A blog covering early modern history in the British Isles, Europe and North America
John Crofts (University of Birmingham)
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I have just discovered John Crofts of the University of Brimingham via 'X' (aka Twitter). He is working on radicals in the New Model Army between 1647 and 1649.
LAWRENCE STONE AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE GENTRY CONTROVERSY The controversy over the economic and social origins of the English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form, in Chapter 2 of his work...
In the spring of 1967, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, then the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, wrote to me to ask if I would assist Dr Pearl in her work by transcribing Walter Yonge’s diaries held (in Additional Mss.18,777-18,780) in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum at that time. I agreed and it was settled that I would be paid £150 per volume by the History Faculty of the University. I duly transcribed the first of these volumes in 1967 and the remaining three by 1973. I was not her “assistant” in this task but undertook it myself. I did not, moreover, keep copies of the first three volumes. In mid-1975, I read in The Times Higher Education Supplement that she was preparing the Yonge volumes for publication. But nothing happened. By 1984, seventeen years after I had transcribed the first volume and eleven years after finishing the last one I was puzzled by this failure to proceed and, having asked several academic friends if they th...
One of the things that surprised me until ten or so years ago was the record of history departments and universities in ensuring that proper collections were made of the work of historians. Admittedly, plenty of collections of correspondence survive but there was much less material available in the form of audio recordings or film or video evidence. This always struck me as strange. I was reminded of this issue last week when I found a long forgotten letter from Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1967 in a file dealing with the affairs of the Providence Island Company in the years between 1629 and 1641. (How it had got there is still a puzzle.) It had some characteristically perceptive comments to make on the Parliamentary politics of the 1640s and some observations on how he thought John Pym's career might have evolved had he lived beyond late-1643. His ability to suggest new ideas to explore was unrivalled and what made him so stimulating a supervisor. It also differentiated him from some of t...
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