In a compelling study published in 1973, Warren Hollister and Thomas Keefe argued that the Angevin Empire, “an aggregation of diverse provinces that differed from Henry I's tightly-integrated Anglo-Norman state not merely in size but in fundamental character …, was Henry Plantegenet's own creation, born of his youthful ambition and achieved through his skill and good fortune.” Hollister and Keefe demonstrate conclusively that King Henry I had no such empire in mind when he arranged the marriage of his widowed daughter Matilda to Geoffrey Plantegenet, the fourteen-year-old heir to the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine.

In attempting to ascertain the origins of the Angevin Empire, however, are we limited only to a choice between Henry I's intentions and Henry II's ambition? Might we not ask what Count Fulk the Young, Geoffrey's father, had in mind when he arranged the marriage of his son to the heiress Matilda? John Le Patourel has suggested that Fulk was pursuing the normal Angevin practice of expanding the family's dominions. Le Patourel maintains that “this expansion took a familiar form, the acquisition of rights by marriage, inheritance or in other ways, and their enforcement by war.” For the Angevins the alliance between Geoffrey and Matilda ended a century of warfare between Anjou and Normandy. “Henry I was somewhat furtive over this marriage,” Le Patourel observes, but “in Angers it was a triumph.”

The whole subject of forests, especially forests in the Middle Ages, is overlaid with a great deal of romanticism. The picture of a heavily-wooded England with primeval forests dotted here and there with villages connected by meandering tracks to relieve their isolation is fixed. Only a handful of Robin Hood bands lived within the depths of the forest itself. The present concern for man's destruction of his environment has caused this idyllic picture to be contrasted with the denuded landscape of large areas today, and the pathetic remnants of Sherwood Forest can be used as a cautionary lesson on industrialization since the eighteenth century. In fact, that lesson needs to be extended backward in time and the picture of the untouched medieval forest abandoned, for the reality was that men in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made heavy use of the forests and encroached upon them just as man had done since he first came to the island or, more emphatically, since the Anglo-Saxon invaders began to make drastic changes in forested areas by their farming practices. However, after the Norman Conquest, the policies adopted for the royal forests did serve as some protection for the trees, even though the Norman kings no more had this as their purpose than had their predecessors. The thesis of this article is that the medieval English kings from the Normans on were conservationists in spite of themselves, even in the face of continuous demands from their own barons for disafforestment. Royal forest regulations enforced within the extensive areas under forest law protected the trees from complete destruction and slowed the inevitable encroachment of field upon forest.

William of Orange tried to be as absolute as possible. Inroads upon the power of the executive were fiercely resisted: indeed, William succeeded in keeping even the judiciary in a precarious state of independence. To maintain the prerogative and gain the needed supplies from parliament, he relied upon a mixed whig-tory ministry to direct court efforts. Following the Glorious Revolution, the whigs had divided into two principle groups. One faction led by Robert Harley and Paul Foley became the standard-bearers of the broadly based Country party, maintained the “old whig” traditions, did not seek office during William's reign, tried to hold the line on supply, and led the drive to limit the prerogative. The “junto,” “court,” or “new” whigs, on the other hand, were led by ministers who, while in opposition during the Exclusion crisis, held court office, aggressively sought greater offices, and wished to replace monarchy with oligarchy. They soon joined tory courtiers in opposing many of the Country party attempts to place additional restrictions upon the executive. To defend the prerogative and gain passage for bills of supply, William also developed techniques employed by Charles II. By expanding the concept and power of the Court party, he sought to bring together the executive and legislative branches of government through a large cadre of crown office-holders (placemen) who sat, voted, and directed the votes of others on behalf of the government when matters of importance arose in the Commons. So too, William claimed the right to dissolve parliament and call new elections not on a fixed date, as was to become the American practice, but at the time deemed most propitious over first a three-year and then (after 1716) a seven year period.

“The Pythagoreans … defined justice unqualifiedly as reciprocity.”

(Aristotle, Eth. Nic. V. 8. 1132b 21)

It is one of time's ironies that Richard II, once troublesome to scholars for its “imperfection,” is now enjoying increasing appreciation for unity and harmony. One modern analysis of imagery even recognizes the play as “a succession of balances” whose theme advances “almost as the proof of a mathematical proposition”(italics mine). Other recent scholarship speaks in terms of a “symphony” of repeated key words and balanced scenes, and still another study defends its “emotional consistency,” and “logical continuity.”

Clearly, in spite of some diminution of quality in later acts, what emerges in the end-product is a well-balanced, well-tuned, completely metrical mechanism, whose major moving parts signify interaction, change, and integration in the realms of personal, political, and cosmic order, with an appropriate counterpoint of Pythagorean imagery, e.g., “heaven,” “soul,” “balance,” “time,” and “music” or “harmony.”

Dorsetshire's elite, the leaders of its “county community,” continued to exercise their customary influence in the county's elections from 1604-1640. However, there was a notable change from the Elizabethan age. During the great Queen's reign, no one family was able to establish a preponderant voice in the county's elections. A “sustained monopoly” was, it seems, impossible and the best any influential squire could hope for was to be twice returned for the county. Indeed, it is probable that only Sir Ralph Horsey of Clifton Maubank, chosen in 1586 and 1597, and Andrew Rogers of Brianston, elected in 1586 and 1588, achieved that degree of eminence. Even the great Sir Walter Raleigh, after establishing himself at Sherborne, only managed to serve for Dorsetshire once, in 1597.

That changed after 1604. Dorsetshire elected eleven men to its eighteen knightships of the shire from 1604-1640, and one man, Sir John Strangways of Chirk Castle and Melbury Sampford, established what can be described as a “sustained monopoly.” He served for the county in 1614, 1621, 1624, and 1628; his repeated victories were recognition of his wealth and estate, his close connections with John Digby, Earl of Bristol (1622) and with other county families of note. Strangways had married into the Trenchard family of Warmwell and Wolveton, near Dorchester; one of his daughters married, first, into the influential Rogers family of Brianston and later, in 1624, took as her second husband the stepson of the Earl of Bristol, Sir Lewis Dyve. Strangways was, no doubt, an active supporter of his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Trenchard, in Dorset's 1621 election and, in a bitterly fought contest in 1626, it was Strangway's power and influence that accounted for the return of Sir George Morton. Altogether, Sir John's influence can be credited with five, and more probably six (or one-third), of Dorsetshire's knightships through 1640. Given his ability to win a place for Morton in the face of fierce opposition in 1626, it is possible that his influence was even more widespread in the county's elections.

In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of the Gesta Stephani accused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from his Policraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

Between 1864 and 1869, four laws, known as the Contagious Diseases Acts, were passed by the British Parliament in an attempt to reduce venereal disease in the armed services. These Acts, which applied to certain military stations, garrison, and seaport towns, gave a police officer authority to arrest any woman found within the specified areas whom he considered to be a prostitute. The woman in question was then brought before a magistrate who, if he agreed with the arresting officer, would order her to register and submit to a medical examination. If found to be suffering from venereal disease, she was sent to a hospital where she could be detained for three months or longer, at the discretion of the physican in charge. If she refused to submit to the examination or to enter the hospital, she could be imprisoned with or without hard labor.

This legislation was enacted at the urging of officials in the War Office and the Admiralty who believed that the efficiency of the army and navy was being dangerously impaired because of the high incidence of venereal disease. Ultimately, they maintained, the security of the nation itself would be jeopardized.

Parliament passed these laws very quietly, and the press referred to them only briefly, ostensibly because the subject was not considered seemly for public discussion. Little by little, however, English men and women became aware of this legislation, and with awareness came criticism.

Richard II's attempt to transform his kingdom into an absolute monarchy has provided the basic outline for the traditional interpretation of the reign. The role of the royal household and especially of the chamber has always loomed large in such an interpretation. It was the subject of Thomas Haxey's famous complaint of 1397, and it had a special interest for Thomas F. Tout who undertook a very detailed study of Richard's reign in volumes three and four of his classic Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Tout credited the king's tutor, Simon Burley, with the development of the chamber staff as an instrument of royal tyranny:

Throughout much of the nineteenth century relations between Britain and Germany were blessed not only by the absence of any fundamental conflicts of national interest, but also by positive factors tending to encourage friendly ties. Memories of the common struggle against Napoleon, the predominantly Protestant character of tioth countries, and the marriage of Queen Victoria to a German prince all suggested a natural affinity between them. German liberals and conservatives alike found much to admire in English political institutions, while Englishmen in turn approved the steps, however halting, by which many of the German states adopted constitutions and representative institutions.

During the late 1840s British statesmen did appear to have recognized the benefits that would accrue for Britain through consolidation of the German Confederation, and there was also some discussion regarding the prospect of an Anglo-Prussian alliance. After 1846, thanks to Palmerston's stridency in the affair of the Spanish marriages, Britain lost the good will of France and thus remained diplomatically isolated in the face of the powerful conservative coalition of Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

Soon after her husband of thirty-three years died leaving her a wealthy widow of sixty-two with an estate worth some £6,000, Anne Elsdon met Tobias Audley, a widower of twenty-five and keeper of a tobacco shop, whom one witness later described as “a most lewd person, and of no worth.” On July 21, 1624, Audley took the Widow Elsdon and her friend, Martha Jackson, to the Greyhound Tavern in London, where they met Mary Spencer, Margery Terry, Frances Holiday, and Nicholas Cartmell. The first two were common prostitutes, the second two ministers, though, presumably, not of the burning puritan brand. For the next three days all of them plied the Widow Elsdon with some £25 worth of liquor, staggering from tavern to tavern and eventually ending up at the Nags Head in Cheapside. In that appropriately named hostelry Anne consented to marry Tobias Audley. A special license was hurriedly obtained, but not before Widow Elsdon had passed out. So, after trying to revive her with slaps around the face, Mary Spencer, the common whore, said the marriage vows for her. The Reverend Cartmell pronounced Tobias and Anne man and wife, and off the widow was carried to a Blackfriars tavern for her wedding night. After stripping her, Tobias Audley proceeded to strip her estate. He took plate from her house worth £140, and bonds and deeds valued at £3,000, and largely as a result of her traumatic experiences the widow died two years later.

“Disguise in all its forms is a badge of slavery.” That J.S. Mill, at one time an ardent advocate of secret voting and later its equally ardent opponent, should have included this sentiment in his attack on the ballot may strike one as rather odd. Yet the expression of sentiments of this kind was not an uncommon feature of the debate provoked by the ballot question during the mid-Victorian period and before. Although Mill himself did not explicitly stigmatize the ballot as “un-English,” the emotional content of his condemnation strongly resembled a considerable number of written and verbal assaults on secret voting which attached that label to the proposed reform. Such denunciations of secret voting as un-English were taken seriously at the time, and should be treated seriously by historians of early and mid-Victorian England.

It is, however, necessary to place this un-English aspect within a broader context. The opponents of the ballot were motivated by a number of considerations, and different opponents attacked the measure for different reasons. The formulation of the case against the ballot incorporated several diverse elements: the self-interest of an aristocracy nervous about the potential impact of secret voting on the existing distribution of political power; intellectual convictions concerning the nature of the franchise; and emotional commitments which rejected secret voting as un-English. To ignore the first two of these elements would be to obscure the relative significance of the last. Thus it is perhaps best to begin with the emergence of the ballot as a practical political issue.

The subject of mutilations is one I would cheerfully have left to others were it not for its bearing on the character of King Henry I. The sources for his reign disclose a number of instances in which alleged wrongdoers were punished by mutilation, and these punishments have earned Henry a somber reputation among modern historians. Christopher Brooke calls him a “savage, ruthless man”; Emma Mason deplores his “reign of calculated terror”; R.H.C. Davis speaks of his “reputation for brutality.” To Sir Richard Southern, “Henry's vengeance was terrible and barbaric … . He had a morbid dislike of ridicule and he punished with a Byzantine ferocity already outmoded in the humaner society of feudal France, not only treachery and rebellion but slights to his dignity and honour.”

Perhaps the best known contemporary mutilation story comes from the 1125 account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where it is disclosed that Henry had the minters of England castrated and deprived of their right hands. We learn of Henry's morbid dislike of ridicule from an event of about the same time reported by the Norman monk, Orderic Vitalis. Henry had ordered the blinding of three captive rebels when Count Charles the Good of Flanders, who happened to be visiting, protested that it was unjust to mutilate prisoners captured in the service of their lords.

The first half of the seventeenth century in England witnessed the growing strength of Puritanism and even a “Puritan Revolution.” Frequently it is assumed that in the intensely religious atmosphere of that period local, county, and national authorities imprisoned offenders in order to protect “the inferior sort of people,” those of low rank, from bad example, and to avoid incurring God's wrath for allowing sinners to go unpunished. After all, did not officials incarcerate numerous adulterers, fornicators, and unwed parents? A glance through the documents, however, fosters the conclusion that it was an economic and not moral basis upon which many committals were made. This is suggested by the number of debtors incarcerated and the number of persons found innocent of alleged offenses, yet imprisoned for lack of sureties. Ralph Kershaw and his wife from Audenshaw near Manchester, for example, were found innocent of stealing £9 14s. in cash, but both were jailed until they paid 12s. to the clerk of the peace for their fees. A careful review of seventeenth-century legal records refines first impressions, and suggests that authorities imprisoned women for moral reasons and men for economic considerations. Probably everyone in the seventeenth century would have agreed with the justices who committed to the house of correction in Preston (Lanes.) Alice Robinson of Manchester for having four bastards “by maryed men and others,” and Thomas Greenhalgh of Atherton for fathering seven bastards. But they would not have agreed on whether the male and female were equally guilty or whether the unwed father and mother should be punished similarly.

Few crises in the British Empire demonstrated its vulnerability as did the Boer War. In addition to showing itself woefully ill prepared for military conflict, the British government strained its financial resources to the utmost during the South African struggles. Its war debt amounted to nearly one hundred and sixty million pounds and this figure did not include the effects of the dislocation of trade and long-term debt charges, and telegraph cable subsidies. From the Treasury's point of view, the War exerted extreme pressure on the fragile financial framework of taxation. Treasury officials therefore called for retrenchment and economy. But the South African conflict also demonstrated significant weaknesses in Britain's military preparedness. Many in the Cabinet, and in the country as well, called for army and admiralty reorganization and further naval construction. This in turn meant increased government expenditure which gave rise to acrimonious Cabinet debates and ultimately the Chancellor of the Exchequer Michael Hicks Beach's resignation.

The struggle between those concerned with the financial stability of the British government and those preoccupied with its political and strategic position in an increasingly hostile world provided the backdrop for the evolution of the South African Loan and War Contribution Act of 1903 (3 Ed. VII, c. 27). The Peace of Vereeniging, May 31, 1902, had solemnized Britain's annexation of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony in the Previous year. With the war over and the Boer Republics now crown colonies, post-war rehabilitation was the order of the day. The South African Loan Act sought to facilitate the renewal of commercial, mining and agrarian enterprises in the new British possessions. Though divided on other party policies, the Salisbury and Balfour governments of 1902-3 agreed on the importance of reconstruction, but for different reasons.