It has probably occurred to many people that a slight air of unreality overhangs our conception of the relations between church and state in England in the twelfth century. We know the main questions at issue, and something at least of the personalities engaged upon them. We possess much correspondence—ill edited, on the whole, but still illuminating. We have also much biographical matter. Above all, in the Constitutions of Clarendon we have an official statement of what the king claimed, and his bishops could not deny to be the ancient customs of the realm. It is not surprising that the twelfth-century church in England has sometimes been treated by modern writers in a way which would suggest that little more remains to be learned about it.

The vicarage system has already attracted a number of historians and owing to their investigations the main points in its origin and development are well known. The subject, however, still presents difficult problems, and it is in the hope of contributing towards a solution of some of these that the present paper has been prepared.

[This article has been inspired by Dr Stella Kramer's recent book, The English Craft Gilds (Columbia University Press, 1927), and is, in fact, an inquiry into it. In this, her second work on the subject, she has dealt with the last phase, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. Her material is drawn principally from the published records of towns and gilds, of which she has made so thorough an investigation that any one who has the temerity to follow in her steps will have an unprofitable task. To one who, some years ago, covered a fraction of the same ground with the same object in view and arrived at some tentative conclusions, the temptation to use Miss Kramer's exhaustive study to test and amplify those conclusions is irresistible.]

The decline in prosperity of the British West Indies after 1815 was so rapid as to obscure their importance during the Napoleonic War; but of their commercial pre-eminence among British colonies at that time there are many proofs. Thus, on 12 September 1804, while watching Toulon, Nelson, who knew them well, wrote in a lately published letter, “…I think the French will some day send their fleets to sea, and that the West Indies … is (sic) more likely for them to hurt us in than this country. We have but few troops to defend our islands and recent conquests; 10 or 12,000 French troops would injure us more there than in any other part of the world.” Herein he agreed with Dundas, who in August 1796 stated to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, that far more harm would result to our commerce and credit from a French invasion of Jamaica than of Great Britain or Ireland. As is well known, Nelson in April 1805 acted on his conviction recorded above, and, despite the perilously scanty news as to the course of the Franco-Spanish fleet, he chased it to the West Indies because of his conviction of the immense importance of those colonies. Lord Barham, now First Lord, approved his action; for he himself had come to the conclusion from the French moves against those colonies, “that depredation and the destruction of our trade is their grand object,” and that the invasion of England was now a secondary object. This view was for the present somewhat exaggerated; for Napoleon, who overworked his admirals even more than his generals, expected Villeneuve and Gravina first to devastate our Leeward Islands (with Tobago thrown in) and then to fly back, along with Ganteaume's fleet, to cover the invasion of England.

Russia in 1815 appeared with England as the saviour of Europe from Napoleon's despotism; the Tsar Alexander I, both by his moderation towards the French nation and by the generosity of his promises to the Poles, earned the respect of all good Europeans. In England especially the Whig party, true to the traditions of 1790 and of opposition to Pitt's warlike threats, was always ready to admire the Tsar and to co-operate with Russia. Twenty years later dislike and fear of Russia was in the minds of most Englishmen, and the responsible utterances of party leaders ranged from extreme reserve to unconcealed hostility. It is curious that some of the most hostile voices were now among the Whigs, while the tone of Conservative leaders was more cautious, and the only friends of Russia were to be found in Lord Durham and Richard Cobden, both men of Radical leanings.