荐书|Records of Social and Economic History
牛津大学出版社从上世纪开始，出版了一套丛书：Records of Social and Economic History，汇编了中世纪到近现代英国的原始资料（账簿、日记、信件等等）和以此为基础的著作。麦克法兰在《英国个人主义的起源》中引用的牧师乔斯林的日记（The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616-1683）就在此列，还有研究英格兰银行普通投资者的Anne L. Murphy六月底即将出版的著作（The Worlds of the Jeake Family of Rye, 1640-1736）也在此列。
此套丛书目前共出版了44本，我只列举了其中的16本。完整版点击文末“阅读原文”即可跳转到牛津大学出版社的相应页面，网址也一并附在文末。
1.
Description: The eponymous hero of this book is an old man, who lived in a small provincial town, remote from fashionable centres of polite society. Yet the letters of Joseph Symson provide a rare glimpse into the public and private life of an inland merchant who was also a member of England's urban elite. The volume reveals how Symson organised his trade and attempted to organise his family. It details his responses to the political, economic, and religious uncertainties of the early years of the eighteenth century.
Joseph Symson's letter book inhabits two worlds. The first is an insular, closely-knit society of prominent north west mercantile and ecclesiastical families - a world of connection, regional affiliation and kinship. From his home in Kendal, Symson documents aspects of Lakeland society before the advent of tourism and Wordsworth.
His correspondents, however, included merchants and kinsmen based in London, Liverpool and Manchester. In consequence, the book yields insights into the commercial communities of what Symson himself described as the great trading towns of England. His was a society becoming increasingly integrated with the economies of England, Ireland and Scotland - a world linked to the expansion of the Atlantic economy.
The volume provides a detailed account of the Symson family, and an appendix profiles some 200 correspondents, including many north west families.
2.
Description: The Visitation returns of William Wake, Bishop of Lincoln 1705-16, shed light on the history of over 1200 villages and the people who lived in them in six counties of England in the early years of the eighteenth century. Covering Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, they contain detailed information about the population, religious affiliations, schooling, charities, church attendance, and much besides. Many individuals are named, particularly non-conformist preachers and those who transgressed church laws or were baptized as adults.
Bishop Wake's Summary of Visitation Returns from the Diocese of Lincoln 1706-15 is published in two parts. Part 1 contains a comprehensive introduction to Bishop Wake and the Visitation returns. Documents included in this volume cover parishes in the Archdeaconries of Stow and Lincoln. Transcriptions of the summaries of the Visitations in 1706, 1709, and 1712 are given, together with additional material from the original returns from those years, and from 1715.
This latest addition to the Records of Social and Economic History series will be a rich source of information for social historians, local and family historians of these counties, and church historians.
3.
Description: The Papers of Bulstrode Whitelocke, brought together from various sources, form an important archive - quite separate from his Diary - and much of it unpublished or even unknown to scholars. Ruth Spalding has selected about 1000 names from the Diary, assembled biographical details that elucidate the Diary references, and has worked into this framework much new material from Whitelocke's papers.
Many entries shed light on the politics of the period, since Whitelocke knew nearly all the leading characters personally. There is also much information on the `unhonoured dead' - secretaries, servants, tenants, villagers, and petty officials.
The volume complements Miss Spalding's edition of The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605-1675 (RSEH New Series XIII)
4.
Description: The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke covers his whole life, from his birth in 1605, until shortly before his death in 1675. Whitelocke was a distinguished lawyer and Member of Parliament, a keen musician and scholar, a bon viveur, and a family man who had three wives and seventeen children. His Diary provides descriptions of life at school, university and the inns of court, details of marriages and marriage settlements, his property dealings, salaries and pensions, the management and improvement of his estates, and his relations with tenants, builders and servants.
Whitelocke knew most of the leading characters of the period personally. He held high offices as Keeper of the Great Seal, temporary Speaker of the House of Commons, and Lord President of the Council, and reveals in his Diary short insights into public affairs, notably during the Civil Wars and Interregnum.
The volume is complemented by the publication of Miss Spalding's Contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605-1675 (RSEH Vol XIV).
5.
Description: This account book of a small yeoman farmer in Lancashire, running from 1724 (just after his marriage) to his death in 1767, provides a record of expenditure on domestic, personal, and farming items. It is unique in offering a detailed view of household life and domestic economy in a stratum of society from which very few documents of any sort have survived.
Shedding light on the informal economy of the locality, entries cover payment for services, clothing, household goods, seeds, farming equipment, servants, medical expenses, books and education. A computer-generated concordance provides a comprehensive listing of all references likely to be of interest to historians.
6.
Description: This is a full edition of the trading privileges that had been granted to the Merchant Adventurers' Company of England by the princes of the Low Countries from 1296, copied into one diplomatic reference book in 1484.
The sequence of grants reveals the steadily increasing value of the cross-Channel trade - at first dominated by wool, and then by woollen cloth and linen - which made it important that peace was maintained between the nations. The introduction explains why this copy of the grants was made for an embassy ordered by Richard III to solve a mercantile impasse and circumvent the conditions of civil war in the Low Countries so that trade might continue. Appendices describe the development of the office of the governor of the Merchant Adventurers up to 1484, and present the little known petitions from Antwerp merchants to the kings of England that their own position be put on a par with the advantages enjoyed by the English under their privileges.
The text of each privilege is included in its original language of French, Latin or Dutch, accompanied by the 15th-century English translation.
This unique addition to the corpus of English texts of this period forms a valuable sourcebook on trade and political events in medieval Europe, as well as a unique tool for students of medieval language and translation.
7.
Description: The accounts of Joyce Jeffreys offer a rare opportunity to enter the social world of the early modern spinster - her daily life, personal circumstances, social activities and family relationships are all reflected through the entries in her manuscript. The accounts also reveal extensive evidence of Joyce's business dealings, most prominently as a moneylender in and around the Hereford and Worcestershire region, but also as a farmer, market gardener, landholder, and horse and livestock dealer.
The income or receipts section details loan arrangements and provides evidence of rental and other income. The expenditure or disbursements section provides a wealth of information on a range of contemporary expenses, including the cost of wages, food, drinks, clothing, textiles, medicines and medical care, the training and care of horses, and even stud fees. Further entries relate to amounts paid out in the form of gifts and gratuities, litigation fees, local and national assessments, and church dues.
Joyce Jeffreys appears at the centre of a large, vibrant kinship network, in which she was an active participant. This gave her access to regional gentry affiliations, and linked her with some of the most prominent local people. Although Joyce's business dealings may have centred on the Hereford area, they reached as far as London. She travelled regularly to visit relatives and friends, to listen to lectures, and to attend social events until her health prevented her from doing so. Royalist by inclination, Joyce decided to abandon Hereford before the Parliamentary army arrived and the social as well as economic costs of the civil war are a further feature of her accounts.
Published in their entirety for the first time, these accounts suggest that Joyce Jeffreys was neither as culturally or intellectually isolated as the historiography of spinsterhood would have us believe.
8.
Description: John Cannon, known to some as 'the poor man's Pepys', was the self-taught son of a Somerset farmer. Though some episodes in Cannon's life have been partially drawn upon in other studies, this edition is the first full scale study enabling Cannon and his world to be understood in their entirety.
The manuscript he wrote over nearly 60 years offers a remarkably candid autobiography, crowded with people of all ranks in hundreds of different places, roles and occupations. His Chronicles also record virtually all aspects of change, at a social level seldom so continuously documented in any period, as they were experienced and observed in significant regions of the country, during a crucial span of British history.
Part 1 includes Cannon's unique personal account of Country Excise, in the Thames Valley, and back in Somerset. The extended Introduction places Cannon and his Chronicles in all their contexts. (Part 2 covers the period 1734-1743.)
9.
Description: Correspondence of Sir John Lowther of Whitehaven, 1693-1698 : A Provincial Community in Wartime
10.
Description: This comprehensive study makes a unique source accessible to historians of the later medieval nobility. Household accounts contain invaluable evidence on daily life, diet, hospitality, etiquette, travel, the arts, politics, as well as on medieval finance generally.
In Part 1, Dr Woolgar's detailed introduction discusses these documents as a coherent body of records, and places them in the context of the administrative systems for which they were created. Their diplomatic forms and development are analysed and compared with those on the Continent, and an extensive glossary is provided to assist scholars in the study of these sources.
Dr Woolgar has also carefully selected and edited the accounts of 28 households, to illustrate the full variety of texts that have survived. Diet accounts of 14 households are printed in Part 1, ranging from those of knights and earls to those of the higher clergy.
Part 2 will contain texts from 14 more households - diet accounts (ii), cash, corn and stock accounts, wardrobe accounts - and a complete catalogue of extant medieval English household accounts.
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12.
Description: The records of Queen Elizabeth's New Year's gift exchanges convey a wealth of information about the late Tudor court. Records of twenty-four exchanges survive from the forty-five years of Elizabeth's reign, naming more than 1,200 participants. The vellum rolls record what was given to the Queen and what she gave in return. The gift rolls convey important information on a broad range of topics, including Elizabethan biography, language, and social and economic conditions, as well as the age's costume, jewellery, and plate, yet they remain largely unstudied by scholars in the many disciplines that would benefit from such evidence. A. Jeffries Collins, the first scholar to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the rolls, lamented more than a half-century ago how little use had been made of them by professional historians. Elizabethan studies rarely cite the substantial and varied information found in these documents, and even that use has been almost wholly restricted to the seven New Year's rolls edited in whole or part to date. This edition opens up their use to scholars by providing complete transcriptions of the extant rolls. They are complemented by five appendices which include biographical sketches of participants with cross references to their titles, a table of court offices with details of participants' offices and occupations, a listing of gift terms and descriptors, and a glossary of unusual or obsolete words found on the rolls.
13.
Description: In the early 1640s Henry Best, a gentleman farmer of Elmswell in the East Riding of Yorkshire, composed an account of his farming practices. The resulting Farming Book provides a unique account of seventeenth-century farming, of the marketing of agricultural produce, and of rural customs. It is here published in a new transcription by Donald Woodward. In addition, a complete transcript of Henry Best's Memorandum Book is published for the first time; this volume gives details of a wide range of day-to-day transactions mainly during the period 1617 to 1645. The editor adds greatly to our knowledge of Henry Best, his family and estate in a substantial introduction, and much ancillary documentary evidence is provided in a series of appendices. The volume is rounded off by an extensive new glossary prepared by Peter McClure.
14.
Description: This volume publishes the 1334 Lay Subsidy assessments for the whole of England. The medieval lay subsidies were taxes on personal wealth, levied on the laity from time to time to meet the increasingly urgent demands of the Crown for revenue over and above its regular income, particularly for military operations. The subsidy of 1334 continued what had become established practice - levying a rate of a fifteenth from rural areas and a tenth from boroughs. But in one important respect it different from its predecessors: the system of direct taxation on individuals was, with a few exceptions, replaced by a system of taxation quotes payable by each vill and borough on the basis of entirely new assessments negotiated with each local community. These quotes, with minor adjustments, remained the basis for future collections of the subsidy for some three centuries, whenever Parliament granted a fifteenth and a tenth. The records of the 1334 subsidy, listing county by county some 14,000 places, give complete coverage over the whole of England, with the exception of the Palatinates of Chester and Durham and a few other franchises. They thus provide an invaluable index to the relative wealth of different districts and individual places in early fourteenth-century England, and afford many sidelights on the state of the country immediately before the Black Death. Dr Glasscock supplies a detailed Introduction and an Index which serves as a valuable gazetteer.
15.
Description: The annual expenditure accounts recorded in this Register provide a marvellously complete picture of a Cluniac monastery during its last 60 years.
A medium-sized house containing about 15 monks, Thetford Priory was well-endowed and under the patronage of the Howard Dukes of Norfolk, but the Register was probably compiled to help regulate expenditure at a time of financial strain. The accounts provide important evidence for many aspects of monastic and outside life, including liturgy, obits and corrodies, the provisioning of the household, farming, taxation, legal disputes, and entertainments.
Part 1 contains an introduction, glossary, and accounts for the years 1482-1517. The accounts up to 1540, in which can be traced the priory's strenuous attempts to survive, will be published in Part 2, which will also include biographical and other appendices and full indexes. Together these volumes will provide an invaluable resource for historians of Norfolk and of monastic life in the run up to the Reformation.
16.
Description: The letters in The Worlds of the Jeake Family of Rye create a narrative across more than a century and through three generations of the Jeake family. With Samuel Jeake junior and his wife Elizabeth at its centre, this collection also touches on the lives of their parents and their children. It begins with a letter written in 1640 about the death of Samuel senior's mother, Anne, and ends with the death of Samuel and Elizabeth's last surviving child in Jamaica in 1773.
Samuel Jeake is well known to early modern historians through his published diary. The letters extend our understanding of his life, business dealings and his key relationships - those with his wife, Elizabeth, and his father, also Samuel. Other correspondents include Samuel's business contacts and his extended family. This collection of letters reveals the import role kinship connections played in the management of business and to the family's survival during the religious and political upheavals at the end of the 17th century. They give detailed insights into the Jeakes' domestic life and a rare glimpse into the life and work of a middling-sort woman. Elizabeth Jeake made a significant contribution to the marital economy. The Worlds of the Jeake Family of Rye also tells the story of Samuel's troublesome brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hartshorne, who became involved in the political machinations surrounding the Exclusion Crisis and narrowly avoided execution after a short and disastrous career as a government informer.
This collection of around 300 letters is accompanied by comprehensive introductions to each chapter which put the correspondence in context and complete the narrative.
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