After the Protestant Reformation, clergymen could marry, and increasing numbers did so out of inclination and to show they were committed to Protestantism. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 placed regulatory conditions on clerical behaviour, including marriage, although it was still controversial to the public and disliked by Queen Elizabeth I. Second-year UoP history student Madeleine East discusses this historical context using witness depositions from the Winchester Consistory Court, dated March 1571, relating to the marriage proposals of one Hampshire clergyman, a document that she studied for the second-year module Underworlds: Crime, Deviance & Punishment in Britain, 1500-1900 The document was made by ecclesiastical courts, which regulated moral behaviour in Early […]
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History Research Seminars Winter/Spring 2019
Every year, the History team at Portsmouth organise a series of research seminars that take place across the autumn, winter and spring terms. Historians are invited from a range of institutions, both in Britain and abroad, to talk about their latest research projects. The subjects presented cover a broad historical timespan and offer insight into a diverse range of topics. In this winter and spring terms there will be talks on children’s writing in 1930s Britain, relationships in early modern England, immigration in Tudor Southampton, the Royal Marines’ institutional legacy, and the health of British seamen while travelling overseas. All are welcome to attend. All talks take place in Milldam […]
Love, courtship and ‘personal sources’ in late medieval England
Dr Maria Cannon is a Lecturer in Early Modern History and specialises in late medieval and early modern family history. She co-ordinates the Level 5 core unit ‘Introduction to Historical Research’ where students are introduced to the range of historical sources available for their independent research and the kind of issues associated with using different types of evidence. In this blog she reflects on one of the examples discussed under the theme of ‘Personal Sources’. In February 1477 a young woman from a Norfolk gentry family wrote to the man she was engaged to marry. Margery Brews greeted her fiancé John as ‘my ryght welebeloued Voluntyne’, the earliest surviving use […]