Two years ago, at an NACBS council meeting at the now defunct Shamrock Hotel in Houston, one of our officers—not me, I hasten to say—suggested that NACBS Presidents really ought to begin earning their keep by delivering presidential addresses. I objected that NACBS Presidents receive no keep, but I was ruled out of order. I therefore stand before you this evening as the first person ever to deliver an NACBS presidential address. This, I can assure you, is a daunting challenge. One provision of the council resolution was that the address should be published as a scholarly essay in Albion, and with Albion's international reputation, this means that what I say here tonight will be read very critically—perhaps even scoffed at—by historians of medieval Britain throughout the world. I dare not be frivolous. On the other hand, we have all just enjoyed a splendid banquet. We have indulged in good wine. Some might now be in the mood for an hour's technical discussion of Anglo-Norman prosopography, but in actuality, I suspect that very, very few of you are in such a mood.

So the great challenge of the presidential address is to be amusing and significant at one and the same time—and I'm not at all certain that I am capable of squaring that circle. I was puzzling over the problem almost exactly one year ago, at our NACBS Annual Meeting last October, at the elegant and, indeed, unsinkable Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.

One of the most persistent and frustrating problems which the social historian faces is that of gaining access to private lives in the past. This is true for all periods, but it is especially so for the Middle Ages. There are some letters available, but they tend to be scarce and limited in nature. Another type of document which proves a useful means of entry into medieval life is the testament. The information it contains is often of an intensely personal nature and allows the reader to understand the testator's relationships with others.

The wealth of information contained in testaments is only beginning to be fully exploited. In his article “Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Wills as Historical Sources,” Michael L. Zell has demonstrated the breadth of information which these documents contain and points the way to many areas of further investigation. The usefulness of testamentary evidence to trace inheritance patterns and the disposition of property is well established. Eleanor S. Riemer has used testaments from Siena to examine the economic position of women. W. K. Jordan used wills extensively in his three volume study of charity in urban and rural England. More recently, Joel T. Rosenthal employed them to study gift-giving patterns among the English aristocracy. Wills have been used as sources for the study of religious values and popular piety, as a means of investigating the patterns of epidemic disease, and of tracing the spread of literacy. Historians have also begun to use testamentary evidence in the investigation of family life. For the history of the English family, the use of testamentary evidence is just beginning.

To attempt to portray Anselm in all his varied activities as monk, prior, abbot, archbishop; as philosopher, theologian, writer of private prayers and meditations; in his letters of spiritual counsel and ecclesiastical policy; as man of God, friend, teacher and guide to the spiritual life; and in his relations with popes, kings, episcopal colleagues, lay men and women, monks and nuns, is one of the most challenging tasks in medieval history. The number of possible combinations in which his life and thought played a part is very large. To add to the difficulties of the subject, much of the evidence is tangential: we interpret for one purpose material that was created for quite different ends. The material is full enough to invite speculation, but rarely full enough to provide clear-cut solutions to the questions asked. To take only two examples at opposite ends of the spectrum: Anselm never wrote any account of the principles which guided his public life as archbishop, which Vaughn is particularly concerned to interpret; and, at the other end of the scale, he wrote much on friendship, but all that he wrote, as we shall see, is capable of widely different interpretations. Even his silences cry aloud for interpretation; and when we come to that, we are in very deep water indeed.

The morale or fighting spirit of an army has always been a most important if intangible factor in military success. Clausewitz believed that “the moral [psychological] elements are among the most important in war.” Field-Marshal Montgomery went so far as to claim that “the morale of the soldier is the greatest single factor in war.” And Napoleon's dictum has often been quoted: in war “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” Since morale is such an elusive quality, however, its role in military history can be nearly lost in the study of battles of long ago. Indeed, the historians of medieval warfare have been little concerned with it. Philippe Contamine, in his War in the Middle Ages, includes a short chapter on courage, which focuses on theological definitions of courage as a virtue and risk assessment in the wars of the later middle ages. J. F. Verbruggen makes a number of valuable comments on the psychology of war. But these two are notable exceptions. Of course, the evidence for mental states in medieval battles is severely limited, but even what little there is has been largely overlooked.

For at least one significant battle, the Battle of the Standard, there is evidence which shows the psychology of one of the two armies which faced one another on a foggy August morning in 1138. We can see in considerable detail the low morale of the northern English forces as they tried in desperation to stop a devastating invasion by the king of Scotland. We can see their concerns and fears, and some of the attempts by the leaders to overcome them and rouse their spirits. We indeed get a remarkable glimpse of “the face of battle”—or at least the pre-battle. Military historians of the middle ages have neglected this building of battle morale entirely; although other historians have made passing reference to it. Since the evidence for the morale of the English army at the Battle of the Standard is so unusual and full, it deserves greater attention. The developments leading up to the battle will be considered briefly, and then evidence that reveals the psychology of a medieval army will be considered in detail.

The English Civil War and Interregnum produced an astounding number of political tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides that have long fascinated historians and bibliographers. The lack of any effective control over pamphlet content after the elimination of the Court of Star Chamber in the summer of 1641, coupled with the use of printed propaganda by both the king and Parliament, combined to create a body of free-speaking literature that is unmatched in scope and daring. Extensive microfilming and cataloguing projects have made the pamphlets widely accessible to study, but have failed to answer basic questions about the nature of the pamphlets themselves. Fbr example, how soon after an event could a pamphlet be available? How many pamphlets were actually being printed (and when) as opposed to what was being entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company of London? In other words, what could a concerned citizen find for sale at the bookstalls on a given morning?

It is probably impossible to answer these questions for more than a fraction of the pamphlets. Yet, by examining what records do remain, it is possible to gain at least a sense of what the pamphleteers were capable of in serving a public avid for news.

Money lending was an essential part of the local and regional economies of England during the later medieval and Tudor periods. Cash was required for purchases of goods, animals, or land, payment of rents and taxes, and the wages of hired workers. People who lacked money to cover these expenses between 1300 and 1600 commonly resorted to borrowing. Borrowing thus might be undertaken for purposes of either consumption or investment. Further, during much of the later medieval period and occasionally during the Tudor years specie was in short supply. Even a man of some wealth might find himself without sufficient currency on hand to cover his immediate needs. In nearly all cases late medieval and Tudor loans were for short terms, for periods ranging from a few weeks to six months. Interest was normally charged on local loans, although the amount was concealed due to the Church's prohibition of usury.

Money lending was particularly important within commercialized areas—the major cities and their economic hinterlands. The region lying within a radius of about twenty miles from London formed one of the most thoroughly commercialized parts of the country. By the fourteenth century people living on the periphery of the capital were deeply involved in furnishing consumer goods to London. Agriculture among middling and larger tenants focused upon market sale; craftsmen sometimes sold to citizens as well as to their own neighbors. Late medieval London was surrounded by a ring of at least thirty-two market towns located within twenty miles of the capital. These markets served to channel grain, animals, fuel, and craft items into the city while also functioning as centers of trade for their own areas. In the market communities around London the extent of trade was unusually large and the economic sophistication of local people unusually high. Cash was the medium of accounting for all transactions and the medium of exchange for the great majority of them. It is not surprising that money lending played an especially significant role in this area.

In 1922 the Irish Free State began life with a constitution which embodied two contradictory principles. The first recognized that all powers of government derive from the people and provided for a system of government in which the Irish Cabinet was clearly responsible to the popularly elected Irish lower house, Dail Eireann. The second recognized a monarch, King George V, as head of the Irish executive, with substantial prerogative powers derived not from the Irish people but from British common law. The constitution was a compromise between Britain and Irish republicans to end the Irish War of Independence. Though not every compromise in politics makes complete sense, for Britain this one represented more than a short-range expedient. Its contradictions represented the dying gasp in a long, often anguished, and ultimately futile attempt by Britain to devise a formula which would simultaneously permit the Irish a measure of self-government and protect vital British interests in Ireland.

This essay will review the attempts to construct a satisfactory Anglo-Irish relationship in the years between 1782 and 1949. It will concentrate on four models of government proposed for Ireland: (a) the independent Irish Parliament of the period from 1782 to 1800, (b) O'Connell's proposals to repeal the union with Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, (c) the devolution proposed in the home rule bills of 1886, 1893, 1912, and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, and (d) the independence provided in the Irish Free State constitution of 1922 and its successor, the Irish constitution of 1937. It will also place these models in the context of the constitutional evolution of the British Empire. In the Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, and South African colonies, colonial self-government and British imperial interests were reconciled, beginning in Nova Scotia in 1848, by using a kind of constitutional double-think involving the Crown and the colonial Governor. But the problem of the troubled Anglo-Irish relationship could not be resolved so easily.

As the latest in a long line of St. Anselm's biographers, I am privileged here to address the comments of my most distinguished predecessor, Sir Richard Southern. Perhaps the greatest compliment one's work can receive is a rigorous and thorough examination of its premises, evidence, and argument; Southern has graciously rendered that favor to my Anselm of Bec and Robert of Meulan. I am grateful to both Sir Richard and to Albion for this opportunity to reply.

No one could dispute Southern's summation of the difficulty involved in assessing the richness and variety of Anselm's activities and achievements, nor indeed the fullness of the surviving materials and yet their tantalizing silences toward some of our most pressing questions. Indeed, fifteen years would hardly be enough time to work through them, were it not for the labors of many others, including Southern, upon which my arguments often depend. What seems remarkable to me, and apparently to Sir Richard as well, is that he and I can derive such different conclusions from virtually the same evidence. Southern views Anselm as “essentially a monastic contemplative man, with his eyes wholly directed towards God, and with his energies mainly absorbed in the task of calling others to the monastic life,” while I have argued for Anselm's political awareness, his conviction (at some point prior to his archiepiscopal consecration) that God had destined him for Canterbury, and his sense that as God's steward of the mother church of Britain, he must take effective action in the world of high politics to safeguard Canterbury's lands, privileges, and primatial rights. And I have argued that he did so skillfully and successfully. These two views seem almost mutually exclusive.

Sir Richard Cocks (c. 1659–1726) was a rare bird among the crook-taloned specimens perching on the back benches of King William III's House of Commons. He seems to have displayed every hallmark of that declining species, the Country Whig; impeccably Whiggish, indubitably rustic, learned in Greek and Roman history and versed in contemporary neo-Harringtonian literature; profoundly tolerant and resolutely erastian in his religious inclinations, even somewhat Puritan in outlook. He supported the Revolution settlement but opposed a standing army and entertained a healthy suspicion of placemen; approved of trade but distrusted the new power of finance; assisted Quakers and inveighed against priestcraft. What is more, he was never tempted to compromise his principles with the taint of office, nor to forsake his patriotism for Treasury gold. Old Whig, radical Whig, Roman Whig, Vulgar Whig, and independent country gentleman rolled into one, he stood almost alone among his fellow M.P.s, sometimes literally as well as metaphorically. Unlike the vast majority of these parliamentary colleagues, he left posterity a detailed record of his opinions, in the form of two albums or memoranda-books, now in the possession of the Bodleian Library, a handful of letters and essays scattered through various repositories, and a clutch of publications, religious tracts and charges delivered to grand juries in his native Gloucestershire. Of those contemporaries who kept diaries or preserved their personal papers the one whose social and political profile perhaps most resembles Cocks's is the Yorkshire baronet Sir Arthur Kaye, a Country Tory rather than a Country Whig, and with an archive of parliamentary diaries, letters, and speeches, mostly dating from the 1710s, that is nowhere near as extensive. Cocks's writings offer a unique opportunity to examine some of the thought processes at work in the mind of a rank-and-file Country Whig in what might be considered the golden age of Country Whiggery at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Students of inter-war foreign relations have long recognized the role played by the British public's disapproval of the Treaty of Versailles in the burgeoning of the appeasement policy of the 1930's. The peace settlement, once generally viewed as “stern but just,” came to be perceived by all political parties and by the public at large as unduly harsh and punitive in its treatment of Germany. Hitler's rearmament of the Fatherland, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the occupation of the Sudetenland were all significant attacks on the Versailles system which most groups in Britain had come to consider unworthy of defense.

The influences which brought the Treaty into disrepute were various. For one thing, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations tended to foster an increasingly sympathetic attitude towards Germany. Then, too, the problems of the British economy led to an awareness that the stability of Britain's former trading partner in Central Europe was essential to her own prosperity and to a corresponding desire to soften those features of the peace settlement which might be impeding German recovery. In addition, John Maynard Keynes' brilliant polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), not only made the case that the reparation clauses were unfair and impossible of fulfillment, but, with its withering portraits of the peacemakers, also tended to undermine respect for the Treaty as a whole. Finally, criticisms of various aspects of the peace settlement by elite groups ranging from bankers to bishops of the Church of England contributed heavily to the public's increasingly negative perception of the entire Treaty.

World War One and its aftermath restored the empire to a central place in the considerations of Whitehall. Not only did the war open new vistas for imperial ambitions and drive home the benefits to be drawn from the established dominions, notably in terms of manpower and materiel: it also brought into seats of power the likes of Lords Milner and Curzon, men whose careers had been devoted to the maintenance and expansion of Britain's imperial realm. Though their autocratic style ill-suited democratic politics, it did serve the needs of a modern state at war, where all sectors of society were subordinated to central command. It can be argued that these imperial bureaucrats had a more sophisticated appreciation for the power of the state than their domestic counterparts, who still labored under the lingering constraints of laissez-faire doctrine. They understood from colonial experience the state's potential for engineering social change. And they saw change as vital to Britain's future. Deeply imbued with a social Darwinist world-view, they regarded the war as evidence that national survival would require a more integrated, self-contained, harmonious imperial system, directed with greater deliberation and rigor from above. They were, in effect, social imperialists. Although this doctrine had taken shape in the Edwardian years, it was the war that eroded much of the resistance to its implementation. Yet how far could these gains be extended into the critical post-war period?

As Keith Williams has argued in his valuable dissertation, an important feature of social imperialist doctrine concerned migration: here the bonds between Britain and the empire were those of culture and blood.

One of the greatest problems in the discussion of eighteenth-century British foreign policy concerns the assessment of the influence of the particular character of the British political system. British foreign policy, and thus the country's alliance strategy, was conditioned by the subtle interplay of internal processes, the functioning of her domestic political system, and the international situation. As historians are concerned increasingly to probe the nature of the domestic pressures influencing the formulation and execution of policy, so it becomes more important to define the political, as opposed to constitutional, role of Parliament and public opinion. This is of obvious significance for the study of Britain's relations with her allies. Were these made more difficult as a consequence of the distinctive character of the British political system? There was no shortage of contemporaries willing to state that this was the case. An obvious category of discussion concerned the citing of domestic pressure as a reason why concessions could not be made to foreign powers, both allies and those whose alliance was sought. This was of particular significance when ministries explained why gains made during war could not be surrendered at peace treaties and gains made at the peace could not be yielded subsequently. Their defense of the retention of Gibraltar was based on this argument. Similar arguments were used by British ministers in seeking to persuade allies to do as they wished. Diplomatic pressure on France over the state of Dunkirk or on Spain and Portugal over commercial disputes made frequent use of the argument of domestic pressure.

There is no uniform technique for the study of popular protest and ideology: different periods require different forms of analysis. Historians of the eighteenth-century crowd, for example, have to de-code the rituals, symbols, violence, and theatre of seemingly tumultuous collective behavior in order to infer the legitimizing aims and beliefs of the plebeians who were so rebellious in defense of custom. Students of Chartism, by contrast, have a less daunting task. They have merely to consult the movement's literature and propaganda, the very language of which, it is now argued, did not simply mediate but actually served to determine the nature and limitations of proletarian ideology in early nineteenth-century England. There is no need to de-code or decipher this public political language: it must be read as it was phrased, within the structural conventions and constraints of traditional oppositional discourse. Eschewing the orthodox social and economic interpretations of Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones has insisted that the movement's altogether political language was neither symbolic nor anachronistic. It was political monopoly, the Chartists proclaimed and believed, which led to polarization and immiseration; it was political power, therefore, secured by the venerable Six Points, which would facilitate economic and social amelioration. Phrased in the traditional radical idiom of political exclusion, the Chartist challenge acquired unprecedented conjunctural relevance and force in the 1830s as parliament and the state were reformed at the expense of the unrepresented. Regional rental variations notwithstanding, the uniform £10 franchise of the 1832 Reform Act left the working class alone as the excluded and unrepresented people, separated from the “shopocrats” who acquired the vote and joined the ranks of the politically privileged.

The “deluge” of World War I not only produced change within British society, but it intensified governmental and societal interest in the empire. This trend occurred for several reasons. Britain's wartime co-operation with her dominions led many Britons to assume that this new imperial unity could, and should, be cultivated in the post-war period. The imperial pessimism generated in some circles by the tragedy of the Boer War faded from the public's memory. Equally important, however, by 1917 the government was conscious of the serious economic and social problems Britain would confront once victory had been attained. One of several imperial solutions studied extensively during the war was state supported emigration. The government, which since 1914 had played an increasingly prominent role in solving society's problems, believed that emigration would serve a variety of useful purposes. It would alleviate the distress of thousands of British women, it would accelerate the economic and social development of the dominions, and it would strengthen the British Empire, giving it the power and self-assurance necessary to carry out its diplomatic and military roles in the post-war world. During the course of these deliberations during and immediately after World War I, the importance of women to any comprehensive strengthening of the empire was fully accepted by the government for the first time in British history.

The growth of interest in government sponsored imperial migration, including that of women, did not occur, however, in a vacuum. The 1920s and 1930s were, as it is increasingly recognized, “a great age of British Imperialism,” during which the “mass pheonomena of Empire—the Empire Shopping Weeks, the Empire Exhibitions and Empire Day celebrations” became a prominent part of the British social scene.

No British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence has been, and continues to be, deeply felt by intellectuals of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).

Perhaps Orwell's broadest imprint, however, was stamped upon the only literary group which has ever regarded him as a model: the Movement writers of the 1950s. Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which have consisted almost entirely of political intellectuals rather than writers—and whose members have responded to him as a political critic first and a writer second—some of the Movement writers saw Orwell not just as a political intellectual but also as the man of letters and/or literary stylist whom they aspired to be.

The Movement writers were primarily an alliance of poet-critics. The “official” members numbered nine poets and novelists; a few other writers and critics loomed on the periphery. Their acknowledged genius, if not leading publicist, was Philip Larkin, who later became Britain's poet laureate. Orwell's plain voice influenced the tone and attitude of Larkin's poetry and that of several other Movement poets, especially Robert Conquest and D. J. Enright. But Orwell shone as an even brighter presence among the poet-novelists, particularly John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose early fictional anti-heroes were direct descendants of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939).

This article explores the connections between the seventeenth-century Leveller movement and the democratic radicalism of the period 1790 to roughly 1840. At first glance the two appear to have much in common. Both were concerned with the extension of the franchise, the idea of a written constitution, and the equality of citizens before the law. Various commentators on the subject, including some historians, have suggested that such a continuity does indeed exist. Unfortunately this conclusion has been based for the most part on vague connections indicating a lack of solid research on this topic. An exception in this regard is the 1962 essay of Olivier Lutaud which traced many of the linkages of Leveller ideas and phrases in European literature.

By contrast historians of seventeenth-century England have tended towards a too ready acceptance of a discontinuity between the Levellers and the democrats of the post-1788 era. They have been content to consign the Levellers to “relative oblivion” and “near-oblivion,” and to assert, quite erroneously, that Leveller pamphlets were not reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time we must be aware that the historian of early nineteenth-century radical movements is not confronted with a powerful body of evidence indicating strong Leveller-radical connections. The influence of Levellerism on subsequent radical-democratic movements was subtle and somewhat oblique in nature.