This article will examine the responses to the dangers of the Second World War by a local authority in north-east England, Whickham Urban District Council. Councillors and officials received guidance from central Government, Durham County Council and from military authorities to prepare for the anticipated effects of total war, including invasion, bombing and chemical warfare against the civilian population. Detailed monthly reports to the Urban District Council reveal the extensive and expensive preparations made by the Council to counter these threats. Newspaper articles demonstrate the willingness of inhabitants to support the Council and participate in patriotic initiatives including voluntary work and fundraising.

A considerable corpus of literature addresses the poor relief crisis and its culmination, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. However, the Act's adoption was not uniform, temporally or geographically, and the role of West Riding Gilbert incorporations in delaying its local implementation, and the consequences of that delay, have received little attention. The environs of Leeds were less affected by the Act than elsewhere. Four sprawling incorporations comprising 160 townships, established under Gilbert's Act of 1782, obstructed the formation of New Poor Law unions. The largest, the Carlton Incorporation, included in its membership seven of the ten Leeds out-townships. Alongside member townships, others, interspersed but non-incorporated, like Holbeck in Leeds, might also administer relief predominantly in the tradition of Old Poor Law welfare mechanisms, with greater autonomy, and by select vestries, to which working men might be elected. Such was the case in Holbeck, where on three occasions in the 1840s Chartist administrations were returned. This paper examines the impact on the poor of relief administration in the Carlton Incorporation, and Holbeck, during the 1840s, introducing an analysis of the workings, policies, and effects of an example of Chartist local governance.

Walled gardens for pleasure and production may pre-date the Persian walled gardens that influenced Greek, Roman, monastic, and Islamic gardens. Walled and kitchen gardens continued to have a functi...

This volume, born as a result of a shared belief of the editors and contributors that there is much work yet to be done on the North-East of England and its saints, is the welcome product of a conf...

War and military activity has always engendered espionage. Christine de Pisan’s Fayttes of Armes advised its readers — kings and lesser rulers — to be ‘curiose & diligent’, and ‘to send … here & there … espies subtyli … to understande the purpose of [the] enemy’.1 England’s fifteenth-century king, Edward IV, was a master of such practice, with his victories against the Scots and his capture of Berwick in 1482 owing much to a vast network of intelligence. His successor, Henry VII, also invested in the area and used a great many disaffected Scots, Picards and merchants for diplomatic and military gain. And, of this group, perhaps the most interesting and contemporaneously recorded is a Scottish nobleman, John Ramsay, Lord Bothwell and Lord Balmain, of Terrenzeane (c. 1464–c. 1513). He is an individual often neglected by researchers, but who appears very much to have played an important role in shaping the histories of both kingdoms. The following article aims to trace his noteworthy career in the later medieval and early modern periods.

This set of biographical essays on J. H. Whitley stems from a conference held at Huddersfield University in September 2016. The quality of the essays is high, as is the quality of Routledge’s produ...

The Anglo-Norman prose Brut chronicles (ANPB), written in the north of England c. 1272–1340, were widely read and had a significant impact on the writing of historical literature. However, during t...

The demolition of castles following the English Civil War is often seen as an inevitable consequence of the conflict, with their slighting often being ascribed to a need to prevent further bloodshed and punish the ruling elite. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the destruction of elite buildings during this period was far from straightforward, and this complexity is reflected in the methodology employed to damage them. At Sheffield, so extensive was this damage that, less than a century later, not a trace remained of what had once been one of the largest castles in South Yorkshire. Whilst little remains of the building itself, the rare survival of a set of demolition accounts, alongside a large number of other sources including personal correspondence, estate rentals and town records, means it is possible to explore in great detail the circumstances of the castle’s slighting. Through these a far more nuanced picture of civil conflict emerges with the castle’s destruction taking place within a complicated dialogue between the Lord of the Manor, Parliament’s officials and the inhabitants of Sheffield themselves.

A volcanic eruption in the Americas, producing both a world famine and a world cycle of literature, is one of history’s stranger tricks, yet seemingly happened in the year 535. The traditional susp...

Scholars of the late medieval and early modern period have expressed little interest in the far North West and, less still, its political figures.1 One explanation for this may be an ostensible lac...