The subject of this paper is a celebrated incident in Constantius' Life of St. Germanus. The work is a near contemporary piece, evidently drawing on eye witness accounts. It was composed in Gaul about 480 A.D. Constantius provides several interesting and possibly historical details concerning conditions in Britain during the transition from Celtic independence to Saxon dominance. St. Germanus visited Britain in 429 to combat the Pelagian heresy. While there, according to Constantius, he led the Britons in a military victory over invading Picts and Saxons, the Alleluja Victory. He thereafter passed into a prominent position in British legend and history.

This biography of St. Germanus and particularly the incident of the miracle victory have long been the focus of a lively historical debate. Incidental details in Constantius' work including references to cities, synods, and men bearing vaguely Roman titles in Britain have been accepted (rather uncritically) as genuine. Others have rejected the work as historically valueless and suggested that the Alleluja victory is simply an allegory based on Biblical miracles such as the fall of the walls of Jericho.

Midway through his account of the reign of King Edward III, John Speed paused to remind his readers of what had gone before, an account of Edward's wars in France, by way of leading into his next subject, the king's godliness. “You have heard a part of great king Edward's victorious fortunes in battle, both by land and sea; be not ignorant of his pietie.” Speed's choice of language is striking: “You have heard.” Many early modern authors employed this same peculiar device. In 1600, Thomas Danett commenced a chapter of his A continuation of the history of France with the sentence, “You have heard how a truce for five years was concluded betweene the kings of Fraunce and Spaine.” Thomas James, translating a French work on the Stoics, wrote, “You have heard discoursed unto you the principall lawes which the Stoickes thincke expedient….” To justify the printing of a quotation from a medieval manuscript, William Camden urged his reader to “heare the verie words out of that private historic” Richard Verstegan directed the reader to “heer the testimony of sundry ancient and approved authors.” The anonymous author of The historie of Mervine (1612), a chivalric romance, reminded the reader of an earlier event with the remark: “the childe (as you have heard) was baptized….”

As historians, we have all had occasion to refer the reader back to earlier points in our articles, theses, and books. As a rule, such passages begin with a phrase like “we have seen,” or “it has been shown,” not “you have heard.”

Ecclesiastical benefactions by English barons have provided topics for a number of scholars, but the professional civil servants, proto-bureaucrats, who first appeared in the twelfth century, are another group whose gifts to the Church deserve more study. In England, such men appear as early as Henry I's time, but they become more numerous in the reign of his grandson, Henry II. At first, such royal servants were men of all work, doing whatever the king assigned to them at the curia regis, in the counties, and abroad. By the last years of Henry II and in the reigns of his sons, however, some specialization was taking place, and this becomes easier to see in Henry III's early years.

It is next to impossible to probe these royal administrators' minds. They left few letters, no personal recollections, and they earned only a few anecdotes—mainly hostile—in the chronicles. For a number of years, I have been studying a group of fifty-two of these men, whose careers span the last third of the twelfth and the first third of the thirteenth centuries, chosen first chiefly because of their connection with the work of royal justice. They form a representative sample, ranging in rank from the justiciar to knights of the counties, from archbishops to men in minor orders, including roughly equal numbers of clergy and laity. They range from close associates of the king to largely local officials (see Appendix I).

The opinion of modern scholars is divided about the nature of Anne Boleyn's relationship to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. On the basis of a few of his verses and three Catholic treatises, some writers have concluded that Anne and he were lovers. In these analyses not enough attention has been paid to the role of Henry VIII, the third member of this alleged lovers' triangle, who guarded his own honor and inquired into that of his wives, before, during, and after their marriages to him. A comment on the way in which the king viewed and defended his honor will be useful to this examination of the evidence customarily accepted as proof of Anne and Wyatt's love affair.

A gentleman's honor, as Henry's contemporaries perceived it, was a complicated concept. First and foremost it was assumed that a man's birth and lineage would predispose him to chivalric acts on the battlefield where, in fact, only one cowardly lapse would stain his and his family's reputation forever. Secondly, the concept embodied the notion that it bestowed upon its holder certain social privileges and respect. During Henry's reign, moreover, the “realm and the community of honour” came to be viewed as “identical” with the sovereign power of the king at its head. One result of this “nationalization,” was that the behavior of crown dependants and servants affected the king's good name in both a personal and a public sense, and his ministers took care to do all that was appropriate to his reputation in settling disputes and in negotiating treaties.

In recent years, church historians have been paying increasing attention to the characters who populate that troublesome “middle ground” of the Elizabethan religious settlement. Neither doctrinaire conformists nor hot gospellers, these adherents of the “religion of protestants” have heretofore had their role in English history minimized simply because they did not fit neatly into the usual historiographic categories, and our view of Elizabethan and early Stuart religious history has thereby been simplified at the expense of accuracy. The orthodoxy now being established instead is that most English protestants in the decades before the Civil War found themselves nearer the middle than the ends of the religious spectrum. The religion of protestants turns out to be the religion of Chaderton and Hutton, Morton and Carleton, rather than that of Laud or of Ames.

But now we face a new problem—what do we do with the middle? In particular, what do we do with the ultimate failure of the middle to keep the extremists from each other's throats? The fact of war still looms large on the Stuart horizon, and ending our accounts of the religion of protestants in 1603 or 1625 does not quite eliminate the problem of conflict to come. Where was the middle in 1640?

It is generally assumed that the earl of Salisbury's last years were a time of political decline, largely because of the failure of the Great Contract. “In 1610,” one historian has written recently, “Salisbury lost the confidence of both king and Parliament. The collapse of the Great Contract, in which so much of his credit was bound up, was a blow from which his prestige never recovered.” The outlines of the story are familiar. Salisbury, lord treasurer since 1608 and James's chief minister since the beginning of the reign, was securely established in the king's trust and affection at the beginning of 1610. His fall began with court opposition to the Great Contract, opposition which it has been suggested may have been the real cause of the contract's failure. According to Godfrey Goodman, a “great peer” on his deathbed advised the king

The dying peer blamed those who “did endeavour to engross and monopolise the King, and kept other able men out of his service.” From that point, according to Goodman, Salisbury, “who had been a great stirrer in that business, and was the man aimed at, began to decline.”

Although significant changes took place in the Church of England between 1547 and 1553, the Protestant Reformation under Edward VI has received less attention from historians than the Reformation under Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. The publication of A. G. Dickens' The English Reformation in 1964 marked the beginning of a redirection of reformation studies which included a deeper appreciation of the importance of the Edwardian Reformation. Dickens saw the English Reformation as part of a larger European religious crisis and focused attention on Lutheran, Calvinistic, and other continental influences that contributed to the development of protestantism under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Emphasizing the successes of Edwardian reformers, Dickens wrote, “Such evidence as we can adduce suggests that Protestantism continued steadily to expand amongst the upper and middle classes, while … able preachers could still make many converts among the working people of the towns.” In recent years, however, regional studies have revealed the obstacles to Protestant reform and the survival of Roman Catholicism.

This essay looks at the Edwardian Reformation from the center of England, the city of London, and examines religious change at the parochial level. It is based on sixty-three clergy who were appointed to a total of sixty-six London benefices between 1547 and 1553 and traces their careers through the reign of Mary to the Elizabethan settlement of 1559. The essay studies the process of parochial reform by examining the exercise of patronage and attempting to determine the quality and religious orientation of beneficed clergy. It also seeks to identify the successes and failures of the government of Edward VI as it sought to promote Protestant reforms throughout the country.

The role of women in revolutions has recently excited a good deal of scholarly interest. Innovative studies have appeared on women in the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution that have not only rescued women from oblivion but also modified and enlarged understanding of the revolutions themselves. But for the English Revolution of 1688-89 there has been, aside from biographical studies of the two future queens, Mary and Anne, very little published work on the role of women. My purpose is to remedy that situation, and to broaden the inquiry by addressing four major questions: (1) what role did women from all social groups, lower, middle, aristocratic and royal, play in the Revolution: (2) why, in view of customary restraints, did they enter the public arena; (3) what influence did they have on the Glorious Revolution; and (4) what influence did the Revolution have on women? Underlying these queries is the basic question of what are the contextual conditions that encourage or even make possible women's participation in revolutions?

Such a topic requires changes in the questions customarily used in studying political history. If politics is defined in traditional terms simply as the competition for and exercise of power by individuals through their office, voting, and decision making, then there is nothing to say about women in the Glorious Revolution. Women, whatever their social status, had no direct access to the levers of conventionally-defined politics. They did not vote, sit in either house of Parliament, or hold office on any level of government, unless they were queens. In a predominantly patriarchal society, females, except for widows, were customarily subordinate to their fathers or husbands and confined to the sphere of the family and household.

Since his death Orwell's reputation has derived largely from the anti-totalitarian emphasis in his later writings, even if it is now widely agreed that Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular does not represent any sudden shift towards pessimism in Orwell's thought. This article argues that Orwell's understanding and critique of twentieth century developments was much wider than many of his readers still presume. Instead of being read only as an anti-totalitarian theorist, Orwell must instead by seen as a critic of modernity, of modern industrial civilization (in both its capitalist and socialist forms) and its hedonistic culture. Orwell's critique of hedonism and conception of its relationship to industrialism is probably the single most important area of his thought not to have received adequate treatment by scholars and critics. To appreciate its significance is thus to establish him as a more sophisticated social and political thinker than he is usually assumed to have been, as well as to show that too narrow a political reading of his work obscures essential features in its development. Orwell does, of course, oppose political tyranny even in his early works, but he also identified the characteristics of what he regarded as a distinctively novel and modern form of civilization, which underlay and to some extent provided the cultural and psychological bases for the emergence of new, totalitarian forms of tyranny.

The rapid increase in Irish immigration, it is often argued, was the chief cause for the growth of anti-Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century England. Patrick Joyce and Neville Kirk both believe that ethnic tension and violence in southeast Lancashire and northeast Cheshire increased during and after the late 1840s, that that increase “followed the pattern of the arrival and dispersal” of Irish immigrants, and that the controversy over the creation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 intensified the conflict.

L.P. Curtis, Jr., agrees that the mid-century is important, for it was then, he argues, that the stereotype, based on scientific racism, of the Irish as inferior, was “finally assembled and reproduced for a mass reading public which was by then ready to believe almost anything of a derogatory nature about the Irish people.” The English image of the Irish

Curtis admits that the Victorians used the word “race” very loosely, and that working-class anti-Irish “prejudice” had class and religious, as well as racist, bases. But he fails to explore these non-racist elements; his argument rests on the evidence of Victorian anthropological writings; he clearly believes that racism bears explanatory primacy.

The National Council of Labour attempted to coordinate the policies and actions of the Trades Union Congress and Labour party. It had a checkered history and eventually failed. Its existence, however, demonstrated that the leadership of the Trades Union Congress and Labour party were grappling with questions which have constantly confronted modern British labor, especially the ever-present controversy over the TUC and party relationship, as well as whether a unified labor movement is possible or even desirable, or whether the TUC and labour party appropriately represent components within such a movement. If the last is true, do both institutions share fundamental concepts, and can they develop common tactics or approaches in furthering them? Are those “two wings” mutually dependent? Can the party aid the TUC in achieving its political goals? If the concerns of the TUC and party differ, can they or should they be reconciled? Should the TUC-party relationship remain the same whether the party is in government or in opposition?

The National Council of Labour consisted of representatives from the TUC's General Council, the Labour party's National Executive Committee (NEC), and the parliamentary Labour party's Executive Committee (PLP executive). Originally created in 1921 as the National Joint Council, it was reconstituted in 1930 and again in 1931-32, renamed the National Council of Labour in 1934, and began declining in 1940 to impotence by 1946. It was an extra-parliamentary, extra-party body designed to enhance cooperation and coherence within the labor movement.

An important aspect of John Knox's thought is his concept of divine providence. Closely related to and partially dependent on his notion of providence are the reformer's ideas on God, history, politics, and predestination. Knox did not, however, write a specific tract on divine providence. In fact, he denied being a speculative “theologian” and regarded himself as a preacher, being called “to blow my master's trumpet,” rather than “to compose books for the age to come….” Consequently, he did not approach the subject systematically. For example, Knox did not, as John Calvin had done, logically relate the subjects of creation and providence. In fact, the Scottish reformer seldom spoke of God's act of creation. Despite this nonsystematic approach, Knox did have a doctrine of divine providence, even if at times it was implicit rather than explicit. As a result, his concept of providence must be derived piecemeal from his historical, polemical, and pastoral writings.

What then is the value of studying the concept of providence in the thought of a reformer who did not think systematically? First, such a study will demonstrate that a coherent conception of the nature of divine providence can be found in Knox's writings, though not expounded in a single treatise. Second, his thoughts on this subject have not been the object of an extensive scholarly investigation, either by historians or theologians. Third, Knox's concept of providence had a practical and motivational significance for both the reformer's thought and actions, thus revealing more about Knox the man, his mission, his motivation, and worldview. His great objective was the reformation of religion, particularly in his native Scotland.

According to Nicholas Tyacke, the doctrine of predestination worked as a “common and ameliorating bond” between conformists and nonconformists in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England. Anglicans and Puritans both accepted Calvin's teachings on predestination as a “crucial common assumption.” Puritans were stigmatized either because of their refusal to conform to the church's rites and ceremonies or because of their rejection of the church's episcopal government, but their agreement with the episcopacy on predestinarian Calvinism imposed “important limits” on the extent of persecution. The Synod of Dort, a Dutch conference held in 1619 which included several English representatives, repudiated Arminianism and affirmed the Calvinist view of salvation, Tyacke calls “an event which has never received the emphasis it deserves from students of English religious history,” because the Synod “served to emphasize afresh the theology binding conformist and nonconformist together, and the limits which that common bond imposed on persecution.” The rise of Arminianism broke this common bond and contributed to the causes of the Civil War. To the Arminians, Puritans were those who opposed the new religious policies of King Charles I and archbishop William Laud. The Arminians' elimination of Calvinist influence in the church and at court, along with intensified persecution of Puritans, “generated a Puritan militancy” that erupted in 1640. By that date, Tyacke concludes, predestinarian Calvinism had been “transformed with relative ease into a call for ‘root and branch’ remedies”; at the same time, presbyterianism emerged as “the cure of Arminian disease.”

The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, Gathered out of the Worde of God is a seventy-seven-page octavo for which no one claimed public credit. The book appeared in 1590 (n.s.), as shown by the date of the preface, January 1, 1589, though the title page is misprinted 1599. No place of publication is named; in fact that book came from the press of Richard Schilders at Middleburgh. The author chose anonymity. He must have been known at the time but was not identified inprint until some thirty years later. He was Henry Finch (1558-1625), third son in a prominent family of the Kentish Weald, who became a member of Parliament, a knight, serjeant-at-law to James I, and a respected student of the common law. His stepfather, Nicholas St. Leger, was active in the puritan interest in Parliament, and Finch, too, had a puritanic streak that marked his religious writings from The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, his first, to his last and best known, The Worlds Great Restauration, or the Calling of the Jewes, a millennial tract of 1621 that put him at odds with the king.

This much is known: author, printer, date. What has remained obscure, even unguessed at, is the authorship of the long unsigned “Preface to the Christian Reader.” In addition, the work is freighted with glosses that sometimes squeeze the text into a corner or drive it off a page entirely. There are reasons to believe that these marginalia are largely the work of another hand than Finch's, in all likelihood the same that wrote the preface.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the growth of the national debt, the burden of the taxes necessary to support it, and the effect of this system of public finance on the politics, economy, and society of Britain, deeply concerned politicians in opposition. Their frequent expressions of concern were sufficiently persuasive to induce similar apprehensions on occasion in politicians at court. In 1753, when the national debt was a little over £74,000,000, earl Waldegrave, a personal favorite of George II, felt compelled to tell the House of Lords about a “consideration of very great importance, … the state of our national debt [and] the heavy taxes which are the consequences of this debt.” The situation required, he went on, “prudent measures of government, with that strict national economy which must be our only remedy.” Waldegrave did not go so far as to believe the nation was on the verge of collapse. As he pointed out, “a country and a government like ours has so many and so great resources, that we may bear a great deal and still be in a flourishing condition.” “Yet as long as this evil does subsist,” he warned the House, “we can never expect fully to exert our proper strength.” He concluded, “Till this burden is removed it will remain a check to our trade, will be still heavier on the landed interest, must lessen our credit and influence abroad, and will be a cause of discontent if not of disaffection at home.”