In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of the Gesta Stephani accused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from his Policraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”

In an attempt to understand the public and private roles of medieval women in the English countryside, historians have devoted growing attention to widows as villein tenants and transmitters of land in manorial communities. Villein women are often recorded in manorial sources as co-tenants and recipients of property rights on their husbands' deaths. Although in Common Law the widow's share ranged from one-third to one-half of a free husband's lands, the villein widow often received a right to life usage of the whole of the conjugal estate upon her husband's death as her “free bench.” The extensive property-holding rights of these villein widows have made them rich subjects for study of their legal, social, and economic status and activities.

Case studies based on manorial estates, however, have often focused exclusively on the widow as a transmitter of property and have subordinated the study of widows within a framework governed by considerations of land markets and property transmission. Medieval historiography contrasts with studies of early-modern and modern populations that have put elements such as age at widowhood, number of dependents, social status, personal choice in connection with widow remarriage, and provisions for widows at the forefront of study. By connecting work on widows and the landmarket with these other concerns it is possible to study medieval peasant widows within broader comparative perspective.

In 1935 in New York the publishing house of Harrison Smith and Robert Haas published George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England. Now, fifty years later, the book is as vital, if not more so, as when it was first published. It was quite appropriate that the book, and its author, were celebrated last Spring at a meeting of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies at San Luis Obispo in California, quite close to Santa Barbara where Dangerfield lives overlooking the Pacific ocean. Even nicer, perhaps, is that in this year we shall see Halley's Comet again, which Dangerfield remembers having seen as a child, and being told that it would not appear again in his lifetime. The comet appears on the first page of the book (heralding the dazzling prose to come), observed by the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, from the deck of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, “to blaze forth the death of a king”: Edward VII.

The Strange Death of Liberal England has had, eventually, a strong impact upon the historical profession, as well as something of an odd history. The original publishers quite soon went out of business and the book was not kept in print in America. It was published a year later in England for the first time by Constable, but in a slightly truncated form without the important epilogue on Rupert Brooke. Over the next twenty-six years it was a book known only, I believe, by a few, recommended by word of mouth and not, on the whole, given much attention by the historical profession or the reading public.

The friction between civil and military authorities was never greater than during the Great War of 1914-1918. The unprecedented casualties suffered by the British Army and involvement of every element of British life in the conflagration gave added intensity to this conflict. The ability of British democracy to wage total war was put to a severe test. Where did the responsibility of the civilians end in formulating strategy? Where did the authority of the soldiers begin? This strategic debate largely centered on the size of Britain's commitment to the ghastly slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front.

Before 1914 British war planners had thought of a short war with at most only limited involvement in Europe. After Britain's plunge into war, the civil and military authorities decided to employ the small professional British Army on the continent to save France from being overrun, a decision made easier by the widespread belief that the war would be over within a few months. By this continental commitment Britain became involved in a long and bloody war of attrition in France and Flanders.

As 1914 ended in stalemate in the West with few of the original members of the British Expeditionary Force still on their feet the debate over the employment of future British armies began in earnest. The government's chief military adviser was Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Although the public viewed Kitchener as Britain's greatest soldier, his appointment was almost certainly a mistake.

I found Professors Wohl's and Schmiechen's replies informative and stimulating. Unfortunately I do not think they would upset the dreadful Laing. Before I go on to explain why, however, I should correct two misunderstandings.

Firstly: I offered “Laing's theorem” as a hypothesis, not necessarily as my view. Nowhere in my original article did I indicate my “acceptance” of it (Wohl). It is simply an idea to be tested, as a possible explanation for what I do regard as high Victorian Britain's artistic poverty, of which more in a moment. Secondly: I do not regard myself as a “basher” of Victorianism, of the kind that used to be common a few years ago. That is Professor Schmiechen's charge. As I understand and indeed remember it, the old bashers deplored Victorian taste. I on the contrary have a consuming passion for it. In particular, I have a high regard for Victorian architecture, which is one of the two areas I specifically exempted (though Professor Wohl has missed this) from my strictures against the quality of the high Victorians' cultural achievement. For what it is worth — and it is not worth much, being only my own personal opinion, but I feel I need to establish my credentials here — I would place All Saint's, Margaret Street, London, by Butterfield, high on my list of the most inspiring buildings anywhere in the world, and St. Mary's Church, Studley Royal, Yorkshire, by Burges, among the half-dozen most beautiful. There is dedication for you. This may lower one or two philo-Victorians' hackles. I hope so.

A fresh interpretation of King William III's employment of the royal veto provides new insights into the political and constitutional issues of his reign. The veto, or the crown's negative voice as it was called by contemporaries, is a particularly fruitful subject for study in charting the course of politics in seventeenth century England. The employment of the veto offers an accurate barometer for measuring political and constitutional change. It addresses the key issue of sovereignty—who makes law? King or Parliament? It is surprising, therefore, that historians have neglected to examine the implications of William's employment of the veto. As a result, their conclusions about the veto are not supported by a full analysis of the available evidence. What they have overlooked is that a close examination of the bills the king rejected, and of contemporary views of the royal prerogative, demonstrates that underneath the turmoil of Williamite politics lay a stable foundation built on the settlement achieved at the Revolution of 1688/9.

During his brief rule William III rejected a significant number of bills. Between 1692 and 1696 he vetoed five public bills: the Judges, Royal Mines, Triennial, Place, and MP Qualifications Bills. Previous Tudor and Stuart monarchs, with the exception of Queen Elizabeth I, only infrequently invoked the crown's right to refuse legislation. Queen Anne, who followed William to the throne, vetoed only one bill. She was the last monarch to employ this prerogative, although it remains theoretically a legitimate royal power.