Some of the poorest regions of historic Britain had some of its most vibrant festivities. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the peoples of northern England, Lowland Scotland, and Wales used extensive celebrations at events such as marriage, along with reciprocal exchange of gifts, to emote a sense of belonging to their locality. Bride Ales and Penny Weddings looks at regionally distinctive practices of giving and receiving wedding gifts, in order to understand social networks and community attitudes. Examining a wide variety of sources over four centuries, the volume examines contributory weddings, where guests paid for their own entertainment and gave money to the couple, to suggest a new view of the societies of 'middle Britain', and re-interpret social and cultural change across Britain. These regions were not old fashioned, as is commonly assumed, but differently fashioned, possessing social priorities that set them apart both from the south of England and from 'the Celtic fringe'. This volume is about informal communities of people whose aim was maintaining and enhancing social cohesion through sociability and reciprocity. Communities relied on negotiation, compromise, and agreement, to create and re-create consensus around more-or-less shared values, expressed in traditions of hospitality and generosity. Ranging across issues of trust and neighbourliness, recreation and leisure, eating and drinking, order and authority, personal lives and public attitudes, R. A. Houston explores many areas of interest not only to social historians, but also literary scholars of the British Isles.

The new edition of this important, wide-ranging and extremely useful textbook has been extensively re-written and expanded. Rab Houston explores the importance of education, literacy and popular culture in Europe during the period of transition from mass illiteracy to mass literacy. He draws his examples for all over the continent; and concentrates on the experience of ordinary men and women, rather than just privileged and exceptional elites.

What can we learn from suicide, that most personal and often inscrutable of acts? This strikingly original work shows how, from treatment of suicides in historic Britain, unique insights can be gained into the development of both social and political relationships and cultural attitudes in a period of profound change. Drawing ideas from a range of disciplines including law, philosophy, the social sciences, and literary studies as well as history, the book comprehensively analyses how successful and attempted suicide was viewed by the living and how they dealt with its aftermath, using a wide variety of legal, fiscal, and literary sources. By investigating the distinctive institutional environments and mental worlds of early modern England and Scotland, it explains why suicide was treated as a crime subject to financial and corporal punishments, and it questions modern assumptions about the apparent 'enlightenment' of attitudes in the eighteenth century.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one examines the role of lordship in managing social and economic relationships following suicide and illuminates the importance of distinctive punishments inflicted on suicides' bodies for understanding historic communities. The second part of the book places suicide in its cultural context, analysing the attitudes of early modern people to those who killed themselves. It explores religious beliefs and the place of the devil as well as secular and medical understandings of suicide's causes in sources that include provincial newspapers.
Informed by continental as well as British research, Punishing the Dead? explicitly compares England and Scotland, making this a completely British history. It also offers intriguing evidence for the importance of cultural regions and local vernaculars that transcend national boundaries.

This is a new edition of a wide-ranging book that deals with the growth of Literacy and examines impact on early modern Europe.

In 1500 few people in Europe could read or write yet by 1800, the era of mass literacy had already arrived. Rab Houston explores the importance of education, literacy and popular culture in Europe during this period of transition. He draws his examples for all over the continent; and concentrates on the experience of ordinary men and women, rather than just privileged and the exceptional elite.

Scottish education and literacy have achieved a legendary status. A campaign promoted by church and state between 1560 and 1696 is said to have produced the most literate population in the early modern world. This book sets out to test this belief by comparing the ability to read and write in Scotland with northern England in particular and with Europe and North America in general. It combines extensive statistical analysis with qualitative and theoretical discussion to produce an important argument about the significance of literacy and education for the individual and society of relevance not just to the Scottish experience but to a far broader social and geographical area.

Over the past thirty five years population history has been one of the most important growth areas within the flourishing field of social and economic history. Our understanding of demographic history in the period before the Industrial Revolution has been transformed. The amount of literature which has been produced is daunting both in its volume and its complexity. In this concise volume for students Dr Houston reviews the literature and explains the different population trends evident in parts of Britain and Ireland. He sets out the sometimes complex interactions between fertility, nuptiality, morality and migration in a clear and comprehensible way, and explains why the mechanisms which balanced population and resources in England were not found in Scotland and Ireland.

Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment. The lives and ideas of its prominent figures have received extensive treatment, but little attention has been paid to the society which produced them. In this comprehensive study of Edinburgh over a century of social change, R. A. Houston offers unrivalled breadth of analysis of the ways in which urban life was transformed. Chapters on social relationships, the use of space, the place of the poor in Scotland's capital, religious values and attitudes to urban living, riot and popular protest, and developments in political economy build up to a powerful argument about social change. As well as providing unique depth of context for Englightenment studies, this book explains how broader changes in social attitudes and values took root in a century which witnessed dramatic political, economic, and intellectual developments. It is a major contribution not only to Scottish but also to British history.

Over the past thirty five years population history has been one of the most important growth areas within the flourishing field of social and economic history. Our understanding of demographic history in the period before the Industrial Revolution has been transformed. The amount of literature which has been produced is daunting both in its volume and its complexity. In this concise volume for students Dr Houston reviews the literature and explains the different population trends evident in parts of Britain and Ireland. He sets out the sometimes complex interactions between fertility, nuptiality, morality and migration in a clear and comprehensible way, and explains why the mechanisms which balanced population and resources in England were not found in Scotland and Ireland.

How did people view mental health problems in the eighteenth century, and what do the attitudes of ordinary people towards those afflicted tell us about the values of society at that time? Professor Houston draws upon a wide range of contemporary sources including asylum documents, civil and criminal court records to present unique insights into the issues around madness, including the written and spoken words of sufferers themselves. This is a detailed yet profoundly humane and compassionate study of the everyday experiences of those suffering mental impairments ranging from idiocy to lunacy, and an exploration into the meaning of this for society in the eighteenth century.