Автор: Пользователь скрыл имя, 11 Февраля 2012 в 11:37, курс лекций
However complicated the modern industrial state may be, land and climate affect life in every country. They affect social and economic life, population and even politics. Britain is no exception. It has a milder climate than much of the European mainland because it lies in the way of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water and winds from the Gulf of Mexico.
Even such is time, that takes in trust Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with earth and dust. Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days. But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust.
Task 1.
Answer
the following questions.
Task 2.
Explain the meaning of the following statements.
1. England's wish to control Scotland had suffered a major setback at Bannockburn in 1314.
2. England went to war because it could not afford the destruction of its trade with Flanders. It was difficult to persuade merchants to pay for wars against the Scots or the Welsh, from which there was so little wealth to be gained.
3. Chivalry was a useful way of persuading men to fight by creating the idea that war was a noble and glorious thing.
4. The dramatic fall in population, however, was not entirely a bad thing.
5. Richard II skilfully quietened the angry crowd. He promised to meet all the people's demands, including an end to serfdom, and the people peacefully went home.
6. At the end of the fourteenth century new religious ideas appeared in England which were dangerous to Church authority, and were condemned as heresy.
7. The first crisis came in 1327 when Edward II was deposed and cruelly murdered. The principle that kings were neither to be killed nor deposed was broken.
8. England was beginning to lose an extremely costly war in the middle of the 15-th century.
9. The Wars of the Roses nearly destroyed the English idea of kingship for ever.
10. Almost half the lords of the sixty noble families had died in the wars. It was this fact which made it possible for the Tudors to build a new nation state.
11. Scotland paid heavily for its "Auld Alliance" with France.
12. Edward I had ordered that all those with an income of £20 a year must be made knights. This meant that even some of the yeoman farmers became part of the "landed gentry", while many "esquires", who had served knights in earlier times, now became knights themselves.
13. By the end of the Middle Ages the more successful of these lawyers, merchants, cloth manufacturers, exporters, esquires, gentlemen and yeoman farmers were increasingly forming a single class of people with interests in both town and country.
14. The growth of this new middle class, educated and skilled in law, administration and trade, created a new atmosphere in Britain.
15. Henry understood earlier than most people that England's future wealth would depend on international trade. And in order to trade, Henry realised that England must have its own fleet of merchant ships.
16. The Scottish nobles who supported friendship with England had welcomed Protestantism for both political and economic reasons.
17. Living conditions got worse as the population rose. It is not surprising that fewer people married than ever before.
18. One
group of people suffered particularly badly during the Tudor period.
These were the unmarried women.
Task 3.
Comprehention – true or false.
1. War could not also, of course, be profitable. But in fact cruelty, death, destruction and theft were not the reality of war, as they are today.
2. At the end of the thirteenth century the sharp rise in prices had led an increasing number of landlords to stop paying workers for their labour, and to go back to serf labour in order to avoid losses.
3. But the Peasants' Revolt, as it was called, only lasted for four weeks. During that period the peasants took control of much of London. In fact the revolt was not only by peasants from the countryside: a number of poorer townspeople also revolted, suggesting that the discontent went beyond the question of feudal service.
4. Towards the end of the fourteenth century Richard II was the second king to be killed by ambitious lords.
5. The English army was twice defeated by the French, who were inspired by a mysterious peasant girl called Joan of Arc, who claimed to hear heavenly voices. Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians, and given to the English. The English gave her to the Church in Rouen which burnt her as a witch in 1431.
6. Much later, in the nineteenth century, the novelist Walter Scott named these wars the "Wars of the Roses", because York's symbol was a white rose, and Lancaster's a red one.
7. Scotland did not experience many of the disasters that affected England at this time. The Scots escaped the Black Death or the other plagues, and they also did not suffere from repeated wars.
8. Wages for farmworkers and for skilled townspeople rose faster than the price of goods in the fifteenth century.
9. The alliance between esquires and merchants made Parliament more powerful, and separated the Commons more and more from the Lords. Many European countries had the same kind of parliaments at this time, but in most cases these disappeared when feudalism died out. In England, however, the death of feudalism helped strengthen the House of Commons in Parliament.
10. The century of Tudor rule (1485-1603) is often thought of as a most glorious period in English history.
11. The Church was not a huge landowner, and the monasteries were important to economic and social growth in the way they had been two hundred years earlier.
12. By 1585 most English people believed that to be a Catholic was to be an enemy of England. This hatred of everything Catholic became an important political force.
14. The Tudors fought four wars during the period to make the Irish accept their authority and their religion. In the end they destroyed the old Gaelic way of life and introduced English government.
15. Until
the end of the Tudor period Parliament was supposed to do three things:
agree to the taxes needed; make the laws which the Crown suggested;
and advise the Crown, but only when asked to do so.
Task 4.
Find
the right explanation of the following words.
To escape,
a plaque, to be exhausted, to escape, maintaining, a damage, undoubtedly,
an alliance, a gang, to increase, to appear, to disappear, an
advantage, an authority, a determination, king’s overlordship, a battlefield,
weapon, a destination, unwillingly, agricultural, a profit, to rent,
to shrink, to survive.
Task 5.
Look
up in a dictionary and write short definitions of the following words.
To be encouraged, a spinster, to rebell, to inherit, cheap, serfdom, a discontent, to execute, oppressive, an establishment, an adviser, to be deposed, mysteriously, to conquer, to be descended, to be proclaimed, to be skilful, obeying, to remain, to rescue, to chase, to encourage, profitable, pfrticularly.
Task 6.
Summarise
your factual knowledge of the subject.
1. War with Scotland and France.
2. Plaque and disorder.
3. Heresy and orthodoxy.
4. The Wars of the Roses.
5. Government and society.
6. The condition of women.
7. The Tudors.
8. The Protestant – Catholic struggle.
9. The new foreign and trading policy.
10. Tudor parlaments.
11. Rich and poor in town and country.
12. A Scottish king for England.
13. Language
and culture.
Lecture III.
Part 1.The Stuarts
1. Crown and Parliament
The Stuart monarchs, from James I onwards, were less successful than the Tudors. They quarrelled with Parliament and this resulted in civil war. The only king of England ever to be tried and executed was a Stuart. The republic that followed was even more unsuccessful, and by popular demand the dead king's son was called back to the throne. Another Stuart king was driven from his throne by his own daughter and her Dutch husband, William of Orange. William became king by Parliament's election, not by right of birth. When the last Stuart, Queen Anne, died in 1714, the monarchy was no longer absolutely powerful as it had been when James VI rode south from Scotland in 1603. It had become a "parliamentary monarchy" controlled by a constitution.
These important changes did not take place simply because the Stuarts were bad rulers. They resulted from a basic change in society. During the seventeenth century economic power moved even faster into the hands of the merchant and landowning farmer classes. The Crown could no longer raise money or govern without their cooperation. These groups were represented by the House of Commons. In return for money the Commons demanded political power. The victory of the Commons and the classes it represented was unavoidable.
It would be interesting to know how the Tudors would have dealt with the growing power of the House of Commons. They had been lucky not to have this problem. But they had also been more willing to give up their beliefs in order that their policies would succeed. The Stuarts, on the other hand, held onto their beliefs however much it cost them, even when it was foolish to do so.
The political developments of the period also resulted from basic changes in thinking in the seventeenth century. By 1700 a ruler like Henry VIII or Elizabeth I would have been quite unthinkable. By the time Queen Anne died, a new age of reason and science had arrived.
Parliament against the Crown
The first signs of trouble between Crown and Parliament came in 1601, when the Commons were angry over Elizabeth's policy of selling monopolies. But Parliament did not demand any changes. It did not wish to upset the ageing queen whom it feared and respected.
Like Elizabeth, James I tried to rule without Parliament as much as possible. He was afraid it would interfere, and he preferred to rule with a small council.
James was clever and well educated. As a child in Scotland he had been kidnapped by groups of nobles, and had been forced to give in to the Kirk. Because of these experiences he had developed strong beliefs and opinions. The most important of these was his belief in the divine right of kings. He believed that the king was chosen by God and therefore only God could judge him. James's ideas were not different from those of earlier monarchs, or other monarchs in Europe.
He expressed these opinions openly, however, and this led to trouble with Parliament. James had an unfortunate habit of saying something true or clever at the wrong moment. The French king described James as "the wisest fool in Christendom". It was unkind, but true. James, for all his cleverness, seemed to have lost the commonsense which had helped him in Scotland.
When Elizabeth died she left James with a huge debt, larger than the total yearly income of the Crown. James had to ask Parliament to raise a tax to pay the debt. Parliament agreed, but in return insisted on the right to discuss James's home and foreign policy. James, however, insisted that he alone had the "divine right" to make these decisions. Parliament disagreed, and it was supported by the law.
James had made the mistake of appointing Elizabeth's minister, Sir Edward Coke, as Chief Justice. Coke made decisions based on the law which limited the king's power. He judged that the king was not above the law, and even more important, that the king and his council could not make new laws. Laws could only be made by Act of Parliament. James removed Coke from the position of Chief Justice, but as an MP Coke continued to make trouble. He reminded Parliament of Magna Carta, interpreting it as the great charter of English freedom. Although this was not really true, his claim was politically useful to Parliament. This was the first quarrel between James and Parliament, and it started the bad feeling which lasted during his entire reign, and that of his son Charles.
James was successful in ruling without Parliament between 1611 and 1621, but it was only possible because Britain remained at peace. James could not afford the cost of an army. In 1618, at the beginning of the Thirty Years War in Europe, Parliament wished to go to war against the Catholics. James would not agree. Until his death in 1625 James was always quarrelling with Parliament over money and over its desire to play a part in his foreign policy.
Charles I found himself quarrelling even more bitterly with the Commons than his father had done, mainly over money. Finally he said, "Parliaments are altogether in my power ... As I find the fruits of them good or evil, they are to continue or not to be." Charles dissolved Parliament.
Charles's need for money, however, forced him to recall Parliament, but each time he did so, he quarrelled with it. When he tried raising money without Parliament, by borrowing from merchants, bankers and landowning gentry, Parliament decided to make Charles agree to certain "parliamentary rights". It hoped Charles could not raise enough money without its help, and in 1628 this happened. In return for the money he badly needed, Charles promised that he would only raise money by Act of Parliament, and that he would not imprison anyone without lawful reason.
These rights, known as the Petition of Right, established an important rule of government by Parliament, because the king had now agreed that Parliament controlled both state money, the "national budget", and the law. Charles realised that the Petition made nonsense of a king's "divine right". He decided to prevent it being used by dissolving Parliament the following year.
Charles surprised everyone by being able to rule successfully without Parliament. He got rid of much dishonesty that had begun in the Tudor period and continued during his father's reign. He was able to balance his budgets and make administration efficient. Charles saw no reason to explain his policy or method of government to anyone. By 1637 he was at the height of his power. His authority seemed to be more completely accepted than the authority of an English king had been for centuries. It also seemed that Parliament might never meet again.