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Now wenches, listen, and let lovers lie: women's storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare
No full textThis essay involves two ‘borders’. The first is the border of gender, between male poet and female subject. The second is a cultural border, much criss-crossed in the early modern period, but still tricky for the nineteenth-century ‘labouring-class’ poets to negotiate: the border between oral and printed culture. If I do not on this occasion cross the river Tweed, I am nevertheless keenly aware here that John Clare’s ‘absent’ grandfather was an itinerant Scottish schoolmaster, and that Scotland itself in the period was, as Hamish Henderson reminds us, the very powerhouse of British balladry and folk culture
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A study of John Clare in his historical and political context
No full textAs the title indicates, the basis of the thesis is to set John Clare’s life and work within the context of the social and political history of his time. It is a study that is long overdue. The manner in which topical and political matters were mediated to him and were reflected in his work are analysed. His introduction to the literary and social worlds of Stamford and London is evaluated, and the advantages and disadvantages of patronage assessed. The active and complex political culture of Stamford has been taken into account as this may have affected his later political statements and a growing awareness of his audience. His antagonism to enclosure and the social changes that it engendered are considered. Three major questions that arise from this are addressed. The two local newspapers that Clare is known to have read are used throughout. His correspondence with friends, colleagues and casual correspondents has provided valuable insights as have his poetry and prose writings. Research in the Northamptonshire Record Office has revealed important new information in the form of one book of Enclosure Commissioners’ Minutes dated 1809-14, the first five years of the enclosure of Helpstone, Clare’s native village
Progress and Distress on the Stratford Estate in Clare during the Eighteen Forties
No full textIn the late 1980s and early 1990s, the author acquired about 30,000 letters written mainly in the 1840s. These pertained to estates throughout Ireland managed by James Robert Stewart and Joseph Kincaid, hereafter denoted SK. Until the letters - called the SK correspondence in what follows - became the author’s property, they had not seen light of day since the 1840s. Addressed mainly to the SK office in Dublin, they were written mainly by landlords, tenants, the partners in SK, local agents, etc. After about 200 years in operation as a land agency, the firm in which members of the Stewart family were the principal partners - Messrs J. R. Stewart & Son(s) from the mid-1880s onwards -- ceased business in the mid-1980s. Since 1994 the author has been researching the SK correspondence of the 1840s. It gives many new insights into economic and social conditions in Ireland during the decade of the great famine, and into the operation of Ireland’s most important land agency during those years. It is intended ultimately to publish details on several of the estates managed by SK in book form. The proposed title is Landlords, Tenants, Famine: Business of an Irish Land Agency in the 1840s, a draft of which has now been completed. A majority of the letters in the larger study from which the present article is drawn are on themes some of which one might expect - rents, distraint (seizure of assets in lieu of rent) ; ‘voluntary’ surrender of land in return for ‘compensation’ upon peacefully quitting; formal ejectment (a matter of last resort on estates managed by SK); landlord-assisted emigration (on a scale much more extensive than most historians of Ireland in the 1840s appear to believe); petitions from tenants; complaints by tenants, both about other tenants and local agents; major works of improvement (on almost all of the estates managed by SK); applications by SK, on behalf of proprietors, for government loans to finance improvements; recommendations of agricultural advisers hired by SK, ete. Thus, most of the SK correspondence is about aspects of estate management. It seems, in the 1840s, that the only estate in Clare managed by SK was that of the elderly Col. Stratford. Although the files on the relatively small Stratford estate are much less extensive than those on some of the estates investigated in detail in the draft of Landlords, Tenants, Famine, they do refer to most of the core aspects of estate management mentioned above. But in the case of the Clare estate, the material on some of those themes is extremely thin.
The estates of the Clare Family 1066-1317.
No full textPhDThroughout the early Middle Ages, the Clare earls of Hertford and.
Gloucester were prominent figures on the political scene. Their position
as baronial leaders was derived from their landed wealth, and was built up
gradually over two hundred and fifty years. Richard I de Clare arrived in
England in 1066 as a Norman adventurer, and was granted the honours of
Tonbridge and Clare. The family more than doubled its lands during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, mainly by inheritance, the greatest
acquisition being the honour of Gloucester in 1217.
Only in the first half of the twelfth century was the honour an
autonomous unit. In the honour of Clare, the earls relied on their own
tenants as officials in the twelfth century, but in the thirteenth the
administration was professional and bureaucratic. The earl's relations
with his sub-tenants are unknown before the early fourteenth century; then,
in contrast to other estates, the Clare honour-court was busy, strong and
fairly efficient. In contrast to the honours of Clare and Gloucester,
held of the king in chief, Tonbridge was held of the archbishop of
Canterbury, and the relationship between archbishop and earl was the subject
of several disputes. As to franchises, the earl exercised the highest
which he possessed in England at Tonbridge; elsewhere he appropriated
franchises on a large scale during the Barons' Wars of 1258-1265, but most
of these were surrendered as a result of Edward I's quo warranto proceedings In the thirteenth century, the Clare earls of Gloucester were
important Marcher lords. They strengthened their authority in Glamorgan
by expelling most of the Welsh princes in northern Glamorgan, and they
long avoided royal interference in their liberties. Nevertheless, in
the notorious case of the earls of Hereford and Gloucester in 1291-2,
Edward I temporarily succeeded in breaking down March custom
The life and works of Osbert of Clare
No full textOsbert of Clare was an English monastic writer, whose works extended from
the mid-1120s to the mid-1150s. His Latin hagiography reflects a deep admiration for
Anglo-Saxon saints and spirituality, while his letters provide a personal perspective
on his turbulent career. As prior of Westminster Abbey, Osbert of Clare worked to
strengthen the rights and prestige of his monastery. His production of forged or
altered charters makes him one of England's most prolific medieval forgers. At times
his passion for reform put him at odds with his abbots, and he was sent into exile
under both Abbot Herbert (1121-c.1136) and Abbot Gervase (1138-c.1157). Also
Osbert, as one of the first proponents of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, wrote
about the feast, worked to legitimize its celebration, and provided us with the only
significant narration of its introduction to England.
This thesis is divided into two sections. The first section is principally
historical and the second is principally literary. In the first section, I provide an
overview of Osbert of Clare's career and examine in greater detail two of his most
significant undertaking: his promotion of Westminster Abbey and his attempted
canonization of Edward the Confessor. In the second section, I give a philological
study of Osbert Latin style and examine themes that nm throughout his writings, such
as virginity, exile and kingship. Osbert's promotion of the feast of the Immaculate
Conception is included in the second section of the thesis because of its ties to the
themes of virginity and femininity within his writings. There are also two appendices:
the first is a survey of the extant manuscripts of Osbert's writings, and the second is
an edition of Osbert's unpublished Life of St Ethelbert from Gotha,
Forschungsbibliothek MS Memb. i. 8l
Introduction - veterinary science
No full textThis introduction - co-written with Clare Palmer - sets up the following selection of open access essays in the 'living book': Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health online at: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Veterinary_scienc
Author interview: considering Emma Goldman with Professor Clare Hemmings
No full textWe speak to Professor Clare Hemmings about her new book, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (Duke UP, 2018), which examines Goldman’s significance as an anarchist activist and thinker to the past and present of feminist theories and activism. Hemmings shows that the contradictions and tensions within Goldman’s approach to race, gender and sexuality speak to unresolved questions that continue to shape feminist practices and politics today
"Mild health I seek thee": Clare and Bloomfield at the limits of pastoral
No full textIn The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams dismantled the “pastoral assumption” that the rural laboring class were pictures of health and vitality, uncovering instead the reality of embodied suffering in laboring-class poetry. This essay considers how Robert Bloomfield and John Clare interrogated this “pastoral assumption” of rural health, suggesting that to claim they merely rejected it risks losing sight of their subtle forms of poetic critique. The body, mind, and verse of laboring-class poets were subject to simultaneous cultural narratives of robust health and sickly weakness, within which Bloomfield and Clare had to forge their own distinctive poetic voices. They wrote poems, I argue, that ostensibly upheld a pastoral ideal of health emanating from the natural world, but also critiqued this ideal through an artful hesitancy, especially in their use of apostrophe. I consider the influence of Bloomfield’s “To My Old Oak Table” (1806), and “Shooter’s Hill” (1806) on Clare’s early poem “To Health” (1821) and one of his middle-period sonnets in particular. Far from being uncomfortable or under-confident in the pastoral mode, Bloomfield and Clare brought their own aesthetic experiments and experiences of precarious health to bear on some of its key tropes
[Letter with poem manuscripts] [to] [Hessey] / John Clare.
No full textSee also other poets\u27 manuscripts in the collection: Rossetti and Whitman.Clare states that he is enclosing some of his work, but flippantly advises the recipient to think what he pleases of them, and Clare won\u27t be disappointed. Clare declares, "I am this day clear of the world & care for nobody & be d--d if I dont [sic] continue & keep so for my satisfaction as well as others." He surmises Mr. Herbel to be an overseer of a parish who has found out, employing "craneology" [phrenology-- a popular "science" viewed with varying degrees of credulity] that "some poor Brats in his Workhouse to be near a kin to me." It is unclear whether Clare is referring to illegitimate issue from one of his extramarital affairs. He includes two poems: "To +++++" and "On Seeing a Marble Copy of the Venus..." A naturalist, poet, and farm laborer, Clare\u27s 2000+ poems focus on the farm labor, village festivals, and Northamptonshire scenery he knew well. His first collection appeared in 1820, followed by _The Village Minstrel_ (also 1820) and he enjoyed great success for a time, meeting Coleridge and Lamb in London. The financial and domestic responsibility of caring for a large family proved too strenuous and Clare\u27s mental health degraded; he was committed to the Northamptonshire Lunatic Asylum where he remained until his death. A memorial in Poets\u27 Corner in Westminster Abbey commemorates him
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