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.

Was the Habsburg Empire doomed to collapse, and if so, at what point did its collapse become inevitable? This is a question which has been debated consciously and unconsciously by historians ever since 1918. Today, it is true, Austrian historians are warning against it— Professor Wandruszka even a decade ago advised us to do our ‘duty’ and accept ‘the tragic element in history’1—yet the issue is still discussed. Alexander Gerschenkron, for example, in his last work on Austrian history2 chose a counter-factual theme, and in the introduction to his book condemned historians—presumably those like Professor Wandruszka—who were ‘anxious to prevent people from asking pertinent and interesting questions and [had] neither the wit nor the imagination for asking those questions themselves’. Whether Professor Gerschenkron himself employed too much imagination is only one of the issues to be examined in this paper.

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).

We know almost as much about the operations of big Italian companies in England as about those in Italy itself during the early fourteenth century. Tuscan trade here engaged some of Europe's most celebrated businesses, attracted by the kingdom's fine wool and the credit-worthiness of her crown and nobility. Historians have some-times drawn an analogy with international lending from richer to poorer countries in the modern world, both to create a point of contact with their readers and to meet the need for deep-lying explanations. The analogy usually carries the implication that Italy had a more advanced economy than England, and there are authors who say so explicitly. Some use terms designed to describe international economic growth during the last two hundred years, and represent medieval Italy as a pole of development, or a core economy. Others, borrowing the language of power, describe Italy as a dominant economy. Professor Cipolla uses a number of these ideas at once in his observation that ‘in the early years of the fourteenth century Florence represented a dominant and developed economy, while England and the kingdom of Naples were two decidedly underdeveloped countries: the periphery, to use Wallerstein's expression’.

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.

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.

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

A REVEALING metaphor runs throughout The Practice of History, Sir Geoffrey Elton's first and fullest consideration of the methods and purposes of historical study. The aspiring historian is pictured as an apprentice—at one point specifically as an apprentice carpenter (p. 214)—who is aiming to produce a first piece of work to be inspected and judged by a master craftsman. Elton repeatedly speaks of the need for die young scholar to undergo ‘a proper apprenticeship’ (p. 103). He must acknowledge that ‘his life is that of an apprentice learning a craft’, and that he requires to be ‘instructed, guided, and trained’.

Some share—fluctuating and uncertain, but assuredly significant—of English foreign trade in modern times is to be credited to smugglers, who were ever busy in evading customs regulations and prohibitions. Mere administrative watchfulness and thoroughness could never do more than damp their activities; it was only the triumph of free trade in the early Victorian age that deprived them of their livelihood, and until then they were able to match by increase of cunning and of organization the ever more elaborate network of the customs system—its spies, its coastguards and its cutters as well as its routine officials at the ports. The smuggler flourished right down to the end of the period of protection, despite sporadic seizures by the revenue officers. In the first half of the nineteenth century, French wines, brandies and luxury textiles were being punctually shipped across the Channel in the teeth of prohibitions. In the other direction, we know, for instance, of the existence in the same period of so remarkable á phenomenon as the muslin manufacture of Tarare, near Lyons, which relied for its raw material upon the assured supply of English yarn owled abroad. But it was probably the eighteenth century, when customs regulations were at their most burdensome and complicated, that marked the classic epoch of illicit trade, the period in which the technical skill of both breakers and defenders of the law might earn the highest rewards.

What I propose to put before the Society is a study in English diplomatic, that is, in the Science of Diplomatic under the form which I conceive it may take when applied to English Records. Opinion is so vague upon many points connected with this Science—such for instance as whether it is an unchanging series of rules, or merely a method of looking at historical sources which varies with the subject to which it is applied; whether it is applicable to documents of all periods and countries; whether it is an essential preliminary or only an interesting supplement to historical research upon documents—Diplomatic is, in fact, still so unreal a thing to many of the mass of students who now use documents for their work that it may be a little profitable to give, not indeed an exposition of its principles, but a slight view of its practical working upon an easily comprehended group of documents. If it can be made to appear that an ordered survey thus taken is a useful, even essential, preliminary to practical search in documents after any class of information, the fact that the documents here used are much later in date than those which usually form the subject of this science, will only make stronger the plea for its serious consideration by historical students. Though the mistakes caused by neglect of any introductory study of the inner side of the documents used may be more glaring (as indeed they are very glaring) in the case of the medieval than in that of the modern classes; though the latter are more comprehensible as being less removed, by reason of their dates, from our habits of thought and action; yet I hope it may appear that the difference in the character of English Records of all manner of dates is much less than it is usually believed.

To the historian of the late fifteenth century interest is centred on the transitional character of the times. Throughout Europe medieval thought and institutions were decaying. The dream of Christendom was fading, and the development of non-moral national states was quickened by the policy of despotic rulers in many countries. Medieval “liberties“ appeared only as bars in the path of progress, and in most countries fell before the new centralized administrations. Economic changes spread more rapidly and defeated that apparent inertia which had afflicted the countryside during the rule of the feudal baron. New conditions meant an age of distress and turbulence, and new opportunities meant the rise of strong, vigorous personalities who were left without authoritative guidance to work out their country's salvation. Of such were Henry VII and his council of the “ablest men that were to be found”. They were typical examples of the age; men brought up with medieval traditions, using medieval forms, yet treating many problems in an independent spirit, cautiously feeling their way to a development that is only clear at the close of the sixteenth century when the modern state had been almost created. Of the importance of this formative period there can be no doubt, but not much can be learnt about the men who guided England at this very critical time, for they have left only scattered and often but fragmentary records behind them. For the sake of the light that the Tree of Commonwealth throws on the views that Edmund Dudley must have shared with his colleagues, as well as for its own original and lively expression of opinion on many political and social questions, the work and its author seem to deserve more serious consideration than they have yet received.

Among the more striking literary creations of Herman Melville is a short story entitiled ‘Bartleby’. The eponymous hero is a law-clerk who gradually withdraws from his employer's power, and ultimately from the world, by meeting all requests – to copy texts, to quit the premises, to co-operate with the authorities of the prison to which his intransigence finally leads him – with the phrase, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Melville's existential fable is disquieting on all sorts of levels and it has, perhaps, a special resonance for historians. The story's narrator is Bartleby's employer, a tranquil elderly man baffled by the latter's stubbornness. One of the problems the narrator faces is the shortage of sources: ‘this man … was one of these beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except trom the original sources and … those are very small’. After Bartleby's death, the narrator learns that he had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, and the story ends with a vision of piles of lost ‘dead’ documents and artefacts whose texts and meanings remain unread and beyond recall. As a text haunted by notions of unknowability and by the crushing weight of dead letters, ‘Bartleby’ seems to speak directly to some of the pre-occupations of historians in a post-modernist era.

Notions are potent but nebulous, often direct and determining in their effect but themselves indeterminate in origin and structure. My title is designed to circumvent two lines of thought which have largely circumscribed the study of inheritance in the eleventh and twelfth centuries hitherto. First, I shall say something here and there about succession, but it will be only a subsidiary part of the argument. Heritable title was not diminished by unsettled rules of succession. On the contrary, in the eleventh century as in the thirteenth, it was emphasised and nourished by the claims and counter-claims of competitors. In such disputes the opposing arguments were couched in a common language; it is the language, therefore, that will be my first concern. Second, for this same reason I shall also pay scant attention to the jurisdictional aspects of inheritance. To be sure, in post-Conquest England inheritance amounted not to a title but to a claim upon a lord; heritable title was realised when the lord admitted it; no concession by a tenant was as secure as it could be made until his lord had confirmed it.

I BEGIN with the quotation in my title: ‘Alfred, a king across the sea’. It is actually a tenth-century label rather than a strictly contemporary one: it was used by Flodoard of Rheims in c. 960 when he summarized a letter sent to Alfred by Archbishop Fulk of Rheims in c. 890. How Fulk himself had addressed Alfred we don't know. But, according to Flodoard, what he said was ‘amicable’: he ex-pressed satisfaction on hearing of the appointment of a good man, Plegmund, to the see of Canterbury, because he had heard that ‘a most perverse sect’ had spread among the English and Plegmund was the man to cut it down. This sect held that bishops and priests could have women secretly living with them and that anyone who wished could mate with kinswomen of his own family and have incestuous relations with women consecrated to God and have a wife and a concubine at the same time. Fulk ended by demonstrating to Alfred the error of such views.

SOME of the most cherished arrangements, the most comforting statements, the most confident claims about the nature of a society living under a divinely sanctioned sacramental–sacerdotal order, were given very different meanings in late medieval Prague, Paris and Pontefract. Such divergence and difference had always been a pattern of European life, as variety applied not only to climate, economic systems, language and political institutions, but also to devotional styles. The consolidation of sameness which was attempted – and to a significant extent achieved – by the church between 1100 and 1300, was offered through a single system of law, of preferment, of ritual. This was embedded within a set of understandings about the relationship of ecclesiastical hierarchy to salvation as well as to social order. Yet by around 1400 doubt and discomfort had attached to several of the touchstones of this world view – eucharist, pope, clergy – and thus hindered the flow of communication and cooperation which both underpinned and represented it. The authority to discern truth was in the hands of rulers and prelates who, in turn, were empowered or catalysed by professional thinkers and communicators – scholars, preachers, teachers, lawyers and poets. Words mattered greatly because they could conjure a vision of possible peace and remedy. They were spoken in tens of universities, hundreds of city councils, in a growing number of representative assemblies. Polities – be they territorial lordships, cities or even at times the Emperor – were pressing these thinkers and communicators to help in the work towards revival, purification and healing, away and against schism, pollution and war. How is the confidence to judge and discern spiritual and ethical truth ever regained by institutions or by individuals? More than ever before we witness preoccupation with the re-ordering of a Christian world through the re-establishment of social, economic and ethical order.

In the early months of 1327 the communities of the Angevin kingdom of Sicily were ordered to send representatives to Naples, there to discuss means of opposing ‘the lord Lewis, duke of Bavaria: qui in Italiam transire disposuit et regnum Sicilie invadere, servans antiquum odium belli et interitus Corradini.’ The reference to the last Hohenstaufen in this contemporary comment on Lewis' Italian enterprise is at first sight surprising. During the half-century following Conradin's execution the prestige of the empire in German hands had fallen steeply in the estimation of western Europe; all the activity of Dante's emperor could not disguise that fact. From time to time the Angevins at Naples urged the abolition of the institution, as something of which the usefulness was now outworn. Other solutions were being talked of, such as the setting up of a separate hereditary kingdom in Lombardy or the transference by election or papal provision of the imperial title to the ruling house of France. Perhaps too much importance has been attributed to some of these schemes, though there is no reason to doubt the seriousness of French ambitions to acquire as much as possible of the western possessions of the empire. But their frequent recurrence, together with the known weakness of the German kingship, does indicate a climate uncongenial to a repetition of the themes of Hohenstaufen imperialism by a German ruler in the third decade of the fourteenth century. Consequently Lewis' conflict with the papacy has an anachronistic air. Long ago Gregorovius cast a stereotype destined to wear well, when he wrote that ‘this afterpiece’ was saved from being ‘an utterly unbearable caricature of a great past’ only by the ‘progress of human thought’ with which it was associated.

The term ‘Protestant’ itself is a historical accident, but the category of western Christians who have separated from Rome since 1517 remains a useful one. The confessionalisation thesis, which has dominated recent Reformation historiography, instead posits the two major Protestant confessions and Tridentine Catholicism as its categories, but this can produce a false parallelism in which the nature of the relationship between the confessions is oversimplified. Instead, this paper proposes we think of a Protestant ecosystem consisting of self-consciously confessional Lutheranism, a broad Calvinism which imagined itself as normative, and a collection of radical currents much more intimately connected to the ‘magisterial’ confessions than any of the participants wished to acknowledge. The magisterial / radical division was maintained only with constant vigilance and exemplary violence, with Calvinism in particular constantly threatening to bleed into radicalism. What gives this quarrelsome family of ‘Protestants’ analytical coherence is neither simple genealogy nor, as has been suggested, mere adherence to the Bible: since in practice both ‘radical’ and ‘magisterial’ Protestants have been more flexible and ‘spiritual’ in their use of Scripture than is generally allowed. It is, rather, the devotional experience underpinning that ‘spiritual’ use of the Bible, of an unmediated encounter with grace.

Social historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have tended to see literacy as a modernising force which eroded oral tradition and overrode local identities. Whereas the increasing literacy of the period has long appeared an important constituent element of Tudor and Stuart England's early modernity, custom has been represented as its mirror image. Attached to cumbersome local identities, borne from the continuing authority of speech, bred within a plebeian culture which was simultaneously pugnacious and conservative, customary law has been taken to define a traditional, backward-looking mind-set which stood at odds to the sharp forces of change cutting into the fabric of early modern English society. 1 Hence, social historians have sometimes perceived the growing elite hostility to custom as a part of a larger attack upon oral culture. In certain accounts, this elite antipathy is presented as a by-product of die standardising impulses of early capitalism. 2 Social historians have presented the increasing role of written documents in the defence of custom as the tainting of an authentic oral tradition, and as further evidence of the growing dom-nation of writing over speech. Crudely stated, orality, and hence custom, is seen as ‘of the people’; while writing was ‘of the elite’. In this respect as in others, social historians have therefore accepted all too readily John Aubrey's nostalgic recollections of late seventeenth century that Before printing, Old Wives tales were ingeniose and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil warres, the ordinary Sort of people were not taught to reade & now-a-dayes Books are common and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and the variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellowe and the Fayries.

As the Hudson's Bay Company prepares to celebrate its tercentenary it is not mere academic perverseness which prompts a paper on a period in the Company's history when it was threatened with extinction. Longevity has its own fascination, and crucial in the story of the Company's growth into one of the great business enterprises of the modern world was its survival amid the bitter criticism directed at chartered companies in the eighteenth century. Small and apparently vulnerable, it showed unexpected stubbornness in resisting attacks which overwhelmed several of its fellows. The controversies which buffeted the Hudson's Bay Company also help to illuminate those mercantile pressure groups working against monopolies in the mid-eighteenth century, and reveal something of the friction at home which accompanied the steady expansion of British commerce overseas.

The economic history of Ireland in the late seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies unfolded in an age marked by considerable legislative interference by the British parliament in Irish affairs. The impact of this interference was all the greater because the executive in Dublin was, from the point of view of an Irish colonial nationalist, constitutionally irresponsible, answerable to the king's ministers in London rather than to the Irish legislature. It is not surprising that against this background colonial nationalism emerged at an early date. The interpretation of economic issues fell inevitably under the shadow of constitutional controversy and rising colonial nationalism. In the eyes of contemporaries, and subsequent Irish historians who have borrowed largely both their facts and interpretation of events from the writings of the period, economic development was subsidiary to political issues; not only subsidiary but its achievement or negation a product of policy.