Long ago, in an ambitious and valuable study, Sidney Painter sought to trace the progress of incomes from the estates of lay baronies between 1086 and 1350. While Painter suggested that some of the nominal growth in baronial incomes he found represented a real increase, especially before 1250, he was astute enough to realise that at least most of the nominal growth had probably arisen from price increases. Since Painter wrote, opinions about the success or otherwise of estate management in outpacing or at least matching rises in prices during the period of the “long thirteenth century” have differed considerably, from the decidedly optimistic to the somewhat pessimistic.

This is certainly an important question. If the fortunes of landlords cannot tell us directly about the fortunes of peasants, they can, in conjunction with a view of the progress of the economy as a whole, throw some light on the relationship between the two groups. Dealing largely with the aggregates of the incomes of entire honours, as Painter did, is a pragmatic and useful approach. However, it does have the disadvantage of conflating two questions: the success or failure of a family or institution in preserving or increasing its estates, and their success or otherwise in preserving or increasing the real profits of individual holdings.

Near the end of a speech to his first Parliament (19 March 1604), James makes a rhetorical move, disingenuous and shrewd. He offers an excuse “in case you have not found such Eloquence in my Speech, as peradventure you might have looked for at my hands. I might, if I list, alledge the great weight of my Affaires and my continuall businesse and distraction, that I could never have leasure to thinke upon what I was to speake, before I came to the place where I was to speak.” Because James has had almost a year since being named King of England to contemplate his maiden speech to Parliament, we may take his “excuse” as special pleading. Clearly his strategy nicely reinforces the obvious eloquence of the speech; indeed, hearers may marvel all the more at the quality of the speech, given James's apparent lack of leisure to prepare it. James cannot, however, offer a compelling case for lack of time to write this important, initial speech to Parliament; in fact, his own care as a writer argues against this. But if, for the sake of argument, we take him seriously, where might James easily and readily have gotten the major ideas and themes of the speech (beyond his own obvious writings)? I answer that he could have found them in the magnificent royal entry pageant in his honor that occurred only four days (15 March) before the speech to Parliament. Most of the ideas that inform James's speech find some kind of dramatic representation in the pageant. Indeed, I will argue that the pageant and Parliament speech form a continuous event, designed to honor, instruct, and celebrate the king. These two events constitute the most important public events of James's early English reign and therefore make an exceptional claim for historical significance. In order to reach Westminster and Parliament, James must first figuratively and literally pass through London's civic pageant.

The terrain of British intellectual life in the twentieth century was dominated by two major features: freelance writers and university scholars. At the elite level, as Noel Annan showed, the two types—independent thinkers and academics—can be treated as one class, linked by personal connections and by common attitudes arising largely from the old school tie. However, when intellectuals beyond the elite stratum are surveyed, it becomes clear that the fortunes of these two features of the intellectual landscape differed sharply. The university teachers grew rapidly in number and made themselves into what Harold Perkin calls “the key profession.” But as John Gross has contended, freelance writers, despite a rich heritage from the nineteenth century, seemed, especially in their own eyes, to form an old and decaying mountain range. From 1880 to 1980 freelance writers experienced a pervasive and intensifying sense of crisis in their trade and in their cultural role. John Wain, a successful novelist and critic, stated the matter plainly in 1973: contemplation of the difficulties of “being an author,” he said, always threw him into “a black depression in which I could slash my wrists.”

How can one explain the pessimism of freelance writers, their sense of being increasingly marginalized? Were their complaints simply habitual expressions of a writerly pose common since the romantic period? After all, many of the broad social and cultural trends in Britain between 1880 and 1980 should have been advantageous to independent writers.