Category: New Publications

New Publications

Church and People in Interregnum Britain

In this post, UoP senior lecturer in history Dr Fiona McCall talks about her new book Church and People in Interregnum Britain, bringing together new research from scholars across Britain and further afield on the profound religious changes which took place after the British Civil Wars and how people responded to them.

From 1642-5, England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, endured the first in a series of devastating civil wars, which split communities ideologically, politically and religiously. These wars have been termed ‘the last of the wars of religion’ by leading Civil War historian John Morrill.[1] In 1645, as the first Civil War approached its end, and the religious reformists gained the upper hand, a second Reformation took place which profoundly changed British society. Before 1640, there had been only one religion allowed in England, and that was the Church of England. After 1645 the Church was effectively dis-established, and Godly puritan practices promoted in parish churches and everyday ordinary life. The aim was to make the Church in England more like other Calvinist ‘reformed’ churches in places like Scotland and Geneva. Some people welcomed these changes, like Lady Brilliana Harley, who wrote in a letter to her son in 1641, that she looked forward to those things being reformed which burdened the conscience of God’s children and had ‘longe trubeled the peace of the church.’ [2] Others sought even more radical religious change. New religious beliefs and practices emerged, horrifying traditionalists, who experienced these as times of madness and trouble. Historians continue to debate the extent of the social disruption that resulted, and the impact of Godly ideals.

My first book, Baal’s Priests, the Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (2013) looked at the impact of the Civil Wars on the clergy who supported the losing side.[3] In 2015 I gained British Academy funding for a project looking at traditionalist resistance to religious change. Included in that funding were funds to run a conference, ‘The people all changed: religion and society in Britain during the 1650s’, held at the University of Portsmouth on 15-16 July 2016. Because of the significance of the political changes and military events of this period, the social and religious aspects of the period tend to be neglected by historians. Social historians often prefer to concentrate on what the Annales school of history termed the longue durée, centuries rather than decades, and there has become a tendency for research projects to either end in 1640 or start in 1660, or to treat the seventeenth century as if the disruptions of its middle years hardly mattered. The aim of the conference had been to help to change this, by drawing together researchers working on the records of this period. These tend to require specialist knowledge because political and religious administrative structures were not the same as before 1640, and kept altering still further, another reason why research into the interregnum has been more limited than it might be.

We were really lucky to attract the pre-eminent social historian of the period, Professor Bernard Capp from the University of Warwick, to give one of the keynote papers at the conference.[4] When thinking about publishing the papers presented at the conference, we also benefitted greatly from a suggestion made by Professor Dave Andress, to put forward a proposal to the Institute of Historical Research New Perspectives series. This is a book series commissioned and edited by the Royal Historical Society and published for the Institute of Historical Research by the University of London Press. It specialises in publishing the work of early career historians. Many of the contributors to our conference fell into that category. Happily, Bernard agreed to write an introduction for the volume, and took a very hands-on attitude throughout the process by commenting on and even editing the different contributions. I also had considerably assistance from Dr Andrew Foster, now at the University of Kent but formerly at the University of Chichester, who runs an early modern studies group based in Chichester in which I participate. Andrew and Helen Whittle, another member of the group, both contributed chapters for the book. I also found two additional contributors to the volume amongst fellow-attendees at two 2017 conferences I attended: the British Churches 1603-1707, at the University of Kent, and Religion and Conflict in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, at Nottingham Trent University.

The final volume includes chapters from eleven contributors. Some relate to the administration of the interregnum church, the role of Oliver Cromwell in ecclesiastical affairs, efforts to survey parish churches with a view to reform, and on the problems of parish record keeping during this period. There were chapters on the clergy of Sussex, Dorset, Warwickshire and Wales, and on moral discipline in Scotland. Contributors came from the Victoria County History, and from the Universities of Warwick, Kent, Leicester, West of England and as far afield as Sydney, as well as my own. My own chapter looked at how the regime, having abolished the church courts, turned to the secular courts to police religious matters.[5]

Dutch engraving satirising Oliver Cromwell’s role in the church, 1651, British Museum, 1871,1209.975.

What will the volume contribute to our understanding of the period? Firstly individual chapters show how committed the reformers were to bringing in their own particular brand of religion. In appointing clergy to parishes, Cromwell had a very active role, assuming the powers of the king, and taking them even further.[6] The regime had very high ideals, setting out to improve the way churches were run and to get rid of anything they considered ‘superstitious’, or similar to the Catholic church, like bishops, the book of common prayer, religious imagery, organs and choirs. They made changes in the way baptisms, funerals and particularly marriages were conducted, bringing in laws to say people could only be married by a justice of the peace, and not by the clergy. But many people opposed these changes. Keeping things under control politically via a large army made the regime hard-pressed for money; funding religious improvements often meant taking money from ex-royalists, who naturally were not too happy about this.[7] To make the changes work, the regime had to remove a significant proportion of the clergy who supported the King or traditional ways.[8] Parishioners did not necessarily like the changes either: those who supported reform were probably only a minority, if a significant and determined one. The reformers were particularly keen to enforce sabbatarianism, where everyone went to church twice on Sunday, with no working, dancing or playing sports. In Bristol they even turned off the water supply on Sundays to prevent people using it.[9] I found plenty of evidence of resistance to this policy, whether from groups of boys playing football or walking on Scarborough beaches, or weavers in Exeter working on Sunday behind locked doors.[10] Quite frequently physical violence was involved. Some groups, like the Quakers, who emerged in this period, were opposed to any form of religious organisation, to clergy and to churches, and caused problems by interrupting and disrupting church services. All this led to a lot of turbulence and instability: one of the most interesting findings for me was the high turnover of clergy, indicative of a somewhat troubled parish life.[11] Although the majority of clergy survived in post, many had to deal with attempts to displace them, or otherwise make their life difficult.

Southwick church, north of Portsmouth, 16th-18c interior.

All this challenges the impression, which I still find repeated in history books, that religious life continued on pretty much the same as normal despite the reforms. Yes, some things didn’t change: parish churches were administered by churchwardens as they had been before, for example. Where parishes had previously been served by puritan clergy, services wouldn’t have looked so different to what people were used to. Other aspects were quite different. The Book of Common Prayer, previously required to be used in church services, was banned; a few churches may have tried to continue using it, but there’s little evidence it was used widely, at least in public. Private baptisms became more common in this period, probably because people wanted to have Common Prayer used for this important religious rite.[12] In places like Suffolk, where there had been an organised campaign to remove images and break stained glass windows, churches would have looked different.[13] Cathedrals and larger churches were often in a sorry state, as were those churches which had been involved in civil war fighting, including several in Hampshire. Portsmouth Cathedral had its tower destroyed by Parliamentarians firing from Gosport during the siege of Portsmouth at the start of the Civil War; at Alton the church was the centre of a civil war siege, ending with the royalist commander being killed in the pulpit.[14]

The only stained glass left after the visit of iconoclasts to the church of Clare in Suffolk were these images of the sun and moon, probably left because they were non-religious images.

To quote Bernard Capp’s final conclusion, the interregnum church, fond of controversy, assailed by both traditionalists and radicals in religion, with its many vacant parishes and dilapidated churches, was ‘not one to inspire enthusiasm’.[15] Yet it did mark a watershed for the state of religion and morality in Britain. Attempts by the puritans to tighten moral order proved counter-productive, permanently damaging the system of moral control previously in place. There was a democratization of religious belief which made it very difficult for the state to continue to tell people what to believe. The return of the Church of England after the Restoration of 1660 restored traditionalist ways, but non-conformists, confirmed and solidified in their own groupings and religious beliefs which had flowered under the turbulence of the interregnum, were resolved to have little part in it.

[1] J. S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1993), 68.

[2] The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley (London: Camden Society, 1854), 110.

[3] F. McCall, Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English Revolution (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).

[4] B. Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660 (Oxford, 2012).

[5] F. McCall, “Breaching the Laws of God and Man: Secular Prosecutions of Religious Offences in the Interregnum Parish, 1645-1660”, in F. McCall (ed.), Church and People in Interregnum Britain (London: University of London Press, 2021), 137-170.

[6] R. Warren, “The Ecclesiastical Patronage of Oliver Cromwell, c. 1654-60, in McCall, Church and People, 65-86.

[7] A. Craven, “Soe good and godly a worke’: the surveys of ecclesiastical livings and parochial reform during the English Revolution”, in McCall, Church and People, 41-64.

[8] McCall, Baal’s Priests, 130-31.

[9] Bristol Record Office, JQS/M/4 1653-71, Quarter Session Minute Book, Epiphany 1655.

[10] M.Y. Ashcroft (ed.), Scarborough Records 1640–1660 (Northallerton, 1991), 261; Devon Heritage Centre, ECA, quarter sessions order book, 1642-60, fo. 351v, 23 March 1656/7.

[11] See Helen Whittle’s chapter on the Sussex clergy, H. M. Whittle, “The clergy of Sussex: the impact of change, 1635– 65”, McCall (ed.), Church and People, 111-136.

[12] P.M. Kitson, ‘Religious change and the timing of baptism in England, 1538-1750’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009): 292.

[13] The Journal of William Dowsing, ed. T. Cooper, (Woodbridge: The Ecclesiological Society, 2001).

[14] G.N. Goodwin, The Civil War in Hampshire, 1642-45 and the story of Basing House (Alresford: Laurence Oxley, 1873).

[15] B. Capp, “Introduction: Stability and flux: the Church in the interregnum”, McCall (ed.), Church and People, 18.

September 30, 2021
Sailors Ashore: The Exploration of Class, Culture and Ethnicity in Victorian London by Brad Beaven

Brad Beaven has a new blog published on the Social History Society’s blog, looking at the history of ‘sailortowns’, seaport’s urban quarters where sailors would stay, eat, drink and be entertained. These were transient and liminal spaces and a unique site of cultural contact and exchange. Despite the rich array of research areas in class, race and gender relations that these districts have to offer, sailortowns have tended to be overlooked in historical study. This is because they sit at the cross-roads between the urban and maritime realms, and have tended to fall between these two schools of history.

Brad writes about his new article published for the journal Social History. This looks at nineteenth-century London, then the largest port in the world, and its infamous Ratcliffe Highway, as the ideal case study to explore this relationship between sailors and working-class communities.

February 16, 2021
Building Supernatural Cities

In this post, Karl Bell, reader in cultural and social history, talks about his new book Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality, bringing together scholars from across the globe working on the relationship between supernatural beliefs and urban cultures. He describes what the book is about, and what he learned from the process of international academic collaboration.

In my most recent book I brought together and led an international group of scholars in an exploration of magic, monsters, ghosts and storytelling in urban cultures around the world. Examining these ideas from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century, Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety and Spectrality (Boydell and Brewer, 2019) challenges the assumption that supernatural beliefs and magical practices died out under the impact of modern urbanisation. Engaging with urban supernatural cultures across five continents, the contributors demonstrate how such ideas played a role in evolving urban cultures, and how they continue to serve a cultural function up to the present day. Underlying the broad historical and geographical scope of the book is the argument that the supernatural has continually been adapted and updated to accommodate and express our cultural, economic and environmental fears.

Heart Amulet from the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

The book takes its title from my faculty-funded research project (www.supernaturalcities.com), and originated from the project’s first conference, held at the University of Portsmouth in 2016. Both the conference and the subsequent book brought together a diverse range of academic approaches, with contributions from historians, geographers, anthropologists, folklorists and literary scholars. When approached by the publisher, Boydell and Brewer, to develop it into a book, I was encouraged to expand the scope beyond a predominantly European focus. This represented an ambitious scaling up from my previous research and publications, which have focussed on magic, ghosts, and urban legends in nineteenth-century Britain.

To facilitate that broader scope, I had to seek out scholars around the world who shared an interest in the themes of the book, and that led to a fascinating trawl through Academia.edu. Long before we were all working online due to the Coronavirus, this meant collaborating with scholars who I have never met, in places as varied as Russia, South Africa, the USA and Australia. Given that a third of the contributors were complete strangers to me, I was hugely impressed by their consummate professionalism and the way they got behind the publication.

My previous book editing experience was as a co-editor on Port Towns and Urban Cultures (2016) (See http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/port-towns-book/), a collaboration with fellow UoP historians, Professor Brad Beaven and Dr Rob James. For Supernatural Cities, the challenges of structuring the book, reviewing chapters, and steering it to completion fell solely to me. This necessarily resulted in a slower process and, again, I was impressed with the contributors’ patience and commitment. Engaging with chapters that ranged from witchcraft in nineteenth-century Paris, to the Goat Man scare near Washington DC in the 1970s, to Manchester’s post-industrial psychogeography and the ghost lore of twenty-first century Beijing certainly took me out of my comfort zone. However, as I have repeatedly found in my research, it is often when we dare to take that step that we develop as scholars.

The Goat Man of Washington D.C.

The book sets out three ways of understanding the relationship between the supernatural and the urban environment. The first section on enchantment considers the empowering influence of magical beliefs and the ability of folkloric tales to transform and enrich our understanding of the urban environment. Examples are drawn from Paris, London, Limerick and the emerging modern cities of South Africa. Focussing on less positive aspects, the second section uses the supernatural and the Gothic to explore social fears, environmental anxieties, and the demonising of various urban ‘others’. Here, case studies are drawn from New York, Manila, Washington D.C., Tokyo, the post-Soviet era industrial cities of the Urals, and the London Underground. The third section explores ghosts, spectrality, and their links to haunting, historical guilt and trauma, and memory. Chapters focus on the Australian goldfield town of Ballarat, Mexico City, Beijing and Manchester. Across the collection, and the broad geographical sweep of its examples, it is fascinating to see the way these themes prove universal while taking on their own local cultural and historical expressions.

H.P. Lovecraft, The Horror at Red Hook (1927)

The book seeks to make an important contribution to our understanding of how urban environments, both past and present, inspire our imaginations, prompt cultural insecurities, and generate spatial fears. If it helps stimulate greater multidisciplinary discussion between scholars of the supernatural and urban cultures, and if it can encourage dialogue between eastern and western perspectives (and northern and southern hemispheres), then it will have more than fulfilled my ambitions and hopes for the project.

For a full outline of the book’s contents see https://boydellandbrewer.com/supernatural-cities.html. If inspired to read more, Supernatural Cities is available as an ebook via the University Library

April 23, 2020
Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain
New Publications |

Dr Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, has just published a book with Professor Paul Almond on Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain: Society, Legitimacy and Change since 1960. The book charts the development of modern British health and safety, in response to ideas around risk society, managerialism, regulatory capitalism, and demographic and economic changes in the workplace. Mike’s research focuses on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Health and Safety in Contemporary Britain – Society, Legitimacy, and Change since 1960 | Paul Almond | Palgrave Macmillan

To read more about the book, click here.
January 15, 2019
Looking backwards – and forwards

In this post, Mike Esbester, Senior Lecturer in History, outlines student and staff work with an external partner to mark a significant anniversary. Mike’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain, particularly on the cultural history of safety, risk and accident prevention, and on the history of mobility.

When people hit a big milestone age – 40 is a common one – it seems that for many the mind starts to think with greater focus about the past, as well as turning to the future. In some respects organisations are no different: big anniversaries are often used as a moment to pause and take stock, as well as to consider next steps. And so it was that in 2016 I was contacted by the Herefordshire Health and Safety Group. They were alive to their past, and had identified that 2018 would be 50 years since they were founded, a date they wanted to mark in some way.

The Group’s President, Roger Bibbings, was someone that I’d known for some time, as a result of my research into the history of health and safety and accident prevention groups, and particularly my efforts to work with current organisations. As a result, when the Herefordshire group were looking for someone to help them with marking their history, Roger suggested my name. I was keen to do it for several reasons. It fitted happily with my wish to see the past brought into current practice, as well as opening up a new – and as yet unresearched – group that would fit in with my interests.

In addition, the timing was fortuitous – this was an ideal project on which to involve a student, and it was possible to arrange it so that the role would work inside one of our placement units. Through it we recruited an excellent candidate, Josh Bassett, at that point a 2^nd year student. This would work to the advantage of both Josh and the Group, so it was a win-win situation; Josh gained experience of working in an environment beyond the University and particularly dealing with external stakeholders, and the Group gained a great researcher contributing to their anniversary.

Between us, Josh and I spent time meeting with the Group’s Executive Committee, to understand the Group, their knowledge of its past, and what they were looking for from our collaboration. The key output was to be a booklet, but beyond that we were given free rein about content, design and direction – all of which were going to be dependent on what we found. One of the points I was keen to contribute was the importance of contextualising the Group’s activities over the years: this needed to be a booklet that looked wider than just the Group. Fortunately they were enthusiastic about this idea.

Josh and I sifted through the Group’s archival material, split between the Herefordshire Archive and Record Centre (a lovely new building, climate neutral too – very impressive) and an industrial estate where one of the member firms of the Group was based. Much of it was in hardcopy, though of course the more recent records were digital, so we ran up against the questions that have been confronting archivists for some time now, about retention and preservation of ‘born digital’ records. Fortunately between the various sources we had a reasonable run of material, apart from a gap in the 1980s (a point at which the Group was in a low of membership).

As part of the archival work, we introduced one of the Committee members, Peter Smith, to the archives, to familiarise him with the work we were doing – an interesting experience for all concerned, as his questions forced us to think carefully about why we did things in a particular way! Josh and I also carried out an oral history interview with Ron Aston, the longest serving Committee member, who had joined the Group in the late 1970s. That was useful in getting both a sense of the personal within the Group and its work, and in addressing some of the gaps in the documentary record. This didn’t cover everything, of course – the ‘one that got away’ was the poster competition held in the early 1970s: sadly we were unable to find images of the entries!

Having gathered as much evidence as possible of the Group’s activities since 1968, Josh and I came up with a structure for the booklet. We’d initially thought we’d have enough for a relatively slim volume, but it grew and grew, until we’d enough material for 68 pages. We worked closely with the Group on these stages in particular as we wanted to ensure they were going to be satisfied with the end product – helped by the fact that they were true to their word and gave us complete independence in terms of the content. We worked with a design student from the University, Jasmine Kenney, as she handled the design and production side of things – a good thing too, as we ended up with a nice looking booklet, and that wouldn’t have been the case had design been down to me! This was also another great example of how we try to embed practical experience across the various degree programmes at Portsmouth, working with our external partners.

The booklet launch was held earlier this year at Hereford Town Hall, a good opportunity to mark the anniversary, to catch up with the Group and to meet some of their members. Feedback on the booklet has been very positive, with copies distributed widely in Herefordshire, across a range of sectors – industrial, retail, education, regulation, health care and more. Thankfully the Group has been well satisfied with the booklet – and are now moving into their next 50 years!

If you want to read more about the Group’s activities and ethos over the years, you can download the booklet here!

November 15, 2018
‘Read for Victory’: Public Libraries and Book Reading in a British Naval Port City during the Second World War

Dr Robert James, Senior Lecturer in History, has recently published an article in the journal Cultural and Social History on the role of public libraries in the naval town of Portsmouth, UK during the Second World War. See below for the abstract, and if you want to read the article, click here.

Abstract: In 1942 a library official in Portsmouth, UK appealed to the city’s inhabitants to ‘read for victory’, believing that they had a duty to use their reading time productively as part of their wartime activities. This article argues that long-standing desires among the country’s political and civic elites to encourage the nation’s readers to spend their leisure time prudently intensified during the Second World War. The public library service was utilized by civic leaders, library officials and publishing trade personnel to aid the country’s war effort. The article argues that negative attitudes regarding mass reading tastes remained largely static, despite recognition that the conflict drew people to the written word for relaxation and escapism. Using the naval city of Portsmouth as a case-study, this article charts the activities of the city’s public library authorities and the borrowing habits of its readers to reveal that while many people borrowed books in order to distract themselves from the conflict, the city’s strategic importance ensured that many citizens also read in order to facilitate their preparedness for war service, whether that be on the home front or overseas. The article argues that while, in common with national trends, many of Portsmouth’s citizens used libraries to obtain books to help distract them from the war, many remained eager to make use of the service for educational purposes, unlike the majority of the nation’s library users, whose interest in this aspect of library provision rapidly waned as the war progressed. The article concludes that the public library service was viewed as a central plank in the war effort and that library officials worked continuously to ensure that it remained so.

February 27, 2018