Out of all of the participants in World War I, the most curious, in my opinion, is Great Britain. With the English Channel guaranteeing a navally superior Britain could guarantee its independence indefinitely, joining a world war does not seem like the obvious move to make. Despite this, on August 4th, 1914 Britain was at war with Germany. In my paper, I will argue that the invasion of Belgium provided the catalyst for a great power conflict due to the institutional, material, and personal realities that set the two nations on a collision course.

The England and Scotland of today exist together within the same nation state. During the Middle Ages they existed as distinct kingdoms or realms, and as will be seen their relationship was strenuous and broke down into major political disputes and warfare on many an occasion. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, these issues became more serious, erupting into what is now called the First Scottish War of Independence in 1296. This paper aims to analyze the feudal politics underlying the relationship between the two realms particularly in regard to feudal homage and how kings such as Edward I of England and Robert I of Scotland and their predecessors approached and understood that relationship. I will present the situation leading up to the war as well as the war itself and provide a brief look into how it affected the future relationship. Scottish independence after the conflict will be included as well. I will make use of primary sources such as treaties, charters, letters and the Chronicle of Lanercost as well as secondary sources from historians.

Though the term toxic masculinity has only been defined and in use in recent years, the type of masculinity that emphasizes characteristics that are harmful (to women, society, or to the men themselves) is not exclusively modern. I locate toxic masculinity depicted in nearly all of the male characters of Anne Brontë’s novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), whose practice is legitimized and supported by male dominance in the nineteenth-century British middle-class. While the nineteenth- century British middle-class encouraged domestic masculinity, which emphasized caring for the home and family, many of Brontë’s male characters opt to practice toxic masculinity instead in order to assert their masculine identity and exercise authority, particularly over women. The characters in the novels associate characteristics of toxic masculinity—indulgence, brutality, superiority, and exclusively male spaces—with masculine identity. In these novels, toxic masculinity often leads to the men’s mistreatment of women’s bodies, emotions, possessions, and labor, or even outright abuse and physical violence. Because of the socially, legally, and culturally sanctioned dominance of men and common expectations for women’s subservience in the nineteenth-century British middle-class, toxic masculinity was essentially inescapable for women, and because they had no option for legal recourse in the face of abuse by men, they were forced to respond to toxic masculinity themselves. While all of the women in the novels experience toxic masculinity, it is not always to the same extent, and thus the women are not unified in their responses, but each responds in the way most beneficial to herself. While many women opt for the path of least resistance and meekly accept their treatment under toxic masculinity, others choose to try to utilize it for their own gain by either appropriating or indulging it, while the heroines of the novels attempt to challenge toxic masculinity.