Historians examining the critical response to Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire have remained largely true to the presentation Gibbon himself laid down in his Memoirs: the primary focus is on the first volume of 1776 and the storm provoked by chapters fifteen and sixteen on the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire. But publication of Gibbon's Vindication in 1779 neither marked the final crushing of his opponents, nor did it close down controversy: it merely led the troops of the orthodox to regroup. The appearance of volumes two and three in 1781, then volumes four to six in 1788, once again brought them out into the field, and their writings and critical preoccupations deserve serious attention. It is all too easy to overlook the high standard of Anglican apologetics throughout the eighteenth century and, indeed, the continuing role of the clergy as the guardians of the state's intellectual inheritance, especially its distinctively Christian character.

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.

Raoul Glaber, the Burgundian monk and chronicler, noted in a famous passage in his Historiarum Libri Quinque how, about the year 1000,

Although Glaber was writing primarily of the Continent, the tide of religious revival that followed the coming of the millennium eventually lapped upon the shores of the most distant corners of Europe. In Scotland, the great age of church-building came a century later, and it was the twelfth century, rather than the eleventh, which was notable for the foundation of churches and monasteries on a large scale. Nevertheless, by 1200 Scotland, too, had been cloaked in a white mantle of new churches, made up of cathedrals, parish churches, and monasteries. It is the latter with which this essay will be principally concerned.

The works of Professor Barrow are of the first importance for understanding the patterns of monastic patronage that brought the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and other religious orders to Scottish soil, and for the contribution these orders made to the medieval kingdom of Scotland.

Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.

It has long been thought that the deposition and murder of King Richard II was a personal tragedy, and that “Richard's personality—his natural or inherited character considered apart from the important actions of his life—was the chief cause of his downfall.” In more recent years the aesthetic side of his Richard's character has assumed a new importance in explanations of his fall. Richard H. Jones, for example, has noted that “in any case the fundamental obligation of the medieval king was that he should lead his arrays on the field of battle. Yet, Richard was slight of frame and sensitive of disposition. His tastes were aesthetic rather than athletic.” As well, in the view of Bertie Wilkinson,

In recent decades, several historians, including myself, have argued that many nineteenth-century British urban elites were akin to a sort of new squirearchy. The intention of this article is to explore how far this idea enables us to better understand the role, power, and style of urban leadership, and the political, social, and economic context in which it existed. Given that the termination point is 1914, it also examines how much the notion has to say about political change in the rapidly expanding urban context after around 1850. The notion of a “new squirearchy” implies two things about nineteenth-century local leadership and the nature of its power: first, that urban elites aped and importantly resembled their rural “old” squirearchical counterparts in both substance and style; second, in so doing, such elites were calling up (whether intentionally or not) rural patterns of behavior to try to resolve problems of order, authority, legitimacy, and power in a situation where they did not naturally have easy and economical access to the means of producing any of these things. With this in mind, and after some preliminary clarification of terminology, the article will divide into three broad sections. In the first, it explores the utility of the squirearchical model to understanding the character and power of urban elites in the period up to around 1880 when local leadership in many industrial towns seemed most generously endowed with attributes to which the model might apply. The not very astonishing conclusion will be that the model is helpful in some ways, less so in others, all of which stem from the urban and industrial context in which leaders were operating. The second section will focus on the years up to around 1918 when “men (and women) of property and station” were withdrawing from active participation in the urban and industrial scene. Here, the argument will be that, at least in those northern towns under particular scrutiny, elements of the “new squirearchical” style proved remarkably resilient in spite of the withdrawal of many of those who practiced it—and may well have much to say about how the transition from one sort of leadership to another was managed, or at least took place. The final section will be concerned with the consequences of withdrawal for the power of urban leaders who remained. It will suggest that, just as property and station was no more than a partial predictor of power in the period when it was most abundantly in evidence, so its decline after 1880 was only one among many factors explaining what happened to the ability of local leaders to achieve intended effects. In fact, for various reasons, again heavily connected with the urban context in which leadership was exercised, the power at least of local political leaders in important respects increased.

The immediate objective of the young Philip Francis in the series of pseudonymous letters signed Junius and Philo Junius, which were published at intervals in the Public Advertiser between 1769 and 1772 when the author was aged between twenty- nine and thirty-two, was to encompass the downfall of the Grafton administration and, subsequently, the North administration, in anticipation of their replacement by a ministry drawn from the opposition. Grafton went in 1770, but with the opposition falling into disarray, Junius failed to dislodge North and abandoned his campaign. No Junius letters appeared after January 1772. The letters were characterized by vituperative attacks on the personal conduct of ministers and the court. These attacks were accompanied by an acidulous commentary on political events as they unfolded. Ministers were accused of abusing the constitution, as often as not with the complicity of Parliament. Casting himself as a defender of the constitution Junius identified defects in the modus operandi of Parliament and the electoral system without himself bringing forward firm proposals for reform. It was not until he was drawn to comment on propositions advanced by the Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights in 1771 that Junius took up a position on parliamentary reform.

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.

Archibald Alison is perhaps more widely remembered from a brief-and disguised—reference in Coningsby than from any direct usage of his own voluminous writings: “Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read the Quarterly Review with great attention; and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy's History of the late War, in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” The dubbing of Alison as “Mr. Wordy” was one of Disraeli's most unerring shafts. Alison's History of Europe, covering the period 1789-1815, would have earned him that sobriquet on its own, to say nothing of the other books, pamphlets, and articles that flowed from his inexhaustible pen. The various editions of his History, most commonly in sets of twelve volumes, made Alison a quite celebrated historian in his own day. Long neglected in the twentieth century, the History has recently received some critical attention. Without seeking unduly to resurrect a departed reputation, Hedva Ben-Israel does at least acknowledge the History's earlier success: “It was by far the best-selling history of the French Revolution in England and America almost to the end of the century, and was translated into most European and several oriental languages.” Some fruitful comparisons between Alison's work and the more enduring classic by Thomas Carlyle have been drawn by Clare Simmons.

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.

England during the early Restoration is a fascinating case of the cultural fertility of counterrevolution. The problem of the reimposition of authority following the destruction and revival of such traditional institutions as monarchy, bishops, and nobility led to a variety of new expedients, rather than simply the return to old verities that one might expect from the somewhat misleading term “Restoration.” Historians such as Jonathan Scott and Richard Greaves have remarked upon the continuing challenge posed by oppositional ideologies dating back to the Revolution, republican and/or radical Protestant, in the England of the Restoration. Historians such as James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Patrick Curry, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, have traced the ways in which the new science and Baconian ideology participated in the effort to find new bases for authority in the still unstable England of the time following the Civil War and Interregnum. John Gascoigne, in his recent history of Cambridge University in the eighteenth century, refers to the nexus of establishment politics, rational religion, and natural philosophy that originated in the Restoration and dominated the eighteenth century in England as the “holy alliance.”

This article will examine two important, and largely neglected, documents of the early Restoration, the Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663) and the Discourse on Vulgar Prophecies (1665), both by the Anglican clergyman and scholar John Spencer. These works, produced in response to a specific challenge to the Restoration state, contributed to the creation of a Baconian scientific ideology in the 1660s, and its “holy alliance” with Latitudinarian religion. This article also examines, in turn, Spencer's political, religious, and natural-philosophical arguments. By demonstrating the connections between them it demonstrates that the “holy alliance” predated the development of Newtonian physics, and that Spencer, neither a natural philosopher nor one of the well known Latitudinarian divines, contributed to it.

Cecil Roth (1899–1970), the dominant figure in the writing of English Jewish history in the mid-twentieth century, served as president of the Jewish Historical Society of England nine times. In his valedictory presidential address in September 1968, which he titled “Why Anglo-Jewish History?” Roth defended the enterprise—and the society and himself, by extension—against critics who considered it “petty and unimportant” and believed that “after all that has been written on the subject there is nothing more to be discovered.” In his apologia, Roth referred to discoveries made by members of the society that proved that “industrious cultivation of our own modest cabbage patch” contributed to knowledge of both British history and Jewish history in general. In Roth's metaphor, “the inconspicuous inlet of Anglo-Jewish historical research” sometimes branched out into “majestic and…unexplored rivers.” But, in closing, he admitted frankly that what motivated his choice above all was “the pleasure of the thing” rather than high-minded ideals.

In contrast to the spirit of laissez-faire, the Colonial Office under Gladstone's first government served as a large-scale social engineering agency concerned with the cautious restructuring of volatile societies in the sugar-producing colonies of the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. From the perspective of the Colonial Office civilizing the barbarian made him more governable. There is a revealing paradox in the fact that so much of what Victorian Liberals did in the name of civilizing benighted natives involved active government initiatives in imperial settings. Under the banner of “peace, retrenchment, and reform” nineteenth-century British Liberals advocated cost-cutting and laissez-faire at home and non-expansion abroad. Liberal leaders' public statements in this vein helped set the historiographical stereotype of supposed Gladstonian Liberal “little Englandism” versus a dramatic imperial policy shift toward “forward movement” in the Disraelian Conservative era. Scholarship over the last thirty years has refuted this older view and has stressed the continuity of British imperialism throughout the nineteenth century. However, a careful examination of the details of policy reveals that from 1868–74 the Liberals not only valued the Empire, but were willing to sacrifice their own theories of limited government in order to strengthen the British hold—even on their bankrupt sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Indian oceans. Initiatives in colonial religion, education, health, justice, and labor regulation demonstrate a surprising Liberal bent toward government activism in the non-white Empire. Moreover, the self-conscious and energetic manipulation of such a wide range of policy tools reveals a serious Liberal commitment to empire, which further belies the old notion that from 1868–74, “little Englandism” reached its high point.

No event of the post-Second World War decade in Britain is recalled as affectionately or enveloped in such an aura of nostalgia as the Festival of Britain, a five-month series of cultural events and exhibits, with its centerpiece at the South Bank in London. But the Festival dear to the recollections of those growing up during and after the war diverged sharply from the original conception of its progenitors.

In 1943 the Royal Society of the Arts, partly responsible for the Great Exhibition of 1851, suggested to the government that an international exhibition along similar lines be staged in 1951 to commemorate the earlier event. To propose a celebratory occasion in 1943 was an act of faith that the war would not only end successfully, but that Britain would have recovered sufficiently by 1951 to warrant such a demonstration. In September 1945, with the war over and Labour in power, Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, addressed an open letter to Stafford Cripps, then President of the Board of Trade, advocating a trade and cultural exhibition in London as a way of commemorating the centenary of the Crystal Palace. Such an exhibition would advertise British products and display British prowess in design and craftsmanship. He favored a site in the center of London, such as Hyde Park or Battersea, either of which would provide ample space for such an exhibition. What prompted these suggestions was the need to provide practical help to British commerce at a time when it was clearly under pressure shifting from wartime controls to peacetime competition.

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.