Everyone is familiar with the story of how William the Conqueror brought feudalism to England. Despite some recent voices to the contrary, medievalists are for the most part inclined to agree that the Norman Conquest introduced the fief into a previously non-feudal land. Moreover, since feudalism did not arise in England gradually and of its own accord but instead was imposed from above by an all-powerful conqueror, it is usually described as more symmetrical — more “perfect” — than the feudalism of the Continent. One historian, reflecting the views of many others, asserted recently that in the years after 1066 “England became the most perfectly feudal kingdom in the West.”

It is well to be wary, however, of too much perfection in an institution such as feudalism. It is always possible that in identifying an institution at a particular point in time and space as “perfect” or “nearly perfect” one is being misled by the surface appearances which usually accompany decay. As institutions become less and less relevant to their societies, they are apt, for a while at least, to assume the appearance of increasing orderliness, increasing selfconscious coherence, increasing formalism. These tendencies have been noted by a number of sociologists and have by no means escaped the attention of Professor Parkinson. To determine whether they apply to the so-called model feudalism of Norman England is both hazardous and difficult, but the effort must be made. So much has been written on the question of whether any real traces of feudalism can be detected in England before the Conquest that it may prove refreshing to scrutinize critically the “ideal” feudal state of post-Conquest times, particularly if it can be shown that Anglo-Norman feudalism was not so perfect after all.

The last published work of Garrett Mattingly, The “Invincible” Armada and Elizabethan England in the Folger Library series of “Booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilization,” demonstrates his remarkable clarity of perception as a historian and his capacity for presenting fresh and original conclusions based on new factual research. This booklet is by no means a summary of the information in his full-length study, The Armada, published in 1959. On the contrary, it contains several new points of view developed since the publication of the earlier book, and it will stand as a model of succinct historical analysis, written with such ease and charm that a casual reader may not realize that it has far greater significance than many a ponderous tome.

Mattingly was in many ways an old-fashioned historian who showed no interest in, or regard for, current fads in historical interpretation. Controversies that mean so much to many would-be revisionists today — and mar so much contemporary historical writing — found no reflection in Mattingly's works. Yet few historians of this generation exceeded him in the quality and quantity of new knowledge that he unearthed and the significance of the interpretations that this knowledge made obvious. Mattingly was a revisionist, but the revisions that he made were based on factual information that nobody else had previously shown the ingenuity or the diligence to discover. Mattingly did not spin an hypothesis from his own brain and then go in search of something to prove it.

Every man, according to Bacon, is a debtor to his profession. Although the historian pays his debt by devotion to truth, unless he has thought about truth as well as worshipped it he may — to adapt a figure from Bishop Berkeley — become a thriving earthworm but he will surely make a sorry historian. So vermiculate a metaphor need not prompt every disciple of Clio to compose a penetrating Idea of History, but it may properly incite him to give life to his facts by evoking the universal while documenting the specific, by preferring insights to formulas, and by recalling that historiographical clichés and historical facts — modern saws and ancient instances — go ill together. If the historian of the ancient world benefits from built-in ignorance, the historian of the modern world suffers from built-in knowledge, not merely because of the mountain of fact but because this very mountain permits him to let a tissue of fact do duty for history. Absence of metaphysics is too high a price for erudition.

For some years historians have been revolting against easy generalizations and after-mindedness. Their revolt does not find expression in systems, which carry farthest the very practices exciting revolt, but in analysis of assumptions. The critical historian explores his topic in its own terms, not in terms of later dogmas; he reconstructs ideas and institutions in their own context, not as the shape of things to come; he considers his characters in their own environment, not as ancestors; he replaces anonymous society and impersonal forces with living men and women.

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.

The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.

The years immediately following the War for American Independence have been rightly called the “critical period” in the history of the United States. Internal order, stability, even national existence were the issues of the struggle culminating in the Constitution. The times were critical for the new nation, too, in the regulation of her external affairs. The French attempted to make her a satellite. The Spanish would forbid her the Mississippi. By far the greatest problem in foreign affairs, however, was the reestablishment of peace-time relations with Britain, the erstwhile Mother Country.

Anglo-American relations during the decade after the Peace of 1783 have claimed much attention from American historians. Disagreement about internal developments are often bitter; but evaluations of British policy toward the former colonies are remarkably unanimous. Whether “Federalist” or “Jeffersonian,” American writers generally depict Britain as the villain. Beaten in war and vengeful, she manifested “disgust and exultation” at the difficulties which befell the new republic. Seizing upon every occasion to show her “casual contempt,” Britain adopted a policy based on “an intention of humiliating the Americans”; and her subjects plotted “how to punish their former colonies.” The British nation resolved to disregard the Treaty of 1783 with a callousness and a cynicism which made a mockery of their pledged word.

Resting upon studies in the voluminous American sources, these judgements and assumptions correctly reflect the convictions of many important Americans of the time. They accord but little, however, with a dispassionate examination of British sources.

Between 1870 and 1900 British military organization was extensively revised by act of Parliament. The reforms went further than any previous changes in the history of the British army. They were so enduring that the modem British army has its foundation in these years, particularly in the legislation associated with the name of Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's Secretary of State for War in the Whig-Liberal Ministry of 1868-74. The Cardwell reforms were a vital part of that ministry's legislation to diminish the influence of privilege and acknowledge the place of merit and efficiency in the professions, the civil service, education, and the army. Cardwell's legislation for the army, however, was not so beneficial as historians have implied. Too much of the existent knowledge of British military organization in the late nineteenth century is based on a sympathy with those reforms which glosses over their weaknesses and makes alternative schemes seem reactionary. The Cardwell reforms were neither so new nor so radical in their effects as many reformers intended. A detailed study of army organization between the Crimean and the Boer Wars leads to the conclusion that much of the old continued while many of the changes made under Cardwell failed to take hold. It is time that more emphasis was placed on this conservative aspect of British military history rather than on the liberal and novel features of army reform in the late Victorian period. Why was it, for example, that the country which was the first to experience technological and industrial change on a national scale, and which extended its colonial empire farther than any power in Europe, was also the last among European powers to transform an eighteenth-century army into an instrument of modern warfare?

For many Englishmen Lord Cromer was the embodiment of the British imperial tradition. As one who had spent the greater part of his lifetime in the East representing British power and had crowned his career by being virtual ruler of occupied Egypt from 1883 to 1907, he had come increasingly to symbolize the proconsular tradition in British imperialism. His retirement from his post as Consul-General of Egypt had seemed to many the end of an era. Or as the editors of the Living Age had put it:

Thus, to the supporter of an imperial policy he was “the regenerator of Egypt” and “the empire-builder”; and to the anti-imperialists, heirs of the Gladstonian tradition, the suppressor of Egyptian liberties and the tyrant of the East. In the latter years of his administration of Egypt the mere mention of his name in Parliament was enough to touch off a lively debate on the merits of imperialism.

Unfortunately, Cromer's reputation as a typical imperialist has obscured the fact that in the early years of his life he was not known for his imperialistic ideals. Quite the contrary, he was considered by others and considered himself a liberal of Gladstonian persuasion.