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This chapter begins by discussing that James V's unexpected death in December 1542 led to an entirely new phase in Henry VIII's policy towards Scotland. It then explains that in order to resolve England's diplomatic problems and religious insecurities, the Scottish queen was married to Prince Edward. It clarifies that the transformation of the political scene had not eliminated certain intractable complications in recent Anglo-Scottish dealings. It explains that the religious dynamic of the practice of assuring could therefore be a strong weapon for either side in the conduct of war. It examines the Castilian enterprise during 1546 to 1547. It argues that the incompatibility of the aims of the Scottish rebels and Henry VIII showed the difference between their interpretations of the purpose of their alliance. It discusses Somerset's effort to revive the Anglo-Scottish union.

The subjects of English folk songs—whether they deal with romance, tragedy, conviviality, or legend—have the background of nature and its seasons. When the lovers make love the plough boys are ploughing in the spring and the lark is singing. When May comes round the moment is appropriate to celebrate it in song. The succession of flowers in the garden provides symbols for the deserted lover. The festivity of the Harvest Home is celebrated in the allegory of “John Barleycorn.” The young maiden meets her dead lover among the storms and cold winds of autumn; and the joy of Christmas is set in its true background of frost and snow. The songs come from various sources from Cecil Sharp's Folk Songs from Somerset, and from the collections of Lucy Broadwood and Fuller Maitland.

On the night of November 11, 1536, three weeks after the fall of Pontefract Castle and most of a fortnight after the truce at Doncaster, men were seen mustering in woods near Snaith. It was Sir Brian Hastings gathering his neighbours against a rumoured rustling of his cattle. In the subsequent atmosphere of misunderstanding and recrimination, Somerset Herald was sent to Temple Hirst to challenge Thomas Darcy about the Pilgrims' breach of the truce. For Darcy, this was an opportunity to offer his own account of his actions. Repeatedly he declared his loyalty to King Henry VIII. He had tried to take Robert Aske but failed, he had defended Pontefract for as long as possible without hope of relief. Even though he had ultimately been forced to surrender the castle, Darcy and his fellows had done the king ‘as good a service as though we had been in his privy chamber’.

This chapter examines the landscape of Somerset, which lies at the south‐western limit of landscapes that in the medieval period were characterized by villages and open fields. The topographical regions within the county are introduced, followed by a characterization of the historic landscape (the present patterns of fields, roads, settlements, land‐uses, etc.). Possible explanations for the regional variation in landscape character within Somerset are reviewed. There is now considerable evidence for villages and common fields existed by the tenth century though only to the east of the Blackdown and Quantock Hills.

This chapter explores who was responsible for shaping the character of the medieval landscape in Somerset. The potential role of Glastonbury Abbey is examined through a comparison of their manors across Somerset and Devon. It is argued that they had a relatively ‘hands‐on’ approach, in contrast to the bishops of Wells who appear to have had less interest in how their estates were managed. There is no correlation between landownership in Domesday and landscape character (e.g. areas with and without villages and open fields), nor with a series of large territories that appear to have existed in the earliest centuries of the medieval period. It is therefore suggested that the physical restructuring of the countryside in some areas was part of the process whereby these estates fragmented and eventually became manors.

In 1789, Hannah More and her sister Martha (Patty) founded a Sunday school at Cheddar — the first of a series of schools in the Mendips — which marked a significant advance of elementary education in Somerset. The schools are chronicled in Patty More's Mendip Annals. Sunday schools were the latest fashion in philanthropy. The pupils were the children of farmers, miners, and glass-workers. The schools have been criticized by E. P. Thompson and scholars influenced by Michel Foucault, but it is argued here that the Mendip peoples were not the passive recipients of class patronage. The success of the schools led to the setting up of women's benefit clubs in Cheddar and Shipham. The school and club feasts became a distinctive part of Mendip culture. Because of the problems of finding suitably Evangelical teachers, the sisters sometimes had take the potentially dangerous step of recruiting teachers with Methodist sympathies.

The earls of Worcester ran a company or companies during the early years of Elizabeth’s reign. Edward Somerset, the fourth earl, was a rising power in the land from his accession to the title in 1589. He succeeded Essex as Master of the Horse in 1601, when his company was beginning to compete for the third London foothold. He was a signatory to the Privy Council’s warrant of March 31, 1602 ordering the Lord Mayor to accept the Boar’s Head as a playing-place for the merged Oxford’s and Worcester’s. Thomas Heywood, an early writer for his company and always a loyal client, suggested that it was through Worcester’s own generosity that he handed over the patronage of his company to Queen Anne in 1603. This chapter looks at the history of the Worcester’s/Queen Anne’s/Revels Company, their performances, the plays they performed, the playhouses where they performed, their playing sharers, and their travelling records.

His early days in Bristol and collaboration with Robert Southey, followed by intimacy with William and Dorothy Wordsworth in Racedown and North Somerset. Speculation on the nature of life and interest in observation of all its manifestations. Awareness of recent scientific work, including the discovery of oxygen. The planning of Lyrical Ballads.

The third chapter investigates the role that the Overbury murder scandal played in recontextualizing anti-courtly love poetry. Donne planned to dedicate a limited print edition of his poems to the most prominent of the murderers, the earl of Somerset, after the poet replaced Overbury as the earl's secretary. While Donne must not have carried out his plan to publish his works, verse collectors soon intensified the scribal publication of Donne's poems. Moreover, they included his poems in miscellanies among libels attacking the countess of Somerset—libels that, needless to say, Donne would not have included in his collection for her husband. By associating Somerset libels with Donne's poems, the compilers of these miscellanies effectively turned Donne against his own patron. In this way the Overbury affair radically recontextualized Donne's verse—as it did poems by Francis Beaumont and by Overbury himself.

This chapter surveys Milestone’s career in the early 1930s: The Front Page, Rain, and Hallelujah, I’m a Bum. The comedy The Front Page, produced and financed by Howard Hughes, adapted a fast-paced play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur about a Chicago newspaperman torn between his work and his fiancée. It was nominated for three Academy Awards. Based on Somerset Maugham’s story, the drama Rain starred Joan Crawford and Walter Huston in a racy story about repressed sexual desire. Al Jolson starred in Hallelujah, I’m a Bum, a Depression-era musical. Other topics discussed: Milestone’s friendship with Sergei Bertenson and their Paris adventures, courtship of actress Kendall Lee, changing Hollywood censorship guidelines.

This chapter examines representations of Englishness and the British Empire in the writings of W. Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. It suggests that Maugham's representation of Europeans in Malaya is troubled by a reservation expressed in the work as to the authority of Englishness. Burgess, on the other hand, harbours an anxiety as to the role of the Englishman in the tropics. Taken together, the works of these two authors depict a Malaya that is gradually becoming socially and politically uninhabitable to its colonial occupants.

Cecil James Sharp, musician, author, and collector and arranger of English folk songs and dances, was born in London and was educated at Uppingham School and at Clare College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he entered fully into the musical activities of the university. After taking his degree, Sharp went in 1882 to Adelaide, where he held the legal post of associate to the chief justice of South Australia. He was also during this period assistant organist of the cathedral and conductor of the Philharmonic Society. However, interest centres on the last 25 years of his life and in the gradual growth under his influence of the knowledge of the English traditional arts of music and dancing. In 1902 his experience as singing teacher at Ludgrove School led him to prepare and publish A Book of British Song. This contains both traditional melodies and “composed” music of a simple kind. A further book, Folk-Songs from Somerset, was published in 1904.

Former plantations were sites of slavery in the South, but when they are presented to the touring public that fact has often been absent from the interpretation. Indeed, as Alisa Y. Harrison shows in her essay about the Somerset Place State Historic Site, North Carolinians during the 1960s sought not only to preserve the plantation home of Josiah Collins III but also to interpret the mansion by focusing on the romance and mythology of the antebellum South. Doing so meant ignoring the plantation’s slave past in the interest of not upsetting the touring public, assumed to be entirely white.

This chapter examines the life and work of the Somerset midwife Sarah Stone based on her book A Complete Practice of Midwifery. Although the facts of her life are not clear, it seems likely that Stone was born in about 1680, married and began to practice as a midwife around 1700, and moved to London in 1736. The publication of A Complete Practice of Midwifery in early 1737 may have marked her retirement from the profession; it is the only book of case notes published by a female midwife in eighteenth-century England. It is an account of child delivery among the common people of provincial England. This chapter first describes the demographic background of Somerset in the early eighteenth century before discussing the local experience of pregnancy, childbirth, death, and survival in the population from which Stone drew her patients.

This chapter explains some of the influences on authorship and reading discoveries behind Ray Bradbury's remarkable rise from raw and undisciplined talent to literary prominence. Once Bradbury realized that he could write with conviction and power from his own hopes, fears, and experiences, he was able to develop his own style instead of imitating the hallmarks of other writers. He discovered new, more mature influences and use them in honing his writing skills. Bradbury came to these discoveries through three interrelated processes: his professional reading in the nature of authorship, his ever-widening range of literary reading, and the constructive criticism offered by other writers. This chapter discusses Bradbury's professional readings between 1938 and 1944, including W. Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, Lajos Egri's How to Write a Play, and Maren Elwood's Characters Make Your Story; the last three books provided the insights by which Bradbury worked out his own maturing dynamics as a writer.

This chapter examines the lessons learned by Ray Bradbury from his readings during the war years. There were Modernists who appealed to Bradbury in more mature ways than Frederic Prokosch had done, and there were in fact abiding lessons that he could take away from some of these other writers such as Somerset Maugham and Christopher Morley. Maugham and Morley provided Bradbury the narrative models that were reinforced by Thornton Wilder's The Cabala (1926). This chapter considers two other novels read by Bradbury and what he learned from each one of them: the English translation of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1941) and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1944). It shows that Darkness at Noon's ethical insights inspired Bradbury to embark on a work of fiction that would evolve, over a period of six years, into Fahrenheit 451.

This chapter examines the shipbuilding output in the major ports of Southwest England in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries. The shipbuilding industry in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset prospered enormously during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, but suffered a sharp, major decline in the years preceeding the First World War. Starkey examines the scale, output, and economic forces of the region in order to explain this decline.

This chapter paints a satirical picture of television news. It describes the so-called Mordant Principle, “fiction is always superior to fact in every way”, and its scientific testing, of which Somerset Joad was a part of.