A History Of The Post In England From The Romans To The Stuarts

Author : Philip Beale
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429648383
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A History of the Post in England from the Romans to the Stuarts written by Philip Beale and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was originally published in 1998. From Roman times until this century the business of government has been largely carried out by the writing of letters, either in the form of instructions or of authorisations to deliver information orally. These documents were addressed to the recipient and authenticated by a seal or signature, often having a greeting and a personal conclusion. The messengers who took them also carried copies of laws and regulations, summonses to courts and whatever else was needed for the administration of the country. Without a means of speedy delivery to all concerned there could be no effective government. Separate postal services developed to meet the needs of nobles, the church, merchants, towns and the public. This book discusses three meanings of the word 'post’: the letters, those who carried them, and the means of distribution. It shows that there is some continuity from Roman times and that the postal service established throughout England after the conquest of 1066 continued until 1635 when it was officially extended to the public, thus starting its amalgamation with the other services.

Author : Duncan Campbell-Smith
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141973226
Total Pages : 840 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Masters of the Post written by Duncan Campbell-Smith and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of the Post Office go back to the early years of the Tudor monarchy: Brian Tuke, a former King's Bailiff in Sandwich, was acknowledged as the first 'Master of the Posts' by Cardinal Wolsey in 1512, and went on to build up a network of 'postmasters' across England for Henry VIII. Over the following five hundred years the Royal Mail expanded to an unimaginable degree to become the largest employer in the country, and the face of the British state for most people in their everyday lives. But it also faced the demands of an increasingly commercial marketplace. With the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the possibility of privatising the Royal Mail has prompted passionate arguments - and has added immeasurably to the difficulties of running it. In charting the whole of this extraordinary story, Duncan Campbell-Smith recounts a series of remarkable tales, including how postal engineers built the first programmable computer for the wartime code-breakers of Bletchley Park and how the Royal Mail managed to successfully continue delivering post to the front lines during two world wars, but also how they failed to avert the Great Train Robbery of 1963. He brings to life many of the dominant personalities in the Royal Mail's history - from Rowland Hill, who imposed a uniform penny post and set the great Victorian expansion on its way, to Tony Benn who championed the modernisation of the service in the 1960s and Tom Jackson who led the postal workers' biggest union through fifteen frequently stormy years up to 1982. This is the first complete history of the Royal Mail up to the present day, based on its comprehensive archives, and including the first detailed account of the past half-century of Britain's postal history, made possible by privileged access to confidential records. Today's debate over the future of the Royal Mail is shown to be just the ;atest chapter in a centuries-old conflict between its roles raising revenue and serving the public. Will its employees remain, like Brian Tuke's postmasters, servants of the Crown? This book could hardly appear at a more timely moment.

Author : Paul Trolander
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1611494982
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Literary Sociability in Early Modern England written by Paul Trolander and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study represents a significant reinterpretation of literary networks during what is often called the transition from manuscript to print during the early modern period. It is based on a survey of 28,000 letters and over 850 mainly English correspondents, ranging from consumers to authors, significant patrons to state regulators, printers to publishers, from 1615 to 1725. Correspondents include a significant sampling from among antiquarians, natural scientists, poets and dramatists, philosophers and mathematicians, political and religious controversialists. The author addresses how early modern letter writing practices (sometimes known as letteracy) and theories of friendship were important underpinnings of the actions and the roles that seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century authors and readers used to communicate their needs and views to their social networks. These early modern social conditions combined with an emerging view of the manuscript as a seedbed of knowledge production and humanistic creation that had significant financial and cultural value in England’s mercantilist economy. Because literary networks bartered such gains in cultural capital for state patronage as well as for social and financial gains, this placed a burden on an author’s associates to aid him or her in seeing that work into print, a circumstance that reinforced the collaborative formulae outlined in letter writing handbooks and friendship discourse. Thus, the author’s network was more and more viewed as a tightly knit group of near equals that worked collaboratively to grow social and symbolic capital for its associates, including other authors, readers, patrons and regulators. Such internal methods for bartering social and cultural capital within literary networks gave networked authors a strong hand in the emerging market economy for printed works, as major publishers such as Bernard Lintott and Jacob Tonson relied on well-connected authors to find new writers as well as to aid them in seeing such major projects as Pope’s The Iliad into print.

Author : Alan Stewart
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191563560
Total Pages : 423 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shakespeare's Letters written by Alan Stewart and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-11-13 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shakespeare's plays are stuffed with letters - 111 appear on stage in all but five of his dramas. But for modern actors, directors, and critics they are frequently an awkward embarrassment. Alan Stewart shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. By reconstructing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, and recapturing what it meant to write, send, receive, read, and archive a letter, it throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas. Early modern letters were not private missives sent through an anonymous postal system, but a vital - sometimes the only - means of maintaining contact and sending news between distant locations. Penning a letter was a serious business in a period when writers made their own pen and ink; letter-writing protocols were strict; letters were dispatched by personal messengers or carriers, often received and read in public - and Shakespeare exploited all these features to dramatic effect. Surveying the vast range of letters in Shakespeare's oeuvre, the book also features sustained new readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV Part One.

Author : Catherine Delano-Smith
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English Maps written by Catherine Delano-Smith and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an introductory volume on the history of English maps. The authors adopt the revisionist perspectives of the new history of cartography, and review a broad range of maps, ranging in date from about 700 AD to the beginning of the 20th century. Their principle objective is to explore the ways in which maps have interacted with society in England's past, to analyze the roles that maps have played and the uses to which they have been put.

Author : Joseph Clarence Hemmeon
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.1S/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The History of the British Post Office written by Joseph Clarence Hemmeon and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Old English Newsletter written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Lindsay O'Neill
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812246489
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Opened Letter written by Lindsay O'Neill and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early eighteenth century, the rapid expansion of the British empire had created a technological problem: communication and networking became increasingly vital yet harder to maintain. As colonial possessions and populations grew and more individuals moved around the globe, Britons both at home and abroad required a constant and reliable means of communication to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, and exchange news. As face-to-face communication became more intermittent, men and women across the early modern British world relied on letters. In The Opened Letter, historian Lindsay O'Neill explores the importance and impact of networking via letter-writing among the members of the elite from England, Ireland, and the colonies. Combining extensive archival research with social network digital technology, The Opened Letter captures the dynamic associations that created a vibrant, expansive, and elaborate web of communication. The author examined more than 10,000 letters produced by such figures as Virginia planters William Byrd I and his son William Byrd II; the Anglo-Irish nobleman John Perceval; the newly minted Duke of Chandos, James Brydges, and his wife Cassandra Brydges; and Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Royal Society, and his colleague Peter Collinson. She also mined letters from the likes of Nicholas Blundell, a Catholic member of the Lancashire gentry, and James Eliot, a London merchant and ardent Quaker. The Opened Letter reassembles and presents the vital individual and interlocking epistolary webs constructed by disparate groups of letter writers. These early social networks illuminate the structural, social, and geographic workings of the British world as the nation was becoming a dominant global power.

Author : Susan Whyman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199532443
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pen and the People written by Susan Whyman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10-08 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, 'The Pen and the People' will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people.

Author : Peter Beal
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199265445
Total Pages : 478 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology written by Peter Beal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bespr. in Book collector 57(2008)4