This article will explore the interplay between a traditional fête in Devon and Oxfordshire, the celebration of the Fifth of November, and the last significant wave of English food price disturbances in 1867. Both popular culture and collective action mutated, of course, as underlying economic and social structures changed; but even in those regions where the pace of change was rapid, to neglect the factors of persistence and survival would lead to a history written according to a too simplistic formula. To say that culture and collective action changed in the nineteenth century as society and the economy changed can even become a truism, telling little about the processes through which these relationships worked themselves out. Without overdrawing the case, an effort has been made here to focus precisely upon persistence and survival, and to show how, in regions such as the southwest or Oxfordshire—and by implication, many other regions of Britain as well—the pace of nineteenth century cultural, economic, and social change was more leisurely than studies based exclusively on the industrializing north might lead one to conclude.

Besides remaining the celebration of the failure of the Popish Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes acquired a number of new meanings for those involved in nineteenth century Fifth of November manifestations, and some other novel “uses” as well. Annual celebrations all over the south were frequently organized and mounted by secret or semi-secret societies of “bonfire boys” or “Guys.” Members of the bonfire gangs usually concealed their identities with masks or soot and appeared in uniform or grotesque costumes to preside over the collection of wood and other combustibles, the begging or extortion of money from the wealthy, and the fabrication of suitable effigies to be ritually consumed on the bonfire.

For students interested in the political history of Britain during the early years of the Great War, Lord Beaverbrook's Politicians and the War, 1914-1916 is now essential reading. This, however, has not always been the case. The historiographical fortunes of this important study, Beaverbrook's modus operandi, and his preoccupations as a historian are the main concerns of this paper. Examination of these issues, combined with a reassessment of of certain key themes and incidents in Politicians and the War allow for a reevaluation not only of the book as a major source for the period but also of that wonderful and partisan fusion of politics and history who was Max Aitken, the first and only Lord Beaverbrook.

Beaverbrook, as A.J.P. Taylor's vast biography makes clear, was a man of many parts. Politics colored almost everything he did. His politics were those of the Unionist (later the Conservative) Party and, as a Canadian colonial who had come to Britain to augment further his considerable fortune, he identified strongly with the Tariff Reform wing of the party in the years before the First World War. He was Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyne from 1910 to 1916. Within the Unionist Party his closest friend was Andrew Bonar Law, another Canadian born politician, who in 1911 became Leader of the party and was thus a central figure in the tumultuous events examined in Politicians and the War. Aitken also had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Liberal Party. They, too, provided him with another perspective on the politics of the wartime period; one of them, David Lloyd George, in one of his earliest acts as Prime Minister in December 1916, elevated Aitken to the House of Lords where he took the title of Lord Beaverbrook.

The articles that follow employ quantitative and prosopographical approaches that, although not new to historical investigation, are new to the field of royal-baronial relations in Norman England. Traditionally, English medieval politics have been treated with a strongly constitutional emphasis. Barons have been viewed as a largely undifferentiated group whose relations with the monarchy were seen as a reaction against the advance of rational central government, or as a defense of traditional liberties against oppressive kings.

The better historians, over the past century and more, have resisted such simplifications. John Horace Round, for example, attacked and ridiculed the anachronistic constitutional generalizations of some of his predecessors by producing a mass of detailed information on individual Anglo-Norman aristocratic families. Sir Frank Stenton, in a tribute to Round written soon after Round's death in 1928, summarized his contribution in these apt words:

Stenton, too, was an expert in aristocratic genealogy and family history; and with the sources of Saxon and Norman England at his fingertips, he was a master of the apt illustration.

Marriage has been a means of climbing the social ladder in most societies, and post-conquest England was no exception. The Conquest had provided a sweeping opportunity for men of all strata of the feudal hierarchy to gain lands and wealth in England, but high social status and prestige remained the prerogative of magnate families who had constituted the aristocracy of Normandy and northern France before 1066. Most of these families had themselves risen only recently to wealth and power through ducal patronage, but by 1066 they were firmly entrenched in their Norman estates and in the duke's inner circle of advisors. Many magnates possessed comital titles and ties of kinship with the Norman duke-kings, and all profited greatly from the Conqueror's victory at Hastings and his subsequent redistribution of English lands. Families such as the Beaumonts, Montgomerys, Clares, Mandevilles, and Warennes continued to enjoy the highest aristocratic honors in Anglo-Norman society.

In the second generation after the Conquest, a number of men of lower social standing amassed land and political importance through service to William Rufus and Henry I, desiring to be accepted as peers by the great magnates. Their striving for social success is illustrated by William of Malmesbury in his History of the Kings of England. In recounting the plan of William fitz Osbern to marry the widow of Count Baldwin of Flanders, the chronicler ascribed his motives to a desire “to increase his dignity.” Many men also wanted to impress the lower orders of society with their rank. Orderic Vitalis's contemptuous tale of one of Henry I's “new men,” Richard Basset, suggests that acquisition of social prestige was a possible motive for marriage. Having married a daughter of the earl of Chester, Basset returned to Normandy “and made a show of superiority to all his peers and fellow countrymen by the magnificence of his building in the little fief he had inherited from his parents.…”

To what extent were families important participants in the statecraft of Henry I? Their political influence, or clout, can best be measured by an examination of the rewards that the king bestowed upon their members for good service. Royal patronage could range from appointments to lucrative offices and marriages to heiresses to monetary gifts, pardoned debts, and exemptions from danegeld, auxilium burgi, and the murdum fine. Analysis of the Pipe Roll of 1130, the only surviving record of Henry's income and expenses, indicates that nearly seven hundred individuals received favors from the king in that account. The focus of this study shifts to royal patronage of the family groups to which these favored individuals belonged. Considered within the context of their domus, they form fifty-three fiscally-favored families and constitute the statistical sample upon which this analysis is based.

This study fits into the prosopographical framework envisioned by Timothy Reuter for the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and described by George Beech. The Pipe Roll of 1130, a document of impressive detail and accuracy, illustrates which families were powerful and in the king's good graces and is a rich source of familial activity. It provides a glimpse not only of the financial and political activities of great magnates such as Ranulf earl of Chester and Waleran count of Meulan, but of the endeavors of families of modest origins and moderate status as well. Furthermore, the Pipe Roll suggests that political service and its consequent rewards were not confined to a “closed group,” but that the power structure could include families of varied means.

During Henry I's reign the Anglo-Norman nobility as a group was changing, reflecting twelfth-century demographic, military, and cultural changes, but also responding to specifically “English” developments in royal government. Increasingly, the king relied upon a group of men, familiares, most of whom were more dependent upon royal favor than their own patrimony for their position in society. The king's use of patronage in turn affected the composition of the nobility by creating nobles or providing the means for mobility within the class. To what extent, however, did this occur, and could anyone rely on the king and his court to be the major source of mobility and wealth? To find out it is necessary to see who within the nobility benefitted the most from different types of royal favor, and whether Henry I's familiares formed a separate group or network within the nobility, set apart not only by their curial behavior but by their feudal and family connections. It is an aspect of the family behavior which will be examined here and be fit into the larger question in subsequent work.

If the familiares received favor desired by others and did not blend into the larger class through lifestyle and alliances then they were an obvious target for anti-royal sentiment. R.W. Southern, in the article which in many ways revived Anglo-Norman historical inquiry, showed how a few familiares did rise to great and obvious wealth through royal favor. Administrative developments affected not only individuals—“new men,” “old men”—but families.