Welshmen and Scotsmen provoked their stronger neighbors of England in the late thirteenth century into wars that almost filled the reign of Edward I. Whether in keeping with “Manifest Destiny” or not, King Edward accepted the provocation of the Welsh and sent his troops into their land in an attempt to subjugate them; by a workmanlike series of campaigns he conquered and pacified them between 1277 and 1294. Then began an almost unbroken period of war against the Scots, a period lasting well beyond Edward's own death in 1307. By their persistence and by their tactics the Scots forced Edward and his people to a major effort, one that made every Englishman aware of his obligation, whether to fight, to feed the fighters, or to support the fighters with works.

For medieval soldiers, like their modern descendants, war was mostly a matter of working and waiting. Battles punctuated the wars, then as now, and at these times the combat troops spent their strength. During the long stretches between battles, however, support elements continued to supply the troops and put them into position to fight. The men in the armies of Edward I who kept the war going in this way and kept going themselves were the auxiliaries: the ditchers, woodcutters, smiths, carpenters, paymasters, provisioners, and the engineers. Important as they were in medieval warfare, the engineers have received little credit for it. Their work, bridging, building fortifications, and operating artillery, rarely rates a description in a chronicle and they receive little notice in secondary works.

In his recent examination of licensed absenteeism and proctorial representation in the Edwardian house of lords, Professor Vernon F. Snow sustained and elaborated the thesis which he first postulated in an earlier article on the upper house in Henry VIII's reign. He claimed that these procedures benefited both the Crown and the individual member. They permitted the latter to secure leave of absence in the case of bona fide personal difficulties — sickness, age, poverty — yet to retain, in the person of his proctor, a voice in the affairs of the house. At the same time they satisfied the Crown. They committed the licensee to decisions taken in his absence. They could be used to authorize the royal servant to remain at his post. And above all they enabled the Crown, through the privy council, to control the House of Lords. The procurators “possessed latent power in proportion to the number of proxies they held.” As the great majority of proxies were concentrated in the hands of councillors, the Crown was able to control proceedings in the upper house through a large, perhaps majority, bloc of committed spokesmen and voters. The arithmetical essense of Snow's thesis is that parliamentary power in the Lords, whether it be of the individual or of the Crown, increased in direct proportion to the number of proxies held. The council's possession of most of them constituted a power additional to the traditional devices for influencing the composition of the upper house and the distribution of power within it: the ennoblement or promotion of faithful lords temporal, the translation or deprivation of obstinate lords spiritual, detention or the denial of writs from prominent opponents of the Crown.

It would be rewarding at the outset of this rejoinder to single out several areas of agreement between Mr. M. A. R. Graves and myself. First, we share a common objective: both of us aim to describe the system of parliamentary politics in the Edwardian House of Lords. Since Graves found little fault with section I of my article, which explained the proxy procedures, I assume that he concurs with that explanation. Secondly, we both are attempting to account for the behavior of individuals and groups within that system. Here we seem to agree on intention, although we differ on many specifics. Thirdly, we both rely upon quantitative techniques to explain certain political actions. It is in this area that the gap between objectives and results appears to be greatest. Graves has leveled most of his criticism at my statistical evidence, the method of quantification and the conclusions drawn from that evidence.

It is appropriate at this juncture to make some concessions. Graves has made a more complete survey and intensive study of attendance and absenteeism than I have. While I confined my attention to proctorial representation and absenteeism reflected in the proxies, he has amassed statistics and calculated percentages from the daily attendance records as well, and in so doing has improved the methodology and produced more accurate calculations pertaining to the political behavior of absentees. In short, he has out-quantified me and I concede that most of his conclusions relating to the incidence of absenteeism are sound.

In the course of the debate over Puritan contributions to the scientific movement it sometimes has been asserted, and even more often assumed, that the English universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were either unsympathetic towards or even hostile to the “new philosophy,” and that scientific studies had no place within their confines. Proponents of this position acknowledge one major exception to the scientific hiatus at Oxford and Cambridge, that of the Wadham group organized by John Wilkins in the 1650s which was the precursor of the Royal Society. However, the exception itself is said to result from Puritan intervention in the universities, and the dissolution of the group to follow from the demise of the Puritan regime.

It will be the purpose of this paper to examine the state of the sciences in Oxford and Cambridge prior to, during, and after the Interregnum in order to suggest that universities had shown a continuous interest in science, that Puritan intervention did not significantly alter the pattern of scientific concerns and that the existence of the Wadham group of the 1650s does little to lend support to the notion of a connection between Puritanism and the development of science.

The evidence for science in the universities before the Puritan Revolution is necessarily incomplete and scattered as is much of our knowledge of university life in that period. It might be best to begin with the work of Mark Curtis and F. R. Johnson who have already shown that the traditional framework of studies permitted the introduction of new ideas. By 1610 Oxford men had been disputing about such topics as the Copernican thesis, the infinity of the universe, the plurality of worlds, the habitability of the moon, and the earth as a magnet in formal university exercises.

Borrowing was a necessary and important part of government finance during the period from 1660 to 1688. During Charles II's reign, over twelve per cent of the government's receipts were loans paid directly into the Exchequer and, during some years, loans made up as much as one-third of the total receipts. Clearly borrowing was essential. Anticipatory borrowing, for instance, was necessitated by the very nature of government finance. With the exception of the scheduled payments made by private tax collectors, tax revenues were received by the government irregularly during the course of a year. In addition, the government's expenditure was not easily apportioned over the entire year; in most cases, large lump sums were required, and consequently it was necessary for the government to anticipate future revenue receipts by borrowing in order to meet its current expenditure obligations. Of course the government could have solved this problem by accumulating surplus revenue and using it as reserve from which large payments could be made without recourse to borrowing. But during Charles II's reign, the demands on the revenue were generally larger than the income.

Before 1688, in most cases the only guarantee a potential creditor of the government had that the loan would be repaid on time, if at all, was the vague security of the king's word. This was largely the result of the constitutional status of government finance. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, there were no major changes in the constitutional status of government finance.

It has been Octavia Hill's fate to survive, rather like some great “classic,” well-known by name, but neglected and unread – of the major Victorian social reformers perhaps the most misunderstood and inadequately handled. Geoffrey Best in his study of the Church of England Ecclesiastical Commissioners has drawn attention to her profound respect for the principle of self-help and comments, “She was on one of history's losing sides, and, as is the way with losers who are in no way romantic, she has rather dropped below the horizon of modern knowledge.” Octavia Hill has, unfortunately, been the victim of partisan history. Abruptly dismissed, on one hand, as an absurd anachronism, a devout believer in individualistic solutions in an age of creeping state and municipal socialism, she has been too uncritically praised, on the other, by those who were related to her or closely associated with her work. Her life (1838-1912) encompassed many vital reforms. She was co-founder of the National Trust and a great Victorian conservationist, whose devotion to the preservation of commons and parks, and concept of a “green belt” enabled London and other large towns to pass into the twentieth century, civilized and relaxing places in which to live. Her successful efforts to save Parliament Hill and Hampstead Heath from the encroachments of late Victorian speculative builders deserve the closest examination, from all those interested in urban development and the preservation, in and around our cities, of the natural environment.

At the turn of the century the temperance question ranked among the handful of public issues which dominated British politics. It aroused powerful pressure groups which insinuated themselves in the political process at every level from constituency to Cabinet. The politics of drink raises difficult questions about the effectiveness and style of these temperance and trade pressure groups, the internal dissension which sometimes dissipated their influence, and their relationship with political parties and factions at a time of uncertain allegiances and narrow pluralities. The temperance question worried the Conservatives intermittently, the Liberals incessantly. It strengthened the Liberty Party, strained it, and sometimes threatened to shatter it.

Paradoxically at a time of decline in per capita consumption of alcohol, the temperance movement gathered impressive new support and the beleaguered drink trade achieved unprecedented political effectiveness. The dominant tradition in the temperance movement, that of the prohibitionist activists, was rooted in a hatred of drink as innately and infectiously evil, a force destructive of everything good, and in a Christian humanitarian concern for the security of the home. Many moderate reformers who did not look upon drink as sinful in itself or share the ideology of the teetotal home also worried about the effect of heavy drinking on the country.

Nation-making, said Canadian journalist Sir John Willison, was one of Canada's infant industries. Canada had first become a nation in 1867, and, according to party literature, with every subsequent change of government “we have been made a nation over again.” Sir John was not exaggerating the number of times that writers have made Canada a nation, and, since historians have often been employed in the same nation-making industry, this paper will concern itself with the problem of the historian in dealing with the conceptions of “nationalism” and “imperialism” in Canada and other colonies of British settlement.

The study of nationalism in British settlement colonies is hampered by difficulties of terminology, conceptualization, and ideological inflection. Looseness of word-usage, such as using “nation” for both state or country and as a word to describe a group of people with some common features, constitutes a major difficulty, especially when historians accept the looseness uncritically and without analysis. Sometimes “national” is used as a euphemism for the policy of protection – Sir John A. Macdonald's Canadian National Policy was originally little more than that. The same term was used by Queensland's Premier McIllwraith in 1882, and there “national” could only have meant the economic development of the Queensland “nation.” “National” sometimes simply means a geographic whole or a common, central institution – that is, a “national” government can merely mean one government governing four provinces, or six states. The word can even, as in “national schools,” mean non-denominational.