‘The Grand Inquest of the Nation’: Parliamentary Committees and Social Policy in Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century England*

Connors, Richard

doi:10.1111/j.1750-0206.1995.tb00218.x

Cited by 8 publications

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“…In the wake of the Glorious Revolution and with the routinisation of annual meetings, parliament increasingly became the arena within which reform and redress of grievances were contested and conducted. 53 Social welfare initiatives such as those which dealt with the poor law could be national or local in content and context. Proposals of a regional or local nature were far more likely to succeed as wide-ranging and sweeping national initiatives which dealt with the poor and the administration of poor relief proved more likely to fail.…”

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The Nature of Stability in the Augustan Age

Connors¹

2009

Parliamentary History

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This article seeks to synthesise aspects of recent research on the Augustan age and consider the longevity of the interpretations of the period provided in the late 1960s by Geoffrey Holmes and Jack Plumb. More particularly, it reconsiders the nature of political and social instability in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and examines the arguments historians now offer to account for the diminution of the strife and discord that characterised the rage of party under Queen Anne and the difference between that late Stuart polity and the seemingly more stable and politically placid Georgian period. Furthermore, it considers the broader social and economic conditions of the Augustan age and seeks to show the importance contemporary debates over moral reform, poverty and poor relief had for social stability in the decades after the Glorious Revolution.

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The Nature of Stability in the Augustan Age

Connors¹

2009

Parliamentary History

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“Under ye Lash of ye Law”: The State and the Law in the Post-Culloden Scottish Highlands

Dziennik¹

2021

J. Br. Stud.

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In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British state enacted a series of restrictive legal measures designed to pacify the Scottish Highlands and crush the military power of the Gael. With the evolution of scholarly work on the British state, these measures are increasingly seen through the prism of state power, with the Scottish Gàidhealtachd cast as the victim of a fiscal-military system determined to impose obedience on its territory and peoples. In analyzing the implementation and enforcement of the laws passed between 1746 and 1752, this article challenges this narrative. By focusing attention on the legal system—particularly with regards enforcement—this article considers the local reception of the laws and the ideological, legal, and bureaucratic limitations to state authority. Yet it also explores how clan chiefs and traditional elites, who were the primary target of the legislation, quickly turned the laws to their own advantage. This analysis challenges the idea of effective state intervention in the Gàidhealtachd after 1746 and instead brings attention to how parliamentary legislation was mobilized by regional actors to local ends in ways that cast a long shadow over the history of the Scottish Highlands.

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Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 1754–1780

Beattie¹

2007

Law hist. rev.

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John Fielding succeeded his half-brother, the novelist Henry Fielding, as the leading magistrate in Westminster in 1754 in the midst of a crime wave in London. Over the previous six years, since the peace that had brought the war of Austrian Succession to an end, frequent reports of highway robberies around London and muggings on the streets of the capital had provided constant reminders, along with the high levels of executions at Tyburn, of the depth and seriousness of the crisis. Substantial rewards for the prosecution and conviction of robbers had failed to stem the tide. Nor had new legislation, deriving from the first enquiry ever held by a parliamentary committee into the problem of crime, diminished the danger on the streets. By the fall of 1753, with crime still apparently at an alarming height and a winter approaching that could only make things worse, the central government was ready to try new measures. It was in these circumstances that the Duke of Newcastle, the secretary of state, asked Henry Fielding to suggest what might be done.

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‘The Grand Inquest of the Nation’: Parliamentary Committees and Social Policy in Mid‐Eighteenth‐Century England*

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

The Nature of Stability in the Augustan Age

The Nature of Stability in the Augustan Age

“Under ye Lash of ye Law”: The State and the Law in the Post-Culloden Scottish Highlands

Sir John Fielding and Public Justice: The Bow Street Magistrates' Court, 1754–1780

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