The constitutional arrangement of December 1135, under which Stephen of Blois won England with the support of the Londoners and of the administration at Winchester, with unction from the archbishop of Canterbury, and with recognition from the pope, did not prevail, as all know. Eighteen years later, the Treaty of Winchester legitimized the dynastic transfer from the house of Blois to the house of Anjou. By its very nature, the treaty constituted an endorsement of the Angevin rebellion against King Stephen. In the theory and mechanisms by which it provided a legal basis for the ultimate transfer of government to Henry Fitz Empress, Winchester relied upon certain crucial ideas and institutions: hereditary succession; the church as a guarantor of social and political order; the legal force of conciliar decisions; and the bonds created by fealty and homage. Such notions are supported in one way or another in the writings of men who observed Siephen's passage from dynastic victory to defeat. These commentators are thus an important gauge of the constitutional thought of Stephen's reign and of the early part of Henry II's, particularly for the right of rebellion, and they provide a context for appreciating the constitutional settlement which terminated Stephen's reign. The literary style of these observers is also worth notice for its effect on the historiography of Stephen's reign, chiefly in its contribution to the hard-to-eradicate image of this nineteen-year period as “the anarchy.”

General elections occurred in mid-19th century Britain for various reasons. Sovereigns died; prime ministers tried to enlarge their xsmajorities in the House of Commons—or to reduce their miniorities; and, of course, the Septennial Act put an outside limit upon the length of time a given Parliament might last. The seven year limit has since been replaced by a five year limit. Also, the death of a sovereign no longer requires the summoning of a new House of Commons. These changes are important. They have often been noted. But they are far less important than certain other changes to which less attention has been given. As a rule today a contest takes place in every constituency on every possible occasion. But at some general elections in the mid-19th century a contest took place in fewer than half of the constituencies.

Presumably, historians have always been vaguely aware that such was the case. But until fairly recently this awareness was indeed rather vague. To my knowledge Professor Gash was the first person to make a systematic count of the numbers of constituencies from which candidates were returned to Parliament without opposition. He made the count for each of the general elections between 1832 and 1847. And then, in a way that suggests his uncertainty what the phenomenon of the uncontested election really meant, when he published his figures in 1953 in his Politics in the Age of Peel, he did so not in the body of the book but in an appendix to which no significant reference was made. Since then others have continued to count. In 1965 Trevor Lloyd published a short piece entitled “Uncontested Seats in British General Elections, 1852-1910.”

Boyle's natural philosophy as it evolved in the 1660s was the product in part of some competing philosophies and theologies. Since he defined his own thought in terms of these others, one of the best ways of understanding it and its origins would seem to be to study it in relation to this context of competing ideas—especially as this has never before been done for Boyle. This was no mere battle over philosophical and religious ideas; beneath the surface lay extreme ideological differences; the nature of society and government was at stake just as it was in Boyle's dialogue with the sects in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Indeed some of his opponents in the 1660s still represent positions against which he argued before the Restoration, and these are the ones I wish to consider here.

In 1665 or 1666 Boyle wrote A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. By “the vulgarly received notion of nature” he means the conception deriving from ancient Greek philosophy, both Platonic and Aristotelian, that there is a governing agency in nature apart from God which cannot be reduced to the mechanical principles of matter and motion. This agency is called variously plastic nature, the astral spirits or the soul of the world, and as Boyle says is conceived by “the schools” as “a being that…does always that which is best.” Boyle's intention is to show that his own idea of nature is preferable to this Peripatetic and Platonic one because his goes further than its rival towards a proper understanding of the relations between Creator and creation.

In setting forth these impressions of what has been done in recent years by historians of Restoration England (a period I take to cover the years 1660-1689), it seems convenient to review activity since 1960. Robert Walcott, some ten years ago, covered the period 1939-1959 (presumably using the publication date of Grose's bibliography as his starting point). The past few years have seen the publication of two bibliographies relating to the period: the revised Davies, by Mary Keeler, covering the entire Stuart era, and my own bibliographical handbook, dealing only with the reigns of Charles II and James II. Keeler's revision includes very little published after 1961. My own compilation involved a systematic appraisal to 1969, and therefore serves as the principal basis for the following remarks. The period 1660-1689 is a relatively short one, as bibliographies go; a good many of the works touched upon here have a somewhat wider scope, but in all cases they seem to make important contributions to Restoration history.

In 1960 Cecily Wedgwood could still note that the Restoration era was a much emptier field, at least as far as political history is concerned, than the early Stuart period. But that is by no means so true today. Taking up various categories in my Restoration England, I find that in the fields of political and constitutional history just over half the entries refer to works published since 1960. Next in popularity come Science and Technology, and Intellectual History, each with about a quarter of the entries.

The background of Christian thanksgiving in prayer and liturgy is in the Jewish berakah, a term which refers to thank-offerings made prior to meals, at the annual harvests or in-gatherings, and upon such special occasions as a military success against the Philistines. David's song of deliverance in 2 Samuel 22 is an exmple of the latter, and numerous examples of other subjects of thanksgiving are recorded in the Psalms. Psalms 66, for example, represents the sort of thanksgiving offered at the annual “Feast of Weeks” or “Feast of Ingathering” (specifically of grain), the Jewish harvest celebration of Pentecost (see also Exodus 34:22). The New Testament records several occasions upon which Jesus celebrated the berakah at meals, the most notable being at the feeding of the multitude in Matthew 15:36 and at the Last Supper (Luke 22:17); and on his way to Rome Paul offers thanks at the breaking of bread during a storm at sea (Acts 27:35). In the Greek of the New Testament the berakah is translated as eucharistia (“thanksgiving”), and it is the Eucharist that becomes the central rite of Christian worship. In his “Treatise on Good Works” Martin Luther observes that “praise and thanksgiving will follow with a pure heart, from which the mass is called eucharistia in Greek, that is, thanksgiving.” Friedrich Heiler affirms that “The Thanksgiving Prayer in public worship, the direct expression of the living consciousness of salvation, is always a calling to mind of the history of redemption.” In effect, the Jewish offering of thanks for deliverance from generally immediate, tangible enemies (the Philistines, the Moabites, unfavorable crop conditions) becomes the Christian offering of thanks for deliverance from sin and death through the redemption of Christ. The sacrificial lamb of the Old Testament becomes Christ the lamb in the New Testament, and for the Christian “the Eucharistic action is first and foremost a sacrifice of thanksgiving.” Any study of Christian thanksgivings, however, will demonstrate that the occasional and specific nature of the Jewish thank-offering remains in Christian practice.

The remote and rather dreary reign of King Stephen recently has had great appeal to contemporary historians and several distinguished scholars have carefully analyzed it. Indeed, who would have thought that a study of medieval government in a troubled time, always interesting on its own terms, would seem so pertinent, especially to concerned Americans? Since the Watergate revelations, nearly everyone observed a declining confidence in our national leadership. Journalists, politicians, and private citizens continually asked whether the president had lost the ability to govern. Barons, bishops, and burgers discussed similar questions in King Stephen's time—in 1135, in 1139, in 1141, and in 1153—and yet their king and country survived. Our nation also surmounted its series of crises and the consoling lesson of both trying periods may well be that the salvation of necessary administrative institutions and the preservation of relative prosperity depend far more upon the loyalty, dedication, and service of barely visible, self-effacing governmental bureaucrats than it does upon any one leader's personal skill, principal advisors, or private morals.

Generations of young men have grown old safely categorizing King Stephen's days as “The Anarchy” and their professors still regale other eager students with the Peterborough chronicler's description of that time in England when “Christ and His angels slept” and “we suffered nineteen winters for our sins.”

Enclosure riots were a prominent manifestation of social tension in England in the 1530's and 1540's. Although enclosures of land for pasturage and tillage had been undertaken since the beginning of English agriculture and did not usually cause social conflict, the rapid increase in population of the sixteenth century pressed hard on the available supply of land. The necessity of increasing the food supply speeded up the process of enclosure. The supplies of corn and meat could not be increased significantly without the year-round use of enclosed and consolidated plots of land, which was inconsistent with communal access to common and waste land and the stubble remaining after the harvest on arable lands. Other causes of friction in agrarian society included the greater fluidity in the land market resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries together with revolutionary methods of exploiting the land. The social relationships existing among great landlords, small holders and tenants could not remain unaffected.

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the early Tudor enclosure riot as a primitive or pre-political form of social protest. This will necessitate: (1) describing the forms and extent of violence employed; (2) distinguishing between those riots that accompany the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellions of 1548-49 and those riots that occur outside of the years of rebellion; and (3) modifying the assumption that the typical enclosure riot was perpetrated by an exasperated peasantry venting their rage upon the hedges and ditches of a commercially-minded, grasping gentry.

Queen Anne's appointment of Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, as Lord Treasurer in 1702 was a fortunate choice for England. The country faced a war with France occasioned by the empty Spanish throne and the expansionist schemes of Louis XIV. England needed a man of ability in finance, experience in government, and credit with queen and country to handle home affairs and finance the armies of the allies on the continent. The Duke of Marlborough, head of England's armies, considered his friend Godolphin the only man for the task. He even threatened not to command English armies unless Godolphin took the Treasury post. Godolphin had opposed the war with France and had resigned from a Treasury post in 1701 for this reason, but in 1702 he accepted the white staff of Lord Treasurer at the insistence of his friend Marlborough.

During the course of the War Of Spanish Succession Lord Godolphin used his exceptional talents to finance the military forces of England—land and sea—and to provide large amounts of money for the military expenses of England's allies in the conflict. He was successful while Louis XIV's efforts to accomplish the same ends by some of the same means failed.

Godolphin possessed expertise and long experience in national finance, holding responsible Treasury positions in the reigns of Charles II, James II, and William III, before becoming Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer. Recognizing the advantages that the Bank of England could provide for national finance, he had helped push the proposal for its establishment through the House of Lords in the face of strong opposition in 1694. He had also favored a Land Bank that eventually came to naught. Seeing the value of exchequer bills in expanding the nation's money system during William III's reign, he made extensive use of this novel idea in financing Queen Anne's war.

A glance at recent publications on the history of theoretical sociology in Europe would reveal that no one has yet attempted to write a full scale history of the early phases of that movement in Britain. There is certainly nothing that compares with Raymond Aron's Main Currents in Sociological Thought for British sociology. Aron's study, in fact, contains only scattered references to British thinkers and attaches little significance to them. Nor does this absence of Britishers result from some slight on Aron's part. While British sociology during the formative years of the discipline, roughly 1850-1930, did make some notable advances in its empirical branches, it produced no individual worthy to stand with theorists like Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto or Emil Durkheim.

The reasons for this shortcoming on the British part are numerous and diverse. First, British thinking generally was concerned with more practical problems and not with theoretical matters and thus, automatically favored less abstract forms of social science. Additionally, those few British thinkers interested in problems of theory generally failed to recognize the significance of the advances of Continental mental philosophers and psychologists whose work has done so much to enrich twentieth century social theory. Yet there is a deeper and more subtle set of reasons interconnected with those aforementioned for the relative stasis of British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

King Stephen's reign has long been recognized as a crucial period for monasticism in England. Many authors have written about alleged anarchical conditions during those nineteen years, and scholars have done a great deal of work on twelfth century English monasticism; nevertheless, comparatively little attention has been paid to the impact of this supposed anarchy on the monastic establishment. This impact is the concern of this essay. Due to the limitation of space, I will confine myself to the material damages suffered by monastic houses during Stephen's reign and will offer an extended summary of my findings.

The traditional picture of anarchy in England during Stephen's reign is that the civil wars wreaked havoc with nearly all aspects of life and inflicted massive and long lasting material damages. Medieval writers—most memorably the Peterborough chronicler— emotionally depicted scenes of terror and devastation, and the majority of later scholars—most notably H. W. C. Davis—upheld the basic validity of this picture. During the past century, however, historians have somewhat modified the traditional view. Whereas most medieval writers described an England embroiled in internal warfare for nearly all of Stephen's nineteen year reign, modern scholars have realized that the area of active fighting was more limited and that actual warfare lasted less than half of the reign. Also, modern scholars have shown that many of the occurrences in Stephen's reign were not characterized by aimless chaos and confusion, but rather by purposeful actions directed towards specific ends.

Students of British history continue to experience a certain haziness as to what precisely differentiated the Liberals and Conservatives of the mid-Victorian era, a haziness by no means allayed by the plethora of recent publications on the social and organizational structure of the nineteenth-century political party system. In 1832 political reform had constituted an apparently decisive issue—at least Grey and Russell had strongly favored it and Peel and Wellington had forthrightly opposed it. In the mid-1840s the Corn Laws had supplied a comparable cause for division. The Whigs and Radicals had provided Peel with his majority, and two-thirds of the Tories had disavowed their leader and resisted the abolition of the Corn Laws to the last.

Yet neither of these issues would seem to provide a key to the party rivalry of the 1860s. The manner in which Disraeli played the role of political magician in 1867 and pulled the Reform Act of that year out of his hat provides prima facie evidence that political reform as such was not then fundamental to inter-party rivalry. Nor was agricultural protection, the plank that Derby and Disraeli had quietly removed from their party platform a decade-and-a-half earlier. The cause of Italian unification, which had briefly divided parties in 1859 and had spurred Gladstone to cast his political lot once and for all with Palmerston and Russell, had become a fact and was no longer an issue.

Seventeenth century England may be described by various adjectives, many of them indicating a divided society. This was a century of rebellion and reaction, of popery and puritanism, of factions and political parties, of Parliament and King, and finally, of Common Law and prerogative power. As the 1600's came to a close, the air of crisis gradually passed from the English scene to be replaced by the serenity, indeed the complacency, of the eighteenth century. But this newly stable England of squire and clergy rested on earlier achievements. Revolt succeeded and became accepted; popery was pushed, many hoped, into the farther reaches of hell; toleration was accorded trinitarian Protestants; patronage-based political parties began to dominate Parliament while Commons increasingly became the seat of power. But what happened in this period to prerogative monopoly, frequently utilized by both Tudor and Stuart monarchs to reward favorites at the expense of the economy? This neglected issue can be examined through attempts of the Royal African Company, chartered under the Restoration Stuarts, to enforce its patent.

Cicero, in his Brutus, remarked of the Gallic War that while Caesar had written it so that “others who wanted to write history should have materials from which to work ready to their hands, he perhaps put in his debt only the pedants who like to frizzle such things with curling irons, and deterred sensible men from writing at all.” But Pollio Asinius, another of Caesar's contemporaries, disagreed with this opinion; according to Suetonius (Julius 56), Pollio considered Caesar's commentaries “to have been composed with little care and little unbiased verity, for Caesar was usually too ready to believe the reported achievements of others and, whether deliberately or through lapse of memory, to relate his own deeds falsely; and he thought that he had intended to rewrite and correct them.” Both were wrong—Cicero in believing that chroniclers would be content with ornamenting Caesar's data and Pollio in assuming that the major departures from fact in Caesar's biography would be due to his own slips. A choice demonstration of both kinds of error is the legend of Caesar's relations with the Scots.

It is clear from the Gallic War that in Britain Caesar did not have time to go farther north than what is now Essex or Hertford, but by the fifth century a story was current that he had conquered the entire island. In the verse panegyric that Sidonius Apollinaris addressed to his father-in-law, the Emperor Avitus, a personification of Rome tells Jove that Julius Caesar “led his victorious standards even against the Caledonian Britons; and though he vanquished Scot, Pict, and Saxon, he still sought foes even where nature forbade him to seek farther for mankind” (11. 88-92).

I cannot oucrslipp some without manifest iniury. that descrue to haue their names enrolled in the first rancke of valiant Confuters: worthy men, but subiect to imperfections, to errour. to mutual reproofe; some more, some lesse, as the manner is. Harding, and lewell, were our Aeschines, and Demosthenes: and scarsely any language in the Christian world, hath affoorded a payre of aduersaries, equiualent to Harding, and lewell; two thundring and lightning Oratours in Jiuinity.

These words, occuring as they do in Gabriel Harvey's Pierces Supererogation (1593), cannot but sound strange to modern ears. The language is, of course, somewhat peculiar, as we might expect from a contemporary of Shakespeare's, and in particular from so pedantic a writer as Gabriel Harvey. But apart from that, the reference of his words—with their apparently exaggerated praise—seems oddly misplaced. If he had spoken of More and Tyndale, or even of Whitgift and Cartwright, his praise might have appeared more intelligible. But who today has heard of Jewel or Harding, at least in terms of literature? Neither of them receives so much as a mention in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, or even in Baugh's voluminous Literary History of England, no doubt because they are regarded as belonging to a brief episode in ecclesiastical history. Yet Harvey speaks of them, in openly literary terms, as “two thundring and lightning Oratours in diuinity,” and even dares to compare them with the great Athenian orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes. So the question arises: Was he merely deluding himself with a spirit of exaggeration—a spirit not unknown in Shakespeare's England? Or was he, after all, recording a widespread feeling among Shakespeare's contemporaries which has somehow vanished like a bubble on the river of time?

The guiding policy of James I, as King of England and the acknowledged leader of Protestant Europe, had been since his accession one of rapprochement with the great Catholic powers. To this end he had determined to marry his son and heir, Prince Charles, first to a Bourbon, and then a Hapsburg princess. James saw himself not as the leader of a bloc, but as a mediator impartial in the interests of peace. To his mind this was the most exalted function of Christian kingship, and it was his hope that Spain and England, the leaders of Christendom's two camps of faith, could preserve the peace of Europe by acting in concert.

Yet James was no dreamer. While courting Spain, he retained hegemony among his fellow Protestants. If he proposed to marry Charles to a Catholic, he had matched his daughter Elizabeth to a Calvinist, the Elector Palatine Frederick V. The latter alliance, however, was to prove to be his fatal mistake, for it sucked him inextricably into the maelstrom of German politics and precipitated not only the gravest foreign crisis of his reign, but a domestic one of ultimately far greater significance as well.

Frederick was the leader of the most important alliance of Protestant powers in Germany, the Evangelical Union. He was also one of the seven electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. Three of these were Catholic bishops, three secular Protestants, and the last, the King of Bohemia, had for a hundred years been the emperor-designate himself, to wit, the senior male representative of the House of Hapsburg. It was evident, therefore, that any disturbance in the orderly succession to the Bohemian crown would immediately jeopardize the traditional Hapsburg claim to the imperium, and with it the entire European balance of power.

To H. W. C. Davis, writing in 1905, Stephen's reign presented “a terrible picture of rapine, cruelty, and wanton insolence.” More recently scholars have called into question the notion of the nineteen years when England suffered for its sins and “Christ and his saints slept.” Nowadays scholars of Stephen's reign commonly put “anarchy” in quotes in an effort to dissociate themselves from an old fashioned notion which they nevertheless continue ta find useful. Sir Frank Stenton, A. L. Poole and others have argued that warfare under Stephen was limited to specific periods and places and that the horror stories of contemporary writers are exaggerated or relevant only to particular local conditions. Most recently, H. A. Cronne and T. A. M. Bishop have both observed that Henry Ts administrative system survived Stephen's wars, at least after a fashion, and John Appleby has concluded that although Stephen was not the best of kings he was probably the best available at the time.

Each of the three foregoing essays contributes in some way to the problem of Stephen's anarchy. Robert Patterson has provided a valuable study of the application of medieval constitutional principles in the politics and polemical literature of the reign. Most of what he says is both illuminating and persuasive. And although he refrains from relating his findings directly to the anarchy issue, nevertheless certain connections can perhaps be made. Patterson's essay suggests to me that an age given to rational explanations of things—the age of Abelard and Gratian—was as capable of rationalizing domestic violence as theology and law.