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ABSTRACTDespite the volume of research on the Old Poor Law, only in the last two decades have detailed local studies begun to assess the impact of relief payments across the life-courses of individuals. Their conclusions have been mixed. While many have found that the rural labouring poor of southern England were increasingly frequent recipients of poor relief after the 1780s, recent studies have indicated that 'dependence' on relief was generally intermittent, not permanent. Based on a new dataset for the Essex village of Terling, this study sets individual life-histories within the broader chronology of change to show how young, able-bodied men and women became relief recipients much more often after 1795 than they had before.

Nearly every conceivable aspect of the old poor law in England appears to have been studied. Yet some fundamental questions about parish‐level provisioning remain hard to answer. These include the amount that people received from the parish, from all sources, each week; how the balance between types of payments shifted over the period, and (correspondingly) within the individual life‐course; the range of services or supplements that such individuals received, from the parish, over the course of their lives; and how this spectrum of relief adjusted to the massive macro‐level changes that we know occurred in the poor relief system between the 1760s and 1834. This study attempts to answer these questions in new depth, by employing a dataset that encompasses all payments to named individuals within the Essex parish of Terling between 1762 and 1834, totalling 143,801 payments to 1,508 recipients. Analysis of this dataset provides new insights into the size, scope, changes, and significance of poor relief in labouring families' lives in southern England in this period.

This article will consider the relationship between the agrarian use-rights and political governance of urban common lands in English towns, in the period c. 1500–1840, and assess how far these common rights correspond to Elinor Ostrom's model of "Common Pool Resource" (CPR) management. It will review the most frequent varieties of common land and common rights held by the residents of English towns and argue that systems of commons management in English towns were always connected closely to urban political structures. Freemen, who were commons users in one context, were urban electors, defenders of corporate monopolies, or rent-seekers in other contexts. The governance, and the very survival, of urban commons could be affected by these additional imperatives. The defence of common rights often involved the assertion of a minority privilege, even if this was usually expressed in terms of a collective, or universal, civic right. Ironically, this defence was undermined fatally by the expansion of parliamentary and corporate electorates in the 1830s. When civic politics began to take account of the interests of a wider middle-class majority, the access privileges of borough freemen were swiftly abolished. These features mean that the longevity and eventual abolition of English urban commons conforms more closely to research by Sheilagh Ogilvie and Maïka De Keyzer about the "distributional effects" of unequal power relationships and external influences on economic institutions than to Ostrom's assumption that the survival of CPR management structures was determined ultimately by their economic efficiency. ; This article will consider the relationship between the agrarian use-rights and political governance of urban common lands in English towns, in the period c. 1500–1840, and assess how far these common rights correspond to Elinor Ostrom's model of "Common Pool Resource" (CPR) management. It will review the most frequent varieties of common land and common rights held by the residents of English towns and argue that systems of commons management in English towns were always connected closely to urban political structures. Freemen, who were commons users in one context, were urban electors, defenders of corporate monopolies, or rent-seekers in other contexts. The governance, and the very survival, of urban commons could be affected by these additional imperatives. The defence of common rights often involved the assertion of a minority privilege, even if this was usually expressed in terms of a collective, or universal, civic right. Ironically, this defence was undermined fatally by the expansion of parliamentary and corporate electorates in the 1830s. When civic politics began to take account of the interests of a wider middle-class majority, the access privileges of borough freemen were swiftly abolished. These features mean that the longevity and eventual abolition of English urban commons conforms more closely to research by Sheilagh Ogilvie and Maïka De Keyzer about the "distributional effects" of unequal power relationships and external influences on economic institutions than to Ostrom's assumption that the survival of CPR management structures was determined ultimately by their economic efficiency.

This edited collection of correspondence written by members of English landed gentry families provides insights into the formation, experience and practice of elite masculine identities. The source book examines continuities and changes in such processes within the male life cycle and across the early modern and modern periods.

This study on masculinity focuses on the English landed gentry. It covers the period from 1700 to 1900 and is based on thousands of letters written by 19 families. It concentrates on the experiences of sons' upbringing, particularly schooling university or business, foreign travel, and the move to family life and fatherhood