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"This book examines the structures and texture of rural social relationships, using one type of document found in abundance over all the four component parts of Britain and Ireland: petitions from tenants to their landlords. Exploring the authorship, form, and style of more than 2,000 petitions as well as their content, and looking at variations in petitioning as a communication strategy, it uses requests for help to understand the diverse material and social lives of those who worked the land in an era of profound change. Ranging over the many practices of lordship and estate management, the book offers unexpected angles on many aspects of society and economy on estates in north-west England, the Highland margin of Scotland, the north of Ireland, and Wales. Broad in geographical and chronological scope, it integrates, compares, and contrasts the experience of the rural population in different parts of the British Isles. Primarily social and cultural in focus, it also extends understandings of local, regional, and national histories."--

Improper confinement of those alleged to be mentally troubled was a prominent issue for the literate and propertied classes of eighteenth-century England and one which has fascinated historians too. In contrast, Scots did not perceive wrongful incarceration of the mentally disabled to be a serious social or legal issue. This article seeks to explain the differences between Scotland and England by focusing on a case where the care of a mentally troubled person was fought over. The article explores the familial settings and relationships involved in the care of the mad and idiotic and it shows medical and lay understandings of mental incapacity. Finally, it gives insights into the eclectic medical regime used to treat the mentally troubled and into the relationship between law, medicine and society. The argument is that different legal and medical structures meant that Scots were much less exercised about wrongful confinement. The article concludes that respect for the transparency of Scottish courts, for their cheapness and for their relative speed helped prevent the development of any extensive critique of improper confinement in eighteenth-century Scotland. Coupled with this was the relative power of the family compared with that of medical practitioners in Scotland.