This book explores the importance of history to Elizabethan and early Stuart gentry and how this led to a vibrant antiquarian culture. The family, town and county histories written by the community, which form the core of the study, had an influence on the development of local history in England which lasted into the twentieth century and is still felt today.

Writing Welsh History is the first book to explore how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been written over the past fifteen hundred years. By analysing and contextualizing a wide range of historical writing, from Gildas in the sixth century to recent global approaches, it opens new perspectives both on the history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh - and thus on the use of the past to articulate national and other identities. The study's broad chronological scope serves to highlight important continuities in interpretations of Welsh history. One enduring preoccupation is Wales's place in Britain. Down to the twentieth century it was widely held that the Welsh were an ancient people descended from the original inhabitants of Britain whose history in its fullest sense ended with Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1282-4, their history thereafter being regarded as an attenuated appendix. However, Huw Pryce shows that such master narratives, based on medieval sources and focused primarily on the period down to 1282, were part of a much larger and more varied historiographical landscape. Over the past century the thematic and chronological range of Welsh history writing has expanded significantly, notably in the unprecedented attention given to the modern period, reflecting broader trends in an increasingly internationalized historical profession as well as the influence of social, economic, and political developments in Wales and elsewhere.

Drawing on a broad range of cultural materials including novels, film, theatre and tourist literature, Writing London and the Thames Estuary by Len Platt traces the making of the Thames estuary as margin by the London metropolis.

This book assesses the everyday use of petitions in administrative and judicial settings and contrasts these with more assertive forms of political petitioning addressed to assemblies or rulers. A petition used to be a humble means of asking a favour, but in the early modern period, petitioning became more assertive and participative. This book shows how this contrasted to ordinary petitioning, often to the consternation of authorities. By evaluating petitioning practices in Scotland, England and Denmark, the book traces the boundaries between ordinary and adversarial petitioning and shows how non-elites could become involved in politics through petitioning. Also observed are the responses of authorities to participative petitions, including the suppression or forgetting of unwelcome petitions and consequent struggles to establish petitioning as a right rather than a privilege. Together the chapters in this book indicate the significance of collective petitioning in articulating early modern public opinion and shaping contemporary ideas about opinion at large. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Parliaments, Estates & Representation.

Encounters with a 'multicultural' Britain in the Tudor and Stuart periods written with an eye to debates about immigration and ethnicity in today's Britain.

Remembering the English Civil Wars is the first collection of essays to explore how the bloody struggle which took place between the supporters of king and parliament during the 1640s was viewed in retrospect. The English Civil Wars were perhaps the most calamitous series of conflicts in the country’s recorded history. Over the past twenty years there has been a surge of interest in the way that the Civil Wars were remembered by the men, women and children who were unfortunate enough to live through them. The essays brought together in this book not only provide a clear and accessible introduction to this fast-developing field of study but also bring together the voices of a diverse group of scholars who are working at its cutting edge. Through the investigation of a broad, but closely interrelated, range of topics – including elite, popular, urban and local memories of the wars, as well as the relationships between civil war memory and ceremony, material culture and concepts of space and place – the essays contained in this volume demonstrate, with exceptional vividness and clarity, how the people of England and Wales continued to be haunted by the ghosts of the mid-century conflict throughout the decades which followed. The book will be essential reading for all students of the English Civil Wars, Stuart Britain and the history of memory.

This volume honours the memory of Professor Alan Everitt who, in a series of publications during the 1960s and 1970s, advanced the fruitful notion of the 'county community' during the seventeenth century. Everitt's The community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1966) convinced scholars that counties were worth studying in their own right rather than merely to illustrate the national narrative. He emphasised the importance of local identities and allegiances for their own sake. Taking into account over two decades of challenges to Everitt's assumptions, the present volume proposes some modifications of Everitt's influential hypotheses in the light of the best recent scholarship. In so doing, this collection signposts future directions for research into the relationship between the centre and localities in seventeenth-century England. The essays' innovative interpretations of the concept of the 'county community' reflect the variety of approaches, methods and theories generated by Everitt's legacy. The book includes an important re-evaluation of political engagement in civil war Kent and also has a wider geographical focus as other chapters draw examples from numerous midland and southern counties as well as Wales. A personal appreciation of Professor Everitt is followed by a historiographical essay which evaluates the extraordinary impact of Everitt's book and the debate it provoked. Other chapters assess the cultural horizons of the gentry and ways of analysing their attachment to contemporary county histories and there is a methodological focus throughout on how to contextualise the local experiences of the civil wars into wider interpretative frameworks. Whatever the limitations of Everitt's original thesis may have been, historians studying early modern society and its relationship to the concepts and practice of governance must still reckon with the county and the primacy of local experiences which was at the heart of Everitt's work.