Over the last thirty years the work of historical demographers, spearheaded by Sir Tony Wrigley, Roger Schofield and others at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, has demonstrated the centrality of marriage to explanations of early modern English demographic change: ‘a history of English population in this period in which nuptiality did not figure prominently would resemble the proverbial production of Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.’ Although their ‘neo-Malthusian’ or ‘neo-classical’ model of population levels kept in ‘dilatory homeostasis’ by negative feedback relationships between living standards, age at first marriage and the proportion of the population never marrying has not been immune from criticism, it is now generally accepted that changes in fertility rather than in mortality account for population stagnation in mid-seventeenth-century England, and for its renewed and rapid growth from the 1730s. Moreover, having flirted with, and subsequently discarded, changes in marital fertility as a proximate cause of fluctuations in the birth rate, Wrigley and Schofield are now convinced that nuptiality was decisive. For Wrigley, ‘the crucial importance of the tension between production and reproduction which affected all pre-industrial societies’ explains why marriage had a ‘significance…far wider than the purely demographic.’ ‘Marriage,’ he argues, ‘was the hinge on which the [early modern English] demographic system turned.’

This paper continues the argument made in ‘Educating the Nation: I. Schools’, that democratic demand for ever widening access to education was the principal driver for expansion in the second half of the twentieth century. Demand for higher education was not as universalistic or egalitarian as demand for secondary schooling; nevertheless, it was pressing, especially from the late 1950s, and ultimately irresistible, enshrined in the ‘Robbins principle’ that higher education should be available to all qualified by ability and attainment. The paper tracks the fortunes of the Robbins principle from an initial period of rapid growth, through a mysterious period of sagging demand in the 1970s and 1980s, to the resumption of very rapid growth from the late 1980s. It remains the guiding light of higher-education policy today, though in very altered circumstances where the price is paid ultimately more by beneficiaries than from the public purse.

One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform’, ‘Ages of Revolution’, ‘Triumphs of Reform’, and ‘Centuries of Reformation’ exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating an idée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.’ Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or construct processes, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation’ orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture.

The century between Reformation and Civil War saw a slow but steady expansion of the cultivated area of England—by bringing new lands under the plough in outlying regions like Devon and Cornwall, Cumberland and Westmorland; by extension of cultivation to forests, wastes and common lands; and by drainage. The same century also saw an expansion of the area of London's trade, and of London influence. Corn and dairy products were being shipped to the capital from Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland. London merchants began to purchase wool direct from North Wales, Wiltshire and the West Riding. Welsh cottons and cattle depended on the London market: early in the Civil War the gentry of North Wales petitioned the King for safe conduct across the fighting lines for their herds. Merchants in Shrewsbury and Hereford kept up trading connexions with the capital throughout the Civil War: Worcester merchants tried to do the same.

This paper explores the memories and histories of the slave trade and slavery produced by three figures, all of whom were connected with the compensation awarded to slave owners by the British government in 1833. It argues that memories associated with slavery, of the Middle Passage and the plantations, were deeply troubling, easier to forget than remember. Enthusiasm for abolition, and the ending of ‘the stain’ upon the nation, provided a way of screening disturbing associations, partially forgetting a long history of British involvement in the slavery business. Yet remembering and forgetting are always interlinked as different genres of text reveal.

THE Dutch Revolt lasted longer than any other uprising in modern European history—from the iconoclastic fury in August 1566 to the Peace of Munster in January 1648; and it involved more continuous fighting than any other war of modern times—from April 1572 to April 1607 (with only six months' cease-fire in 1577) and from April 1621 to June 1647. Its economic, social, and political costs were enormous. The longevity of the revolt becomes even more remarkable when one remembers that the two combatants were far from equal. The areas in revolt against Spain were small in size, in natural resources, and in population—especially in the first few years. In 1574 only about twenty towns, with a combined population of 75,000, remained faithful to William of Orange; Amsterdam, the largest town in Holland, stayed loyal to the king until 1578. Against the ‘rebels’ Philip II could draw on the resources of Spain, Spanish America, Spanish Italy and, of course, the Spanish Netherlands. Although by the seventeenth century the odds had narrowed somewhat—by then there were seven ‘rebel’ provinces with a combined population of over one million—Spain could still call on vastly superior resources of men and money. There were a number of occasions in the course of the war when Spain seemed to stand on the threshold of success. In 1575, for example, the con-quest of the islands of Duiveland and Schouwen in South Holland divided the rebel heartland in two and appeared to presage the collapse of the revolt. A decade later, in 1585, Antwerp was re-captured against all predictions, leaving Holland and Zealand dispirited and prepared to discuss surrender. As late as 1625, with the reconquest of Breda in Brabant and Bahia in Brazil, Spain's final victory seemed near. But total success never came. Spain never regained the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands and by 1648 Philip IV counted himself lucky to have retained the ten southern ones.

The “Mutiny” was the summary of the rise of the British in India, and, as the cry of the Sepoys at Meerut was “Delhi, Delhi,” it is in Delhi that the key to a political theory must be sought. The scope of this paper is limited, therefore, to the light thrown upon the subject by “the proceedings of the trial of the King of Delhi.” Its object is to examine afresh this document as a test for a theory of the relations between the East India Company and the Mughal Empire, and consequently of the nature of the rise of the British in India.

From the earliest moments of the French Revolution, the Midi displayed its own special characteristics within the revolutionary phenomenon. This was the chosen land of political extremes. The outbreak of the Revolution rapidly engendered an aggressive strain of radicalism which, by 1792, had made Marseille in particular the epitome of patriotism, enshrined in the association of its name with the battle-song of the Revolution and in the rôle of its militant fédérés in the overthrow of the monarchy. At the same time, militant counter-revolution appeared with mass support in the Midi well before it achieved notoriety in the Vendée. There were peasant-based insurrections in the Massif Central each year from 1790 to 1795, whilst the Bagarre de Nîmes in 1790 was the first major manifestation of royalist plotting that was to trouble many major low-land towns for the rest of the Revolution. In the earlier years of the decade, the Midi frequently descended into anarchy involving, in its most spectacular instances, civil war in the Comtat Venaissin in 1791 and armed expeditions in the name of patriotism between rival towns in 1791 and 1792. By late 1792, radical groups in Lyon, Marseille and Aix were articulating well developed proto-terrorist programmes. Indeed, at Marseille they had got to the point of largely ignoring the central government by changing the location of administrations and establishing extraordinary institutions. In 1793, it was in the Midi that Federalism developed to the extreme, requiring a campaign and sieges by regular troops for its defeat. Toulon went as far as to call in the English.

In the paper which I read last year upon the History of Landholding in England, I described the principles which underlie the distribution of land among the aboriginal inhabitants, the primal occupiers of the soil. It is not necessary that I should now dwell at much length upon that portion of the subject. I would, however, refer to two authorities which have weight in relation to the allotment of lands.

This paper requires some justification. In what is otherwise an under-researched period, the campaign for reformation of manners in the 1690s has been a very well-ploughed furrow indeed. Since the publication in 1957 of Dudley Bahlman's The Moral Revolution of 1688, there have been half a dozen major essays on reformation of manners, as well as some outstanding unpublished research. The work has not only been copious, but also of a very high standard. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of reformation of manners that has only been dealt with tangentially in the existing literature: the relationship between godly reformation and the cause of Protestant union. Historians have noted that the societies for reformation of manners were composed of both churchmen and dissenters, and that this stimulated high church attacks upon the societies in Anne's reign. But there has been little analysis of the ways in which the ideal of Protestant union coloured some aspects of reformation of manners. The second half of this paper seeks to fill that gap. But first it will be necessary to explore the providentialist context of reformation of manners ideology. We shall begin by taking a brief excursion to the island of Jamaica.

Probably the most famous passages in Halévy's work are those attributing England's immunity from revolution after 1789 to the influence of Methodism. The ‘Halévy thesis’ encouraged, though it did not begin, a debate which still fizzes, jumps and occasionally explodes. Little attention has been given to Halévy's first essay in Methodist history, ‘The Birth of Methodism in England’, which appeared in La Révue de Paris in 1906, even though one of its central themes prefigured his famous thesis. After decades of neglect, this has been disinterred, translated and excellently introduced by Bernard Semmel. Compared with Halévy's major writings it is thin and slightly documented, for much of the primary research on which it was based was crowded into a few weeks in the Bodleian Library, after which he seems to have been discouraged by the misleading news that his subject had been pre-empted. The essay remained a rather slender piece, sweepingly written, which found its outlet in a cultural periodical rather than a learned journal. But it is something of a tour de force.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century language has come to occupy a prominent place, often a provocative and intolerant one, in the ideology and rhetoric of nations. ‘Every people (Volk)’, so Herder asserted, ‘has its own language as it has its own culture (Bildung).’ Bishop Stubbs spoke with equal certainty, if only to vindicate the Germanic character of the English people and to clear it of the charge of being infected with Roman or Celtic traits. Language, he pronounced roundly, is ‘the nearest approach to a perfect test of national extraction’. It is a sentiment whose certainty and content would command almost no historical support today. We are much more likely to agree with Eric Hobsbawm's opinion that ‘language was merely one, and not necessarily the primary, way of distinguishing between cultural communities’.

IN the late 1140s William d'Aubigny, Earl of Chichester, wrote to all his men both French and English, to say that he had sinned and that he was very sorry. He had made many exactions on the churches and the lands of those in the bishopric of Chichester and under my authority (sub potestate mea). A few years earlier Gilbert Earl of Pembroke had written to Theobald Archbishop of Canter-bury to tell him that there is a place in Wales called Dungleddy, and that it lay in those regions which by divine mercy have recently been added to our authority (potestas again). And from the last few years of the reign there is a well-known agreement between the earls of Chester and Leicester, designed to keep the peace in Leicester-shire. In it each party made specific promises, intended to reduce the damage should they have to fight against each other for their different lords. At the end of each set of promises there was a statement in this form: the earl of Leicester ought to guard the land and the goods of the earl of Chester which are in the power (in potestate) of the earl of Leicester without ill-will; the earl of Chester gave an undertaking in the same words. There are four earls here, and three different regions. They speak the same language, and that language reflects the same pattern of thought. They think in terms of territorial lordship: the bishopric of Chichester, the county of Leicester, the regions of Wales.

So many books and articles have been devoted to the life and career of He´rnan Cortés that it may well seem presumptuous to add to their number. But there is still no satisfactory biography, and it is only quite recently that his writings—his ‘letters of relation’ to Charles V, his general correspondence, and his military and administrative directives—have been subjected to the close critical scrutiny which they deserve. In particular, Dr. Richard Konetzke has drawn attention to the constructive aspects of Cortés's career as the founder of a colonial society, while an Austrian historian, Dr. Viktor Frankl, has analysed with extraordinary ingenuity Cortés's idea of empire and his indebtedness to Spanish medieval traditions and ways of thought. Other important contributions have been made by Mexicans:Dr Manuel Alcalá, who has drawn an extended parallel between

Just before lunch on Tuesday 13 October 1942 the British War Cabinet assembled for a hasty meeting in the Prime Minister's room in the House of Commons. Sandwiched on the agenda between discussion of the impending visit of the South African premier and the arrangements for celebrating Armistice Day was a unique item, one on which no less than six different Cabinet ministers had submitted papers. The subject was the treatment of the black soldiers who were in Britain as members of the US Army's expeditionary force. The American policy was to segregate them as much as possible from white troops. The Cabinet had now to make up its mind about a War Office proposal that British troops should be encouraged to adopt a similar attitude to the black GIs. The issue, bluntly stated, was whether the British Government should approve a discreet colour bar.

In the parish churches and cathedrals of England and Wales stand many thousands of early modern funeral monuments. Typically, these are elaborate structures of carved stone, often painted and decorated in bright colours and trimmed with gilding. Their complex programmes of inscribed text, allegorical figures, heraldic emblazons and sculpted effigies are set within architectural frameworks. With a few exceptions, such as the famous memorials to Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare or John Donne, these monuments are relatively little studied and little known. However, they were extremely costly to their patrons and prominently displayed in churches in purpose-built family chapels or against the wall of the sanctuary. Contemporary comment reveals that they were accorded high status by both specialist commentators, such as antiquaries and heralds, and by the patrons who invested in them so heavily. All-in-all, they represent what was the most important kind of church art made in the post-Reformation England, a period when there was a great deal of general uncertainty about the status of visual experience and particular worries about the legitimacy of religious imagery.

On 13 July 1405 Henry de Boynton, knight, was brought before the Court of Chivalry of England, sitting in Berwick at a place called ‘Waleisgreene’, and was there condemned to death for high treason. His crime had been that of levying war against the king in his own realm, in the company of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. The evidences of his guilt were a series of warlike acts against the king's lieges, committed ‘si notoirement et si publicement que par nulle tergiversacion nautre excusacion queconque purra estre concele ne denie’. He had ridden in arms, robbed, plundered and taken ransom in the lands of his liege lord, and he had surrendered the keys of Berwick into the hands of the king's enemies, the Scots. He had refused his sovereign entry into the town when the royal host lay before it, so that the king had been forced to fire his cannon at the walls of his own city. These acts amounted to notorious treason, and as such they were judged by John of Bedford, constable of England, presiding in the court, ‘par1 comandement mon tresredoute seigneur et pere le roy avantdit ton liege seigneur’. Boynton was therefore condemned to death, to be hanged, beheaded and quartered, and all his goods and chattels to be forfeit to the king.

This essay offers a major reassessment of the career of Einhard, biographer of Charlemagne, and an analysis of elite lay piety in the Carolingian era. Einhard's life (c. 770–840) is discussed in terms of childhood, youth, marriage and old age, with emphasis on the significance of his wife, Imma. His personal relationship with the relics which he had translated from Rome to Seligenstadt and his self-description as a ‘sinner’ offer insights into his religiosity. Einhard and Imma are also situated in a broader discussion of the religious activities of other elite married couples of their day. Monastic foundations, relic collecting, Christian household morality and close engagement with the Psalter characterise a distinctive conjugal Christianity in the Carolingian period.

By examining British anti-slavery debates across a longue durée – before and after West Indian emancipation – the basis of moral responsibility for political action may be reassessed. Recent interest in humanitarian or transnational compassion may have underappreciated the geographical limitations of the moral responsibility Britons assumed for slavery and the slave trade. The notion of national complicity was crucial in mobilising individual Britons to petition, abstain from slave-grown produce or otherwise pressure parliament. While the peculiar aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars created a British responsibility for other nations’ slave trading, there was little comparable appetite for the internationalising responsibility for the slave-labour origins of traded goods. This meant that transnational obligations to police the slave trade did not translate into concern about the slave production behind overseas trade. By tracing these national debates over time, it is possible to discern the dominant and recessive arguments for how and when moral revulsion should translate into political action by Britons and the British state. This suggests a need to revisit scholarly conclusions about abolitionist campaigning, the basis of moral responsibility for slavery, and the antecedents of modern consumer responsibility.

Edward I and his judges delivered some of the most resounding obiter dicta on the nature of law and justice in the medieval period; but on occasion they found themselves at the receiving end of such pontificating practices. One such occasion took place at Oswestry in January 1279. Walter de Hopton and his fellow justices were ambling their way through the interminable dispute between Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales, and Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, lord of Powys and client of die English king. In rotund phrases, at once deeply flattering and profoundlychallenging to Edward I, Llywelyn delivered himself of a grand declaration about the relationship of law, people and political power:

Each province under die empire of the lord King has its own laws and customs according to the habit and usage of the parts in which it is situated—for example, die Gascons in Gascony, the Scots in Scodand, the Irish in Ireland and the English in England. This indeed exalts rather than diminishes the crown of the lord King. The Prince accordingly requests diat he likewise should have his Welsh law and should proceed according to it. He has all the more reason for making diis request since the King, of his own free will, in die recent peace treaty concluded between diem, granted to Llywelyn and all Welshmen die right to have their own law. By natural justice (de jure communi) he ought to have Welsh law and custom, just as other peoples(naciones) under the empire of the lord King have their laws and customs according to their language, or ethnic affiliation (secundum linguam suam).