Attainder was the most solemn penalty known to the common law. Attainder for treason was followed not only by the most savage and brutal corporal penalties and the forfeiture of all possessions, but in addition the corruption of blood passing to all direct descendants, in other words, by the legal death of the family. Before proceeding to an examination of the effects of parliamentary acts of attainder in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries it is necessary first of all to define the scope of forfeiture for treason as it affected landed property. Bracton's classic definition of forfeiture had involved for the traitor ‘the loss of all his goods and the perpetual disinheritance of his heirs, so that they may be admitted neither to the paternal nor to the maternal inheritance’. Feudal opinion had always been very much opposed to the stringency of this conception and the Edwardian statute De Donis Conditionalibus, confirmed implicitly by the treason statute of 1352, had protected entailed estates from the scope of forfeiture, thus leaving only the fee simple and the widow's dower within the scope of the law. The wife's own inheritance or any jointure which had been made for her, because they ante-dated her husband's treason, as distinct from her right to dower which did not, were not liable to ultimate forfeiture—though a married woman could claim them only when ‘her time came according to the common law’, that is after the death of her husband when she ceased to be ‘femme couvert’. This equitable principle was confirmed by a statute of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 which, however, included for the first time the rule that lands held to the use of a traitor were also included in the scope of forfeiture. Thus, by 1388, of the lands held by a traitor (as distinct from the wife's inheritance and jointure), only those held in fee tail fell outside the scope of the treason laws. This loophole was closed by Richard II in 1398 when Parliament declared forfeit entailed estates as well as lands held in fee simple and to the use of a traitor, thus reverting with one exception to Bracton's view of forfeiture.

IN a vigorously argued paper, Mr J. P. Cooper has attacked my interpretation of Henry VII's reign.1 If the point at issue were only Mr Cooper's view of my methods and scholarship—or, for that matter, my view of his—I should feel neither justified nor inclined to trouble anyone again with these problems. But Mr Cooper is almost as much concerned to prove Henry VII rapacious as he is sure that I am wrong; and the truth about Henry VII's government deserves all the elucidation it may need. If, therefore, I reluctantly recur to an argument in which I have already had an extended say, it is because I believe Mr Cooper to be in error on a matter of first-rate importance; I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents.2 A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest.

It is a text-book commonplace that Josiah Wedgwood was amongst the pioneers of English factory organization—the discipline of workers, the division of labour, and the systematization of production—but his work in these fields has never been examined in detail. Sixty thousand Wedgwood manuscripts, organized on a geographical basis for the sake of modern area advertisement rather than for the convenience of the historian, perhaps explain this neglect. The papers have not been ignored, but they have been sifted rather than studied in detail. Certain generalizations have emerged from this hit-or-miss investigation. In the articles of three visiting North American historians, Hower, Bladen and Schofield, and in the work of Thomas (essentially concerned with the history of the whole of the Potteries), the embryonic and incomplete skeleton of Wedgwood's methods has been laid bare, but much of the flesh has been discarded in the process.

The events of 1857 etched themselves deeply into the consciousness of the British in India. Throughout the remaining years of British rule the lessons of the Mutiny were never forgotten; indeed they provided the constant backdrop against which British policy was enacted. To a large extent this experience played a decisive role in recasting the whole direction of British policy. Its impact on policy toward the native Indian states was sharp, and lasting in its effects. Canning realized that the native states were ‘break-waters to the storm which would otherwise have swept over us in one great wave’, and he henceforward, by his grant of the right of adoption, committed Britain to their maintenance.1 This post-Mutiny solicitude for the native states stands in obvious contrast with the deprecatory, if not avowedly annexationist, policy of Canning's predecessors.

The fear of revolution, which was to play such an important part in early nineteenth-century English history, was felt for the first time in 1792. Before that year there had been constant fear of disorder, and frequent riots had demonstrated that the forces of order could at times be set at naught and property endangered. In 1792, however, propertied classes and government began to fear not sporadic and localized outbursts of violence, but an alleged nation-wide conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of both property and government, and the end of social subordination.

The neutralization of the Black Sea was, perhaps, the most important single result of the Crimean War. Regarded by the western allies as a valuable new element in the security of Turkey, it was resented by the Russians as an intolerable insult to their national honour. It rapidly became the object of a diplomatic struggle. Whilst allied—and especially British—diplomacy watched with a jealous eye over its observance, the Russian Government left no stone unturned to secure its early abrogation. With treaty revision the principal object of Russian diplomacy, any European issue between 1856 and 1870 regardless of its origin, became entangled in some form or other with the Black Sea Question. On more than one occasion, the problem forced itself on the attention of the cabinets.

Dr J. H. Plumb'S recent paper to the Royal Historical Society produced positive proof that the ‘lords of the committee’ of the early eighteenth century were simply the members of the cabinet when meeting by themselves in Whitehall instead of in the presence of the queen at one of the royal palaces.1 With this identification now certain, an investigation is possible into those specialist sub-committees which appear to have been responsible for naval and military affairs at various times under Anne, and about which, in Dr Plumb's own words, ‘further evidence would be invaluable’.2 One such body was the ‘committee of council which sits at the war-office ‘, the existence of which is attested by two letters of 1711 from Henry St John, then secretary of state, to the duke of Marlborough.3 Almost nothing has been discovered about this committee, although its existence has been well known to historians for more than fifty years,4 but now a search of war-office and other records has produced sufficient evidence for the committee to be identified and its membership, procedure, function, and history ascertained.

At the present time there is considerable divergence of opinion on the question of whether or not one can speak meaningfully of political parties during the reign of Anne. An effective means of answering the question would be at hand if there were a sufficient number of division lists available. Then, the actions of individual politicians could be charted with precision and it would be possible to determine whether M.P.'s voted in conformity with family groupings or on the basis of what are generally termed Whig and Tory principles. Unfortunately, up to the present time only seven division lists for Anne's reign have been discovered. Thus, the discovery of the eighth, given below, is of some importance.1

By the middle years of the nineteenth century, Englishmen were in full revolt against the principle of centralization. Parliament's experiments in centralized administration had almost all ended in failure. A powerful and independent Poor Law Commission had given way, in 1847, to a more timid Poor Law Board under ministerial and parliamentary control. A strong Board of Health, ruled by that uncompromising centralizer and bureaucrat, Edwin Chadwick, was sheared of a large part of its influence when, in 1854, the government decided to release Chadwick from their employment. The Times responded to this event with a jubilant leader article which announced that, ‘If there is such a thing as a political certainty among us, it is that nothing autocratic can exist in this country.... Mr Chadwick and Dr Southwood Smith, have been deposed, and we prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest than be bullied into health’.

The writer is Arthur Dobbs (1689–1765), M.P. for Carrickfergus, later Governor of North Carolina, and a lifelong believer in the North-West Passage. The letter is in the Walpole Papers. (Cambridge University Library by courtesy of the Marquis of Cholmondeley), but the Memorandum to which it relates is absent. However, the rough draft of the Memorandum, from which I quote at length, is in the Dobbs Papers from Castle Dobbs, Carrickfergus, now on deposit with the Public Record Office, Belfast, and there marked ‘82, undated’.

In April 1904, Emile Loubet, the French president of the Republic, visited the king of Italy in Rome. His visit occasioned a strongly-worded note of protest from the Vatican to the governments of other Catholic nations, and as a result the French ambassador was recalled. Ten weeks later, following a dispute involving the bishops of Dijon and Laval, diplomatic relations between the French government and the Vatican were broken off altogether, not to be resumed for sixteen years, and in the following year, 1905, a law of 9 December abolished Napoleon’s Concordat and separated Church and State in France.

The extent and influence of political and economic organizations among the lower classes was a marked feature of Irish life in the early nineteenth century. Trade unions flourished among the workers of many trades and were bitterly resented by manufacturers.1 These unions were primarily concerned to protect the living standards of their members against the encroachments of the employers. However, matters of national importance also excited their attention. Tradesmen all over Ireland supported the agitation for Repeal of the Act of Union (1801). A number of Dublin tradesmen took part in the revolutionary disturbances in 1848. In Ireland organization for political and economic ends in opposition to the dominant orthodoxy was a familiar and honoured tradition.

Professor Jordan has now brought out the first of two volumes which are to supply the detailed evidence for the statistical arguments in his study of Philanthropy in England 1480–1660. That book showed that the London merchant classes were among the most active and generous benefactors both in London itself and elsewhere in the kingdom, and the bulk of this one consists of masses of illustrative detail digested under three main heads: the geography of the London parishes; the classes of people and their charitable aims; the classes of charities served. These categories and the main conclusions are familiar from the earlier book which was reviewed at length in these columns (vol.III, pp. 89 ff.). Here, with a wealth of facts and pernickety percentages worked out to two places of decimals, Professor Jordan once again declares that in the century under discussion the rich were remarkably ready to provide for the less fortunate, and that charity was turning from religious to secular purposes. There can be no doubt that his enthusiasm and powers of research make his work an important repository of information, nor that up to a point his arguments carry conviction. Unfortunately, however, the main effect of the new book is to increase one's doubts of his methods and conclusions. And again, these are enforced rather than silenced by his lavishing of superlatives: when one reads that Edward Alleyn, the actor, was ‘almost fanatically interested in the plight of the poor’ because he endowed an almshouse for ten persons, one wonders if Professor Jordan is perhaps employing a different version of the English language.