During the later Middle Ages in England both church and state were multiplying their pretensions and powers. The growth of spiritual and temporal administration alike depended upon the availability of bureaucrats willing and able to serve the two powers in the fields of finance, law, administration, and diplomacy. In the absence of cash for paying for services of this kind, popes, prelates, and princes developed means for subsidizing their civil services from sources of revenue to which they were able to invent and enforce claims. This reliance upon the community of the clergy for official service and upon benefices of the church for their maintenance and compensation had the effect of coloring certain ecclesiastical offices down to the Reformation. Prebendal canonries, archdeaconries, and even parish churches came to be viewed more and more as simply sources of emolument — as sinecures to be bestowed upon members of the clergy for the performance of services other than those demanded by the offices given them. For identical reasons English kings, Roman popes, and native prelates laid claim to a variety of ecclesiastical offices and the revenues attached to them in order to obtain the services and skills without which neither church nor state could function effectively in the increasingly complex world of the later Middle Ages. All of this is, of course, well known, and modern scholars have explored rather thoroughly the composition and growth of royal and ecclesiastical administration and the major ways in which each was subsidized.

John Twyne deserves to be better known. Any man raised as he was in a society still not accustomed to drawing a clear line between history and myth, yet who struggled as valiantly as he did to make the nation's distant past comprehensible to men of reason, merits more than a second glance – if only because his failure to free himself completely from the myths and legends against which he was contesting tells as much about the limitations of humanist scholarship as his partial success tells about its potentialities. As it is, no one but the rare scholar interested in Geoffrey of Monmouth's reputation or the fortunes of the Brutus legend in Renaissance thought is likely ever to have heard of him. His one known work, the engagingly levelheaded (and at times engagingly wrongheaded) dialogue, De rebus Albionicis, Britannicis atque Anglicis, remained in the limbo of forgotten books until Sir Thomas Kendrick restored it to its proper place as one of the most resourceful critiques of the British History to appear in the century.

It is less, however, for his substantive contribution to the controversy over the Trojan origin of the British people that Twyne rates additional attention than for his approach to the problems involved in it – a fact which helps account for the neglect he has suffered. An original rather than a profound mind, not quite in the first rank of scholars despite his considerable classical learning, he nevertheless makes possible the examination, in a rarely revealing example, of the sense of temporal perspective then emerging in Renaissance England.

Two careful readings of Lawrence Stone's “Postscript to Eight Hundred and Forty-one Pages” did not relieve me of an uneasy sense of puzzlement. Even second time around the “Postscript” still seemed to be not quite relevant to the section of my article on “The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the English Revolution, 1558-1660” to which it purported to address itself. Somehow Stone seemed either to misunderstand or to misconstrue all my main intentions. If he did so, there are at least two possible explanations for the misconstrual.

First, quite understandably, Stone may have been just plain weary of the whole subject (the title of his reply somehow suggests this), so that he did not given his full attention to what I was saying. Or second, my indications of purpose may have been unduly opaque or ambiguous. After further careful scrutiny of both Stone's postcript and my article, I am inclined to suspect that a bit of both is involved, but a bit more of inattention on Stone's part than of opacity on mine. In any case, here is an attempt to straighten out any confusion as to what I was up to that may remain either in Stone's mind or in the minds of the readers of my article.

Stone ascribes to me the view that “the English Revolution cannot have had deep social causes because it did not have deep social consequences” and then suggests that I have “fallen for the theory of intended consequences, the notion that in history things turn out the way the actors intended them to.”

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.

The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.

The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.

In an article in the Journal of British Studies in November 1965, Helen Taft Manning, referring particularly to the period 1830 to 1850, asked the question, “Who ran the British Empire?” She was especially concerned with the influence of the famous James Stephen, but her question raises matters of wider concern.

“Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change,” she wrote.

This legend is still to be found, as Mrs. Manning says, in general textbooks, among the more important of the fairly recent ones being E. L. Woodward's Age of Reform, and more surprisingly in the second volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Of course, Wakefield and the so-called colonial reformers are well recognized as propagandists.

When Miss Himmelfarb published “The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867” in this journal in November 1966, she drew one courteous protest, the substance of which, on W. E. Gladstone as “Utilitarian,” she has silently admitted in the essay as republished in Victorian Minds.

Nevertheless, some important misinterpretations survive in the new text. It appears with several notable essays on Victorian thinkers, and the collection is likely to be widely read; given the confidence of Miss Himmelfarb's style and footnote polemic, both alluring to undergraduates, it seems worthwhile to correct four main props in her argument. Miss Himmelfarb is concerned to establish that Benjamin Disraeli (the Earl of Derby is virtually ignored with four minor references) throughout 1866 and 1867 believed in a “national” inclusive electorate and that this faith permitted him an ease of manoeuvre and a hardheaded realism in the power struggle denied to the “Utilitarian” Whigs, Liberals, and Radicals. This ideological difference, she insists, is the key to the Liberals' failure and the Conservatives' triumph in 1866-67. The argument may well be true, but at two central points the evidence she adduces does not establish it.

Her view involves Miss Himmelfarb in attempting to show that both parties were committed to reform in 1866 and had been so committed at least since 1858. One would never know from her account that between 1851 and 1864 these Disraelian Conservatives attacked and repulsed three unofficial motions for extension of the franchise and three Whig Government reform bills, apart from seven motions for the ballot.

Whatever our differences, I am grateful to F. B. Smith for what must surely be the best academic news of the year: that undergraduates somewhere, if only in Australia, can still find alluring such things as “style and footnote polemic”; our own undergraduates, alas, have headier tastes. In other respects, however, I must confess to finding Mr. Smith's communication disappointing. One of the longer footnotes in my essay in Victorian Minds is a rather detailed critique of his own book, The Making of the Second Reform Bill, a major work on the subject but one that seems to me – and I gave examples of this – to typify at several crucial points the standard “Whig interpretation.” The present discussion would be more fruitful had he addressed himself to those points instead of countering with a critique based on a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my argument.

The extent of this misrepresentation is exemplified in his opening paragraph. The courteous critic to whom Mr. Smith refers (Robert Kelley) might be discomfited by the suggestion that the “substance” of his quarrel with me concerned my description of Gladstone as a utilitarian. This was only an “example,” as Kelley presented it, of one of his objections; his other objections involved nothing less than my interpretation of half a century of Tory history and of the relationship between intellectual and political history. In my response the issue of utilitarianism occupied one item out of six.

During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Britain, Fabians stood out among socialists as diverging from the Marxian view. Fabians rejected Karl Marx's analysis of surplus value, the most widely accepted and influential socialistic theory of capitalist exploitation. In its place the Fabian Society expounded an entirely distinct notion of exploitation, a radical theory of rent. That theory led to a program for the electoral overthrow of bourgeois liberal societies and the creation of democratic socialism.

The Fabian theory of rent – an ethical touchstone for evaluating the wealth and income of every man – is the subject of this essay. When the theory is abstracted from Fabian writings and fully elaborated, it becomes a blueprint for building a socialist society. That such a society could be founded upon an understanding of rent should be noteworthy to scholars interested in the philosophical origins of Fabianism. Moreover, the point may also be generally significant since it demonstrates that a socialist society may have a non-Marxian genesis and a nonauthoritarian end, two propositions that require constant reiteration in an American political climate which, as Louis Hartz has pointed out, is predominantly liberal.

I

For reasons indicated below, this analysis of rent theory centers upon the years from 1887 to the 1920s. To begin with the term itself, in this period the word “rent” appeared often in Fabian and non-Fabian writings alike and carried two possible meanings. In everyday affairs rent was money received by an owner for the use of his land or goods; thus one paid rent for a farm, an apartment, a truck, or an adding machine.

Scholars have not yet provided an authenticated explanation of Britain's support for the League of Nations against Mussolini's scheme to annex Ethiopia in 1935. Writing during the Italo-Ethiopian War and its immediate aftermath, A. J. Toynbee concluded that the Peace Ballot was responsible, a verdict followed by the two principal Italian historians of the war's diplomatic preliminaries, L. Villari and G. Salvemini. Their judgment was echoed by the author of the pioneer work on interwar British history, C. L. Mowat, and no doubt was cast on this version until 1961. Even then no credible alternative was advanced by the dissenter, A. J. P. Taylor, and in the more recent first full-scale diplomatic history of the conflict's origins, the American, G. W. Baer, has drawn substantially the same conclusions as his European predecessors, A. J. P. Taylor apart.

Villari worked from unpublished (still) Italian documents; Salvemini augmented these selections with a vast array of press material and other contemporary printed sources. When Mowat published his book two years later, only Sir John Simon and Sir Samuel Hoare of the main British participants had written their memoirs, the former having intentionally restricted himself to material already then made public. The Ethiopian affair figured only as an important second-stream event in Taylor's general study, which did not concern itself in detail with the books of Foreign Office officials, such as that of Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart, which had appeared in the meantime.

One of the most remarkable features of the British historical scene since World War II has been the rapid professionalization of local history. The National Register of Archives was set up in 1954 “to record the location, content and availability of all collections of documents, both large and small, in England and Wales (other than those of the central government).” From 1949 something akin to a diary of the burgeoning interest in this area was provided by the journal Archives. Neither the work of the National Register nor the informed discussion of Archives would have been possible, however, without the labours of permanent professional archivists who were to be found in most county and other major local record offices by the 1950s. It is not the purpose of this article, however, to record archival activities as such or to follow the subdividing of these activities throughout the 1950s indicated by the Bulletin of the National Register of Archives, the Lists of Accessions, and the many catalogues issuing from local archives.

For the archivist, interest in local records seemed to follow naturally enough upon his scientific training in national collections. But such was not the case for the academic historian for whom “nationalization” of history had become identified with the development of scientific history itself. While the president of the Historical Association could admit in his Jubilee Address of 1956 that “One of the most important features of the first half of the twentieth century is the realization in one field after another that history is much more than the mere story of governments,” this realization has been very gradual.