The birth of the common law in medieval England has given rise to a long paternity suit. Too often most of the credit is given to Henry II and his advisers burning the midnight oil crafting assizes for the governance of the realm. Here, the king created something new: a system of royal justice, namely the king's court at the Exchequer and the eyre, in which justices passed judgment based on common rules and kept records of their proceedings. The problem with this picture is that it forgets that, when Henry and those advisers sprang to the task at hand, constructing a royal law for the entire realm, the tools they needed for the task were already in their hands. The county courts, for example, on which Henry II's extension of royal jurisdiction over seigneurial courts depended, were in place and eager to administer royal laws. The Anglo-Saxons had set up these shire, as well as hundred and wapentake, courts long before, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Almost as important, the literacy that Henry must have relied on to communicate his orders to the Exchequer, eyre, counties, hundreds, and wapentakes was ready and waiting. This legal literacy, in fact, should be considered the sine qua non of the common law, for without it, the centralization of the courts, which was the catalyst for the emergence of the common law, would have remained a royal fantasy. From where did the extensive literacy of the late twelfth-century kingdom come? Without an answer to the question of how the late twelfth-century kingdom had become so literate, the explanation of the development of the common law, dependent as it was on its rolls and writs, is sadly incomplete.

Lady Joan Barrington, a puritan matriarch esteemed among the godly as a “lady elect,” experienced a profound spiritual crisis in 1628. She felt anxiety and melancholy over the prospects for her own salvation after the death of her husband Francis. Among those attempting to provide her comfort and counsel was the puritan divine Ezekiel Rogers, her former chaplain. Holding a Barrington living in Yorkshire, Rogers wrote regularly to his benefactress and friend in Essex. In years past he had sought the benefit of her counsel and prayers. Now, in February 1630, he advised Lady Barrington to consult not only her minister but also “the society of God's saints.” He warned against her tendency to keep to herself: among her neighbors were “such as coulde helpe…by telling what God had done for their soules.” This refrain—the importance of mutual help and edification among the godly—Rogers repeated in subsequent correspondence. In January 1632, he suggested various methods to reach understanding and assurance, including the telling postscript: “I much advise you to seeke helpe by the communion of the saintes.”

Ezekiel Rogers was recommending a practice common among the godly. Laity often turned to one another for mutual support, spiritual advice, and constructive criticism in order to cope with the great burdens imposed by the obligation of godliness and the desire for assurance. Owen Watkins identifies such “mutual exhortation” as one of the features of the puritan way of life.

Ecclesiastical patrons used a broad range of criteria to select clergy for preferment to livings and dignities in the Church of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The qualifications of nobility, of academic standing, of services to the Church and State, of a patron's influence and strong churchmanship were among those that were most common. But a further factor affected advancement: that of self-recommendation. Ecclesiastical historians, particularly those of the Victorian era, have tended to see this as a morally questionable, if not corrupt, method of gaining advancement—and one which was primarily a feature of the Hanoverian Church. Indeed the traditional view of ecclesiastical history, though increasingly under challenge, regarded the Hanoverian and Victorian Churches as standing in strong contrast to each other. This contrast has tended to include the quality and recruitment of the clergy. Yet, there was no fundamental difference in the methods used by patrons in distributing livings and offices in the Church in these two centuries. Crown livings and senior posts in the Church were distributed by ministers and patrons who were prone to favor, influence, and persuasion. It was to this system that self-recommendation was directed, in the hope of securing preferment. Because of the success of personal solicitation, self-recommendation remained a factor in nominations to places in the Church throughout the nineteenth century. Even when it was declared unacceptable for the appointment to senior Church offices by Gladstone in 1881, self-recommendation remained in existence in a covert form.

Studies of post-1945 Britain have often concentrated upon political and foreign policy history and are only just now beginning to address the question of the restructuring of the British economy and domestic policy. Civil aviation, a subject of considerable interest to historians of interwar Britain, has not been given a similar degree of attention in the post-1945 era. Civil aviation policy was, however, given a very high priority by both the 1945-51 Labour government and its Conservative successors. Civil aviation represented part of the effort to return Britain to a peacetime economy by transferring resources from the military into the civil aircraft industry, while at the same time holding for Britain a position of pre-eminence in the postwar expansion of civil flying. As such, aviation was a matter of great interest to reconstruction planners during World War Two, and was an important part of the Attlee government's plans for nationalization.

Civil aviation was expected to grow rapidly into a major global economic force, which accounted for the great attention paid it in the 1940s and 1950s. Its importance to Britain in the postwar era lay in the value of air connections to North America, Europe, and the Empire and Commonwealth, and also in the economic importance of Britain's aircraft industry. In a period when the United States was by far the largest producer of commercial aircraft, the task of Labour and Conservative governments was to maintain a viable British position against strong American competition. What is particularly interesting is the wide degree of consensus that existed in both parties on the role the state should play in the maintenance and enhancement of this position.