Abstract This article examines fraudulent homicide accusations against clergymen and their associates from thirteenth-century England, revealing a sophisticated form of lay resistance long before the Reformation. Analysis of inquests de odio et atia (of hate and spite) demonstrates that parishioners creatively exploited the criminal justice system to communicate their discontent with the clergy, resist ecclesiastical discipline, or find a way out of paying tithes. While previous scholarship focuses on raptus claims from the fifteenth century, this research identifies similar agency two centuries earlier. By manipulating legal processes—for example, by inventing murders where natural deaths occurred—the laity challenged church interference, suggesting that medieval lay-clerical relations were defined by a complex, long-term pattern of strategic legal subversion.
Abstract This article traces the creation of the Queen’s Colleges, and the degree-granting Queen’s University, in Ireland, the British government’s aspiration in their establishment, and their relationship to the British Empire. It argues that obscured in the existing literature about the aspiration to create a Catholic university in Ireland—the so-called “Irish University Question”—is a story about the way the Queen’s Colleges embodied a desire for a post-sectarian future that trained Irish men for imperial careers. The article traces the development of the competitive examinations in changing the selection process for members of the Indian Civil Service, and it looks at the ways that the Queen’s Colleges used students’ successes in competitive examinations to defend their institutions from the onslaught of criticism by the Irish Catholic Church. The article concludes by exploring the demise of the Queen’s University, and its replacement by the Royal Irish University, and how even by the 1880s imperial service still formed a central pillar in the identity, ethos, and purpose of the Queen’s Colleges.
