The aim of this book has been to explore everyday perceptions and manifestations of the past in England from the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. Memory was ubiquitous in many strands of life during this period, underpinning the shape of religious, economic, and social institutions, and accruing new kinds of gendered meaning for men and women with each stage of the life cycle. Most significant, though, was its prevalence in everyday situations where the past was used to make sense of the present and to plan for the future. Custom, rights over land and property, memories of life events, and commemoration depended on types of remembrance – social, environmental, personal, or generational – that overlapped, but were organised and deployed in distinctive ways. Gender was a central influence upon attitudes towards the past, both reinforcing patriarchal values through normative models of behaviour, and offering a field in which these could be contested and redefined.

Versions of the past conveyed strands of men and women's gendered experiences in subjectivities that revealed the anticipation of the law in everyday life. The intrinsic function of the law influenced people's social, economic, and religious behaviour from the outset, while awareness of its nuances and malleability saw the emergence and use of recognisable motifs and tropes in narratives that shifted subtly over time. Representations of the past in witness testimony did not signify the existence of unmediated discourses, but instead contained interpretations of the law based on the perceptions of litigants, witnesses, and their counsel. Social experience was formed in part through contact with and apprehension of the law both inside and outside the courts, and legal processes developed and adapted in turn through their use in local communities.

A mounting interest in the circumstances of sin by the late twelfth century, coupled with a growing emphasis on conscience and intention in pastoral theology, fostered a fixation with memory in church-court testimony. In these nascent judicial contexts, examiners trialled novel ways of eliciting testimony, using methods which had perhaps been transmitted by learned churchmen and administrators schooled in canon law and theology. Experiments in the application of canon law coincided with a marked expansion in pastoral literature from the early thirteenth century onwards, which had a pervasive influence on many facets of social and spiritual experience.

The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has stated that ‘religion isn't born in someone's bright idea. Religion is born in collective pain.’ If the pain becomes too severe, someone will emerge to lead a new religion forward:

Sacks considers that the Western world has not yet reached such a place of despair, but that it will: ‘We in the West have not yet reached that cry of pain but we may in the predictable future.’ One society that did reach that cry of pain was pre-revolutionary Russia. The uprising of 1917 and the communist era that followed did not give birth to a religion but a political ideology that sought to crush all faith practices. What then happened to people's Christian faith and the culture that went with it? Was it extinguished? Quite the reverse.

We have considered how music has played a fundamental role in human evolution and neurological development. We have seen how music is a universal characteristic of human existence, experience, encounter and relationships. In the third chapter in this part of the book, I explore how the relationship between music and faith has endured, even in the most hostile circumstances in recent European history, including the rise of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. As Michael Bourdeaux has written, religion, and sacred music with it, were intended to be extinguished by Marxist and Leninist ideology:

In his Tractatus de haereticis of around 1330, the judge-advocate Zanchino Ugolini wrote that his work was needed because inquisitors were ignorant of the laws that governed their actions: ‘inquisitores, ut plurimum, sunt iuris ignari’. Indeed, in pleading to be excused of his temerity in striking down a predecessor's verdict, the inquisitor Lorenzo d'Ancona confessed as much. The person who was meant to keep the inquisitor's actions legal was the inquisition notary. He and his small group of colleagues were probably the most important members of the inquisitor's direct team, since they were essential for the validation of any kind of business in medieval Italy. Transactions recorded by a qualified notary were ‘public instruments, whose authority did not depend on witnesses, seals or other authenticating devices’ but simply on the notary's own declaration. Where notaries were appointed under authority of either emperor or pope, the authenticity and accuracy of the documents they prepared or copied was recognised both universally and long after the death of the originator. Locally accredited notaries had a more restricted range of recognition outside their home area, but were still essential to validate local business.

Notaries swore to record faithfully the subject matter with which they were dealing, and could be struck off or subjected to other penalties if they failed to observe their oath. Their participation not only attested the veracity of judicial proceedings and records of public business, but also gave weight to commercial and financial contracts of all kinds. Yet Andrea del Col wrote as recently as 2010 that ‘the characteristics, responsibilities and activity of inquisition notaries are poorly understood’.

The importance attached by the inquisition to written records has frequently been commented on, but it was the notary himself who gave them authenticity. Public belief about the notary's significance in inquisition business is attested very early, when in 1249 four suspected heretics in Orvieto kidnapped the notary of the inquisitor Ruggiero Calcagni, along with his registers, and forced him to rewrite the acts concerning them. By falsifying the record of which he was custodian, they (rather naively) supposed they would escape punishment. Solvi comments that ‘the attempted falsification of the register [seems to me to show] full awareness of the irreplaceable juridical value of the records of the processes’.

Henry II was only twenty-one when he came to the throne in 1154, but, young as he was, he was a fully-formed Plantagenet: energetic, irascible and interventionist. He was a veritable force of nature and his tempestuous character was felt throughout the kingdom. He took control. It was in his reign, and as a result of his actions, that the common law was forged, beginning with the Assize of Clarendon in 1166. Enforcement of the king's law required the apparatus of justice. Among other royal diktats on this subject issued that year, Henry ordered that ‘in the several counties where there are no gaols, let such be made in a borough or some castle of the king at the king's expense and from his wood … to the end that in them the sheriffs may be able to guard those who shall be arrested’ for felony. Lest their evil infect others, they were effectively quarantined from respectable society until they could be tried by the newly created itinerant royal judges called ‘justices in eyre’.

This was the first attempt to establish a regional system of common prisons as an adjunct of the king's common law, the essential infrastructure for the imposition of royal justice. County gaols, commissioned and paid for by the king, were under the authority of his sheriffs. The rest were the responsibility of municipal corporations and local dynasts. It took a long time, and further kingly intervention, for such a diverse constituency to produce results. Even his own officials could be laggard.

The Latter-Day Pamphlets lost Carlyle a lot of his more liberal friends, John Stuart Mill being the most prominent among them, and even some less liberal who were nonetheless aghast at his tone. One he did not lose was Charles Dickens, whom he had known since 1840. Dickens was no liberal where criminals were concerned and was no great believer in character change, as his novels demonstrate. The author of Oliver Twist could not have written Crime and Punishment. He shared Carlyle's opinion of the penitentiary system, even if he expressed his distaste with more humour in his fiction and less bile in his journalism. With the exception of Carlyle, it has been said, he was more reactionary than any of his literary contemporaries. This is true to an extent, but only in relation to inveterate criminals, the depraved and not the deprived. And this is true primarily of his later years: he changed his mind with changing times, as many of his contemporaries did, and with age, as most people do. As his arteries hardened so did his heart. He was a man of large heart and little consistency.4 He was, after all, a novelist, not a criminologist. That is why he is still read.

In his novels Dickens discoursed on the hulks, debtors' prisons, and the penitentiary system. His sympathies lay with neglected and deprived children, those who were put in prison cells for minor offences stemming from need or even ignorance, or street-urchins such as the Artful Dodger, who were seduced into a life and love of crime and exploited by adults such as Fagin, a villain not deprived but depraved, and an arch-corrupter of youth.

[Inside Front Cover]

BEETHOVEN [presumably in his apartment in Mödling]: July, 1820. [//]

BEETHOVEN [presumably at a coffee house, possibly the coach stop in Mödling, reading the Wiener Zeitung of July 6; either Friday, July 7, or Saturday, July 8]:

At Volke’s, [in the] Obere Backerstrasse No. 810; Val. Chr. Fr: Rost, etc., Griechisch-Deutsches Schulwörterbuch, mit durchgängiger Bezeichnung der Quantität [Blatt 1r] zweifelhafter Silben; size 8vo; Gotha, 1820; the subscription price for the whole set is 7 fl. 30 kr. W.W.; the first half is already available.

Mödling is still not rural enough. So many walls—more a small city, therefore also such terrible [Blatt 1v] human rabble.

DIETRICH [in Mödling, possibly encountering Beethoven by accident; probably Friday, July 7, or Saturday, July 8]: By the next art exhibition, I shall sculpt your portrait again, but this time completely life-size. [//] Your head looks particularly good from the front, and it was so appropriate because on one side [was] the Haydn, the other side the Mozart. [//] [Blatt 2r]

The portraits by [English painter Sir Thomas] Lawrence are the best that I have seen by living artists. [//] Fault can be found in everything, if one wants; this way, nothing is brought to perfection. [//] Wachtl took extraordinary joy in your portrait. [//] Wieden, Ankergasse <No. 277;> at the Green Anker. [//] [Blatt 2v]

I was at the building superintendent’s, and he was so stingy that he wanted to pay 10 or 12 fl. for your bust, and that is impossible, since I would have to work on it a week. [//] If the countess were healthy, she would have the bust made in marble without further ado. [//]

An artist named Kisling will now make a bust of our emperor that will be 18 feet high. [//] [Blatt 3r] It's a government like the one in Abdera. [//]

[Sculptor Joseph] Böhm must do everything possible to go to Italy. [//]

Don't take my awkwardness badly. [//] I am very happy to have found you healthy. [//]

Later I shall look at the Bruhl a little. [//]

This article looks in detail at the well-planned and very effective defenses at the Crusader castle of Château Pèlerins on the ʿAtlit peninsula, focusing in particular on the defense line of the ʿAtlit ridge. The castle was constructed during 1217–18 by the Knights Templar, and its defenses, which relied on the topography and the exploitation of locally derived building materials, were never breached. The castle was vulnerable to attacks only from the east, so three defense lines were created:

• (1) On the peninsula neck, two massive walls, towers, and a dry moat.

• (2) A wall entering the sea in the north and the south bays, with guard towers at both ends, to protect the town east of the castle. A line of large stones which once stood upright, was discovered underwater, extending to the north from the north tower, forming a barrier that prevented approach in the shallows along the coast.

• (3) An outermost defense line, including two guard towers, and the easternmost external defense line on the ʿAtlit ridge, the focus of this article. A quarry stretched along the ridge, creating an artificial rockcut cliff. This longitudinal defense wall would delay an attack, even if for a short time, enabling people who worked outside the castle to escape to the well-protected peninsula.

To provide the large quantity of stones required for building the castle and completing the defenses on the ridge rapidly, the builders simultaneously extracted stones in several places. The stones were quarried from the eastern, far flank of the ridge to create the rock-cut cliff. By applying a sophisticated, pre-planned quarrying technique, they removed immense

Whatever the complexion of the government or the public mood, the rehabilitative ideal within a carceral setting still survives, sometimes wilting, sometimes reviving, but always showing persistence and tenacity in the face of adversity. Challenging but rewarding, it motivates staff as much as inmates. It is always under threat from gross overcrowding, longer and longer sentences for more and more people, budgetary constraints, overworked staff, anachronistic buildings, and an ever-increasing emphasis on security.

In the 1980s Aylesbury Young Offender Institution held around three hundred male offenders aged between eighteen and twenty-one serving from five years’ imprisonment to detention for life, for serious offences including armed robbery, aggravated burglary, rape, and murder. It was, and still is, the only YOI able to house those considered to be the most dangerous in their peer group. These were officially known as ‘restricted status’, the equivalent of Category A, an anodyne term which would not alarm local residents. It was not, however, part of the dispersal system, and managed to avoid the worst restraints of that system.

It had undergone a turbulent few years. Serious disturbances and escapes had taken place, officers and inmates had been assaulted, and many youngsters had been isolated for their own protection. Then a new governor, John Dring, arrived in the late 1980s and everything changed. It was a propitious time as prisoner numbers began to drop dramatically and Aylesbury was soon well below capacity. The 1991 Criminal Justice Act would reduce numbers further; the Woolf Report would encourage better relationships. It was an opportunity for a fresh start, an opportunity already enhanced by a reorganisation that had been introduced in 1987, aptly called ‘Fresh Start’. Intended to simplify the labyrinthine complexity of staff working arrangements, increase job satisfaction and improve the relationship between prison officers and management, it involved a fundamental reorganisation of those arrangements and structures.

Doubts linger after the actor's revolt – Susannah Cibber seeks revenge – the Polly Row renewed – Peg Woffington at Drury Lane – ressentiments and tales of scuffles – Charles Burney gets the last word

Referring to Clive, the author of Theatrical Correspondence in Death quotes Virgil's Aeneid on the subject of Dido, Queen of Carthage: ‘Dux Fæmina facti’ – ‘A woman led the exploit’. These words preface the author's charges that Clive is ‘Self-Sufficient’, ‘Self-Conceited’, ‘Arrogant’, and ‘Insolent’. The author also denies her ‘Merit’: ‘what is her Merit, when compared and put in the Scale, with that of many her Predecessors?’ Even the generally pro-Clive creator of the print The Theatrical Contest labels her ‘self superior modest Kate’, suggesting that Clive's modesty is hokum. By the start of the 1745–46 season, ‘Kitty Cuckoe’ was no longer universally held to represent fine taste. The tipping point seems clearly to have been Fleetwood's account of her earnings, which while misleadingly presented was in fact fairly accurate. Disclosures about her leadership of the actors’ revolt further implicated her in unfeminine activities. Changing politics and stage fashions were also working against her. But it was Green Room tattle that would most overtly damage Clive's reputation over the next two seasons.

Celebrity culture feeds on the desecration of the star no less than on her veneration. As a known quantity with top earnings and professional clout, Clive now found that criticism of her flourished while praise dried up. Humiliation came in the form of Green Room ‘peeps’, or inside gossip. The Green Room, the performers’ backstage retiring space, defined rank and boundaries: only playhouse principals, high-level theatre personnel, and men of Quality were admitted. As the century and its celebrity marketing progressed, audience appetite for Green Room ‘peeps’ grew. Among the responses to this was Garrick's rehearsal comedy A Peep behind the Curtain (1767), featuring Clive as Lady Fuz. Yet decades earlier Clive was already the subject of this kind of story, which pretends to intimacy with the star, and carries the authority of events witnessed – whether or not they actually occurred. In Clive's case, revelations about her empowerment had whet popular appetite for stories about her aggressive nature; audiences lost their ear for Clive's sweet harmonies.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) is recognized the world over as one of the greatest composers of all time and is especially known for his musical triumphs in the face of increasing deafness, beginning around 1798.

In 1801 he confided his early hearing loss to Dr. Franz Wegeler in Bonn and schoolmaster/violinist Carl Amenda in Latvia, friends who had lived in Vienna but were now safely far away. By the summer of 1802 others were starting to perceive lapses in his hearing, and his fear and confusion are reflected in the Heiligenstadt Testament in October of that year. With more good days than bad, Beethoven's hearing slowly became weaker, although it had not yet interfered with his performing in public, even with orchestra on the marathon concert of December 22, 1808.

Between 1812 and 1816 he tried using ear trumpets (made for him by Johann Nepomuk Malzel and possibly his brother Leonhard, also an inventor) with varying, but largely disappointing, degrees of success. Between December 8, 1813, and February 27, 1814, Beethoven conducted (or attempted to conduct) four benefit concerts with an orchestra of ca. 113 professionals, causing considerable commentary about his exaggerated motions, some of which by now were the inevitable result of his weakened hearing. At the performances, which included the premieres of his Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8, as well as Wellington's Victory, Beethoven's motions were probably shadowed, much more accurately, by conductor Michael Umlauf. In the fall of 1814, as the Congress of Vienna assembled, Beethoven composed a cantata, Der glorreiche Augenblick, for the occasion. On October 10 the Prague pianist and pedagogue Johann Wenzel Tomaschek visited Beethoven, found sketches for the cantata on the piano, and reported that the composer “was especially hard of hearing this day, so that one had to shout, rather than speak, in order to be understood.” Tomaschek returned on November 24, just as the parts for the cantata were being copied: “Beethoven received me very politely, but appeared to be very deaf on this day, for I had to exert myself to the utmost to make myself understood.” Even though many of his other comments were caustic, Tomaschek did not report that any portion of their conversation took place in writing.

In 1892 Herbert Asquith was appointed Home Secretary in William Gladstone's Liberal government. Change was in the air. The attitude of the informed public was moving away from negative, repressive deterrence, and was aspiring to something altogether more positive. They had read with horror the descriptions of ‘darkest England’ penned by the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, and many agreed with his condemnation of ‘the rude surgery of the Gaol’ which in its sheer punitiveness had ignored ‘the first essential of every system of punishment’ – reformation – and heeded his clarion call to reclaim the lost and transform the lives of the downtrodden. Those Christians whose faith had been dented by Darwin still adhered to the ethical imperative their upbringing had instilled. Liberals, many of whom had an evangelical background, were troubled in their consciences about what they heard or read of what went on behind prison walls. The extraordinary influence of the Idealist philosopher, the late Thomas Hill Green, was at its zenith, harnessing youthful enthusiasm for self-sacrifice and inspiring many Oxbridge graduates not just to devote their expertise to helping the working-class denizens of London but to engage with them by living among them. Many of their new ‘friends’ would end up in prison.

Asquith himself had been at Balliol when Green was a professorial fellow there, and was deeply attracted by his progressive and socially engaged political views. As a politician he had been disturbed by the somewhat overwrought description of a parliamentary colleague, John Burns, of his own experience of incarceration. Burns, an erstwhile firebrand who had participated in an illegal demonstration, had been imprisoned for a short time in Pentonville.

In thirty-nine chapters (Aventiuren), the epic Das Nibelungenlied traces Kriemhilt's (Kriemhild’s) love and marriage to Sîvrit (Siegfried) the dragon-slayer; his betrayal and murder by her brothers and her uncle Hagen; her loss of Siegfried's treasure to Hagen; her subsequent marriage to Etzel, king of the Huns; and her revenge for these wrongs, which results in the annihilation of her family, the Burgundians. Yet among the dramatic action of the tales, the narrative often lingers when, for example, Siegfried the dragon-slayer, Burgundian Prince Gunther, and their company are presented with an exquisite wardrobe:

The Nibelungenlied is liberally embellished with this sort of stanza, known as schneiderstrophen or tailor's stanzas. The frequent and exaggerated emphasis on fine clothing here and elsewhere throughout the poem at first appear to be a significant difference between the roughly contemporary Middle High German epic poem and the Old Norse prose rendition—Völsunga saga—a tale about this same dragon-slayer and the downfall of the Burgundian dynasty. Cross-analysis of the texts within the shared Niflungen/Nibelungen tradition, however, reveals clothing was a powerful and versatile signifier in both texts. Clothing allows core elements of the interrelated textual and oral traditions to be preserved while adapting the narrative to suit the cultural and social milieu of different audiences.

Unraveling the varied roles played by clothing in the Nibelungenlied and Völsunga saga teases out culturally specific expectations of the audiences from the shared threads of the broader shared narrative. Initially, the Nibelungenlied's attention to articles of clothing and their social value seems to be explained by setting and society; what was valued in the continental courts of the early thirteenth century would understandably be out of place in the rural homesteads or outdoor assemblies of Iceland. Yet, both narratives use clothing to illuminate key elements of the Niflungen/Nibelungen tradition, with which both Icelandic and Germanic audiences would have been familiar.