bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
East Anglia and the Danelaw
Authors: Davis R. H. C.
Published: March 2007

IT has been, and still is, the considered opinion of many scholars that the freemen and sokemen who figure so prominently in the Domesday Survey of the northern and eastern counties of England were the descendants of the rank-and-file of the Danish armies of the ninth century. The theory is not based on any precise knowledge of Scandinavian peasant-society in the ninth century, but on the geographical distribution of the free peasantry in England. It was first propounded by E. W. Robertson in 1862:

In the Danelage, … omitting Yorkshirefrom the calculation, between a third and a fourth of the entire population were classified either as liberi homines or as socmen. … Free Socage, the very tenure of which is sometimes supposed to have been peculiarly a relic of Anglo-Saxon liberty, appears to have been absolutely unknown except among the Danes.
The Re-Establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663
Authors: Whiteman Anne
Published: March 2007

After a period of comparative neglect, the ecclesiastical history of the Restoration has recently again attracted the attention of historians. Dr.Bosher's Making of the Restoration Settlement has luminously exposed the politics by which the Church of England recaptured the establishment, and Mr. A. G. Matthews, by tracing the biographies of the Anglicans displaced during the Interregnum and the Non-Anglicans ejected after the king's return, has shown how changes in doctrine and discipline affected the ministry during these years. Here an attempt will be made to discuss another aspect of the re-establishment: its administrative reconstruction. Dr.Bosher has shown how the exigencies of politics led to the piecemeal restoration of Anglicanism, instead of the immediate ecclesiastical revolution which, from a legal point of view, could have been attempted. That the traditional episcopal administration was thereby eventually reconstructed is of course well known, but it seems worth asking what light the administrative records of certain dioceses can throw not only on the details of how this took place, but also on the structure and character of the revived system.
The Constitutional Position of the Great Lordships of South Wales
Authors: Otway-Ruthven A. J.
Published: March 2007

THE great lordships of the Welsh marches constituted a phenomenon not found elsewhere in the area subject to the kings of mediaeval England, and a comparison with the English palatinates and the great liberties of Norman Ireland reveals some very remarkable features. Many of the powers which the marchers exercised were no doubt taken over from the Welsh princes whom they displaced, but this does not in itself explain why they were able to retain such powers. In Ireland at the end of the twelfth century another Norman conquest produced another series of great liberties in which Norman lords displaced Celtic kings who had exercised the powers of independent rulers, but the lords of the liberties of Leinster, Meath or Ulster were subject to the control of the royal government at Dublin in the same way as the greater English liberties were subject to royal control, and never attained a degree of independence comparable with the position held by the marchers. The difference seems most easily explained as being due to the simple fact that the marcher position was in essentials established in the reign of Henry I, while the Norman conquest of Ireland occurred two generations later, at the time when Henry II was extending the control of the crown in so many directions.
The New Agriculture in Lower Normandy, 1750–1789
Authors: Davies Alun
Published: March 2007

ACCORDING to Lord Ernie, the period from 1750 to 1789 was, in spite of many dark features, the brightest period hitherto reached in the history of French husbandry, a period during which ‘we turn, as it were, from the sombre etchings of La Bruyère to the smiling pictures of Watteau’. It certainly was a time when the spirit of agrarian reform which was prevalent throughout Western Europe was blowing strongly in France, arousing great enthusiasms and aspirations. From the presses of France poured a spate of agricultural treatises, books and pamphlets deploring the existing agricultural system, proclaiming the virtues of the English system of capitalist farming, urging the emancipation of property and of sale from all restrictions in order to achieve increased production, higher profits, and the investment of more capital.
Presidential Address: Great Historical Enterprises. I. The Bollandists
Authors: Knowles M. D.
Published: March 2007

ON several occasions during the last twenty or thirty years students of the past have had their attention directed to the seventeenth century by historians of science and of scholarship. We have been told that we shall find there the authentic beginnings of the modern world, and that in that age reliance on the traditions and books of the past gives way to experiment, to analysis and to criticism. In the realm of history, there is a shift from the classical, literary traditions to the original sources and to official records, while the historical writings of the past are subjected to the new technique which for a hundred years had been applied to the literary masterpieces of the ancient world by a succession of great scholars from Valla and Erasmus to Scaliger and Casaubon. Certainly, in many ways the seventeenth century is more significant in the annals of historiography than is the century that followed. In England it is the age of Dodsworth, Dugdale, Twysden, Wharton, Wanley and Hearne. In France, it is the age of D'Achéry, Labbé, Ducange and the Maurists. In the part of the Netherlands that is now Belgium it is the age of the first Bollandists.
Great Britain and the Coming of the Pacific War, 1939–1941
Authors: Lowe Peter
Published: March 2007

In a mood of understandable frustration, the British minister in Bangkok sent a telegram to the head of the Far Eastern department of the Foreign Office in June 1941, referring to the tedious economic discussions he was conducting with the Thai government, saying:

I am disturbed by the contradictory tone of the telegrams sent to me from His Majesty's Foreign Office … Some of them breathe that broad and statesmanlike spirit which I have learnt to respect and admire over a period of nearly forty years. Others strike a shrill and petulant note which is new to me … I have an uneasy feeling that you people in Downing Street live in an ivory tower as regards Thailand …
Presidential Address: Tudor Government: The Points of Contact: I. Parliament
Authors: Elton G. R.
Published: March 2007

It is one of the functions of government to preserve in contentment and balance that society which it rules. Some of the tasks involved in that general purpose are familiar enough. Government exists to maintain peace in the nation—to prevent disturbance, punish crime, and generally ensure that people can lead their lives without threats from others. Government must therefore provide the means for resolving disputes peacefully: it must administer justice and be seen to do so. In addition, since no society can ever stand absolutely still, government is charged with the task of reviewing existing relationships—relationships of rights, duties, burdens and privileges—with an eye to supplying reform, that is, changes designed to keep the general balance and contentment from deteriorating. Most discussions of problems of government revolve around these points. Analysis has concerned itself with the machinery available for discharging these tasks, and assessment has concentrated on establishing the degree of success obtained.
Presidential Address: The Emergence of Majority Rule in English Parliamentary Elections
Authors: Edwards Goronwy
Published: March 2007

The emergence of majority rule in English parliamentary elections has a twofold interest. On the one hand it concerns the history of parliamentary government in England, and in that respect it is primarily an English affair. On the other hand, however, it is relevant also to a much broader theme. Maitland once said that one of the great books that remain to be written is The History of the Majority. There are a large number of historical phenomena which could illuminate that manysided subject. One such phenomenon is the election of representatives for the Englishand subsequently for the Britishparliament. Those elections have been going on with astonishing regularity for close upon seven hundred years. So they provide for the history of the majority one thread of development which, though only single, is at any rate both long and strikingly continuous.
The Mongols, the Turks and the Muslim Polity
Authors: Lewis Bernard
Published: March 2007

Ten years ago a well-known Swiss writer on Middle Eastern affairs published an article on patriotism and nationalism among the Arabs. Discussing the attitude of nationalists to the past, and their tendency to substitute fanciful constructions for serious history, he quotes ‘a high Syrian government official’ as saying, ‘in deadly earnest’: ‘If the Mongols had not burnt the libraries of Baghdad in the 13 th century, we Arabs would have had so much science, that we would long since have invented the atomic bomb. The plundering of Baghdad put us back by centuries.’
Presidential Address: Anglo-American Rivalries in Central America
Authors: Humphreys R. A.
Published: March 2007

Early in the seventeenth century an English or Scottish buccaneer settled with a few companions at the mouth of a river in a deserted section of the coast of Central America. The man's name was Wallace, called ‘Valis’ or ‘Balis’ by the Spaniards. The river to which he gave his name was the Belize river, and the settlement which he founded ultimately became, in 1862, the colony of British Honduras.
The Habsburgs and the Hungarian Problem, 1790–1848
Authors: Evans R.J.W.
Published: March 2007

ON 4 MARCH 1848 Hungarians were excitedly debating the devastating criticisms of their country's rulers pronounced before assembled members of the diet the previous day by the popular tribune, Lajos Kossuth, the culmination of a campaign of agitation which stretched back a decade and more. Kossuth called for a constitutional transformation, with a responsible ministry, full legal equality, and the abolition of all privilege. The following month his programme was conceded wholesale by the authorities, under pressure from the sans-culottes of Budapest, and prostrate before their own Viennese revolution—for Kossuth's speech had played a major part in unseating Metternich there. Six months later power passed to a fully secessionist Hungarian regime, in which Kossuth enjoyed near-dictatorial sway. The ensuing civil war, during which the dynasty was declared deposed, took a further year to contain; its outcome appeared to be a complete breakdown of mutual confidence between king and country.
Censorship, Propaganda and Public Opinion: The case of the Katyn Graves, 1943
Authors: Bell P. M. H.
Published: March 2007

THE SUBJECT of this paper is not the sombre story of the mass graves at Katyn, filled with the corpses of murdered Polish officers; nor will it deal directly with the question of who killed those officers. I approach these events in the course of research on the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy in Britain during the Second World War, and on the closely related matters of censorship and propaganda as practised by the British government in that period. The diplomatic crisis produced by the affair of the Katyn graves was one in which publicity was freely used as an instrument of policy—indeed sometimes policy and publicity were indistinguishable. Those who controlled British censorship and propaganda, and attempted to guide public opinion, were faced with acute and wideranging problems. It is the object of this paper to analyse those problems, to see how the government tried to cope with them, and to trace the reactions of the press and public opinion, as a case study in the extent and limitations of government influence in such matters.
Lord George Bentinck and the Protectionists: a lost cause?
Authors: Macintyre Angus
Published: March 2007

In The processes by which a political cause is defeated, there are significant, sometimes unexpected achievements. This proposition is as true of protectionism before and after the repeal of the corn laws as it is for example of Jacobitism or Gladstonian Home Rule. But while the supporters and fellow-travellers of free trade have had abundant attention, the protectionists have suffered from historical neglect redeemed in recent years only by the distinguished contributions of Robert Stewart and Travis Crosby. A certain absence both of historical sympathy and of interest in the arguments of the enemies of free trade has produced a widely-held view of the protectionists as mererevanchistesand political untouchables, ‘wild men of the right’ who had to be ‘dragged kicking and screaming from their last ditches’ while others made proper preparations for ‘a generation of bourgeois prosperity’. Norman Gash, the doyen of ‘the age of Peel’, while keenly aware of the mixed motives—intellectual, political and economic—which influenced men's conduct in 1845–6 and beyond, writes of the protectionists as ‘the dead weight’ of the conservative party: their cause was too monolithic, too representative of ‘a latent hostility to the other great interests of the country’, to form the basis of a national party; and their leader Lord George Bentinck was principally and destructively inspired by revenge.
Sir John Fielding and the Problem of Criminal Investigation in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Styles John
Published: March 2007

Eighteenth-Century England witnessed an extraordinary transformation in the capacity to disseminate information. Improvements in communications, particularly the turnpike roads and the postal service, together with the multiplication of printing presses and newspapers, underpinned what has been described as an ‘information explosion’. The changes which these developments wrought in the political and commercial life of the nation are increasingly familiar to historians. Their impact on eighteenth-century crime and policing is less so.
The British Civil Service and the War Economy. Bureaucratic Conceptions of the ‘Lessons of History’ in 1918 and 1945
Authors: Lee J. M.
Published: March 2007

Sir Edward Bridges, when he was trying in 1952 to guard against the dissolution of an official inquiry into economic organization which he hoped would establish a set of principles for civil servants to follow, sent a minute as Head of the Civil Service to the Cabinet Secretary which included a powerful rhetorical question: ‘If those of us who have lived all our working lives in Whitehall, and have studied the Whitehall organization, give up as hopeless all attempt to reform it from inside, then what hope is there of any reform in our time?’ In the context of Winston Churchill's return to power in October 1951, Bridges was implying that the new Prime Minister had unilaterally imposed his own conception of Cabinet organization on his official advisers, and ignored their claim that they could effectively design what was required. Churchill had in some sense broken a convention that senior civil servants were primarily responsible for the official side of what they called ‘the centre of the machine’.
Presidential Address: The Rise and Fall of English Landed Families, 1600–1800: II
Authors: Habakkuk John
Published: March 2007

The Lenthall family acquired Latchford in Oxfordshire by marriage in the fifteenth century and settled there. They were lesser gentry, but Thomas Lenthall was M.P. for Oxford in 1542 and John Lenthall—the elder brother of the Speaker of the Long Parliament—was made marshal of the King's Bench prison and knighted in 1616, and he married a daughter of the Temples of Stowe. Before the Civil War at least the family might be said to belong to the rising gentry. Sir John was alleged to be corrupt and extortionate as marshal, accepting money for the improper release of prisoners. But as early as 1645 he was being harried by his creditors, and a substantial part of the estate was under mortgage in the early 1660s. The debts do not appear to have arisen directly from the Civil Wars—in which the senior line of the family took no active part—but may have been the result of Sir John's exceptionally large family. In 1678 his grandson and successor, William, raised money by a method which indicated severe financial difficulties, the sale of an annuity for twenty-one years, and in 1679 his second wife's family found him a Parliamentary seat at Wallingford to enable him to evade his creditors. In the early 1680s the various debts on the estate were bought up by Sir John Cutler, the wealthy money-lender and the hero of Wycherley's Praise of Avarice, and in 1685 were consolidated in a single mortgage of all Lengthall's propery, including his profits from the King's Bench prison, for £12,000. The rate of interest was 5½ per cent, a high rate for the period, and after 1689 the interest fell into arrears, so that by 1700 there was owing on account of this debt over £20,000. In addition, in the 1690s William incurred judgment debts of some £6,500 to two Londoners, and in 1700 had to give these creditors a second mortage on his assets. Thus by 1700 the total of his debts was well in excess of the capital value of his property, and the income from the estate was in the hands of Sir John Cutler's executors and heirs who attempted to foreclose the equity of redemption in order to sell the estate. Their attempt was frustrated by the death in 1702—in the midst of these proceedings—of William without direct issue, but leaving as his legal heirs the descendants of his numerous aunts, some living beyond the sea and others, though in England, untraceable. For this reason two private Acts of Parliament were obtained vesting the equity of redemption of the Lenthall estate in trustees to sell in order to discharge the debts secured on it.
From King and Country to King or Country? Loyalty and Treason in the Revolt of the Netherlands: Read at the Society's Conference 10 September 1981
Authors: Duke Alastair
Published: March 2007

The ‘seventeen Netherlands’ owed their existence entirely to the energies of their rulers. Until 1548 when this hotchpot of duchies, counties and lordships was united in the Burgundian circle of the Empire, the boundaries of the Low Countries had expanded or contracted according to the military and diplomatic fortunes of their princes: there was nothing natural or inevitable about them. Charles V had, for example, threatened to annexe the prince-bishopric of Münster in 1534–5, as he had added Utrecht only a few years earlier. Nor can the incorporation of the duchy of Gelre in 1543 be considered the outcome of an ineluctable historical process. Since the late fifteenth century the rulers in the Low Countries had sought to assert their control over the duchy. But there had been times when it seemed as though Gelre, which looked Januslike both up and down the Rhine, might, in combination with Jülich and Cleves, have constructed a formidable anti-Habsburg constellation into whose orbit a large part of the northern Netherlands would be drawn.
Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: II, New Poor and New Rich.
Authors: Thompson F. M. L.
Published: March 2007

The notion that the great leviathans of wealth, who had for so long been accustomed to taking first place in a nation of snobs which contrived simultaneously to accept, admire, envy, and criticise their opulence, might actually become impoverished first began to gain some currency in the 1890s. True, this had been anticipated by a few specially pessimistic and debt–ridden landowners in the immediate anxieties aroused by the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Monson, who had inherited from a cousin estates liberally furnished with dowagers and other inescapable expenses, and who was in despair at the tendency of income to fall while outgoings remained fixed, exploded to his son in 1851: ‘What an infernal bore is landed property. No certain income can be reckoned upon. I hope your future wife will have Consols or some such ballast, I think it is worth half as much again as land’. A similar but more sober banker's view had been put by Evelyn Denison, a classic gentlemanly capitalist, in 1847 when he announced his intention to sell much of his land ‘not because I am of the class of encumbered landlords, for I have luckily extricated myself from that, but because I do not think it worth while to keep a security paying 2 per cent, when I can get an equally good one paying ’.
The Continuity of the English Revolution (The Prothero Lecture)
Authors: Dacre Lord
Published: March 2007

In our history, the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 are, at first sight, years of desperate, even meaningless change. It is difficult to keep pace with those crowded events or to see any continuity in them. At the time, men struggled from day to day and then sank under the tide. Even Oliver Cromwell, the one man who managed, with great agility, but spluttering all the time, to ride the waves, constantly lamented his inability to control them. When all was over, men looked back on the whole experience with disgust. It was a period of ‘blood and confusion’ from which no one had gained anything except the salutary but costly lesson of disillusion. How different from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that straightforward aristocratic revolt against a king who had so considerately simplified the issues, and ensured a quick neat result, by seeking to convert the nation, like himself, to Catholicism!
Prayers
Authors: Bossy John
Published: March 2007

In 1945, which is beginning to seem a long time ago, Dom Gregory Dix publishedThe Shape of the Liturgy. In the last two chapters of the book he expressed a view about the devotional and liturgical practice of the late Middle Ages which will provide a convenient starting-point for my subject. He said that the trouble about the medieval Mass was its separation of the ‘corporate offering’ assumed to have occurred in the primitive liturgy from the ‘priesthood of the priest’; the notion of worship it expressed, like the doctrine of the eucharist it exemplified, was ‘inorganic’. The effect of this was to let in, especially during the fifteenth century, non-liturgical, individualist forms of devotion which were unparticipatory and obsessed with historical facts about the life of Christ, notably with the facts of his Passion. ‘The quiet of low mass afforded the devout an excellent opportunity for using mentally the vernacular prayers which they substituted for the Latin text of the liturgy as their personal worship … The old corporate worship of the Eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind.’ Liturgical doing had subsided into inactive seeing and hearing, on the way to being engulfed in a miasma of private thinking and feeling. The Protestant reform of the liturgy amounted to pickling this pre-Reformation devotional tradition while dropping the ritual performance to which it had been loosely attached.
The English Monastic Cathedrals in the Fifteenth Century
Authors: Dobson Barrie
Published: March 2007

It might well appear an excessively abrupt change of pace to turn from Professor Bossy's topic to my own—to move from the most personal of all manifestations of individual Christian worship to the most formidably complex institutional corporations late medieval England has to offer for our contemplation. However, there is little about medieval monasticism, that ambivalent exercise in seeking one's own route to the divine but not in one's own company, which is quite what it seems. For perhaps no audiences in fifteenth-century England would have listened to Professor Bossy's lecture with greater fascination than the monastic communities of Canterbury, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester, and Worcester cathedrals. Not only did those Benedictine monks have an obligation to pray as assiduously as any religious in the country but they were also andipso factorequired to do so in the most public and exposed of all possible arenas, the formal prayer housespar excellenceas well as theecclesiae matricesof seven of late medieval England's nineteen dioceses. Precisely how those monks would have explained what they were doing when engaged in acts of communal and private prayer is no easy matter for a modern historian to surmise; but it seems certain that many of them must have been highly concerned about the purpose and quality of their devotions, not least because they could hardly have ignored the priority placed on theoratoriumandoratiowithin the Rule of St Benedict, to chapters of which they listened more or less attentively every day of their professed lives.
Women and Images of Women in the Spanish Civil War
Authors: Lannon Frances
Published: March 2007

At the end of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939, General Franco celebrated his victory by decreeing that full military honours be accorded to two statues of the Virgin Mary. The first was Our Lady of Covadonga, patron of the first great reconquest of Spain through the expulsion of Islam in the middle ages. Now, after removal by her enemies ‘the Reds’ during the Civil War, she had been restored to her northern shrine in Asturias, marking the completion of what the decree described as the second reconquest. The other statue was of Our Lady of the Kings (de los Reyes) in Seville, invoked—so the decree ran—during the battle of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571 and the battle of Bailén agaínst the French in 1808, and invoked once more in the first desperate days of the military rising in July 1936, when a victory for the ‘Red hordes’ in Seville might have changed the whole course of the war. In Covadonga and Seville, in the undefeated stronghold of the Virgin of the Pillar in Zaragoza, and across the length and breadth of the country, the Virgin Mary had saved Spain and deserved every honour and tribute. It was equally true that from far north to far south, Franco and his armies and his Nazi, Fascist, and Islamic allies had made Spain safe for the Virgin Mary. There would be no more desecrated churches, no more burned statues, no more banned processions, just as there would be no more socialists, anarchists, communists or democrats. Spain would be Catholic and authoritarian, and Spanish women could concentrate their energies on emulating Mary, and being good wives and mothers or nuns.
Gregory the Great's Europe
Authors: Markus R. A.
Published: March 2007

Gregory became pope in the summer of 590, to succeed his predecessor who had been carried away by the plague. Nearly fifty years had passed since the first outbreak of the plague in the time of Justinian. Let the plague serve as our signpost to a period of upheaval across Europe. If the 530s were the ‘age of hope’ a disastrous reversal began in the 540s. The succeeding half-century was a time of collapsing hopes and darkening horizons: the prospect of imperial reconquest and peace receding after 540, never to be more than ephemerally and precariously realized; the dreams of spiritual and political unification revealed as illusory; war, plague and the obscure workings of ‘demographic forces’ combined to turn the Italy of Boethius into that of Gregory the Great in the course of some sixty years. The contours of the societies of late Antiquity were becoming displaced to produce a new social landscape. Some of this transformation has left visible traces in our evidence and has been extensively studied; much of it has been concealed from us, either through lack of evidence or through failure to ask the right questions. It is only in recent years, to take one example, that the subtle shifts in Byzantine religiosity and political ideology discernible in the later sixth century have begun to cohere into something like a unified picture of a ‘new integration’ of culture and society in the towns of the Eastern Empire. How far the world of Western Europe was exposed to analogous changes may be a question impossible to answer; in any case, it needs approaching piecemeal and with the necessary discrimination of time and place.
From Strangers to Minorities in West Africa
Authors: Hargreaves J. D.
Published: March 2007

I am somewhat daunted by the honour of opening this conference; for what I have to offer is not the product of intensive scholarship but a broad and possibly contentious argument about the whole sub-continent of West Africa (roughly bounded by the Senegal river, Lake Chad and Mount Cameroon). My underlying hypotheses will be that many so-called minority problems in contemporary Africa derive from changes introduced by the creation of colonial states, rather than from some exotic African malady called ‘tribalism’ and that African experience over the last millennium may sometimes be more relevant to contemporary problems than the received wisdom of western political science. I have some fear that, to adapt a phrase of Sir Keith Hancock, these may prove no themes for scholars.
Religious Belief and Social Conformity: the ‘Converso’ Problem in Late-Medieval Córdoba
Authors: Edwards J. H.
Published: March 2007

The fact that Spain is, to date, the only western European country which has ever been an Islamic colony still seems to banish her to the fringe of her neighbours' historical consciousness. Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs rests with the Spaniards themselves. In most cases and in most periods, the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, used the Pyrenees as an intellectual, as well as a physical, barrier, and considered the Peninsula's problems as distinct from those of the rest of the European continent. A strong reason for adopting this approach is the remarkable co-existence of Islamic, Christian and Jewish civilization between 711 and 1492, which placed Spain and Portugal within both medieval Christendom and the Islamic world of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The successes of co-operation between the three religions which were achieved during this period are worthy of greater recognition than they generally receive, but the intention here is to investigate the causes of the failures which brought co-existence to an end, concentrating on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in a large, late-medieval Castilian town.
A Tale of Two Kings: Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready
Authors: Keynes Simon
Published: March 2007

IN the gallery of Anglo-Saxon kings, there are two whose characters are fixed in the popular imagination by their familiar epithets: Alfred the Great and ÆEthelred the Unready. Of course both epithets are products of the posthumous development of the kings' reputations (in opposite directions), not expressions of genuinely contemporary attitudes to the kings themselves: respective personalities. In the case of Alfred, it was the king’s own resourcefulness, courage and determination that brought the West Saxons through the Viking invasions, for it was these qualities, complemented by his concern for the well–being of his subjects, that inspired and maintained the people’s loyalty towards the king and generated their support for his cause. Whereas in the case of jEthelred, it was the king’s incompetence, weakness and vacillation that brought the kingdom to ruin, for it was these failings, exacerbated by his displays of cruelty and spite, that alienated the people and made them abandon his cause. Few historians, perhaps, would subscribe to such a view expressed as bluntly as that, and more, I suspect, would consider such comparisons to be futile and probably misconceived in the first place. I would maintain, however, that something is to be gained from the exercise of comparing the two kings in fairly broad terms: by juxtaposing discussions of the status of the main narrative accounts of each king’s reign we can more easily appreciate how their utterly different reputations arose, and see, moreover, that in certain respects the apparent contrast between them might actually be deceptive; by comparing the predicament in which each king was placed we can better understand how one managed to extricate himself from trouble while the other succumbed; and overall we can more readily judge how much, or how little, can be attributed to personal qualities or failings on the part of the kings themselves.
Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe
Authors: Pullan Brian
Published: March 2007

A quiet revolution has occurred of late in the history of poor people and poor relief in early modern Europe. Shapeless, decentralized and infinite, like the story of most everyday things, it has depended for progress on the laborious accumulation of local examples, garnered from patchy, weedy and erratically surviving evidence; and for vitality on cerebration which outstrips research, on hypo-theses which demand to be tested in a hundred detailed trials. Time was when sociologists and students of social legislation encouraged historians to believe that with the Reformation there developed fundamental differences in the ways in which the old and the new faiths treated their poor–variances which sprang essentially from the abandonment in the wake of Luther of the ancient belief that ‘good works’ (almsgiving included) offered to those who performed them a direct means of securing salvation. To compress is often to parody. But it can perhaps be said that the coming of Protestantism, in all its forms, was believed to have emancipated poor-relief from the control of a too-indulgent Church, which encouraged the almsgiver to think only of the benefit to his own immortal soul. In so doing the Church had allegedly destroyed all incentive to contrive a rational philanthropy—to build systems which would benefit the receiver of alms, which would serve the common weal, which would in general be directed at procuring good order and reducing physical want and suffering. Hence the Church was credited with a very low capacity for organization and even accused of breeding the very poor whom it relieved, by depriving them of all incentive to find employment and attain self-support.
Imperial Facade: Some Constraints Upon and Contradictions in the British Position in India, 1919–35
Authors: Brown Judith M.
Published: March 2007

THE Raj still has a peculiar fascination for the British public, judging by the stream of popular books, radio and television programmes whose constant themes are the panoply of empire and the life-style of imperial rulers. Among English-speaking historians, however, approaches to Britain's Indian empire have changed markedly in the last twenty years. By the 1950s ‘Imperial history’ was a thing of the past. Gone was its admiring concentration on the men who ruled India and their measures as a way of understanding political change in the subcontinent. Attention shifted to indigenous initiatives and growth points. At first the emphasis was on India's western educated as organizers and spokesmen of a new kind of overtly nationalist politics. In the late 1960s the focus altered to whole localities within the subcontinent as it became clear that the western educated were not elites divorced from local, more traditional societies, but were still subject to its pressures, influenced by its perceptions and involved in its webs of patronage and alliance. In such an environment apparently nationalist politics were shot through with conflicts and contraditions: they were only one aspect of diverse manoeuvres for influence in society and the state structure. In the present decade the wheel has almost come full circle. Imperial overlords again receive attention: not now as architects and guardians, but as elements essential in the analysis of the changing style and content of Indian politics to the extent to which they created the framework of political life, defined its categories, means and ends.
The French Colonialist Movement during the Third Republic: the Unofficial Mind of Imperialism
Authors: Andrew C. M.
Published: March 2007

British colonial expansion, it has been argued, was governed during the nineteenth century by the workings of the official mind. French colonial expansion was not. The official mind of French imperialism was slow to develop and at best half-formed. The first steps in the creation of the modern French Empire under the July Monarchy and Napoleon III followed no grand design or strategic obsession. Empire-building in Africa, Indo-China and the South Pacific proceeded instead by a series of fits and starts of whose significance successive governments were usually unaware. When the Third Republic embarked on colonial expansion in the 1880s, its policies proved almost as incoherent as those of precedessors. Intervention in Tunisia was swiftly followed by refusal to intervene in Egypt; a forward policy in Indo-China was first accepted, then violently rejected; in West Africa Army officers carved out a private empire on their own initiative. After 1880, however, French expansion at last acquired a clear sense of direction. French imperialism, in its final phase from 1890 to 1920, consciously pursued and substantially achieved a series of imperial grand designs; the unification of France's African Empire in the 1890s; the completion of Frenćh North Africa by the Moroccan protectorate in the early twentieth century; the acquisition of a Middle Eastern Empire and German West Africa during the First World War. These grand designs, however, were the product not of the official but of the unofficial mind of French imperialism. That unofficial mind forms the subject of this paper.
The Eighteenth–Century Debate on the Sovereignty of Parliament
Authors: Dickinson H. T.
Published: March 2007

I hope to show in this paper that the national debate in the press and in parliament about the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament is of crucial importance to a proper understanding of the politics and, still more, of the political ideology of eighteenth-century Britain. The significance that this doctrine had come to assume by the later eighteenth century becomes clearly apparent from any study of the dispute between Britain and the American colonies. In the final analysis the most serious point at issue between the mother country and her colonies rested on a fundamental disagreement over the nature and location of sovereignty. The majority of the ruling oligarchy in Britain saw parliament as the creator and interpreter of law and superior to any other rights or powers in the state. To the American colonists it appeared that the arbitrary and absolute power which Hobbes and Filmer had put in the hands of a king had been transferred to the whole legislature of King, Lords and Commons. In rejecting what they regarded as tyranny in another form, the colonists moved towards the concept of divided sovereignty with the people as the ultimate source of authority.
England, Scotland and Europe: the Problem of the Frontier
Authors: Hay D.
Published: March 2007

In what follows I propose to discuss certain questions concerning frontiers as they affect historians. Most of my time will be devoted to the Anglo-Scottish frontier, for the reason that it displays phenomena much more easily identified and documented than those associated with the frontiers of Europe. Some of the lessons one may draw from Anglo-Scottish frontier history are, moreover, of relevance elsewhere within the Continent, not only between countries but in some instances inside countries.
England and Europe: Utopia and its aftermath
Authors: Fenlon D. B.
Published: March 2007

The most celebrated product of the early English Renaissance was composed not in English but in Latin. It was conceived in Antwerp, completed in London, published in Louvain, and reprinted in Paris, Basle and Florence long before it was finally rendered into English, some sixteen years after its author had been executed. He was executed for refusing to adhere to the doctrine that the head of the Church was to be found in England, not in Europe.
Improvised Genocide? The emergence of the ‘Final Solution’ in the ‘Warthegau’
Authors: Kershaw Ian
Published: March 2007

The ‘Warthegau’—officially the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, with its capital in Posen (Poznan)—was the largest of three areas of western Poland annexed to the German Reich after the defeat of Poland in 1939. In the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ it plays a pivotal role. Some of the first major deportations of Jews took place from the Warthegau. The first big ghetto was established on the territory of the Warthegau, at Lodz (which the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt). In autumn 1941, the first German Jews to be deported at the spearhead of the combing-out process of European Jewry were dispatched to die Warthegau. The possibility of liquidating ghettoised Jews had by then already been explicitly raised for the first time, in the summer of 1941, significantly by Nazi leaders in the Warthegau. The first mobile gassing units to be deployed against the Jews operated in the Warthegau in the closing months of 1941. And the systematic murder of the Jews began in early December 1941 in the first extermination camp—actually a ‘gas van station’—established at Chelmno on the Ner, in the Warthegau.
Westminster and the Victorian Constitution
Authors: Quinault Roland
Published: March 2007

The British constitution is unwritten, but not unbuilt. The character of Britain's government buildings reflects the nature of its political system. This is particularly true with respect to the Houses of Parliament. They were almost entirely rebuilt after a fire, in 1834, which seriously damaged the House of Commons and adjacent buildings. The new Houses of Parliament were the most magnificent and expensive public buildings erected in Queen Victoria's reign. Their architectural evolution has been meticulously chronicled by a former Honorary Secretary of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Michael Port. But constitutionalists and historians have shewn little or no interest in the political character of the Victorian Houses of Parliament. Walter Bagehot, in his famous study, The English Constitution, published in 1867, made no reference to the newly completed Houses of Parliament. Likewise most modern books on Victorian political and constitutional history make no mention of die rebuilding.
Kings, Lords and Liberties in the March of Wales, 1066–1272
Authors: Davies R. R.
Published: March 2007

The lords of the March of Wales enjoyed a remarkable position within the dominions ruled by the kings of England in the thirteenth century. They were subjects of the king and held their lands, in Wales as in England, of him as feudal tenants; but within their Marcher lordships they claimed and exercised a measure of authority unsurpassed elsewhere within the king's dominions. The nature of that authority was not the subject of a contemporary treatise or of aquo warrantoinquiry; but that it was of the most comprehensive seems evident enough. Within his lordship the Marcher lord was governor and universal landlord; only the lands and the affairs of the church lay beyond his reach. Jurisdictionally his competence was equally wide. Contemporary lawyers characterized it curtly by referring to the March as an area in which the king's writ did not run. That was to express the point negatively and inadequately. The clerks of the royal chancery put it more clearly and positively later when they declared that a Marcher lord was to enjoy ‘all royal rights, prerogatives and customs belonging to royal lordships, and all royal courts and other jurisdictions, … an authentic seal for commissions, writs and warrants, and power of appointing justices to hold sessions in eyre and other sessions and courts’.
Piracy or Policy: the Crisis in the Channel, 1400–1403. The Alexander Prize Essay
Authors: Ford C. J.
Published: March 2007

The opening years of the fifteenth century witnessed an outburst of lawlessness at sea of such intensity that legitimate commerce between the kingdoms of France and England, and their allies, all but ceased. Official contemporary sources seem to leave no doubt as to the causes of this outburst. The truce conservators of the two kingdoms were in full agreement in placing the blame for the outrages against merchant shipping on the activities of ‘piratae’, ‘depraedatores’ and ‘banniti’, outlaws working without the sanction and beyond the control of their governments. Modern authorities have accepted this ‘official’ explanation without question.
The Cartographic Image of ‘The Country’ in Early Modern England
Authors: Morgan Victor
Published: March 2007

Some four hundred years ago this month Stephen Limbert, master of Norwich School, stood before the gates of the Great Hospital and addressed his well-turned Latin phrases to an audience almost as eminent as that gathered here today. Elizabeth I and her mobile summer court were on progress, and Norwich, the second city of the kingdom and capital of a region that was both the agricultural and manufacturing heartland of England, was determined to impress its monarch with both its loyalty to the Tudor dynasty and its contribution to the common weal—so it hired an impecunious London hack, sometime soldier and court hanger-on, Thomas Churchyard, to write the script. In part, at least, this no doubt accounts for the frequently reiterated commonplaces of Elizabethan propaganda embodied in such of those pageants and speeches as survived the intermittent downpours that sent both Her Majesty and her municipal hosts scurrying for cover on more than one occasion during her visit. Neither did Master Limbert's disquisition differ in its enthusiasm for Elizabethan rule from those of his metropolitan confrère. ‘It is reported’, he told Her Majesty, ‘that Aegypte is watered with the yerely overflowing of the Nilus, and Lydia with the golden streame of Pactolus, whyche thing is thought to be the cause of the greate fertilytye of these countries: but uppon us, and farther, over all Englande, even into the uttermoste borders, many and maine rivers of godlynesse, justice and humilitie, and other inumerable good things … do most plentifully gush out … from that continuall and most aboundaunt welspring of your goodnesse … With what prayses shall wee extoll, with what magnificent wordes shall we expresse, that notable mercie of your Highnesse, most renowned Queene’, sentiments that earned the former Norwich schoolmaster the Queen's invitation to kiss her ungloved hands, and sentiments that direct our attention to the symbols and image-creating aspects of the political culture of renaissance England.
The Social Context of the Templars
Authors: Barber M. C.
Published: March 2007

Replying, on 13 January 1308, to letters of Philip IV of France describing the arrest of the Templars, Albert of Habsburg, King of the Germans, after expressing the customary sadness at the turn of events and extolling his own role as the leading prince in defence of the faith, remarked that although a crime of such evil infamy ought to be reprehensible and damnable in all persons, nevertheless it is known to be more reprehensible among the religious, who ought by the splendour of their life to be mirror for others and an example. Throughout the 193 years of its history the Order had indeed been in a position where it was a mirror for others and an example, a position which made it a particularly sensitive indicator and, in its turn, promoter, of social change. This paper is an attempt to tiace this interrelationship.