Search results for ""University of Hertfordshire Press""

At the cutting edge of new social and demographic history, this book provides a detailed picture of the most comprehensive system of poor relief operated by any Elizabethan town. Well before the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, Hadleigh, Suffolk—a thriving woolen cloth center with a population of roughly 3,000—offered a complex array of assistance to many of its residents who could not provide for themselves: orphaned children, married couples with more offspring than they could support or supervise, widows, people with physical or mental disabilities, some of the unemployed, and the elderly. Hadleigh's leaders also attempted to curb idleness and vagrancy and to prevent poor people who might later need relief from settling in the town. Based upon uniquely full records, this study traces 600 people who received help and explores the social, religious, and economic considerations that made more prosperous people willing to run and pay for this system. Relevant to contemporary debates over assistance to the poor, the book provides a compelling picture of a network of care and control that resulted in the integration of public and private forms of aid.

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Features contextualising essays around the exhibition 'Clothes for Living and Dying' of the photographic series "Clothes for Death" and the "Graduation Dresses".

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With a special emphasis on the exchange of land between medieval servile tenants—especially from the 13th century onward—this scholarly examination of the peasant land market of the Middle Ages explores the identification of peasant families with particular lands to which they had a hereditary right. Using this theme to explore village life and showing how peasants were affected by the changes over time and place, this study employs primary source material from the Winchester estates. Analyzing thousands of land exchanges and interactions from more than 50 different manors on Winchester, this volume reveals unparalleled opportunities for comparing regional and local differences of experience.

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Don Chapman tells for the first time the story of the "Oxford Playhouse", to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of its present home in Beaumont Street, Oxford. He traces the history of this great theater back to its earliest roots in a production of Agamemnon in 1880 which led to the founding of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, the rebuilding of Oxford's New Theater and, eventually, the launch of the Playhouse itself. Jane Ellis was the 'young, obscure actress' from London who made it happen, motivated by a desire for a venue where she herself might play decent roles. She asked J.B. Fagan (who was to produce the first successful Chekhov play in England) to be the theater's first director. Subsequent directors who made their mark included Stanford Holme, Eric Dance (who rebuilt the theater in Beaumont Street in 1938), Frank Shelley, Peter Hall, Peter Wood, Frank Hauser, Minos Volanakis, Gordon McDougall, Nicolas Kent and Richard Williams.The book also celebrates a galaxy of actors including Flora Robson, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Ronnie Barker, Judi Dench and Helena Bonham-Carter and records the first steps of countless students from Peter Brook to Maria Aitken, Diana Quick to Rowan Atkinson, including a few, like Edward Heath and Joanna Trollope, who gained distinction in other spheres. Most fascinating is the role of the University of Oxford. Using the legal powers invested in Vice Chancellors, Dr Lewis Farnell almost stifled the Playhouse at birth in 1923. And even from 1961 to 1987, when the Playhouse was the University Theater, Dr Chapman describes its relationship with the University as 'a shotgun marriage that ended in a messy divorce'.Since reopening in 1991 following a four-year closure, the theater has flourished as an independent trust with support from the University, Arts Council England and other donors, staging a varied program to delight audiences old and new and benefiting in the process from the sea change in academic attitudes to drama. Thea Shurrock, Rosamund Pike and Holly Kendrick are just three of more recent students who have followed in the footsteps of Michael Palin, Imogen Stubbs and Mel Smith and made names for themselves.

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Presents a comparative study of regional theatre in Britain and Germany during the period of 1918 to 1945. Taking Yorkshire and Westphalia as his two representative regions, this book details the history of theatre in York, Hull, Sheffield, Bradford and Leeds as well as in Munster, Dortmund, Hagen, Bielefeld and Bochum.

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This monograph of an innovative art installation documents not only the installation itself but also the visitors' interaction with it. The Wishing Ceremony consisted of six booths, each filled with wishing tokens and the wishes of past visitors; new viewers were encouraged to leave their wishes there as well, becoming part of the exhibit. The wishes, reproduced in this book, range from the mundane to the profound and allow an intimate glimpse at a common humanity.

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As portrayed in this monograph, sculptor Simeon Nelson's work examines human attempts to define, order, and classify nature throughout the ages, questioning how human understanding of the natural world has evolved in relation to the changing fashions of scientific and artistic inquiry.

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This practical and comprehensive guide provides an introduction to family historians to trace their ancestors in Hertfordshire. Every aspect of our ancestors' lives has been considered, from their birth and baptism to their death and burial. Examples of source material, together with photographs and drawings from the collections at Hertfordshire Archives & Local Studies, illustrate the text. The book is thematic in approach, the chapters incorporating related material on subjects as broad as military ancestors and the poor and the sick. In each chapter a brief background to the subject is followed by a description of the kind of records you can expect to find, including their usefulness to family historians, and details of where those records are held. The emphasis is on sources available in Hertfordshire, and particularly those held in the Family History Centre at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) in Hertford, but other sources are also covered. A wealth of experience from family historians and the staff at HALS is passed on in the form of tips and vital information. Appendices have been used to provide useful addresses and websites, and also to list in detail the availability of essential sources such as parish registers and other records, nonconformist registers, and the whereabouts of wills before 1858. This should be of interest to anyone researching their Hertfordshire ancestors.

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There have been many changes since the first edition of this publication appeared in 1984. In addition to the closure of many more local cinemas, there has been the growth of the multiplexes so the picture is not entirely black. This book has been written by Alan Eyles, a full-time specialist researcher and writer on the history of cinema. The new edition has twice the number of pages as the first and nearly 200 photographs including many which have been uncovered by the author in the last 20 years. It includes every cinema which has opened in Hertfordshire since 1908 (when the first opened its doors) and is arranged by town for ease of reference.

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Gypsies in Britain are descendents of people who survived an attempt at genocide in the 16th century. Laws making it a capital crime to be of Romany ethnicity remained on the statute book for two centuries. The British state and people have never apologized for this, never paid reparations - and why should they? Almost every other European state has behaved in the same way. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act is recriminalizing Gypsies. Gypsies may be considered only as a "problem", that a few teachers, council workers and policemen have to accommodate. But it should be considered how and why Gypsy identity has survived many centuries of persecution. Relations with the state and with non-Gypsies have been central to the shaping of the lived identity of Gypsy people. Reaction to Gypsies have been built around the image of them as nomads - even in Eastern Europe where the great majority are not nomads. This book examines how the state deals with Gypsies and travellers, and how they deal with the state. It also provides a comparative study of Gypsy politics in Britain and abroad.

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This book examines the landscape archaeology of the Second World War on the section of the east coast of England known as the Suffolk Sandlings (the coastal strip from Lowestoft to Felixstowe), an area unusually rich in military archaeology. It was in the front line of Britain's defences against invasion throughout the war and as a training ground it was the setting for nationally important exercises in the lead-up to the D-Day landings. In 1944 it also played a major role in Operation 'Diver', the defence against the flying bomb. The Sandlings is therefore an ideal testbed for much wider questions about the militarisation of the landscape during the Second World War. This important new study considers how this area was transformed in the course of the conflict by synthesising an extensive range of sources, including the physical remains of defences and training, aerial photographs, the war diaries of military units on the coast, oral history and artistic representations. What emerges is the most detailed account to date of a coastal landscape during the Second World War. A highly innovative interdisciplinary study, this holistic approach reveals in astonishing detail the struggle to build defences in 1940, the dramatic reorganisation of those defences in 1941? 2 and the slow transformation of the military landscape from one of defence to one where troops prepared for the offensive. The reader is shown not just a new view of the wartime landscape, but a new methodology for the study of conflict landscapes more broadly; in this the book makes a major contribution to scholarship. Richly illustrated with plans, maps and wartime photographs - many published for the first time - the book presents a vivid picture of a landscape in a crucial period in its history and will be of great interest to military historians, landscape archaeologists and all those with an interest in the area.

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An exhibition catalogue of an installation by Andy Goldsworthy at the Margaret Harvey Gallery, St Albans.

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