Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande are an impressive monument to the fruitful co-operation of sixteenth-century scholars. This paper explores part of the creation of the Chronicles and examines some of the complex evidence about the involvement of William Harrison, author of the informative and entertaining Description of Britain published in the Chronicles. For the discovery of a manuscript of Harrison's ‘Great English chronology’ allows a fuller appreciation of his role in the Holinshed group, and reveals tensions within the intellectual milieu from which the Chronicles emerged. The ‘Chronology’ demonstrates that Harrison's Description, written to a commission in 1576, was a deviation from the main thrust of his own work, and together with his other contributions was a late and complicating development in the genesis of the Chronicles. The ‘Chronology’ also shows that some of Harrison's work was censored by Holinshed where it offended his sense of legitimate historical discussion. Before the second edition of the Chronicles in 1587, there was further disagreement about the value of Harrison's contribution.

On May Day 1639, Christopher Deering discovered that a lamb was missing from his property in Heathfield, East Sussex. The most accessible criminal court to try such a theft was the quarter sessions, which met approximately two months later. By the court date, Robert Walcott, a local labourer, had confessed to the felony. In court, Walcott again acknowledged his complicity. Pleading benefit of clergy, he asked the justices to spare his life. Walcott read a biblical text well enough to pass the traditional – although long outdated – literacy test of clerical status. He was branded in the thumb to mark him as an excused felon, and dismissed from public custody.

One of the most distinctive features of the French Ancien Régime was the sale of offices. Several European states resorted to this method of tapping the wealth of their richer subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but nowhere did venality spread further through society than in France, and nowhere did its importance persist so long. Although the revolutionaries of 1789 abolished it, it reappeared for certain public functions in the early nineteenth century, and has not quite vanished even today. The origins and early history of the system have been authoritatively studied, but its eighteenth-century history has received very little attention. This is all the more curious in that France continued to be governed largely by holders of venal offices, they constituted the backbone of opposition to the government in the form of the magistrates of the parlements, and huge amounts of capital continued to be absorbed by office-buying. Even so, most historians consider that by this time the venal system was in decline. This seemed to be demonstrated by unsold offices remaining on the market, and above all by falling, office prices. For Alfred Cobban, indeed, these trends were symptoms of the decline of a whole class, the officiers. Here was ‘a section of society which was definitely not rising in wealth, and was barely holding its own in social status’ as falling office prices showed. ‘The decline seems to have been general, from the parlements downwards, though until the end of the eighteenth century it was much less marked in the offices of the parlements than in those of the présidiaux, élections, maréchaussées and other local courts.’ Resentment at this decline explained the revolutionary fervour of the officiers, whom Cobban had previously shown to be the largest bourgeois group in the National Assembly; and 1789 was largely the work not of a rising capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather of a declining professional one.

In defining the tradition of Austria's German policy between 1815 and 1870, Helmut Rumpler wrote recently that it was both consistent and contradictory. On the one hand it was characterized by a struggle against the establishment of Prussian hegemony in Germany while, on the other, it sought co-operation with Berlin based upon the unspoken but clear assumption of a shared or dualistic supremacy within the German Confederation. Far from wanting to weaken Prussia or significantly to diminish the role Berlin would play in either German or European affairs, Vienna was painfully aware of the importance of a strong Prussia for the maintenance of Austria's position as a European power. The problem of Prussia for Austrian policy was therefore the need to find ways to reconcile the necessity of opposing Prussia's ambitions with the equally obvious need to secure her co-operation and support. The dilemma facing Vienna was one of devising policies consistent with the fact that Prussia was at the same time Austria's most dangerous rival and her most important ally.

Some years ago Henry Pelling offered one of his stimulating and provocative challenges to a conventional wisdom of labour history. He pointed out that it is often assumed that the significant extensions of the welfare activities of the state by the post-1906 Liberal governments were in some way associated with the growth of the organized labour movement; that they were, if not simply responses to pressure from Labour (which has rarely been seriously argued), at least supported and welcomed by a significant proportion of the working class, and therefore could be expected by Liberal politicians to increase their credit with working-class voters, perhaps sufficiently to persuade them to resist the lure of Labour.

When faced in 1920 with allegations of unfair treatment of women civil servants, Austen Chamberlain, the chancellor of the exchequer, expressed some surprise and countered that the postwar settlement not only ‘marked a great advance in the position of women in the Civil Service, but appeared to provide the most suitable machinery for ensuring that the opportunities afforded to women in the Civil Service should be full and liberal. Indeed…the proposals are the best that could be adopted in the interests of women themselves.’ Was the chancellor right? And if not, why not? Such questions may seem surprising or even wilfully obscure to more traditional administrative historians: of what importance anyway are the real or imagined grievances of a gaggle of women, most of whom were humble rank and file? That view, however, is appropriate only if the civil service is taken at its own estimation or, rather, that of its masters, those men at the top in what was called, variously, the first division, class I, and the administrative grade. Behind its façade of bland homogeneity raged both class and gender conflict. The former has been studied at some length. The latter has not. In beginning to remedy this deficiency this article inspects the treatment by the civil service, with the Treasury at its head, of one category of staff, women; an inspection which illuminates its public image as a rational and professional body representative of society and responsive to its needs.

At the national women's conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.