote across the land. It was also “feminine enough,” she noted — “a fine flowing word.” The Pankhursts suggested another version by which -gette was to be pronounced ‘get’ — succinctly indicating the suffragettes’ determination to ‘get the vote’ on equal terms with men.

Acts of definition

Whether dictionaries can ever capture this complexity of meaning is an interesting question. “A female supporter of the cause of women’s political enfranchisement, esp. one of a violent or ‘militant’ type,” wrote Charles Onions, defining this word in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1915. A single pronunciation appears in the accompanying transcription. One suspects that, had the Pankhursts been asked to define this word, it would have been very different. As the opening of Pankhurst’s The Suffragette extolled: “the adventurous and resourceful daring of the young suffragettes who, by climbing up on roofs, by sliding down through skylights, by hiding under platforms, constantly succeeded in asking their endless questions, has never been excelled.” “Instantly the crowd roared, “Votes for Women!”—”Three cheers for the Suffragettes!”” Emmeline Pankhurst’s 1914 My Own Story records, here describing events in 1907. Words, then as now, can mean different things to different people. Point of view can influence the act of meaning, in dictionaries as well as outside them. Were the suffragettes brave, or foolhardy? Courageous or ‘violent’? Women or suffragettes — or, of course, both?

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of History of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke College. She edited the newly revised and updated Oxford History of English. She is the author of Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction and Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. She is the editor of Johnson’s Pendulum (with Freya Johnston) and Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest. She has contributed to The Oxford History of English Lexicography and The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel.

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The death of Margaret Thatcher has already prompted an outpouring of reflections upon her place in history. One aspect of her legacy that deserves attention is her use of rhetoric and the way in which, to a great degree, she helped reshape the language of British politics as well as the substance of policy. Historians divide about when original Thatcherism really was. Certainly, Thatcher’s brand of low tax, anti-union, pro-middle class politics had antecedents in the 1950s if not earlier. Yet, if her economic ideas were borrowed from others, her discursive style contained elements that were radically new.

Baroness Margaret Thatcher, 1925-2013

It was not that aggressive political language was unprecedented in Britain, of course. At the 1945 election, Thatcher’s political hero Winston Churchill alleged that if a Labour government were elected it would have to fall back on ‘some form of Gestapo’ – a taunt which itself owed something to his continued use of the rough-and-tumble style of the Edwardian era. And there were other post-war Conservatives, such as Quintin Hogg and Enoch Powell, whose rhetoric was in some ways more outrageous than Thatcher’s own. What was new about her, though, was her ability not merely to bring what she called ‘conviction politics’ into the mainstream but to make it all but hegemonic as an ideal of political conduct.

To understand this, we need to appreciate what she was reacting against. Again, historians differ about whether there really was a ‘post-war consensus’, whereby the leaders of the main parties reached broad agreement on the desirability of Keynesian economic management and a moderately generous welfare state. What is clear, though, is that by the late 1960s there were an increasing number of voices claiming that such a consensus did exist, and that it was an elite stitch-up aimed at marginalising dissent and suppressing the unarticulated common sense desires of the mass of the British people. As Conservative Party leader after 1975 Thatcher successfully posed as the radical spokeswoman of ordinary Britons against the cosy arrangements of the small-‘c’ conservative Establishment, which in her view encompassed everything from trades union leaders to the hierarchy of the Church of England.

Furthermore, it wasn’t just the content of the consensus to which she objected; that is to say, she did not just think that the politicians of the post-war years happened to have arrived at a mistaken set of policies. Rather, she believed that it was their very manner of conducting politics – the quest for agreement and the aspiration to avoid strife – that had inevitably led to bad outcomes. As Thatcher put it shortly before she entered Downing Street, ‘The Old Testament prophets didn’t go out into the highways saying, ‘Brothers, I want consensus.’ They said, ‘This is my faith and my vision! This is what I passionately believe!’ Searching for areas of agreement with one’s opponents, then, was something she found inherently suspect.

President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Camp David in 1986

This was not the whole story, of course. Once in office she could not do away wholly with the need for compromise, policy reversals, or downright electoral caution. However, the myth of the ‘iron lady’, which the media helped perpetuate, gave her substantial political cover for any such deviations from the true path of ideological grace. It was only when she began to completely believe the myth herself that she came unstuck, gradually dispensing with ministers who were willing to challenge her, and seemingly starting to value her own inflexibility as an inherent political virtue. Cue the disaster of the Poll Tax, battles over Europe, and her eventual exit from power.

Plainly, the effects of the Thatcher years have been long-lasting, and today’s debates about welfare and austerity are conducted very much in her shadow. Her idealisation of unyieldingness (or, if you prefer, obstinacy) as form of political conduct has been of equal importance. Tony Blair was borrowing from her playbook when he boasted that he did not have a reverse gear – a fairly significant defect, one might think, in any kind of vehicle. But perhaps her most powerful trope was her populism. Her ‘conviction’ rhetoric served as token of her alleged difference from other, more conventional politicians. This language served her very well electorally, but at the same time it served to devalue the inevitable, and arguably desirable, compromises of the ordinary political process.

Today, then, Thatcher’s economic views command considerable support across the political mainstream: the market is king. Yet the politicians who preach this post-Thatcherite consensus are themselves the object of popular hostility. They are now being attacked from the right, with UKIP gaining success by painting them as out of touch with the common people – the same trick that helped bring the Tories victory in 1979. RIP Maggie Thatcher; Long Live Nigel Farage.

Richard Toye studied at the University of Birmingham and subsequently the University of Cambridge, where he completed his Ph.D. He is currently Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. His books include Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction (2013), Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007) and Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (2010).

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Image credits: Margaret Thatcher By Williams [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at Camp David 1986. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Matthew Flinders

Can it really be almost a quarter of a century since one of the most defining moments of my own personal political history? I can still remember the day as if it were yesterday. An A-level Politics seminar on the fifth floor of Swindon College; the 28 November 1990; a bright and clear day; and suddenly the door bursts open and someone screams, ‘She’s gone! It’s over! She’s gone!’ Exactly who had gone and what was over were not immediately obvious to me but in a strange way they didn’t need to be because at a deeper level what was obvious from the reactions of everybody around me was that a distinct chapter in British political history had ended. Two decades on and as a Professor of Politics I clearly have a much sharper awareness of exactly who Mrs Thatcher was and what was thought to be over (or not over as the case proved to be) in terms of a distinct approach to governing. But the announcement of her death takes me back to that seminar room and to that strange feeling that a distinct chapter in British political history has — once again — ended.

But what can I say that has not already been said about this grocer’s daughter? What can I write that will separate this obituary from the countless others that are at this moment being written (or — more accurately — rapidly retrieved from pre-prepared files)? The answer to these questions lies not in outlining the contours of Mrs Thatcher’s political career (an already well-furrowed literary terrain), but in teasing-out exactly why her approach to politics provoked such strong reactions and how she managed to cast such a long shadow over the past, present, and future of British politics. Approached in this manner at least three inter-linked issues deserve brief comment — her ideology, her style, and her vulnerability.

First and possibly foremost, Margaret Thatcher forged a new relationship between the state and the market. Having witnessed the trials and tribulations of the Heath government in the mid-1970s and then the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in the late 1970s, Mrs Thatcher was adamant that the relationship between the state and the market had to change. From reforming the state to reducing the power of the trade unions, from privatization to economic reform, and from European affairs to selling-off council houses, Mrs Thatcher undoubtedly shifted the political-economy of Britain in ways that subsequent Prime Ministers have sought to modify or amend but not significant alter. Indeed it is possible to argue that a post-Thatcherite consensus appears to exist in a thread that runs through Major, Blair, Brown, and Cameron. Whether this is viewed as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing is for the moment secondary to the fact that Mrs Thatcher’s legacy has cast a shadow both far and wide. If her policies were distinctive then so too was her uncompromising political style. The ‘Iron Lady’ was a conviction politician in the sense that she believed in the capacity of her political philosophy and economic convictions to deliver positive social change. There was no middle-way; you were either with her or against her. From her ‘The lady’s not for turning’ speech to the Conservative Party in October 1980 through to her European Union rebate negotiations, Mrs Thatcher was in many ways the original ‘Ronseal politician’ — to steal a coalition phrase — in the sense that her rhetoric was generally backed-up by subsequent political reality.

There is, however, a need to dig a little deeper. An obituary should expose the essence of a person and not simply repeat their achievements (or failures). To highlight Mrs Thatcher’s ideology or style — even to dissect the various subsequent forms of Thatcherism — are hardly new additions to a congested historical canvas. The twist or barb in the tail of this obituary is therefore not a focus on Mrs Thatcher the politician but on Mrs Thatcher the person qua politics. Framed in this manner what one achieves is a quite unique perspective on a quite remarkable but possibly isolated and vulnerable woman. To describe the ‘Iron Lady’ as vulnerable might appear to some readers as an almost ridiculous statement but even the mighty Achilles had a weak heel. Indeed, if — as I will argue — Mrs Thatcher exhibited three potential vulnerabilities in her life then it is possible to use these to further underline her remarkable career and achievements.

First and foremost, Mrs Thatcher was a woman who succeeded in a man’s world. She became an MP in 1959, the first woman to lead a major British political party in 1975, and the first female Prime Minister in 1979. There is little doubt that in some ways being a women brought advantages when faced with a political party that had overwhelmingly been educated in single sex public schools and were therefore ill-prepared to deal with a powerful woman. But it also brought with it a sense of exceptionalism and difference. A second source of vulnerability stemmed from the fact that Mrs Thatcher was not ‘one of them’. Born the daughter of a grocery shop owner — indeed being brought up in the flat above the shop — she was not born into the ‘great and the good’ British political establishment. Indeed, resting between the lines of almost every political biography of Mrs Thatcher is a sense that she was always in the Conservative Party but never quite part of the Conservative Party; never quite accepted or respected by Tory grandees or elements of the political establishment. This is a critical issue as her outsider-within status arguably helps explain her style of governing and her almost clinical approach to defining friends and enemies. The final element of vulnerability has, I would argue, become clearest since her departure from frontline politics. Since leaving the House of Commons at the 1992 General Election — saying that this would allow her more freedom to speak her mind — what has been most striking is the manner in which she generally refrained from heckling from the political sidelines. Her illness may have played some role in this but I sense there was also a degree of social and political isolation; a sense that she no longer fitted in; a frustration that her ‘there is no such thing as society’ speech was always taken out of context and used against her; or a fear that no one would want to hear what she had to say. I could be wrong but deep down I can’t help but think that maybe the ‘Iron Lady’ was a little softer than many of us understood.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was awarded the Political Communicator of the Year Award in 2012 and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘The Future of the United Kingdom and Scotland’ Programme. Jack Straw’s response to his criticisms can be found in the journal Parliamentary Affairs (Vol.63, 2010). Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can find Matthew Flinders on Twitter at PoliticalSpike and read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts on the OUPblog.

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The World of Jack the Ripper

Many people are puzzled by the phenomenon of ripperology. What kind of person has a grim fascination with a serial killer famous for not getting caught? For me, and many fellow ripperologists, the appeal is not Jack per se, but the atmosphere of Whitechapel in the 1880s. The case is a window into a forgotten world and one that shows us how that world was experienced by the common man. Not for us the elegant homes and horse-drawn carriages. We want the daily grind, the sweat, and the muddy streets. This is why it is easy to distinguish between the casual and serious ripperologist; the latter will baulk at the slightest mention of a Royal conspiracy.

No, the far more interesting case, the one worth exploring, involves normal men and women and a society ill-at-ease with itself. The case of Emma Smith is illustrative. Smith is not considered a canonical victim, but her murder is certainly indicative of how normalised street violence was at the time. In many ways, the Ripper case is the first time that knife-crime become fodder for sensationalist media coverage. It had long existed, as we will see in Smith’s case, and it always had an obvious motivation: robbery, sexual assault, or drunkenness. This is why Jack is so startling: he is the first recorded serial killer without any discernible motivation beyond the impulse to take lives.

Turning up the heat

Smith can be said to mark the first escalation of violence in what became known as the ‘autumn of terror’ (31 August 1888 – 9 November 1888). Smith was murdered in what appears to have been an especially vicious mugging on April 3rd, 1888. She was relieved of her possessions, sexually assaulted, and beaten, but her attackers did not seem to have set out to kill her. She lived long enough to describe them as a gang and this piece of information is usually considered sufficient to make her case non-canonical. In the canonical cases, with one exception, witnesses claimed to have seen Jack alone with his victim — assuming, that is, they had seen him at all. Even in the sole witness account where we have more than one perpetrator, that of Israel Schwartz in the case of Elizabeth Stride, we are told of a second man and not of a gang.

However, Smith was certainly the victim of a new tendency for extreme violence in the Whitechapel area. The gang that targeted Smith was nothing new. Gangs often extorted money from prostitutes, but they rarely needed to act out their threats. It is possible that Jack gained a taste for violence as part of this gang. Perhaps his fellow gang-members disassociated from him upon realising he was more sadistic than they. However, this goes against our best psychological profiles. Serial killers are, almost always, loners and certainly not known for their ability to co-operate with others.

The Streets of Whitechapel

Smith was attacked, like many women in her trade, as she left one of the many local pubs populated by the working-poor of London. She may very well have found herself, like the canonical Ripper victims, in the dangerous situation of needing to recuperate the money she had spent boozing. Money was needed for a bed at one of the local doss-houses. The easiest way to do this was street prostitution and this took place in the early hours of the morning. This entailed hanging around pitch-black streets; street lamps being rare and sparse. The same can be said of the rag-tag police-force that patrolled the area in predictable beat patrols. These patterns were well-known to the local criminals and easily identified by anyone with a desire to avoid them.

Despite the darkness Whitechapel and surrounding areas were never entirely empty. Between the late-night drinking culture and the early morning trade-culture there was constant movement. This helps explain why the Ripper would have been able to stalk the streets with relative ease. Even blood-stained hands clasping a knife would not have raised an eyebrow. After all, a butcher rises early. Even when hysteria concerning the Ripper was at its height he was able to rely on these facts. Coupled with police inexperience with such cases, including a lack of forensics, and it becomes easier to understand how he slipped their net.

It is worth remembering that the first ever crime-scene photo was taken at the scene of his final murder — that of Mary Kelly (9 November 1888). Then the murders stopped. Time was catching up with Jack. We never hear from him again. His legacy, however, remains with us. Only these days he would likely have been caught.

Paul J. Ennis is a writer based in Dublin. He is the author of Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011).

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Image credits: (1) The “From Hell” Letter postmarked 15 October 1888. Original in the Records of Metropolitan Police Service, National Archives, MEPO 3/142. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Streetmap showing the locations of the first seven Whitechapel murders 1894. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Do we have a constitution? What is the British constitution? Does anyone actually care? At one level the answers to these questions are relatively simple and straightforward. ‘Yes’ — we do have a constitution but its constituent elements are scattered amongst a range of documents and within the tacit understandings of a number of parliamentary conventions; the British constitution is — through accident and design — a mess that has evolved in a muddled manner, betraying the existence of a latent form of ‘club government’; ‘No’, nobody cares because this is how it has always been and we don’t trust politicians and they’re all the same.

The problem with these answers is that although they may have shaped the dominant view of the British constitution in the twentieth century they appear unable to capture and reflect the changing social and political situation in the twenty-first century. When they are reframed as being concerned with the future governance of the United Kingdom then people clearly do care about the constitution. More specifically they care when theoretical debates and questions suddenly become elements of hard, day-to-day reality. For example, setting the date for a referendum on Scottish independence suddenly raises questions about the future of the United Kingdom, and the Court of Appeal’s decision to prevent the deportation of Abu Qatada confuses the public about the balance of power between the executive and judiciary. My sense from talking and (more importantly) listening to people as I travel around the UK is not that they don’t care about British politics and its constitutional arrangements but that they simply don’t understand where power lies or why.

This takes us back to the second question and the evolution of the British constitution. David Marquand once characterized New Labour’s approach to constitutional reform as being: “a revolution of sleepwalkers who don’t quite know where they are going or why.” The introduction of a great raft of constitutional measures without any clear statement of what (in the long run) the government was seeking to achieve, any idea of how reform in one sphere of the constitution would have obvious and far-reaching consequences for other elements of the constitutional equilibrium, or any detailed analysis of the nature or model of democracy that existed towards the end of the twentieth century, therefore formed central components of the ‘Blair paradox’. As such, the public’s confusion about the distribution of powers — not to mention the existence of complex blame games and credit claims — reflects a deeper situation of democratic drift. Jack Straw may have argued with me publicly that my diagnosis is wrong and that New Labour’s reforms were underpinned by a set of underlying principles, but such theoretical back-filling remains unconvincing. The UK is suffering from constitutional anomie in the sense that reforms have been implemented — before and after New Labour — in a manner that is bereft of any underlying logic. Constitutional anomie is therefore an ailment of both mental and physical health vis-à-vis the body politic. Social and political anxiety, confusion, and frustration emerge with the result that reforms that were designed to enhance levels of public trust and confidence in politics, politicians, and political institutions can actually have the opposite effect.

If the phrase ‘constitutional anomie’ risks over-complicating what is in reality a simple issue then let us call it what it is: a constitutional mess.

It is in exactly this context that today’s report Do we need a constitutional convention for the UK? by the House of Commons’ Political and Constitutional Reform Committee makes the case for a more thorough and explicit review of our constitutional framework. Although questions may revolve around the specific structure or nature of this review, what cannot be questioned is the urgent need to look across the constitutional landscape in order to assess what exists and why, and to look to the future in terms of what we want the UK to look like in 10 or 20 years time. The impending 2014 referendum on independence for Scotland makes a thorough consideration of the future of the United Kingdom and all its component nations all the more pressing. I am well aware that in supporting the need for a review, commission, or convention of some kind to take stock of the past, present, and future of our constitutional framework I am being terribly un-British in approach — for many the thought of adopting a set of explicit constitutional principles is almost heretical — but the malleability of the British constitution has arguably been exhausted, the relationship between its constituent parts confused, and the mess that now undoubtedly exists demands urgent review and reform.

Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government & Governance at the University of Sheffield. He was awarded the Political Communicator of the Year Award in 2012 and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Economic and Social Research Council’s ‘The Future of the United Kingdom and Scotland’ Programme. Jack Straw’s response to his criticisms can be found in the journal Parliamentary Affairs (Vol.63, 2010). Author of Defending Politics (2012), you can find Matthew Flinders on Twitter @PoliticalSpike and read more of Matthew Flinders’s blog posts here.

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Image credit: The Houses of Parliament. Photo by Adrian Pingstone. Creative Commons License via WikiWitch on Wikimedia Commons

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Mike Rapport will be giving a free talk at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 23 March 2013 at 1.15 p.m. to talk about The Napoleonic Wars. The Very Short Introductions ’soapbox’ talks will be running twice a day during the festival.

By Mike Rapport

Modern wars, someone once wrote, are fought by civilians as well as by armed forces. In fact, it is of course a truism to say that civilians are always affected by warfare in all periods of the past — as the families left behind, by the economic hardship, by the horrors of destruction, plunder, requisitioning, siege warfare, hunger, and worse. The involvement of civilians in modern wars, however, became more intense because, with the advent of ‘total war’, belligerent states began to mobilise the entire population and material resources of the country. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were an early example of the ways in which a modern war could grind millions of people up in its brutal cogs, whether as conscripts in the firing lines of Europe’s mass armies and navies, or as civilians caught in the path of the oncoming battalions and trapped in the crossfire of the fighting itself. At the Oxford Literary Festival on 24 March, I will be speaking about the non-combatants who, in one way or another, found themselves entangled in the wars.

Civilians were of course victims. Four years ago Karen Hagemann published a fine article on the civilian experience of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, the largest battle in European history before 1914. The local people started as horrified onlookers, as maimed, sick French troops retreated into the city to find treatment in makeshift military hospitals But soon the fighting arrived on their streets and doorsteps and they themselves became the victims. First, they suffered economically with the pillaging and requisitioning of tools, furniture, food and livestock. Then they found themselves under fire, huddling in churches and cellars to shelter — sometimes in vain — from the bursting shells, or they fled the carnage, carrying what they could on carts and wheelbarrows and dragging their terrified children along with them.

Yet this was a ‘people’s war’ not only because the conflict may have killed at least one million civilians (and very likely many, many more). It was also a ‘people’s war’ because the civilian population of all the belligerents mobilized behind the war effort. Economies were reoriented into supplying armies and navies, while the recruiting-sergeant and press-gang became all-too-familiar sights across Europe. In revolutionary France in 1793, the ‘mass levy’ of the entire population for the war effort gave men, women and children explicit roles to play in the mobilisation of all the nation’s resources for the sole purpose of fighting the war. Yet civilians also voluntarily engaged in the prosecution of the conflict. In France in the 1790s, communities collected money and valuables and presented them to the government as ‘patriotic donations’. Women played a pivotal role: in Germany, a ‘Women’s Association for the Good of the Fatherland’ raised money and collected valuables for the Prussian war effort against France in 1813: it boasted some 600 branches by 1815. In Britain, women raised subscriptions for the wounded, the widowed and collected materials and clothing for the troops: there were, again, hundreds of such organisations. In Spain, men and women joined bands of guerrillas to fight and plunder the French, although in many cases such actions appear to have been little different from banditry, since Spaniards suffered from these depredations too.

Yet it all shows that people were not simply coerced. They were stirred by propaganda fed to them by governments and by a media trying to convince them that the war was, variously, a struggle for survival, for liberty, for religion, for monarchy, or for the Emperor. The people themselves played a role in shaping the propaganda, in defining what the war was about. With an expansion in literacy in the eighteenth century, such popular support would have been impossible without an interaction between public opinion and governments. In the varieties and intensity of the civilian experience, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are a chilling anticipation of the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century.

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

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Image Credit: Victory declaration after the battle of Leipzig, 1813 [Public Domain} via Wikimedia Commons

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Ian Donaldson will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Friday 22 March 2013 at 4pm to discuss ‘Ben Jonson and Fame’. More information and tickets.

By Ian Donaldson

Some years ago, while I was working in Australia’s national capital, Canberra, I was about to give a lecture on Ben Jonson when the telephone rang. It was the Canadian High Commission on the phone. A small delegation (I was told) was just setting out to hear the lecture, and wanted more precise directions to the place where I’d be speaking. I was pleased, of course, but slightly mystified at this news, until further enquiry revealed that they were mistaken about the subject of my talk. They imagined that I was going to speak about the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, who for a brief time was the fastest man in the world over a hundred metres, a distance he covered in the amazing time of 9.79 seconds. He fell from grace a few days after this achievement when it was revealed that anabolic steroids had played a part in his success, and (like Lance Armstrong in more recent times) was formally stripped of his various medals and awards. I was forced to explain that my talk would actually be about a long-dead English author with a similar name, with whose achievements the diplomatic party seemed to be unfamiliar.

The episode prompted me to think about the nature of fame, a topic that (as it happened) was of intense interest to this other Ben Jonson, who’d watched as many of his contemporaries ride to the top of Fortune’s wheel, then crash ignominiously on the other side. There was Elizabeth’s one-time favourite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, with whom Jonson had been associated in the 1590s, executed in the courtyard of the Tower of London after his abortive rising in 1601. There was another of Elizabeth’s brightest stars, Jonson’s friend Sir Walter Ralegh, imprisoned in the Tower, then executed under James after his futile expedition to Guiana. There was the learned Francis Bacon, who ‘performed more in our tongue’ (so Jonson declared) ‘which may be declared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome’, then also fell catastrophically from grace. There were James’s favoured courtiers, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, dispatched to the Tower of London along with his wife Frances Howard after it was revealed that they’d conspired to poison Jonson’s friend, Sir Thomas Overbury, who’d opposed their marriage; and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, stabbed by an assassin’s knife in Portsmouth in 1628, prompting scenes of popular rejoicing.

Ben Jonson by George Vertue

Jonson thought hard in particular about literary fame: why some writers’ works should endure, while others lasted only a day. ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’ he wrote in his great poem ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us’, printed at the head of the 1623 First Folio: a tribute to Shakespeare’s lasting powers more generous than any that had been uttered until that moment. Jonson was hopeful his own writings would likewise carry through for ‘remembrance with posterity’. He had good reason for this confidence. In his lifetime and throughout the century following his death Jonson was commonly regarded as the greatest of all English writers, living or dead. By the late eighteenth century, however, his reputation was already in decline, his achievements disparagingly contrasted with those of the great genius that Romantic critics were busily discovering: ‘Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Shakespeare!’, as the celebrated actor and theatrical entrepreneur David Garrick — a lover incidentally of the works of Ben Jonson — had ecstatically hailed him.

Throughout most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Jonson’s works were comparatively ignored. In recent years, however, their boldness, range, and modernity have been increasingly recognized. Neglected plays are delighting new audiences with their surprising topicality. The entire Jonsonian canon has just been re-edited in a format attractive to modern readers. And the extraordinary complexities of Jonson’s life are gradually coming to light.

Ian Donaldson is the author of Ben Jonson: A Life and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. An eminent scholar, Donaldson is a Fellow of the British Academy and past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

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Image credit: Ben Jonson  by George Vertue. Public domain via Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons.

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On 27 April 1942, the Bow Street magistrates convicted The Waldorf Hotel, London, its head chef, and a London horseflesh dealer for ignoring the regulations fixing the maximum price of horsemeat. The chef paid the dealer £6 10s for 78 lb of horsemeat, nearly double the official price of £3 18s. Two American journalists, staying at The Waldorf while reporting on the enthronement of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, read the news with consternation. According to The Times, the hotel manager told the court that the chef, acting on his own initiative, bought the horsemeat to supplement the meat ration of the hotel staff, most of whom were foreigners “not unused to horse flesh and did not mind it.” (28 Apr. 1942, 2) Few people who read press reports of the case believed the manager’s account, suspecting that the chef diverted the staff’s meat ration onto customers’ plates and bulked out meat products with horseflesh.

One of the American correspondents, Clifford P. Morehouse, author of the memoir Wartime Pilgrimage, felt that he had “probed the secret of the strange tasting ‘sausage,’” which he ate on a tray in his hotel room every morning. Disgusted by the thought of eating horsemeat, a meat that he and many Britons associated with poverty and animal cruelty, Morehouse steered clear of sausage for the remainder of his stay at The Waldorf. His colleague “swore that he would eat no more of it for fear that while he was trying to swallow a bite someone might call out ‘Whoa’ and he would choke to death.” Although eating horse flesh repulsed him, Morehouse did not condemn those involved, appreciating Britons’ craving for red meat. In spring 1942, a British adult received a weekly ration of meat to the value of 1s 2d and 4 oz of bacon and ham. According to Morehouse, an adult American would eat a week’s meat ration for Sunday lunch. For middle-class Britons, it represented a 44 per cent cut in the amount of rationed meat they ate in 1944 compared to what they had eaten in 1936/7. Workers, who ate less meat to begin with, saw their consumption fall by 56 per cent over the same period.

Shoppers at Selfridge’s meat counter in 1942. Crown Copyright. © IWM (D 6587)

With shipping space scarce, the government had to cut imports of meat and animal feedstuffs to make room for essential war materials. This resulted in a dramatic fall in the quantity and quality of imported and home-produced beef, lamb, pork, bacon, and ham. To ensure that civilians received a fair share of limited supplies, the government introduced meat rationing and bacon rationing in 1940, fixing prices so that everyone could afford these foods. In addition they could use food points to buy tinned meats. People supplemented meagre rations by buying poultry, game, offal, sausages and meat pies, all off ration, or by eating coupon-free in restaurants and canteens. Eating out and substitute foods, which were also in short supply, did little to dent the public’s appetite for meat.

Meat became a regular part of the working-class diet towards the end of the nineteenth century as average incomes rose and cheap US and Argentinean imports brought the price of meat down. Workers prized meat highly as a source of energy. As in developing countries today, meat consumption indicated one’s affluence, conferring social status. It also played a role in forming masculine and national identities.

Faced with an apparently insatiable demand for ‘a little bit extra’ from their customers, unscrupulous butchers saw an opportunity to boost their profits by selling mislabelled horsemeat. Apart from fixing the retail price of horsemeat, the government left horseflesh dealers alone. The game was not worth the candle as the pre-war trade catered to a small working-class market. The government did not foresee the effects of war and rationing on the industry. With sales to the continent disrupted by war, dealers profited from a booming domestic market for horsemeat. In 1949 a government committee estimated that the number of horses slaughtered for home consumption in West Ham increased from none before the war to 2,000 in 1942. The peak came in 1947 when slaughterers in the Essex borough killed 19,000 horses. Demand was such that horses realised fantastic prices at auction. Rustlers went so far as to target ponies on Dartmoor and Exmoor.

A pony sale at Bampton Fair in October 1943. Crown Copyright, from the IWM Collections (© IWM D 16901).

Two Exmoor ponies being sold at Bampton Fair. Crown Copyright. © IWM (D 16896)

In wartime Sheffield, horseflesh dealers who combined the trade with butchery mislabelled horsemeat as beef or minced it with pork. This trickery allowed their more affluent customers, disgusted by the idea of eating horse, to deceive themselves as to the origin of their black market meat. It also allowed butchers to increase their profit margin by charging a premium price for a less desirable meat. Despite the best efforts of horse lovers, the Manchester Guardian, and the newsreel company British Pathé to alert Britons to the problem after the war, undiscerning consumers, craving a meat chop, continued to eat black market horsemeat until rationing ended in 1954.

Dr Mark Roodhouse is a Lecturer in History at the University of York. He studied history at Cambridge and Oxford before arriving at York, where he teaches modern British history. Mark is currently writing his second book about organised crime in mid-twentieth-century Britain. His first book is Black Market Britain: 1939-1955, published by Oxford University Press.

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The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones will be appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival on Thursday 21 March 2013 at 2 p.m. in a panel event with Clare Mulley, Chris Morgan Jones, and Mark Huband, to discuss ‘the spying game: reality and fiction’.

By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

The question is not what can membership in the European Union do for us in the UK, but what can we do for the EU? There is one way in which we British can strengthen the benefits of union. We can demand and nourish a European Intelligence Service (EIS). Forget the parochial moaning, the time is ripe for such an initiative.

In the last century it came to be accepted that effective intelligence can not only win wars and minimize civilian casualties, it can also help to prevent war — precisely the main aim of the EU, as its recent Nobel Prize confirmed. It further came to be accepted that intelligence liaison is important (two heads being better than one), and that the dominant cooperation was between the UK and USA. The Anglo-American arrangement contributed to the winning of two world wars and to the keeping of the Cold War peace.

But the ‘special intelligence relationship’ declined after the 1950s. The Cambridge Spy Ring and cover up undermined US faith in British intelligence. American administrations began to use the CIA to impose unilateral policies. Displeased with Prime Minister Edward Heath’s overtures to Europe, Henry Kissinger temporarily cut off privileged UK access to US intelligence information. Britain was broke, dependent on the Almighty Dollar, and powerless to resist these developments.

More recently, President Barack Obama performed his “pivot to the Pacific”, detaching America from it umbilical Old World ties. US interests demanded that and so does demography – Americans of European descent are about to become a minority in the USA. The idea that the relationship with Britain is special in the sense of being exclusive has for years been a cause of discreet mirth in Washington. And what’s the advantage of the US intelligence link? On present evidence, the CIA has gone into terminal decline. Demoted in the Washington hierarchy, it now specializes in drone attacks.

The EU already has some intelligence assets. The European Police Office, or Europol, is essentially an analytical intelligence agency. Thanks to French initiatives, the EU is developing a satellite intelligence capability. SITCEN is a small foreign intelligence analytical unit that reports to the External Action Service, the still-embryonic foreign affairs branch of the EU.

There are weaknesses in the current EU set-up. Member states hold the whip hand, and there is a lack of trust in the centre. Along with this goes weakness on the legislative side – we really shouldn’t trust a European intelligence service unless there is a stronger European parliament to oversee it. Neither Europol nor INTCEN have an intelligence collection facility. This means they can’t trade information with other bodies. Last and by no means least, continental Europe is, with honourable exceptions, shot through with racism. A good intelligence service must be cosmopolitan if it is to have the right expertise, and if people of all backgrounds are to trust it sufficiently to offer their cooperation.

We in Britain have something to offer. GCHQ is a major asset of a kind that the EU lacks and needs. We have experience and (setting aside the scandals that make such good stories in the press) a tradition of success in secret intelligence. We have a long way to go regarding racial tolerance, but it is a brutal truth that we can offer a better record than our continental cousins who do not even track inequalities – here, we can lead by example.

• Europol HQ, The Hague

   

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• Henry Kissinger

   

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• Ilkka Salmi, SITCEN Director

   

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• Rob Wainwright, Europol Director JPG

   

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In one crucial respect, we have already shown leadership. Since the 1990s, a remarkable number of British people have served in senior EU security and intelligence posts: Jonathan Faull as Director General of Justice and Home Affairs, Adrian Fortescue as his predecessor in the post, William Shapcott at SITCEN, Rob Wainwright as director of Europol, Aled Williams as president of Eurojust, and Catherine Ashton as High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy. We have expended our political capital getting our people into these security jobs as distinct from other posts.

To appreciate fully the positive side of a European agency, it is also wise to think negatively. Scotland may become independent. As recent parliamentary hearings confirmed, independence would necessitate a Scottish intelligence service. In the absence of an EU solution, the disaggregation of personnel with conflicting loyalties might well destroy all trust within and towards British intelligence.

Finally, the Americans. Setting aside Kissinger and other tantrums, it must be remembered that Washington has always wanted us to integrate with Europe. President Obama has recently reiterated the point. Furthermore, the Americans recognize the benefits of competitive intelligence estimates. If an alternative, trusted view of WMD had been expressed a decade ago, the world would have been saved a great deal of grief.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is the author of In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (OUP, 2013) and of earlier histories of the CIA and FBI. Born in Wales, he is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Edinburgh.

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Image credits: Europol HQ, The Hague © Europol; Henry Kissinger © NARA; Illka Salmi © SUPO; Rob Wainwright © Europol. Used with permission; all rights reserved. 

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Guy Halsall, author of Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages, illuminates the reality behind the façade of myths and legends concerning King Arthur. He outlines here ten ways which will challenge what you thought you knew about the legendary King Arthur and the world in which he was supposed to have lived.

1.            Stop looking for ‘King Arthur’.  There is no conclusive evidence that he ever existed and none at all that would allow us to say anything reliable about him if he did. He might have lived … or he might not. That’s all there is to say and, unless some entirely new piece of evidence is discovered (unlikely), that is all there will ever be to say on the topic (and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise). There are far more interesting things to think about in Britain between 400 and 600.  Get over it!

2.            Forget the characters, artefacts, and places of legend.  If there’s hardly any evidence to support Arthur’s existence, there is even less for Guinevere, Lancelot and the other Knights of the Round Table, for Excalibur or Camelot. While the evidence we have suggests that some people (not many) knew of an Arthur figure, legendary or historical, in the first millennium, the other people, places and things of the legends were all invented after 1000.

Glastonbury Tor: Often supposed to be the Isle of Avalon from Arthurian legend (via iStockPhoto)

3.              Abandon the written sources.  Sadly almost no reliable written evidence exists for a political narrative history of Britain between c.410 and c.597. Gildas’ On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain (written c.475-c.550) tells many things about the church, mentalities and some politics of his day, but little in detail – and we don’t know where or when he was writing. The Life of Germanus of Auxerre tells us a little about the bishop’s visit to the island in 429 and (maybe) again in the 440s, but not much. That apart, every datable source for political history is late (from at least 200 years after Arthur’s supposed lifetime around 500!) and written for the political agendas of its own day.

4.            It’s not just about the South — get some context!  What happened in Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall will only make sense if viewed in a broader context, one that not only takes into account the north of Britain but the whole of western Europe in the fifth and sixth century. (See point 5.)

The Pictish fort at Dundurn at the head of Strathearn, © Guy Halsall 2013; all rights reserved.

5.            ‘Arthur’ was not the defender of the Romans.  Whatever happened as the late Roman diocese of Britanniae (The Britains) became a series of kingdoms, English and Welsh, it did not involve the destruction of Roman Britain by barbarian invaders. Roman civilisation in Britain collapsed in the crisis of the Empire around 400, long before any ‘Saxons’ took over. Any ‘proto-Arthur’ was not fighting to defend Roman civilisation; that had long gone. Fifth- and sixth-century change in Britain only makes sense when you take a view that crosses the artificial boundary between ‘Roman archaeology’ and ‘early Anglo-Saxon’ (or sub-Roman, or early historic in other areas).

6.            ‘Arthur’ did not fight against the Saxon invasion.  The details of the written sources have long since been dismissed by serious scholars but the framework they provided remains. That framework sees Arthur and/or the Britons fighting a defensive war against invading ‘Saxons’, gradually pushing them to the west. But that is an image that suited particular moments of eighth- to tenth-century politics and the histories that were written then. Nowhere in the fifth- and sixth-century West did politics play out simply in terms of conquering barbarians fighting defending Roman provincials. Without the dubious written sources (point 2) there is no evidence that Britain was any different.

A defence against the Saxons? Or a fortified depot safeguarding Roman Britain’s crucial links with the rest of the Empire? The mighty walls of the ‘Saxon Shore’ fort at Richborough (Kent), © Guy Halsall 2013, all rights reserved.

7.            Britain wasn’t united — fifth-century factions.  Fifth-century politics everywhere else in western Europe were about faction-fighting. Regional alliances of Roman aristocrats and barbarian soldiers fought other Romano-barbarian factions for control. This pattern looks quite like that of Anglo-Welsh alliances that we can see when we first get reliable political historical evidence in the earlier seventh century. The political map was probably complex and ever-changing. A ‘Proto-Arthur’, therefore, could have been a ‘Briton’ whose troops were ‘Saxons’, or whose kingdom ‘became’ Saxon. People like that existed. If he was it’s not surprising he was left with nowhere to go but legend.

8.            Stop looking for Saxons or Britons.  Archaeological evidence should not be discussed as relating to Saxons or Britons. Such identities were political. They were multi-layered, they could be adopted or abandoned in certain circumstances and they didn’t only — or perhaps even primarily — relate to the places where someone or their family originated. Therefore specific types of finds, buildings or burials are unlikely to tell you the geographical or biological origins of a site’s occupants or users and, if they do, that will not necessarily tell you what their ethnic identity was. In any case, the archaeology maps very badly onto the old idea of a simple east-to-west advance across the landscape by English (Anglo-Saxon) settlement and kingdoms.

9.            There were no ‘knights’.  Any Arthur proto-type didn’t win his wars because of his use of heavy cavalry. There’s no evidence for fifth-/sixth-century ‘Arthurian’ heavy cavalry. Most if not all war-leaders at the time led warriors who had horses, who sometimes fought mounted and sometimes on foot.

10.          Start thinking in terms of a mess.  Forget the neat lines on the map, the orderly ‘front-line’ of traditional views. Think of a kaleidoscope. A mess is maybe less romantic but more interesting and exciting.

Guy Halsall has taught at the universities of London and York, where he has been a professor of history since 2006. He has published widely on a broad range of subjects and his most recent book Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages explores King Arthur, the myths, the legends, the history — and what we can ever really know about him.

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