ABSTRACT
While there were many specific factors that shaped the history of English violence, a consideration of the English past also highlights more general tendencies, relationships and configurations in the formation and maintenance of mentalities of violence. Violence has become a distinct topic in English historiography through the histories of crime, the criminal law and political protest. Beginning in the 1960s, studies of crowds and mobs delineated elements of a moral economy and ritualized group violence. This book emphasizes the way the collective attitudes toward violence are actively created and maintained. Sources to illuminate the civilized mentality are relatively numerous: moral reformers had the platforms of law, press and pulpit to express their views; the state debated and changed laws and issued government reports; and an increasingly literate middle-class audience read a growing number of journals and magazines that shaped the culture of refinement.
