bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Early English and Gallic Minsters
Authors: Deanesly M.
Published: March 2007

It would be commonly agreed that the history of the earliest minsters is obscure, or relatively obscure. There is no English Gregory of Tours: and we do not know as much about the life and foundations of archbishop Theodore of Canterbury as we do about those of his contemporary, bishop Ouen of Rouen. It is hoped, however, that it may be possible in this paper to throw some light on the nature of the early English minsters by considering them against the background of Gallic and Celtic practice at the date, while retaining firmly in the mind the contemporary meaning of certain ecclesiastical terms, as against their later, developed use. A point of main interest about these early minsters is the use of the term mynstru, monasteria, for the dwellings of clerks as well as of monks, and the approximation of the function of the two classes of foundation. Put in another way, it is of interest to know whether the minsters of monks and nuns ever had a parochia, like that of the mother churches of the Continent. Minster and parish: they are the two critical words. With reference to this subject, I wish to consider, first, the reason for the lack of original charter evidence about the earliest English minsters, secondly, the sixth- and seventh-century use of certain terms, thirdly, the position of the Kentish minsters, Thanet, Lyminge, and the rest; and lastly—something that seems to me the clue to the history of the minsters in the seventh century—the efforts of bishops to equate minsters of ascetics with minsters of clerks, and treat them, as bishop Maroveus of Poitiers said to St. Radegund's successor, “like their other parishes.”
The Duchy of Lancaster Council and Court of Duchy Chamber The Alexander Prize Essay
Authors: Somerville R.
Published: March 2007

The origin of that court of equity which sat at Westminster as the court of duchy chamber has prompted more than one guess, but none of the guesses has reached the truth. Their authors, in applying the Lucretian principle ex nihilo nihil fit and by searching for a definite act of creation, have forgotten an equally profound truth so well emphasised in medieval English history, that few of our great institutions were created all at once, or sprang into life completely armed like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus. Most of these writers have seen in Henry IV's accession to the throne a sharp dividing line in the history of the duchy of Lancaster, which in fact it was not. The charter by which Henry IV regulated the status of the duchy in 1399 expressly provided for a continuance of the existing administration.

Another factor in obscuring the origin of this court has been a confusion with the chancery court of Lancashire. This chancery was set up by a definite act in the middle of the fourteenth century and revived soon after; in the course of time it acquired an equity jurisdiction similar to that exercised by the royal chancery. But its jurisdiction was, and still is, limited to Lancashire, whereas the court of duchy chamber had a much wider range. This confusion is apparent in legal works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Coke continued the misconception, with the result that even modern writers of repute have been led astray.
Ranulf Flambard and Early Anglo-Norman Administration. (The Alexander Prize Essay)
Authors: Southern R. W.
Published: March 2007

The importance of Flambard in Rufus's reign has always been acknowledged. All the chroniclers, in more or less strident language, put him in the forefront of those responsible for Rufus's exactions and lay the blame chiefly on him for the misfortunes they relate. Stubbs in working out his idea of constitutional development gave Flambard a more determined position in this scheme than he had ever held before. It will first be useful to see what kind of picture of Flambard he and, later, Freeman evolved. The chief difficulty Stubbs had in Rufus's reign was to find some guiding hand for the “hardening and sharpening” of feudalism which in his view was going on at that time, and for the introduction of new feudal practices. He required some single and unscrupulous innovator to account for a process which he thought time alone would not have brought about. Stubbs, looking from the point of view of constitutional development, explained the evolution of the conditions described in Henry I's coronation charter as the work of Flambard. The charter showed, for instance, heirs to feudal fiefs having to buy back their lands on the death of the holder instead of merely paying a relief—a stringency which he explained by the discovery of a legal mind working out feudal principle.
Lord Palmerston's Policy for The Rejuvenation of Turkey, 1839–1841
Authors: Rodkey F. S.
Published: March 2007

During the period from 1839 to 1841, when the Concert of Europe intervened in the second Syrian war between Sultan Mahmoud and Mehemet Ali Pasha of Egypt to save the Ottoman Empire from destruction, Lord Palmerston the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs energetically opposed a return to the status quo ante helium in the Levant, risked the development of a serious international crisis in Near Eastern affairs, and played a leading rôle in the negotiation and execution of an arrangement by which Syria and Crete were restored to the direct rule of the Sultan and by which the authority of Mehemet Ali was confined to Egypt. The story of these developments is a familiar one; yet it is not generally known that at the same time when Palmerston was energetically attempting to exploit events in the East to bring about a settlement of the Turco-Egyptian Question in the interest of the Sultan he was also actively elaborating and extending a policy for the rejuvenation of Turkey which he had outlined in a period of peace in the Levant between 1833 and 1839.
English Learning in the Late Twelfth Century
Authors: Hunt R. W.
Published: March 2007

The title of this paper may raise false hopes in the minds of many; and it will be well to explain what has been attempted. English writers of the later twelfth century have on the whole been neglected; and when I was investigating the life and works of Alexander Nequam, it was necessary, in order to keep a sense of proportion, to try to learn something about the schools of the time, and to look at the work of some of his contemporaries. One or two things of interest have come to light, which I have tried to set out here. But the picture is far from complete. Nothing, for example, is said about legal studies.
The King's Secretary in The Fifteenth Century
Authors: Otway-Ruthven J.
Published: March 2007

The term secretanus was employed in England from the beginning of the thirteenth century in the varying meanings of a confidential clerk, an ambassador, or a member of the king's council. This undifferentiated use of the word had, however, practically ceased by the reign of Richard II, if not earlier, and from 1377 the secretanus regis is the holder of a definite office in the king's household, the king's confidential clerk a whose primary function is the custody of the king's signet.
English Students at Padua, 1460-75.
Authors: Mitchell R. J.
Published: March 2007

Although Bologna was still the foremost studio in Italy, at least inthe study of law, Padua was by the mid-fifteenthcentury a strong rival, and foreign students were attractedthere and to Ferrara by the fame of Guarino da Verona. Indeed, the popularity of the studio of Ferrara was directlydue to the appointment of Guarino as the first Professor of Rhetoric there in 1436.
Some Proposed Legislation of Henry VIII
Authors: Plucknett T. F. T.
Published: March 2007

One of the most fascinating features in the study of the history of the common law as revealed in six centuries of law reports is the possibility of tracing the growth of legal thought over long periods of time; hints, suggestions, unsuccessful attempts to establish a rule or a doctrine often appear in such sources long before the innovation has received the final approbation of the courts, and so we are privileged to watch the progress of legal speculation, to overhear the debates upon new departures, and to estimate the forces which produced or obstructed some projected innovation. It is this possibility which gives such life and vividness to legal history. In many fields of thought we are mainly confined to those considered statements of results which have been deliberately left to us by philosophers, theologians, or politaical theorists, but the historian of the common law has more intimate and more human material at his disposal.
The Holles Family
Authors: Wood A. C.
Published: March 2007

Gervase Holles, the Lincolnshire Antiquary (1607–75), was the representative of a junior branch of that family which acquired the Earldom of Clare from James I, produced the famous Denzil Holies, and in 1694 was elevated to the Dukedom of Newcastle. Gervase was a keen student of genealogy, heraldry, records and antiquities, and it was his ambition, inspired perhaps by the work of his friend, Sir William Dugdale, on Warwickshire, to produce an account “both historicall and genealogical” of his own native county.
The Inauguration Ceremonies of the Yorkist Kings and their Title to the Throne
Authors: Armstrong C.A.J.
Published: March 2007

CEREMONIAL played an important part in the actions of the Yorkist kings. Their sumptuary laws and the incorporation of the minstrels and later of the heralds are examples of the concern felt by Edward IV and Richard III for the outward forms of public life. Of especial interest are those solemnities by means of which the Yorkist dynasty announced its possession of the crown. Ceremonies such as these provide what may be called the iconography of kingship.
The English Exiles in Holland during the Reigns of Charles II and James II
Authors: Walker James
Published: March 2007

The United Provinces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the refuge of the oppressed of Western Europe. From the days of the Marian persecutions, considerable numbers of English exiles were to be found jostling one another in the busy street of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, wandering penniless along the quiet avenues of The Hague or seeking freedom in the more desolate expanses of Zealand. Reasons for the popularity of Holland as an asylum are not far to seek. In an age when religious heterodoxy was a political crime, the freedom of worship permitted in Holland was eagerly taken advantage of. The refugees went to live among a people who encouraged such immigration as a means of increasing the material prosperity of their country. English pamphleteers attributed the flourishing condition of Holland to this policy. ‘Liberty of Conscience’, wrote Sir Charles Wolseley, ‘would be a more serious blow to Holland than all the victories yet gained.’ Another writer drew attention to the part played by the refugees from the tyranny of Mary and Laud, in building up the prosperity of Amsterdam.
St Dominic and his first biographer
Authors: Brooke C. N. L.
Published: March 2007

The Order of Preachers was created under the skilled direction of two great men: Dominic of Caleruega and Jordan of Saxony. Whatever else they may have been, both were brilliant organizers; they sketched between them the most sophisticated constitutional organization known to the Middle Ages; for good or ill, they created for us the idea and technique of committee government. Both, it is clear, had tidy and lucid minds. We know that Jordan wrote excellent Latin, was capable of making plain in a few words the nature of the casting vote in general chapter, and equally capable of communicating to his friend Diana Dandalo, and to us, the inwardness of spiritual friendship and the delight of missionary work among the students of Bologna and Paris, many of whom he gathered into the Dominican Order.
The Franchise of Return of Writs
Authors: Clanchy M. T.
Published: March 2007

Return of writs has been considered an essential privilege of the greater liberties in medieval England, because it entitled liberty-holders to exclude the sheriff and hence to execute royal writs through their own bailiffs. Maitland construed it thus when discussing borough privileges, and again when he included it among the powers of lords exercising ‘the highest justice’. Although return of writs had acquired this meaning by the time Edward I died, neither the king's lawyers nor liberty-holders understood it in this way in the thirteenth century. Each side interpreted it differently. The conflict which ensued has attracted little attention hitherto, yet return of writs can only be understood in its context. This struggle has also a wider significance, as it illuminates the attempts of Henry III and Edward I to impose a new definition of royal sovereignty on libertyholders. The present paper will argue that the franchise of return of writs was the product of conflict between king and magnates.
Roger de Montgomery and his Sons (1067–1102)
Authors: Mason J. F. A.
Published: March 2007

The object of this paper is to trace briefly the rise of a great Domesday tenant-in-chief (the only Norman to give a name to a county in the United Kingdom), to discuss in broad outline the shape and organization of his great honour in Domesday Book, and to follow the continued rise and sudden fall of the Montgomery family in the years after 1086. Attempts will be made to discuss various problems in the family's story as they occur.
The Discussion of Imperial Problems in the British Parliament, 1880–85
Authors: Cumpston I. M.
Published: March 2007

Gladstone came to office for his second ministry in May 1880, after fight marked by bitter strife and uncompromising temper on both sides. The Times considered it the hottest political struggle ever known in this country. The Liberal Government with their large majority came into office in a mood of concentration on domestic legislation and the belief that external affairs had hitherto received too much attention. The Conservatives for their part claimed that, if a minority, they were compact and inspirited. The Opposition, although weak, would be resolute.
The English Borough in the Thirteenth Century
Authors: Martin G. H.
Published: March 2007

The thirteenth century was a crucial time in the history of the English borough. It saw towns at the height of their prosperity before the calamities of depression and plague, and the last burst of town-making until the spas of the seventeenth century inaugurated our present urban society. It saw an apparent attempt by Edward I's government to define a hierarchy of towns, in which that which was not a borough would be seen plainly to be something else. It marks the time during which the continental commune was tamed and assimilated to English politics, and commune, gild and portmanmote fused together, in as many different ways as there were boroughs, to make the communities for which the Common Law had evolved the doctrine of incorporation. It also produced for us the first substantial quantity of original records written in the towns themselves, records which are from that time onward our principal source of information about municipal affairs. The purpose of this paper is to display the nature and scope of borough archives before 1300, both as a guide to the mass of material that survives from later centuries, and as a commentary upon the thirteenth-century borough. It is confined to those towns, such as the shire boroughs of Domesday Book, which may be presumed to have recruited their own clerks, and not, like the numerous enfranchised manorial towns of this time, to have had someone else provide them.
Latin Syria and the West, 1149–1187
Authors: Smail R. C.
Published: March 2007

Historians of the crusades have given most of their attention to the major crusading expeditions, especially to the first, and to the surface history of the Latin states in Syria, especially to that of the kingdom of Jerusalem. They have shown less interest in those conditions in western Europe from which all crusading activity grew. It is true that the roots of the movement prior to the First Crusade were traced by Erdmann in a magisterial study which remains the most important contribution made to the subject during the present century. But the First Crusade was not the end of the matter. European sentiment about the crusades and the Latin states continued to develop during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond. Even in the twelfth century there was a body of opinion which was highly critical of crusading activity and this grew in the course of time; but the main weight of conventional opinion in the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth century came to accept the crusade, and the maintenance or recovery of Latin possession of the Holy Places, as a Christian responsibility.
Philip II and the Papacy
Authors: Lynch J.
Published: March 2007

The view that Philip II was the secular arm of the Counter-Reformation still survives. It is based on the assumption that his own words and claims must be taken at their face value, and on the fallacy that because the religious motive was sometimes present in Spanish policy, therefore it was always present and was the most important motive. The popes he had to deal with took a different view. They considered that Philip II, like his predecessors, used his prestige as a Catholic sovereign to pursue objectives that were essentially political. A characteristic summary of the papal view of Philip II's foreign policy was given in 1589 with reference to his ambitions in France: ‘The King of Spain, as a temporal sovereign, is anxious above all to safeguard and to increase his dominions … The preservation of the Catholic religion which is the principal aim of the Pope is only a pretext for His Majesty, whose principal aim is the security and aggrandisement of his dominions’. It is true that Sixtus V had a deep and personal aversion to Spain and a low estimate of its king, but these opinions were not peculiar to one pope. There were conflicts between Philip II and almost every pope with whom he dealt, which makes it impossible to explain those conflicts in terms of personalities and points to some deeper and more permanent cause.
London and Edward I. (The Alexander Prize Essay.)
Authors: Williams Gwyn A.
Published: March 2007

Early in the summer of 1285 Edward I announced that he was sending John de Kirkby and a special commission of judges to the Tower to examine the state of public order in London. On 10 June, nineteen days before their coming, he issued letters patent: the area around St Paul's, he asserted, had become the haunt of thieves and vagabonds, and he empowered the Cathedral to enclose and incorporate it in the churchyard. The ‘area around St Paul's’ was nothing less than the site of the folk-moot and the muster. The moot was the primal city assembly, the muster the characteristic expression of communal patriotism. By this time, it is true, neither was much more than an institutional fossil, but both were integral and basic components of civic tradition. The sites were the city's freehold and there had been no preliminary inquest of any kind. As late as the Iter of 1321, when Hamo de Chigwell tried to reverse the decision, the affront still rankled.
The Government of Tyneside, 1800–1850
Authors: McCord N.
Published: March 2007

The infliction of such a parochial topic on this Society may smack of temerity. My apology must be that the emergence of the first modern industrial societies is one of the most important of all historical developments, and that the experience of each of the areas involved is worthy of the historian's meticulous scrutiny.
The Prothero Lecture: Sir George Prothero and his circle
Authors: Crawley C. W.
Published: March 2007

It is an accident of birth that has brought to a retired College Tutor the honour of giving the first Prothero lecture. To declare my interest at once, it happens that Sir George Prothero's wife was my mother's sister; both my parents died before my sister and I could remember them. We occasionally stayed as children with the Protheros at 24 Bedford Square, but I hardly began to know my uncle better until I was an undergraduate in the last three years of his life, and I was still too raw to get much deeper than the sense that here was a quiet, dignified man, obviously distinguished but overworked and tired. He died in 1922 at the age of 73. There were no children. Before she died in 1934, Lady Prothero gave me the diaries which he had kept with hardly a break for fifty years, and some bundles of letters to him, mostly 1914–18.I am ashamed to say that I hardly did more than skim these diaries and letters until, after my retirement, I was asked by this Society's Council to look over the papers and letters which Prothero had bequeathed to the Society. These came to it on his widow's death, along with most of his historical library, and with his residuary estate.
Cardinal Beaufort—Patriot or Usurer?
Authors: Harriss G. L.
Published: March 2007

Even in his lifetime Henry Beaufort was a controversial figure. The Londoners envied his wealth and detested his policies; Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, denounced him as an ambitious schemer and a traitor; both pope and king punished him for his disobedience. Yet more than once he was extolled in parliament for his generosity, loyalty, patriotism and wisdom in affairs of state. These official encomiums preserved his reputation for a generation after his death. Upon them Stubbs built his pic ture of the cardinal as the defender of the Lancastrian constitu tion, the maintainer of Henry V's conquests and the wise seeker after a timely peace. ‘Far sighted and patriotic in his counsels’, he became ‘the mainstay of his house’, ‘ready to sacrifice his wealth and labour to the king’. It was scarcely Beaufort's fault that, at his death, the tokens of Lancaster's fall were already apparent. A different, less favourable, view originated with Edward Hall and was popularized by Shakespeare. In the scheme of retributive justice with which the new historiography clothed the Wars of the Roses, the cardinal and his family appeared as the principal fomenters of dissension. Hall's own detestation of Wolsey added a touch of venom to his strictures on the pride and avarice of Wolsey's predecessor.
Presidential Address: Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing 1. The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth
Authors: Southern R. W.
Published: March 2007

I hope the Society will not think that I am wasting its time in taking the European tradition of historical writing as the general theme of the addresses that I am required to deliver during my term of office. Although there have been many studies of the wide range of problems that fall under the general heading of historiography, the study of the aims, methods and limitations of the historians of the past has been somewhat neglected, in this country at least. There are of course some conspicuous exceptions. The historical attitudes and aptitudes of St Augustine, Gibbon and Macaulay have been examined again and again. But outside the great names comparatively little has been done to examine historical works for what they can tell us about the way in which historical writing is affected by the intellectual presuppositions and environment of the writer. As historians we are generally content to use the chronicles and histories of the past quite simply as quarries of facts that require to be sifted and purified to make them usable for our purposes, but do not require any profound investigation of the principles of selection, emphasis or composition that determined their preservation. This is how Stubbs dealt with the many chronicles that he edited so admirably. They were the raw material for his own works and those of other historians. He examined them for reliability, and he asked whether they provided new facts that could not be found elsewhere.
Edward I and the Proposed Purchase of English Law for the Irish, c. 1276–80
Authors: S.J. Aubrey Gwynn
Published: March 2007

AS far back as 1877 H. S. Sweetman brought to the notice of Irish scholars a letter which Robert de Ufford, justiciar Ireland, wrote to Edward I in 1277 and the king's answer. The justiciar told the king that ‘the Irish offer 7,000 marks for a grant from the king of the common laws of the English, and much desire to have an answer thereupon’. In his reply the king said that he had deliberated with his council, and that ‘it seemed meet to them that a grant of English laws should be made, because the laws which the Irish use are detestable to God and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed laws’. But it was first necessary to obtain the common consent of the people, or at least of well-affected prelates and magnates of Ireland; and the justiciar was accordingly instructed to hold a conference and ascertain the opinion of such suitable persons.
The Anglo-French Peace Negotiations, 1390–1396. The Alexander Prize Essay
Authors: Palmer J. J. N.
Published: March 2007

The most surprising feature of the Anglo-French negotiations of this period was that they ended in failure. The English king's enthusiasm for peace is too well-known to require comment. It is less often recognized that the French were equally eager. In an official memorandum drawn up for their ambassadors in 1390 it was stated that:

… en traictie de paix dentre si grans princes que les roys de france et dangleterre communement toutes rancunes et offences sont remises dune part et dautre, et retourne chacun en son ancien heritage.
Bentham and the French Revolution
Authors: Burns J. H.
Published: March 2007

God Almighty predestinated me to be the ame damnèe of France.’ So wrote Jeremy Bentham on 9 June 1789. It was a moment of frustration for a man who already felt a great opportunity slipping away from him. Opportunity above all was what the French Revolution meant for Bentham. Forty when the States General were summoned, he had for twenty years been convinced of his genius for legislation. Much of that time he had spent upon an immense but never completed Code of law. In 1785 he had gone to Russia, to join his brother Samuel and (he hoped) lay his Code before the Empress Catherine. But Catherine never saw either the Code or its author. Bentham remained secluded in western Russia, translating his work into French; and when the empress visited the district he stayed—stubbornly diffident—in his cottage.
David II and the Government of Fourteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Webster Bruce
Published: March 2007

Any attempt to discuss the reign of David II of Scotland is bound to be patchy and unsatisfactory because the evidence itself is so. There is for instance no good chronicle of the period. It is true that John of Fordun left some notes on the reign, through which he had lived; but his history was so largely de-voted to remoter and even mythical periods that he never worked up these notes into the history of his own times that he could have written. Later writers all based their work on his; they embroidered on what he wrote, but could not fill in the gaps. Hence the accounts that have survived of the reign consist of a number of isolated incidents rather than a continuous and intelligible narrative. Many more details can be discovered in the records of government, such as the Register of the Great Seal, the Exchequer Rolls, and the large number of surviving texts of the documents issued by David II; but these are again isolated scraps of evidence. What is missing is the framework into which this evidence needs to be fitted.
Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence
Authors: Grierson Philip
Published: March 2007

When Pirenne contributed an article entitled ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’ to the first issue of the Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire in 1922, he can have little realized how the ideas he there put forward were to be developed. His paper was designed as a protest against the traditional and deep-rooted conviction of western scholars that Latin Christendom was the direct and almost the sole heir of classical antiquity. Its argument was the now familiar one that Greco-Roman society survived with little change the shock of the Germanic invasions, and that it was only the appearance of Islam upon the scene that pushed the centre of Latin Christendom away from the Mediterranean and made possible the emergence of a new cultural unit based upon the land mass of western Europe. Medieval Christendom was not a continuation of the Roman world but something new, and Muhammed was a necessary precursor of Charlemagne
The Career of a Political Bishop: Adam de Orleton (c. 1279–1345)
Authors: Usher G. A.
Published: March 2007

Thomas Fuller summarized our subject with brisk and depres-sing confidence:

’This is he so famous in history for cutting off the life of King Edward the Second…he made much bustling in the land, passing through the bishoprics of (Hereford), Worcester and Winchester, and died at last, not much lamented, July 18th, 1345.’
The Negotiations between Charles II and the Cardinal de Retz, 1658–59
Authors: Routledge F.J.
Published: March 2007

AT the beginning of April 1658, Charles II‘s most intimate advisers were giving up their hopes of an English rising and a royalist expedition from Flanders backed by Spanish arms. They now turned their thoughts in two other directions. The meeting of the long-drawn-out Imperial Diet at Frankfurt had given the English exiles in the Spanish Netherlands reason to believe that the house of Austria, in order to prevent further French interference in German affairs, would give support to the house of Stuart as a convenient and easy way of embarrassing Louis XIV's ally, Oliver Cromwell. It was also recollected that the Cardinal de Retz and Charles II had already had dealings with each other in Paris in 1652, so that the now-exiled Cardinal was considered as a suitable intermediary to secure Catholic support. When the postponement of the invasion of England was finally decided by the middle of the month, the crestfallen English Royalists were told that their king intended to go to Frankfurt to treat in person with the Electors. The Comte de Marchin, on whom Charles had recently bestowed the Order of the Garter, had preceded him with letters of compliment to the Elector of Mainz and the Spanish ambassador, the Conde de Peñaranda. This plan did not develop very far and, by June, a visit by the king to Spain was being hopefully encouraged by Henry Bennet, the royalist ambassador in Madrid.
The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell
Authors: Elton G. R.
Published: March 2007

TWO views are current concerning the political views of Thomas Cromwell. One—the more common—holds that he believed in absolute monarchy and desired to establish it in England. The Abbé Constant, summarizing (as was his wont) other people's views in language free from other people's reservations, stated it most starkly: he thought that Cromwell aimed at making Henry ‘tout-puissant’ and that his ministry was the golden age of Tudor despotism. Quite recently, an ingenious theory, buttressed with a misunderstood document, based itself on this general conviction. This view has suffered curiously little from the growing realization that the Henrician Reformation rested on conscious co-operation with Parliament and that the propagandists of the time never produced a theory of absolute monarchy. Pollard, the defender of Henry VIII's constitutionalism, seems to have held that, though the king had no ambitions for a genuine despotism, Cromwell certainly harboured such ideas. The other view, recently given support by Dr. Parker, holds that Cromwell did not bother at all about theoretical issues, that his ‘resolutely Philistine type of mind’ despised political theory, and that he never thought beyond the establishment of a sovereign monarchy. Thus, too, Mr. Baumer thought that Cromwell saw in Parliament ‘only a means of executing the royal will’, but also that he ‘had no theoretical views whatever about the relation of the king to the law’—passages hard to reconcile but suggestive of Dr. Parker's views rather than M. Constant's.
War and Finance in the Anglo-Norman State
Authors: Prestwich J. O.
Published: March 2007

Money', wrote Richard FitzNeal in the preface to the Dialogue of the Exchequer, ‘appears necessary not only in time of war but also in peace. In war it is poured out in fortifying castles, in soldiers’ wages and in numerous other ways, depending on the nature of the persons paid, for the preservation of the kingdom. In time of peace, the Treasurer added, money was spent on charitable purposes; but it is clear from even die limited evidence of the Pipe Rolls of Henry II that expenditure on defence greatly exceeded that on charity.
The Formation of the Coalition Cabinet of 1852
Authors: Stuart C. H.
Published: March 2007

‘Quel grand ministère!’ wrote Princess Lieven to Lord Aberdeen on 26 December 1852. ‘Mais quel curieux spectacle, vous, Lord John, Lord Palmerston! Qui est le fou qui eût osé prédire cette trinité?’

The princess's surprise at this alliance was shared by her contemporaries, among whom the old Tory Lord Londonderry could hardly contain his indignation, writing of it to Clarendon as ‘this grandissima Coalition-Composition (which either seems to have dropped from the skies or been conjured in the regions below)’, and adding that ‘so utterly meretricious … and apparently indelicate and inexplicable alliance was never before contemplated, much less seen’. It is true that some form of alliance had long been expected as the logical solution to the problem of weak minority government that had persisted since 1846, but it was not envisaged in the form, which it ultimately took in December 1852, of an all-embracing union of the Whigs and the former followers of Peel. As late as February 1852 Gladstone had spoken of union with the Whigs as the ‘least natural position’ for Peel's followers, and his opinion was shared by others.
Louis XIV and the Origins of the War of the Spanish Succession
Authors: Thomson M. A.
Published: March 2007

On 16 November 1700, Louis XIV publicly announced that his second grandson, Philip, duke of Anjou, was to succeed Charles II of Spain as the ruler of all the latter's dominions. On 15 May 1702, England, the Dutch re-public, and the emperor all declared war on France; England and the Dutch republic then also declared war on Spain, although they had recognized Philip as king; the emperor, however, who had not done so, declared war, not on Spain, but on the duke of Anjou and his adherents. If, then, Louis's action in November 1700 made war inevitable, it is curious that these declarations were so long in coming.
Archbishop John Stafford
Authors: Jacob E. F.
Published: March 2007

The English bishops of the fifteenth century seldom arouse the historian's enthusiasm. They seem, like their registers, too concerned with ecclesiastical routine, too governmental and orthodox for any that might still expect to find elements of heroism in the later medieval Church. John Stafford is a fair example. He has suffered from the dislike of Thomas Gascoigne and in later times from the coolness of Bishop Stubbs. Gascoigne, who suspected his origins, charged him with begetting offspring by a nun;1 Stubbs, more anxious to be fair, concluded that ‘if he had done little good, he had done no harm.’2 Sir James Ramsay, who admitted his administrative ability, wrote of him as ‘a Beaufort partisan’,3 while Mr Kingsford was cautious and noncommittal.4 Now Stafford was one of Chichele's best lawyers and a close associate: he was also the successor strongly recommended to the pope by the archbishop, and in 1443 the succession to Canterbury was no passing matter.
Profit-and-Loss Accountancy at Norwich Cathedral Priory
Authors: Stone E.
Published: March 2007

Manorial accounts by their existence reflect, somewhat after the event, an administrative revolution that almost swept away the firmarii characteristic of an earlier stage in the management of large estates. During the greater part of the thirteenth century and of the next, lords (or their advisers) generally seem convinced that to manage their manors through fully accountable local officials was preferable to the familiar alternative of committing the property to men whose responsibility would be limited to producing a stipulated annual return. In the thirteenth century, also, many of these lords—monastic lords perhaps especially—displayed a remarkable readiness, sometimes a positive enthusiasm, to undertake the trouble and risks of demesne husbandry, instead of letting their demesnes entire or piecemeal to tenants. This addiction to demesne husbandry, though it may have weakened before the close of the century, persisted in the next; it survived the first consequences of the Black Death and was not widely given up until the last
thirty years of the fourteenth century.
Emperor Charles VI: The Early Years of the Reign
Authors: Stoye J. W.
Published: March 2007

The second decade of the eighteenth century in Europe was an era of administrative experiment and reform. In certain respects, these were as impressive as the measures ofso-called ‘enlightened’ absolutists after the Seven Years War. The earlier, like the later, period discloses the attempt of governments to undo the consequences of prolonged warfare; in this case, also, in some areas, to soften the fearful effects of disease which decimated populations and their livestock in 1710–14, during the last major visitation of bubonic plague in the history of central Europe. Peter the Great tried to give a more settled form to the changes hastily improvised to take the strain of his war with Sweden. Frederick William I set to work on those schemes which led to the resettlement of derelict areas in East Prussia, and to the organization of the General Directory. In France, leaving aside the abortive constitutional reaction afterLouis XIV's death, the gigantic problem of the debt was tackled by orthodox financiers and administrators as well as by John Law. In this setting, it seems worth asking whether the Austrian Habsburgs, faced by similar problems, sought similar remedies. Such an inquiry may help to give a clearer picture of the main outlines of European development immediately after 1713, in the period which is still occasionally regarded as a featureless interim between the fiercer climaxes of the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War on the one hand, and the age of Frederick, Catherine and Maria Theresa on the other.
The King's Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England
Authors: Morgan D. A. L.
Published: March 2007

The rise and fall of the house of York is a story which sits uneasily towards both revolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, in general, attempts to tidy away the political process of Lancastrian and Yorkist times into the displacement of one type of régime by another always fail to convince. They do so because as a régime neither Lancaster nor York kept still long enough to be impaled on a categorical definition. The political life and death of both dynasties composes the pattern, changing yet constant, of a set of variations on the theme of an aristocratic society pre-dominantly kingship-focused and centripetal rather than locality-focused and centrifugal. In so far as the political process conformed to the social order, the households of the great were the nodal connections in which relationships of mutual dependence cohered. Those retinues, fellowships, affinities (for the vocabulary of the time was rich in terms overlapping but with nuances of descriptive emphasis) have now been studied both in their general conformation and in several particular instances; I have here attempted for the central affinity of the king over one generation not a formal group portrait but a sketch focused on the middle distance of figures in a landscape. The meagreness of household records in the strict sense is a problem we must learn to live with. But it would seem sensible to make a virtue of necessity and follow the life-line of what evidence there is to the conclusion that if an understanding of the household is only possible by attending to its wider context, so an understanding of that wider political scene requires some attention to the household.
The French Origins of the ‘Right’
Authors: Roberts J. M.
Published: March 2007

Modern political history begins with the French Revolution. This is not merely because the Revolution began a diffusion of institutional innovations—universal suffrage, rights of association and publication, and so forth—which have been the political shibboleths of advanced societies ever since. It is also that there then appears the modern vision of politics. The term ‘vision’ is deliberately chosen, because it does not imply any necessary or objective correlation with the facts of political life. It is a name for a chosen way of seeing things, a persuasive account of the facts, not the facts themselves. Intransigent opponents have been able to agree on this vision and in finding it inspiring or clarifying. Its essence is a presentation of politics as a struggle between two enduring forces or principles. Sometimes these forces are sharply contrasted, sometimes they are only the opposite ends of a spectrum whose middle ground makes precise distinctions hard (though never impossible). Such modifications of the model do not matter; it is the enduring conflict which is crucial. Whatever names they bear—progress and reaction, liberalism and conservatism, movement and order, Left and Right—in this vision these principles are always at war, and that is what politics is about.
Southern Irish Unionism: A Study of Cork Unionists, 1884–1914 (The Alexander Prize Essay)
Authors: d'Alton Ian
Published: March 2007

August The Fifth, 1914, was a cool, windy day at Mitchels-town. County Cork: but the guests at the houseparty in the Castle were not really conscious of the chilly breeze that whisked the clouds over the tops of the Galtee mountains that stood towering behind the Castle. Here during the afternoon the guests moved about the sunny, gusty terraces and talked, in little low groups, of the War. In retrospect, however, both this garden-party and those who attended it have a significance, dramatic and historical. August the fifth was the day after the War broke out; the garden-party was one of the last ever held in the Castle; and it was not a very ordinary group of people who talked of the War, and of whether its coming would avert the calamity of Home Rule.
The Emergence of an Urban Ideology at Florence c. 1250–1450
Authors: Holmes George
Published: March 2007

Every city must in a sense have a city culture. Florence, however, was the only place in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers. Much of the modern historical interest in Florence has centred around these ideas which emerged in the first half of the fifteenth century, the more so because even the innovations in the visual arts introduced at the same time by Donatello and his contemporaries are in part a by-product of them. The theme which I would like to develop in this paper therefore is the relationship between the city society and its ideology. This is of course a very old and well-worn theme. One of the common presuppositions of Renaissance historiography has been the understandable assumption that the ideology fitted the city, and a good deal of historical analysis has been applied to identifying the congruences between them and illustrating the growth of the humanist school out of the circumstances of Florentine life. The ideology, however, was created in the early fifteenth century, at the end of the period which I am going to discuss, when Florence had already been a great centre of industry and commerce and an independent republic for a very long time. Fruitful as it has been, this approach therefore leaves one with the disquieting feeling that a place which has been for so long and so conspicuously a centre of throbbing urban life ought to have had its ideological revolution much earlier, particularly since economic historians have emphasized the elements of commercial contraction rather than expansion in the early Renaissance period. Some historians have found themselves driven into the paradoxical position of regarding the early Renaissance as a symptom of economic decline. I would therefore like to look at the old theme obliquely by deflecting attention from the great innovations themselves and concentrating it on the factors which favoured or hindered ideological innovation in the century and a half before they appeared.
The Role of Religion in the Cultural Structure of the Later Victorian City
Authors: Kent J. H. S.
Published: March 2007

One obviously cannot make generalizations covering all the towns and cities of late nineteenth-century England. London was a case by itself; Liverpool a very different port from Bristol; an industrial town like Rochdale seems very remote from Dorchester. Nor is it possible to give a single brief definition of a city, though many have tried. ‘Just as there is no single form of the pre-industrial city,’ wrote R. E. Pahl, ‘urbanization as concentration of population does not lead to any single pattern of class action and conflict.’ Attempts to provide a definition of a city culminate in David Riesman's comment that the city is what we choose to make it for the purposes of analysis. One has to accept that Bristol, Dorchester, Rochdale and Liverpool were towns without exaggerating what they had in common.
The First Earl of Shaftesbury's Colonial Policy
Authors: Rich E. E.
Published: March 2007

Almost forty years ago Professor H. E. Egerton, him-self a pioneer in the modern study of imperial history, delivered to this society a paper on ‘The system of British colonial administration of the Crown colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. He opened with the warning that ‘The most learned of historians would find it difficult to add much to the sum of knowledge in treating the subject of my paper.’ 1 The warning still stands; there is little new knowledge to be gleaned, for this is a well-tilled field.
The Folvilles of Ashby-Folville, Leicestershire, and their Associates in Crime, 1326–1347
Authors: Stones E. L. G.
Published: March 2007

On a date which cannot be exactly discovered in 1340 or early in 1341, a priest called Richard de Folville, who had long been notorious as a habitual criminal, took refuge from justice, with some of his followers, in the church of Teigh, Rutland, of which he had been rector for twenty years. After he had killed one of his pursuers, and wounded others, by arrows shot from within, he was at length dragged out and beheaded by Sir Robert de Colville, a keeper of the peace.2 In itself this sordid occurrence is of no special interest, but if we look into the long career of crime which ended thus, we may find that we have come upon something of wider significance. This Richard proves to have been one of six brothers who were all criminals, and their history has left a considerable mark in the records. Thanks to the work of a number of scholars in recent years, we now know a good deal about the apparatus of criminal jurisdiction in the earlier fourteenth century, but of what might be called the forces of disorder, indispensable though they were to the working of the system of justice, we are still very ignorant. ‘Who were the burglars, robbers, and murderers … the sleepers by day and wanderers by night? What was their political, social, and economic status?’ These questions, given here in the words of Professor Putnam, are the reason for devoting this paper to so narrow a subject as the history of one obscure midland family during the early years of Edward III.