The ninth chapter expands the analysis to Scotland and Ireland; in both kingdoms, wardship was instrumental in the disintegration of royal power. In Scotland, Charles I’s efforts to re-write the land law and extend his rights to wardships via an Act of Revocation (1633) was considered to be ‘the ground stone of all the mischeiffe that folloued after’ (sic), an arch reference to the rebellion that began in Scotland in 1638. In Ireland, wardship and the entire land law were deployed as a means of religious conversion. Wardship was thus an integral component of the bitter religious conflict that erupted in 1641. It was these rebellions which ultimately precipitated the English Civil War, that offered Parliament the opportunity to finally abolish the feudal tenures in 1646, an abolition confirmed at the Restoration of the Crown in 1660.

Social networks are a valuable object of investigation in historical sociolinguistics, as they can contribute both to the onset of change and to the maintenance of linguistic norms. However, their characteristics make them complex to analyse, as their intrinsic variability may hinder the identification of phenomena that span different networks across time and space. This chapter is focused on Late Modern English materials, to present new resources through which network contiguities can be studied; this is the case, for instance, with the exchanges of emigrants, political activists, scholars and business correspondents. After addressing a few methodological issues, the chapter presents an overview of the materials at hand and outlines how networks and coalitions have had an impact, not only on the usage of participants (as shown in recent studies) but also on how language has been perceived, described and codified.

Given the privileged position of anglophone literature, medieval travel writing from England has been covered more extensively than that originating in other literatures and traditions. This chapter will try to balance English and Scottish travel writing, while omitting three writers in particular that feature elsewhere in this volume: Sir John Mandeville, Margery Kempe, and William Wey. There is no shortage of travel writing situated in England and Scotland: Ohthere, The Stacions of Rome, or the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales are only some instances. English and Scottish pilgrims to the Continent and Palestine have left numerous accounts, the most striking early example of which is Saewulf’s voyage to Jerusalem in 1102. This chapter will offer an overview of several central and remarkable English and Scottish travel texts. Furthermore, I will look at texts for which travel is central yet that have not been typically considered as travel writing. In this sense, I continue the theme of this volume in embracing a capacious definition of ‘travel writing’ as not only texts that make travel their express subject, but that contain and offer accounts of multiple journeys.

This chapter uses Bill Shankly’s appointment as manager as the jumping off point for a discussion of LFC and the city of Liverpool on the cusp of the 60s. It examines the pre-1959 career of Bill Shankly, his early (not immediately successful) years as LFC boss, and the club’s long and fruitful relationship with Scottish football. The arrival of the ultimate Scottish hero, Shankly, is placed in the context of e.g. the 1892/93 ‘Team of the Macs’ and popular players such as Alex Raisbeck and later Manchester United manager Matt Busby.

The contexts for the acquisition of Scottish Gaelic have changed significantly in recent decades through the impact of ongoing language shift to English in traditionally Gaelic-speaking communities and different kinds of language revitalisation initiatives, especially in relation to education (for adults as well as schoolchildren). This chapter reviews the sociolinguistic and policy dynamics that have brought about these changes and presents key findings from a range of studies involving linguistic demography, community language use, intergenerational language change, dialect maintenance, family language policy, language acquisition and attainment, and issues of affinity and identity.

This chapter discusses MacCormick’s childhood, growing up in a very political family in Glasgow. It examines the complex relationships between MacCormick and his father as well as his mother. It situates his father’s nationalist politics in the historiography of Scottish politics generally, from the 1920s to the 1950s. It describes the three main events in which MacCormick, as a boy, was exposed to his father’s particular kind of nationalism: the Convention (est. 1942) and Covenant (1949–51); the taking of the Stone of Destiny (1950); and the MacCormick v Lord Advocate case (1953). In focusing on MacCormick’s early family life, the chapter begins the process of seeking to explore his character – here, primarily by reference to his relationships with his parents.

This chapter tackles MacCormick’s lifelong engagement with and reflection on nationalism, including both in terms of how he lived it politically and how he philosophised it. It situates MacCormick’s nationalism in the historiography of Scottish nationalism, resisting attempts to frame the field on the basis of either pro- or anti-independence views. MacCormick’s nationalism cannot be shoehorned in this way. Instead, the chapter explores MacCormick’s particular kind of nationalism by reference to its relation to time – e.g., in the form of gradualism – as well as how he reflected on the constitutional importance of the Union of 1707. It also considers how MacCormick conceptualised nationalism – as liberal and civic – and how this was explored both in his philosophical work as well as in his political life, e.g., in his various campaigns as SNP candidate in Westminster elections. The chapter also considers MacCormick’s contributions to the SNP’s Constitutional Policy Committee, and in particular his work on the Draft Constitution for a Future Independent Scotland. In so doing, the chapter examines how MacCormick’s nationalism and constitutionalism can be read as a matter of character.

While Shelley produced many of his most important works in self-imposed exile from Great Britain, various locales in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales played an important role in his personal and poetic development. Attending to Shelley’s experiences across Great Britain and Ireland, and to local sociopolitical dynamics in the places where he lived and worked, this chapter traces some formative influences upon his later poems and essays. It finds that Shelley’s political and aesthetic maturation owed much to his geographical and institutional surroundings and illuminates how these surroundings contributed to his alienation, radicalisation, and visionary zeal.

This chapter focuses on the impact of ecoviolence – in particular, climatic uncertainty – on the language and culture of three areas within the Northwest Wales Coastline and within the county of Gwynedd. These are considered the Cadarnleoedd y Gymraeg. The Cadarnleoedd is often contested as a political tool rather than a formally recognised linguistic or cultural territory, as is the Gaeltacht in Ireland and the Gaidhealtachd in Scotland. Here, it is used to describe the areas in Wales where the Welsh language is strongest, with at least 50 per cent of the population able to speak it. There has been a consistent decrease in the number of people able to speak Welsh in Wales, which is challenging the sustainability of the language in its traditional heartlands.

This chapter takes as its starting point the features identified as critical in understanding the process of educational reform, set out by McLaughlin and Ruby in their review of the case studies in Implementing Educational Reform: Cases and Challenges. These are: the historical and political context; models of implementation; timescale; internal and external actors; communication and discourse. It examines the relationship between structure and culture in promoting successful change in educational systems focusing particularly on the role of external actors in shaping the Scottish Government’s management of change and the tension between the broad curricular intentions and the narrow conception of assessment in upper secondary school. It also examines the extent to which governance reform is capable of enabling sustained cultural change; and the best means of encouraging teachers to develop a sense of agency, not simply the implementers of policy devised by external ‘experts’. It illustrates how educational reform in Scotland is complex, contested territory in which the policy intentions of government are interpreted and mediated through bureaucratic agencies, professional networks and an expanding field of interest and pressure groups.

Johnson’s political views were complex, partly because they were based on a deeper philosophy of the individual and society. Placed here by divine providence, each person has something to do for the good of others; and legislators, too, can play their part in preserving human relationships from individual malice. Crucially, governments must also keep order, and ward off the possibility of social breakdown – the Civil War was within living memory when Johnson was growing up. Thus he praised hierarchy and state-enforced religious unity, inasmuch as it mean harmony and security. Johnson’s political writings are often combative and bluntly phrased: in his early work as an Opposition journalist, outraged at censorship and creeping tyranny; in his fierce critiques of imperial exploitation and slavery; and in his contempt for the radicals who appealed to ‘liberty’ – a slogan Johnson regarded with some suspicion. In his journey to the Scottish Highlands, meanwhile, Johnson praised traditional authority while showing no nostalgia for feudalism.

International pressures, Brexit and the resurgence of nationalism have created new divides in the regions of the United Kingdom. Brendan O’Leary examines the impact of Conservative policy in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, focusing on how prime ministers have handled campaigns and support for Scottish independence, the ruling coalitions in Wales, and also the new post-Brexit framework and demographic pressures in Northern Ireland. The chapter ends with a dire overall evaluation of the condition of the union as a result of Conservative policy.

This chapter addresses the question: How did the term become familiar in society? Even the earliest uses demonstrate the integration of knowledge classification and engagement with large audiences. Derived from German usage, the term ‘applied sciences’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was key to underpinning a major new encyclopaedia project intended to structure knowledge and thinking. A succession of loyal editors realised his vision as the massive Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, advertised using Coleridge’s coinage. It would also be taken up by King’s College London seeking to describe its course teaching knowledge underlying engineering without claiming to be technical training. Meanwhile, the chemist J. F. W. Johnston used the term to promote the services he offered farmers. During and after debates over Corn Law Repeal, the press discussed Johnston’s applied science as a potential saviour of agriculture. The term’s use then snowballed.

In 1559/60 the parliaments of England, Ireland and Scotland proscribed the practice of Catholicism in their respective kingdoms and prescribed Reformed religious settlements in its place. By the end of the sixteenth century the English and the Scots had become nations of Protestants, but contemporary estimates of the number of Irish Protestants ranged between 40 and 120 individuals. Protestantism in Ireland was born of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century. Yet the remarkable contrast in the outcomes of the Reformation across the Atlantic archipelago was not predestined. England and Ireland shared the same Tudor monarchs and the Pale around Dublin was, in effect, an appendage of England. Nonetheless, while Elizabeth I’s religious settlement was a ‘runaway success’ in England it failed to win any significant support in Ireland. Indeed, because Irish women were particularly loath to embrace the new religion no self-sustaining community of Irish Protestants was spawned in the sixteenth century. On the other hand, the Scots created a Reformed Church establishment despite the wishes of their monarch, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots. This chapter adopts a comparative approach to help explain the experiences of Reformation in England, Ireland and Scotland before 1603.

Public service reform in the shape of collaborative governance is consistently promoted by statutory actors in Scotland and other high-income countries to help develop high-quality and efficient public services, responsive to peoples needs, but this notion contains a number of weaknesses. This chapter explores the potential of the capabilities approach (CA), conversion factors in particular, to achieve a more effective model for conceptualizing, driving and evaluating how public services operate, drawing on empirical work conducted by What Works Scotland. It argues that the CA provides an ethical framework for evaluating the role and function of public services in safeguarding peoples well-being and social justice, especially for those with fewest resources. Employing data from two research projects in areas of multiple deprivation, the impact of public service interventions is evaluated in terms of conversion factors, and how these shape outcomes for citizens and communities. The concept of structural conversion factors is an innovative response to criticism of the CA, and the chapter argues that this modification allows it to better confront the drivers of social injustice.