Suchergebnisse

In an earlier study of the plague inColyton,Devon, the household distribution of deaths was studied to see whether this provided a method of identifying the causative disease. In this article, a known epidemic of plague in theSwedish parish ofBräkne‐Hoby was studied as a means of testing out the generality of the household distribution of deaths. It was discovered that, in this case, the very heavy mortality was due to two radically different means of spreading the disease, initially the classic bubonic one through the rat flea, and latterly, and somewhat surprisingly, the pneumonic one, through the infection of the inhabitants by their own friends and neighbours.

In the past a couple had the choice of a day from Monday through Sunday on which to baptise their child, or to get married, or to have their burials registered. The day chosen would reflect the parents' own preferences for days of leisure. As each date was converted by computer during the process of family reconstitution to a number of days that had elapsed since the first of January, 1 AD, all that it was necessary to do was to divide the number corresponding to the date by 7 to get the day of the week. Three graphs reveal, with some surprises, the relative popularity of the days of the days of the week chosen for baptisms, burials and marriages, from 1542 to 1847.

The question that springs to mind at the start of this brief résumé of my career is, how did I come to be employed by the British Economic and Social Research Council, when my research training seemed so much against it? Memory is at best a fallible guide, but, as I remember, 1965 saw the appearance of The World We Have Lost, by Peter Laslett, which sought to describe the structure of English society before the Industrial Revolution. I had known Laslett as a lecturer in the Cambridge History Faculty who gave a course of general lectures on the history of political thought in the ancient world; he was also more generally known as the man who had researched the late-seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. But here he was, writing a different kind of book altogether, with a first chapter called "The Passing of the Patriarchal Household: Parents and Children, Masters and Servants," and further chapters on such topics as whether the peasants really starved. What was this political analyst up to? Not to anything good, or so I was told in a leading article in the Times Literary Supplement for 9 December 1965. In a scabrous attack entitled "The Book of Numbers," E. P. Thompson (for it was he, hiding behind the cloak of anonymity that was generally assumed by the authors of leading articles) did everything to undermine Laslett's version of the new history. "It is to be hoped that the cause will survive Mr Laslett's advocacy," he concluded. He succeeded with me; I let the book pass me by on the other side.

If taxation is the mobilization of economic resources for political ends, it is evident that any study of taxation must probe well beyond the administrative technicalities of its subject. Social, economic, political and administrative history are all part of the investigation. The early Tudor period is especially significant in the history of taxation. This new study examines the taxes granted by parliament to the crown between 1485 and 1547. Under Henry VIII, taxation based on the direct assessment of each individual was revived, having been abandoned as unworkable in the fourteenth century. In the long run, the Tudor experiment failed: direct assessment was abandoned again after decades of complaint about evasion and under-assessment in the mid-seventeenth century, and was not restored until the end of the eighteenth century. But examination of the experiment, and of the timing and causes of its failure, throws light on the changing political limits of the Tudor state. Schofield's research marks an important advance in our understanding not only of the fiscal resources available to the English crown but also of the broader political culture of early Tudor England

Although Western societies cannot escape from images of famine in the present world, their direct experience of widespread hunger has receded into the past. England was one of the very first countries to escape from the shadow of famine; in this volume a team of distinguished economic, social and demographic historians analyses why. Focusing on England (whose experience is contrasted with France), the contributions combine detailed local studies of individual communities, broader analyses of the impact of hunger and disease, and methodological discussion to explore the effects of crisis mortality on early modern societies