The credit relationship between Henry III and merchants of Douai and Ypres, 1247-70

This article looks at an important but neglected aspect of medieval sovereign debt, namely ‘accounts payable’ owed by the Crown to merchants and employees. It focuses on the unusually well-documented relationship between Henry III, King of England between 1216 and 1272, and Flemish merchants from the towns of Douai and Ypres, who provided cloth on credit to the royal wardrobe. From the surviving royal documents, we reconstruct the credit advanced to the royal wardrobe by the merchants of Ypres and Douai for each year between 1247 and 1270, together with the king's repayment history. The interactions between the king and the merchants are then analysed. The insights from this analysis are applied to the historical data to explain the trading decisions made by the merchants during this period, as well as why the strategies of the Yprois sometimes differed from those of the Douaissiens.

Bernard Spencer: essays on his poetry & life

15 chapters by separate hands, an introduction, and updated bibliography publishing proceedings from the 2009 Bernard Spencer Centenary Conference at the University of Reading, along with other related work.

Reticent autobiography: Henry Green and Christopher Isherwood at the Hogarth Press

Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938) and Henry Green’s Pack My Bag (1940) are accounts of the authors’ educations in the 1920s. Published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, these works use reticent narrators to test the limits of autobiography. In each case, authorial self-presentation complicates the work’s classification in the literary marketplace: Green paradoxically extends his use of a pseudonym to autobiography and Isherwood assigns his own name to his purportedly fictional protagonist, and yet Hogarth published both as novels. The two texts and their publication histories exemplify modernist autobiography’s blurring of the lines between fiction and personal history.

Parliamentary sovereignty, popular sovereignty, and Henry Parker's adjudicative standpoint

Discussions of popular sovereignty in early modern England have usually been premised upon a sharp distinction between ‘legal/constitutional’ forms of discourse (which merely interpret the law) and ‘political’ ones (which focus upon the right to make it). In such readings of the period, Henry Parker has a pivotal position as a writer who abandoned merely legalistic thinking. This chapter takes a different view. It argues that Parker’s major intellectual achievement was not so much to abandon legal/constitutional discourse as to offer a theorisation of its most distinctive features: he offered an account of a new kind of politics in which concern for ‘interests’ in property and in self-preservation replaced humanist concern with promotion of virtue. Parker drew upon ideas about representation best expressed by Sir Thomas Smith and ideas about law best expressed by Oliver St John. The theory he developed was not intended as a justification of legislative sovereignty, but of adjudicative supremacy. His picture of the two Houses as supreme adjudicators was meant to block the path to direct democracy. But the adjudicative standpoint they came to occupy presupposed that freeborn adults had ‘interests’ in life, liberty, and possessions. This had democratising implications.

Barriers to “industrialisation” for interwar British retailing? The case of Marks & Spencer Ltd.

Research on international differences in retail productivity has highlighted formidable environmental barriers to the ‘industrialisation’ of mass retailing as a driver of declining British interwar productivity growth in this sector (and in services more generally). We examine evidence for such barriers, using a case study of a firm that built its interwar expansion strategy on ‘American’ retail methods – Marks & Spencer (M&S). We find that, rather than facing barriers to the adoption of American mass retail practices, M&S reaped major productivity gains from this process. This adds further evidence to an emerging literature rejecting the barriers to industrialisation thesis for retailing.

Henry R. Long, Research Engineer

Henry R. Long, research engineer speaks at a New York Trade School event, likely a commencement. Black and white photograph.

"We Are All Homeless Wanderers". Transculturality and Modernism in the Works of Edith Södergran, Elias Canetti, Henry Parland and Marguerite Duras

This article investigates the notion of transculturality and applies it to four modernist authors of the 20th century: Edith Södergran, Elias Canetti, Henry Parland and Marguerite Duras. The concept of transculturality is used to reach a better – or at least different – understanding of the selected writers and their respective body of work.