Violence in the Medieval Church before the First Crusade

The attitude of the medieval church towards violence before the First Crusade in 1095 underwent a significant institutional evolution, from the peaceful tradition of the New Testament and the Roman persecution, through the prelate-led military campaigns of the Carolingian period and the Peace of God era. It would be superficially easy to characterize this transformation as the pragmatic and entirely secular response of a growing power to the changing world. However, such a simplification does not fully do justice to the underlying theology. While church leaders from the 5th Century to the 11th had vastly different motivations and circumstances under which to develop their responses to a variety of violent activities, the teachings of Augustine of Hippo provided a unifying theme. Augustine’s just war theology, in establishing which conflicts are acceptable in the eyes of God, focused on determining whether a proper causa belli or basis for war exists, and then whether a legitimate authority declares and leads the war. Augustine masterfully integrated aspects of the Old and New Testaments to create a lasting and compelling case for his definition of justified violence. Although at different times and places his theology has been used to support a variety of different attitudes, the profound influence of his work on the medieval church’s evolving position on violence is clear.

Death or taxes? The political economy of sanitation expenditure in nineteenth-century Britain

This thesis consists of three papers studying the relationship between democratic reform, expenditure on sanitation public goods and mortality in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period decisions over spending on critical public goods such as water supply and sewer systems were made by locally elected town councils, leading to extensive variation in the level of spending across the country. This dissertation uses new historical data to examine the political factors determining that variation, and the consequences for mortality rates.

The first substantive chapter describes the spread of government sanitation expenditure, and analyzes the factors that determined towns' willingness to invest. The results show the importance of towns' financial constraints, both in terms of the available tax base and access to borrowing, in limiting the level of expenditure. This suggests that greater involvement by Westminster could have been very effective in expediting sanitary investment. There is little evidence, however, that democratic reform was an important driver of greater expenditure.

Chapter 3 analyzes the effect of extending voting rights to the poor on government public goods spending. A simple model predicts that the rich and the poor will desire lower levels of public goods expenditure than the middle class, and so extensions of the right to vote to the poor will be associated with lower spending. This prediction is tested using plausibly exogenous variation in the extent of the franchise. The results strongly support the theoretical prediction: expenditure increased following relatively small extensions of the franchise, but fell once more than approximately 50% of the adult male population held the right to vote.

Chapter 4 tests whether the sanitary expenditure was effective in combating the high mortality rates following the Industrial Revolution. The results show that increases in urban expenditure on sanitation-water supply, sewer systems and streets-was extremely effective in reducing mortality from cholera and diarrhea.