Equipped with some sort of letter from King Henry VIII (‘principis diploma’ as he called it), John Leland (c. 1503–52) travelled extensively throughout England from 1533 to approximately 1536 examining the libraries of the universities, the monasteries, and other religious houses, making lists of what he saw. In the heated atmosphere of the 1530s, when Henry VIII was making a definitive break with Rome and establishing himself as the supreme head of the church in England, Leland's patrons no doubt saw the polemical value in the treatises hidden away in the monastic and other libraries. For himself, Leland had other plans. In particular, he envisaged a comprehensive study ‘De uiris illustribus’, that is, a history of men ‘who hathe beene lernid, and who hath writen from tyme to tyme in this reaulme’. Although never fully completed, this work was compiled in two stages; the first (labelled Stage I in my edition) was begun in 1535 and put aside around 1537, after Leland had abandoned his trawls through libraries and turned to a wider set of itineraries, the notes of which were made in English. When Leland returned to De uiris illustribus seriously c. 1543 (Stage II) the monasteries had all been dissolved, and many of the manuscripts containing the works he recorded had been lost or destroyed.

Leland's booklists were recorded in a folio notebook, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Top. gen. c. 3, pp. 253–74; pp. 5–66, and were published by Thomas Hearne (1678–1735) as part of what he described as Leland's De rebus Britannicis Collectanea. The first edition appeared in 1715 and was succeeded by a second edition (from which I quote) published posthumously in 1770; this was reprinted in 1774. The booklists, which are found in the fourth volume of the 1770 edition, are in the process of being re-edited in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues to which our honorand has been a distinguished contributor. Surprisingly, however, there is no evidence that Leland examined the impressive collections at Syon abbey, and so he does not appear in that volume of the series.

THE ART OF POETRY AND PROSE that was known by its incipit ‘Tria sunt’ was created in the late fourteenth century, in all likelihood by a Benedictine monk with strong ties to Oxford, probably for use in preparing other monks for their studies at the university. Many of the fifteenth-century manuscripts that preserve all or part of the Tria sunt were owned by monk scholars, but others attest to a broader dissemination of this rhetoric textbook both within and beyond the Oxford schools. Careful study of these manuscripts can help explain why the Tria sunt came to be the most widely used of the rhetorical treatises composed in England from the second half of the fourteenth century through the first few decades of the fifteenth.

Tria sunt survives in sixteen copies, most – if not all – of them produced during the fifteenth century and all but one of them in England. Among the new rhetorical treatises associated with the Oxford renaissance of rhetoric, only the contemporary or slightly earlier art of letter writing, Formula moderni et usitati dictaminis (c.1390), by the Benedictine monk Thomas Merke is nearly so well represented, with eleven surviving copies. In fact, even the most influential and authoritative of the medieval arts of poetry and prose – Geoffrey of Vinsauf's early-thirteenth-century Poetria nova – was at best only slightly more popular in late-medieval English schools than the more recent Tria sunt, if the number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English manuscripts that preserve all or part of it is any indication. Twelve complete copies of the Poetria nova survive from this period, along with three imperfect copies and excerpts found in another four manuscripts.

Like the Poetria nova – the work with which it is copied more frequently than any other – the Tria sunt must have derived some of its appeal from the breadth of its contents. It covers, in prose, nearly all the topics that the Poetria nova covers, in hexameter verse, as well as some important topics that the earlier treatise omits or neglects, such as the attributes of persons and actions and the rules for composing letters.

Churchill and his successors were continuing a trend not creating it. The most symbolic year was 1902: it was an end and a beginning. Newgate prison was demolished, ending an eight-hundred-year history of penal notoriety, and the first institution for juvenile-adults, handsomely funded by Asquith who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was opened by Ruggles-Brise on the site of an old convict prison – an annexe of Chatham – in Borstal in Kent, starting sixty years of penal optimism.

He was not the first or only reformer who wanted to divert children from the penal system and help juveniles on the cusp of crime. In the second half of the eighteenth century both the Marine Society and the Philanthropic Society had established schools for waifs, strays and the children of convicts. Their work was preventive. Elizabeth Fry, Charles Dickens, Mary Carpenter, Lord Ashley, and Dr Barnardo are notable examples in the nineteenth century of those concerned about the lot of children both without and within the criminal justice system. Their ambitions were reformative as well as preventive. Ultimately many parliamentarians were persuaded to take action. As early as 1811 and 1819 parliamentary inquiries had condemned the incarceration of young children, but to little effect. Pressure grew especially when reports of a child of three being imprisoned for contempt of court, and a six-year-old homeless vagrant being kept in silent and solitary confinement, came to public attention. In 1838 the Parkhurst Prison Act created out of a former military hospital on the Isle of Wight a national ‘Reformatory’ for 120 boys under the age of twelve and 200 aged between twelve and seventeen sentenced to transportation or imprisonment. The regime was intended to be as reformative as corrective. Ten years later Redhill Farm School was established by the Philanthropic Society as an agricultural colony for boys.

The year 2019 marks the centenary of the International Labour Organization (ILO). The General Labour History of Africa (GLHA) is the result of cooperation between the ILO and a group of Africanist labour historians who came together to write a history of African workers and work in Africa since the beginning of the twentieth century. The GLHA is intended, first, to contribute to a substantial understanding of labour in Africa throughout history and, secondly, to advance African labour studies by incorporating insights from the emerging field of global history and its variant, global labour history. Following the insights of global history, the GLHA is not the history of the making of the working class in Africa, but rather the history of the complex world of labouring people, which includes the industrial working class as well as many other categories. Indeed, the GLHA is the history of all working people, including affluent entrepreneurs, household labourers, careworkers, ‘informal’ workers and unfree workers.

In this introduction, we will provide a brief reflection and survey on African labour historiography in the last century. Our intention is to sketch the wider academic background to this volume, its main concerns, and its place within current intellectual debates. A comprehensive discussion of African labour history in relation to the GLHA project, based on the individual chapters, is provided in the conclusions to this volume by Frederick Cooper.

LABOUR HISTORIOGRAPHIES

In the first decades of the twentieth century, scholarly production on labour in Africa was closely linked to the agenda of colonial administrations. Studies on labour were preoccupied with the understanding of African social patterns and movements of people, and they were conducted under the auspices of colonial interests eager to control the African labour force. African labour was scarce and very much in demand for the mise en valeur and development of the colonies. It must be emphasized, however, that, until the 1930s, colonial officials and scholars alike conceptualized Africans usually as ‘natural peasants’ and were uncertain about whether Africans, even after decades of the ‘civilizing mission’, would work without direct coercion. Thus, hardly any effort was made to consider labour as a social issue. Typically, in the British colonial administrative apparatus, a ‘labour department’ did not exist, labour problems being usually handled by Native Affairs Departments. This situation remained substantially unchanged until the Second World War, which marked the beginning of decolonization.

EXPLICITLY or implicitly, representations of celebrity as ephemeral and unstable always define it against an ideal of permanence. Eighteenthcentury metropolitans inherited a long and remarkably consistent European tradition, which insisted that real cultural immortality was exclusive to individuals whose eminence had to be proven by the cumulative judgement of many generations of historians and artists. Works by Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope distinguished between false fame, briefly raised by popular talk and thus controlled by ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wav’ring multitude’, and the immortal status granted by commemoration in written text. Personifications of fama divide into the many-eyed, many-tongued monsters of rumour, and winged messengers bearing trumpets, the latter often elided or confused with Clio, Muse of History, who tends to have a pen in her hand. This dichotomy between false and real fame affirmed the superiority of literate over oral cultures and naturalised the power of elite metropolitan taste, enshrining its avowedly universal but Eurocentric and masculine viewer as alone able to assess merit and produce authentic fame. Yet as writers of the later eighteenth century wrestled with the emergence of celebrity, this discourse of fame was complicated by an increasing sense that written – and especially printed – texts produced not authority and permanence but multiplicity and transience. By disrupting the cultural mechanisms that were supposed to authorise fame, Oceanic-metropolitan celebrity could be seen as threatening the pretensions to authority by which Britain justified its own ‘civilising’ interventions in Oceania. In the figure of James Cook, the metropolis would eventually reassert its own imperial cultural power by imagining a new version of immortal fame in Oceania: that of the colonial British explorer-benefactor-founder, remembered forever by the descendants of converted ‘savages’ and white settlers. Yet early texts about Cook demonstrate that this nineteenth-century colonial repurposing of the rhetoric of immortality was far from straightforward or universal, and that the colonial hero was a product, as well as a symbolic rejection, of ephemeral celebrity culture.

In Joseph Addison's influential 1709 Tatler essay ‘The Table of Fame’, he depicted immortality, ‘that imaginary existence by which men live in their fame and reputation’, as conferred over centuries on a cast of exceptional, quasi-sacred men. For Addison, heroes are ushered into fame by the historians who live after them.

Jeremy Bentham was an odd but eminently consistent man, in this life and beyond. Born in 1748, he died in 1832. Three days after his death on 6 June, and in accordance with his specific instructions, his corpse was dissected before an invited audience. Afterwards his chosen dissector, Dr Southwood Smith, a Unitarian minister and Edinburgh-educated physician, delivered a lecture on the uses of the dead to the living. It took some courage on the part of Bentham to associate his remains with the punishment of criminals or the fate of paupers. But not too much. He asserted that, if embalmed and clothed, his body might be his best representation, his ‘Auto-Icon’. So it was. After his public but privileged dissection, Bentham's skeleton was articulated in a sitting position, dressed as in life, his head – which had embarrassingly shrunk – was reconstructed in waxwork, and the whole artifice preserved in perpetuity, still on display in a glass case in University College London, not the fate of an ordinary dissectee.

But Bentham was no ordinary individual. He had a fastidious and orderly mind. He loved italics and the prefix ‘pan’. He had opinions on everything, and a philosophical overview that encompassed everything. As his public dissection demonstrated, he was utilitarian to the backbone. He not only proposed many legal and social reforms, but also expounded an underlying moral principle on which they should be based. His fundamental belief was that pain and pleasure are the ‘sovereign masters’ of mankind and ‘it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do’.

Gwynne makes several references to the decentralization scheme for control of chaplains that he had created. In general, it appeared to be working well. His references to Easter devotions are of interest. Normally considered a Low Church bishop he appears to suggest that his preparations included auricular confession. At the end of the month he paid another visit to the WO, partly to ensure that the arrangements for the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury were in place.

1 AprilWalker who had been home to be trained as a Staff Chaplain to Day* of the 3rd Army rode in the car with me as far as S. Pol on my way to Gosnay (en Artois) where I confirmed 170 of the 55th Division in a large barn. I had not time to see the Divisional General so came away after tea and did not get back at S. Omer until 9.30

2 AprilCelebrated Holy Communion in the small church at 7.30 and as all GHQ except ourselves have moved only two besides ourselves were present. At 9.30 I preached to the Artists in the Monro Institute and worked in the office. After lunch I motored to Hazebrouck for a confirmation – walked out with Griffiths and held a service in the Town Hall at 6.30. Milner and Charles of the Glasgow Highlanders dined with me.

3 April

Drury* moved my office today from the lower part of the square of the Salle de Musique. I worked there until 1 and was driven to the new office after a good walk in the Clairmarais woods. It was a glorious spring day and everything in bursting into new life.

4 April

The new decentralization is beginning to work and the S. Chaplains of Armies are functioning and so fewer papers have come through this office the last few days. I motored to my old Division in the afternoon and held a confirmation in the Reformed Evangelique Church at Bruay. Some the confirmees were my old lads from the Oxfords and Bucks.

5 April

Interviewed (by an interpreter) the landlady of a house with a view to taking new rooms. This present arrangement is very expensive and our new cook a robber.

We cannot say when the first place of imprisonment was established in England. It is unlikely to have been created for that specific purpose and more likely to have been an improvised expedient: a piece of rope tied to a pillar; manacles forged by a blacksmith and fastened to a floor; stocks erected on the village green or in the churchyard; or the cellar of a substantial house; whatever and wherever needs must. Headmen, landowners and bishops would have been the gaolers.

As royal power grew, and royal control over the administration of justice with it, local expedients would become more regularised. When the early Anglo-Saxon kings promulgated law codes and established courts in shire and hundred to try criminal offences, the necessity arose for means and places to detain and restrain the small number of those awaiting judgment who could find no sureties or were too dangerous to be let loose, or perhaps the rather larger number of those who were in danger of the lynch-mob. In the early tenth-century law codes of Edward the Elder and Aethelstan and early eleventh-century ones of Canute, detention pending trial was specifically reserved for strangers or for those who had neither friends willing to stand surety nor property that could be held as security. Prison was thus the preserve of those who had no ties to the locality and every incentive to evade justice by going elsewhere, and of those who could evade justice without leaving recompense. The poor, the alien, and the unpopular were ‘held for judgment’ – pending trial by ordeal.

During June 1916, the British army was preparing for its great offensive to be mounted around the River Somme. Gwynne referred to the artillery barrage that was to lead up to the assault. That would eventually take place on 1 July 1916. The elaborate planning detailed the rôle of all arms and services during the battle. Gwynne was concerned that the planning of the rôle of the chaplains was taking place without the agreement of the AChD chain of command. That was a direct challenge to the system that he had created. He was also concerned about the oversight of chaplains serving with the Dominion forces. He referred to meetings with Australian, Canadian and New Zealand (NZ) chaplains.

June 1

Ascension Day – I attended and celebrated Holy Communion at our Small Garrison Church at 8 am and held a confirmation at Merville CC Station for about 40 candidates. Some of them were of the Welsh Division. I heard a quite delightful story from the Canadian Division a few days ago. One of the Presbyterian chaplains is a dear old boy but very long and prozy in prayer at the Parade Services. The Senior Corps Chaplain chatting with some of the men of his flock asked how they liked their chaplain, ‘a very nice old boy,’ said one of them, but he prays too long – he asks for the King, country, Empire, the Allies, victory by land and sea, the breaking up of the Turkish Empire, the entire destruction of the German Army and fleet – the speaker was continuing his list, but was interrupted by a pal who said quite seriously, ‘In fact Sir he indents for too much.’

June 2

I made a mistake today and was late for my confirmation at Ballieul because I got out of my car to eat my lunch and take a little exercise – but missed the lane and fetched up far from my rendezvous. I had good exercise but was late for the Confirmation. Mellish* the chaplain VC was at the service and brought some of his men to be confirmed. I saw my old friend Potter after the service and had a long talk with him. He gave me a very interesting account of the attack his Brigade made on the German trenches at S. Eloi.

[Inside Front Cover]

BEETHOVEN [location unknown; seemingly Saturday, April 1]: Month of April, 1820. [//]

OLIVA [probably at a coffee house; late in the day on Saturday, April 1]: I’ll be at home at 3:30, or [can] come to you, whichever you prefer. [//] Facing the Wildpretmarkt, because the house has two portals. [//]

It depends upon what you take with you, whether all the books and music. The two chests are very inconvenient to bring on the wagon [carriage?] and take up a great deal of room. [//]

But that costs a great deal of money. They have themselves paid for every word. [//]

The music yesterday [Good Friday, March 31] was good; I missed your Symphony [No. 4] in B-flat.

[Blatt 1r]

[The first of the following entries with Karl were probably made at Blöchlinger's Institute and the last ones at a restaurant, Easter Sunday, April 2, possibly late in the afternoon or early in the evening.]

NEPHEW KARL: 2 pairs of boots.

1 pair of shoes.

BEETHOVEN: Walking coat.

A cloth jacket.

Summer stuff. //

NEPHEW KARL: How satisfied are you with Mankind? // That [question] is not an invention of mine; instead, it comes from a religious book. //

Do you know Schiller's Gang nach dem Eisenhammer? [//] [Blatt 1v]

Are you going with me to the Concert? //

H[err] v[on] Blöchlinger has been invited to dinner tomorrow [Easter Monday]. // It has never yet been as good as I have it here. // We have been in the garden since Friday [Good Friday, March 31]. //

Now H[err] v[on] B[löchlinger] wants to hold a musical-declamatory Abendunterhaltung [evening of entertainment] every month. // [Blatt 2r]

Linke also played in Die Befreyung Jerusalems at the Karntnertor [Theater]. // The most famous singers took part. // It is by the Abbe Stadler. // People found several strange ideas in it. // Actually, just the singers. // [Blatt 2v] Herr Barth, Herr Vogel, Herr Krebner, Madame Grünbaum, etc. //

Since I have been at Herr von Blöchlinger’s, I have made much greater progress in Arithmetic.

She ate meat at her uncle’s20 today. // Beef. //

On February 21, 1241, Pope Gregory IX sent a bull to archbishops and bishops alerting them to

The purpose of this letter was to deal with groups of women who apparently had taken to dressing up in a similar way to the nuns of the Order of San Damiano, founded by Clare of Assisi some decades earlier. The bull thus instructed the ecclesiastical authority that these women had to give up their belts, ropes, and habits. The complaint of scandal from the Franciscans and the nuns of San Damiano about these women not only drew attention to the fact that these women were “fooling the trustful pious” with their attire, but also that, with the Damianites being strictly cloistered nuns, the religio simulata of these wandering women reflected poorly on the virtuous disciples of St. Clare, who did observe the norms of claustration.

Yet, as Herbert Grundmann has asserted, there was more to the conflict. These women seemed to have a genuine desire to enter the Order of San Damiano, but had not found a way to do so since, at least between 1228 and 1245, the order was neither accepting new members nor building new convents to accommodate this demand. Therefore, these women might have been more than just impostors, wandering around the cities and trying to trick the devout by appearing to be Damianites. Perhaps they were yet another group representing the wider movement of lay piety that had started to materialise throughout Europe by the end of the twelfth century and which expanded especially among women during the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, despite the possibility that their actions were indeed founded on pious intentions, Innocent IV repeated the tone of Gregory IX's bull, twice in 1250, and again in 1252, with harsh words for these mulieres who went around in a habit similar to the one of the Order of San Damiano.

The Restoration of the monarchy in May 1660 saw the return of the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles II. Soon the persecution of religious non-conformity intensified. The Act of Uniformity, which became law on 24 August 1662, was part of a comprehensive process of suppression known as the Clarendon Code. It required that the Book of Common Prayer be used in all services, and that all clergy and teachers subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. It banned extemporary prayers and unlicensed preaching, mainstays of Puritan worship. Long-term imprisonment, or even transportation, would be the fate of many who, by their righteous obduracy and refusal to submit, prolonged their confinement or exile. It was not, however, the first piece of legislation designed to enforce religious conformity.

Among the many Dissenters stuffed into the county gaols in the early years of Charles II, one stood out, the radical Puritan preacher and prolific writer, John Bunyan. He was also one of the first, as his offending behaviour pre-dated the Restoration. His first brush with the law came when he was thirty, during the Protectorate. In 1658, he was arrested ‘for preaching at Eaton’, but it seems that the grand jury dismissed that case. His luck would soon run out. On 12 November 1660 Bunyan, with a Bible in his hands, was arrested under an Act of 1593 on a warrant issued by Francis Wingate, the local justice of the peace. The charge was that he refused to attend Anglican services and had attended unlawful assemblies or conventicles. The real threat he posed was by his preaching. If convicted, the Act decreed that he should remain in prison until he conformed. Should he not do so within three months then worse would befall. Bunyan was taken, ‘with God's comfort in my poor soul’, to the county gaol on the corner of the High Street and Gaol Lane (as Silver Street was sometimes known) to await his hearing at the quarter sessions.