The scene is familiar to most students of English history. In 664 A.D. the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and his son Alhfrith met with their clergy at Whitby to resolve (in Bede's words) “a great and active controversy about the keeping of Easter.” Oswiu, who presided over the council, listened patiently to a long and often bitter debate between the Irish and Roman advocates. On the surface, it was an unequal contest, for the traditions of Iona were upheld by the king's own bishop, Colman, while those of Rome were championed by a young abbot, Wilfrid, a protege of Alhfrith. But once again David slew Goliath. Oswiu, fearing for the welfare of his soul, pronounced in favor of the Apostle Peter, the “hostiarius … qui claues tenere probatur,” thus turning his back on his own childhood teachings. “When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognized to be better.”

Bede portrayed the Council of Whitby as the decisive confrontation in his native Northumbria between the rival ecclesiastical traditions of Rome and Iona. For him, the Roman triumph, the climax of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, signified that the Northumbrian church would no longer be guided by “a handful of people in the remotest of islands,” but would rejoin the “catholic and apostolic" Church of Christ. Oswiu's dramatic conversion at Whitby was thus a crucial step in the growth of Christian unity in the British Isles.

Henry de Eastry, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury from 1285 to 1331, has long been regarded as primarily responsible for the priory's financial health. On his accession, the monastery was deeply in debt. Eastry, by his reorganization of the administration and his far-seeing policies of adding to the convent's property and exploiting these resources to the fullest, was able to raise the priory “from a state of insolvency to what was probably the highest level of productivity in its history.” One reason that Eastry enjoys such an excellent reputation is that he left behind him several extremely significant records, including a register of his writs and a memorandum book in which he set forth his achievements with elaborate detail. Yet some of his predecessors and successors followed policies that were very similar to those pursued by Eastry. It is time to re-examine Eastry's role in the priory's history and to determine whether his contribution was indeed as outstanding as has been hitherto assumed.

The area that most lends itself to this investigation is that of property investment. R.A.L. Smith, in his pioneering study of the convent's administration only touched on this aspect. He stated that during Eastry's priorate the monks “made astute investments in land,” but gave few examples. Moreover he never tackled the problem of how the priory's activities were affected by the statute of mortmain of 1279, which, in theory at least, severely restricted property accumulation on the part of ecclesiastical institutions. Nor did he consider the question of whether the tremendous fall in population after 1348 hindered or facilitated the acquisition of lands and rents. A detailed analysis, over a fairly long period, of the policies pursued by the priory with regard to investment in land, rent, and building, can not only point out the contribution made by Eastry, but also shed light on the more general questions of the economic impact of the Black Death and the effectiveness of the statute of mortmain.

On March 24, 1603, the day on which Elizabeth was both dead and alive, James VI not only inherited the English throne, but also the Queen's Catholic subjects and the policy which she and her council had devised to contain and render neutral a potentially rebellious minority. Unlike religious minorities on the continent, however, the recusants were not an armed force waiting to defend their freedom to worship. Rather, they were a minority considered dangerous because of their potential as rebels. In dealing with that potentially rebellious group James's policy differed from continental solutions to the problem of religious minorities. His policy was based on his firm belief that the human conscience was inviolable and that “force never helped in religious matters and that gallant men should not be forced to die as martyrs.” These beliefs led James to attempt to introduce religious toleration in England. Previous treatments of the first three years of James's reign and previous analyses of the Oath of Allegiance of 1606 have failed to see that James was using the oath as the basis of religious toleration. The oath solved both the problem of religious authority and the problem of fidelity to a monarch with whom one differed in religion, because the oath recognized the King's God-given authority as a monarch while not denying that the Bishop of Rome did have a spiritual authority over the Englishmen who belonged to his church. If Catholic subjects accepted that oath, James would grant them a limited form of toleration.

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.

In the mélange of conflicting theories on the origins of the English Civil War, a number of English social groups have received scrupulous attention. Storms have brewed over the gentry, the aristocracy, and more recently, “the middle sort of people” in town and countryside. Even the rural peasantry, traditionally neglected by historians, have not been overlooked in the most recent debates. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the English professional classes although studies of the clerical and legal professions have been forthcoming of late. Perhaps worst served of all in the ongoing war of scholars has been the English medical profession. The recent historiography on English physicians and their relationship to the Civil War can be briefly summarized.

The little work that has been done on professional physicians revolves almost exclusively around the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1964, in a distinguished history of the college, Sir George Clark suggested that the fellowship probably leaned to the royalist cause, but out of political expediency accommodated itself to the reality of parliament's power in the City of London. Referring to the events of 1642 and 1643, Clark wrote:

The origins of the Civil War are apparent from the outset of the History of the Rebellion: “he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of the time,” Clarendon contends, “will find all this bulk of misery to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us, from the same natural causes and means which have usually attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification, and castigation of Heaven.” The relationship between prosperity and calamity is, of course, commonplace in classical as well as seventeenth-century chronicles of civil conflict, but both the sections of the History written in 1646 and those added some twenty years later insist that “the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation” (I, 84). Although he modifies his praise of this peaceful era in The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, claiming that “England enjoyed the greatest Measure of Felicity that it [and not, as he earlier said, any nation] had ever known,” this view of Caroline prosperity remains extreme. Clarendon likens the years of Charles's personal rule to a golden age. Without specifically invoking the classical tradition of the halcyon calm or the return of Astraea, his recollection of the 1630s gives central importance and new immediacy to a well-established Caroline myth of peace.

Modern historians have generally found much amiss in the decade of Charles's personal rule, and they have naturally questioned Clarendon's characterization of unrivalled happiness. Only B. H. G. Wormald's seminal study of Clarendon accepts the notion of “unparalleled prosperity,” which, it argues, “is an indisputable fact so far at least as the gentry were concerned.”

Most studies of eighteenth-century Nonconformity have concentrated upon the Dissenters' political ideology, and their contribution to the emergence of liberal thought is now established. Such well-known reformers as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and less prominent ones like William Smith and Robert Robinson of Cambridge, all illustrate the importance of Nonconformity to the Commonwealthman tradition. Two related issues, however, call for further investigation: the influence of the leaders' progressive ideology upon the laity's political behavior and the Dissenters' relation to Whig party politics and reform. The most widely accepted view of the political impact of Nonconformity was advanced by W. E. H. Lecky and G. M. Trevelyan. Both historians assumed that the laity's behavior was an accurate reflection of the beliefs of the elite, and they proceeded to make large claims for the importance of Nonconformity to the English “party system.” In the Romanes Lecture of 1926, Trevelyan advanced the thesis in its classic form: “from the Restoration to the latter years of the Nineteenth Century, the continuity of the two parties in English politics was very largely due to the two-party system in religious observance, popularly known as Church and Chapel.” Within three years of Trevelyan's writing, the Whig interpretation of party was demolished by Lewis Namier, and with the dismantling of the notion of a two-party system, there seemed little reason to pursue the more refined issue of religion and party. Only recently has the topic been taken up again, and this research suggests that there may have been a significant connection between Nonconformity and party politics at both the national and the local level.

The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age of laissez-faire” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.

The term laissez-faire has been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.

The most influential case for an “age of laissez-faire” was presented by Dicey in Law and Public Opinion. In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.

During the unusually hot summer of 1857 English society was shocked and outraged by reports of atrocity and mass murder. News of the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny reached London on June 26, 1857 and, during the succeeding months, tales of massacre and torture followed. Polite Victorian society was incensed. This article examines Parliament's response to this crisis. It reveals that there exists no simple relation between events occurring outside Westminster and the response within. Parliamentary perception passes through the medium of public rhetoric, established policy, party circumstance, and the private concerns of prominent personalities. This creates less a refractive distortion of events than a new aspect to their understanding. Issues such as India acquired significance within a continuing context of parliamentary circumstance long preceding the immediate cause of substantive concern. This article, then, is not about India as such, but about the particular form the Indian question assumed within Westminster. This is a significant concern in itself because of the insight preoccupation with India provided into the tensions, antagonisms, aspirations, and hopes shaping party alignment during the mid-nineteenth century.

A further aspect of this translation of external circumstance into parliamentary perception is that an issue only became the occasion of crisis when it was portrayed as critical. Once again, there existed no simple relation between external events and the response within Westminster. Popular moral outrage over native atrocities became a political crisis over administrative reform. This particular parliamentary response was neither necessary nor inevitable. The recognition of crisis and the particular crisis perceived are themselves historical events that require explanation.

Wilkie Collins's Victorian novel The Woman in White contains a scene in which the hero unknowingly aids the woman of the title, Anne Catherick, to escape from an asylum. When he learns that she was an escaped patient, he reflects on his action: “what had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?” The question was one which, less directly, confronted Victorian society as a whole. The nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of an asylum system designed “mercifully to control” the insane, a development of which many Englishmen felt proud. Yet this pride was often accompanied by an endemic, nagging fear that persons were being improperly confined in asylums. Occasionally, the exposure of some apparently egregious case of wrongful confinement raised these fears to epidemic proportions and produced what the Victorians called “lunacy panics.” These outbursts of public rage symptomized the tensions within a society determined to ban the mad from its midst, yet uncertain of the boundaries of madness, skeptical of the abilities of those it had chosen to draw those boundaries, and undecided as to the actual purposes of confinement. Indeed, the Victorians never clearly established what they meant by “wrongful” confinement. At times they seemed to mean the confinement of the sane; at other times they seemed to include those who were insane but not manifestly dangerous.

Although in recent years Victorianists have eagerly cultivated the fields of sport and women's history, they have produced surprisingly little relating the two areas. Historians of women have virtually ignored the physical dimension of the struggle for female emancipation, while historians of sport have reflected sport's traditional male orientation by neglecting the distaff side. As W. J. Baker noted recently in the Journal of Sport History, “the history of British women in sports … stands high on the agenda of work to be done.”

What limited material there is on women's sport history as such has tended to be produced by physical educators or amateurs like former players and journalists whose methodology can only be described as narrative-descriptive. A broad historical perspective permitting an exploration of the relationship between women's sport and social change is noticeable by its absence. Interpretation and analysis if they exist at all are usually limited to commonplace and uncritical observations about sport mirroring social attitudes to women and providing them with new opportunities for recreation and physical exercise. Such studies should not be denigrated, for when precious little has been known even of the facts of women's involvement in sport their revelation is certainly an important stage in the journey of discovery. However, if a truly meaningful and comprehensive picture is to be developed interpretative accounts are needed, which deal with such topics as power and control, motivation, the nature of participation, female sport's ambiguities and socially disruptive potential, its emancipating and restricting characteristics, and the interaction between feminism and female athleticism.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was elected leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons in January 1899, the party already was divided over the issue of imperialism. By the end of the year, the Boer War had accentuated that division. During the next six years, this disagreement over imperial policy was converted into a struggle between CB (as he was known to his contemporaries) and the Liberal Imperialists for control of the Liberal party. In the course of that struggle, Lord Rosebery, the leader of the Liberal Imperialists, repudiated CB's leadership; the Liberal Imperialists established their own organization, the Liberal League; and finally, the three most prominent Liberal Imperialists in the House of Commons—H.H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and R.B. Haldane—tried to force CB to become a prime minister in the House of Lords before they would serve under him.

Despite the obvious talents of the men involved, the Liberal Imperialists failed in their efforts either to capture the Liberal party or to dislodge CB from his position as leader. Because CB's leadership in opposition has seemed weak, there has been a tendency, even on the part of his sympathetic biographers, to attribute his success in beating back the Liberal Imperialist challenge to pluck and luck rather than to political skill. CB was plucky in his willingness to stick with the thankless task of leading a divided party whose most prominent members—Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, and John Morley—insisted on acting as alternatives to CB both as definers of policy and as focuses for the loyalty of Liberal M.P.s. CB was lucky in that the actions of the Unionist government of 1902-1905 reunited the fractured Liberals.

The traditional approach to the political crisis of 1931 and the events that followed it is to seek to establish responsibility, or guilt, for the fall of the second Labour Government and the formation of its National successor. Few doubt the conventional wisdom that after August 1931 the Conservatives were “cashing in,” completing the imprisonment of MacDonald, securing a massive parliamentary majority, enacting protectionist legislation, and finally causing the resignation of the free traders in September 1932. This orthodoxy has been reinforced in a recent study by John Fair, in which a new “culprit” has been found in Neville Chamberlain. If the evidence of his “culpability” in bringing down the Labour Government is unconvincing, it is buttressed by the assumption that the Conservatives gained most from the crisis, by controlling the new government and enacting conservative measures.

The study of these events cannot advance beyond the discovery of culprits while it remains confined to the study of individual roles. What is needed, and what this article seeks to supply, is an analysis which takes into account the whole political context, the condition and prospects of all the parties concerned at the time when the crisis broke upon them. It is necessary to separate clearly the expectations of the parties in August from the quite unforseen rewards that they reaped in the October election. The partisan bitterness which has plagued the study of the crisis has largely resulted from a failure to achieve such a separation.

It has long been recognized that British central administration rarely undergoes radical upheaval. Major changes tend to occur in a cumulative or incremental manner, rather than being imposed suddenly as part of a politically-inspired program of reform. Even when the tempo of change in Whitehall has been at its quickest, for example in the two world wars, the dominant pattern has been for ad hoc adaptation of existing practices or for uncoordinated improvisations. All this is in character for a country whose political system is determined less by institutional frameworks or legal codifications than by ever subtly changing codes of practice or conventions. As a result, however, it is not unknown for significant changes in the workings of Whitehall to go largely unnoticed by contemporaries. It is argued here that one such development was the transformation in the inter-war period of the Treasury and of the higher civil service which was presided over by Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 1919 to 1939.

The extent and significance of these changes has tended to be masked even for later historians by the more obvious upheavals in both the work and organization of departments during each of the world wars. However, the changes wrought by Fisher and his associates had repercussions far beyond the confines of the Treasury itself. Five interrelated developments can be traced during this period.