The English customs duties under the early Stewarts, and the many vexed constitutional questions involved in connection with them, furnished some of the bitterest subjects of controversy at the time, both in and out of Parliament, and constitutional historians have devoted much attention to them. The questions that have been debated in this connection, however, have been mainly of one kind, and have related mainly to the constitutional powers of the Crown and the proper application of mediæval precedents under changed conditions. But there is an entirely different standpoint from which the customs can be approached, that of their administration as an essential part of the revenue-producing system, and comparatively little attention has been devoted to this aspect of the subject. It is important from a purely English point of view, but it is also specially interesting to the investigator of the English background for the early period of American colonisation, since customs duties played such an important part in fostering the growth of Virginia and of other newly established colonies.

In the last twenty years or so, sociologists have shown that trust is an especially problematic but also especially important feature of modern societies, in which traditional and familiar social ties have been broken up and reconfigured in new patterns. On the whole, however, sociologists do not attempt a historical analysis, contenting themselves with the distinction between modern and pre-modern societies. With few exceptions, historians, who could give a more differentiated account, have not shown much interest in trust. Even those who deal with themes like religion, ethnicity, gender and the family tend to interpret them through power relationships rather than trust relationships. There are very good reasons, though, why historians should tackle the theme of trust. In this essay it is argued that the manner in which trust works in any given society is vital to the understanding of most social phenomena. An account is attempted of certain crucial junctures in European history when the radius of trust has broadened relatively rapidly. Finally the essay offers some suggestions as to why a perceived ‘crisis of trust’ has arisen, both in the contemporary western world and in the global economy, and what might be done about it.

Early in the Civil War some North Welsh gentlemen addressed to the King a petition, the draft of which is preserved in the National Library at Aberystwyth:

“ To the King's most excellent ma'tie. The humble petition of yo'r Ma'ties Loyall subjects subscribed for and on the behalfe of themselues and the rest of the inhabitants of yo'r Ma'ties six counties of North Wales, Sheweth, That the sale of yo'r petitioners' cattle and Welch cottons being the principall and most considerable commodities of these countries, cottons usuallie vented in Shrewsbury and our cattle driven and sould in most parts of England, hath bin and is the onelie support of yo'r petitioners' being and livelihood, among whom there (be) many thousand families in the mountainous part of this countrey who sowing little or noe corne at all, trust merely to the sale of their cattle, wooll and Welch cottons for provision of bread.”

Authors of the surge of economic tracts and treatises published in late seventeenth-century England generally agreed that foreign trade underpinned the wealth, health, and strength of the nation. The merchant was hero

the same to the body politick as the liver, veins and arteries are to the natural; for he both raises and distributes treasure the vital blood of the common weal. He is the steward of the kingdom's stock which by his good or ill-management does proportionably increase or languish. One of the most useful members in a state without whom it can never be opulent in peace nor consequently formidable in war.'

This article takes two major moments of social change in central medieval Europe, the ‘feudal revolution’ in France and the origins of Italian city communes, in order to see what they have in common. They are superficially very different, one rural one urban, and also one whose analysts focus on the breakdown of political power and the other on its construction or reconstruction; but there are close parallels between the changes which took place in France around 1000 or 1050 and those which took place in Italy around 1100. The contrast in dates does not matter; what matters is that in each case larger-scale political breakdown (whether at the level of the kingdom or the county) was matched by local recomposition, the intensification or crystallisation of local power structures which had been much more ad hoc before, and which would be the basic template for local power henceforth. In Italy, the main focus of the article, the different experiences of Pisa and Genoa are compared, and the development of urban assemblies first, consular collectives second, communal institutions third, are all analysed from this perspective, as guides to how the city communes of the peninsula developed, however haltingly and insecurely. The article finishes with a brief comment on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

Much evidence has been brought to light recently to demonstrate the vitality of religious life among the English laity on the eve of the Reformation. Attention has been drawn to the fact that, in the period before the advent of Protestantism, lay men and women evinced a high degree of commitment to their church. The religious changes of the sixteenth century are as pressing a historical problem as ever; moreover, they provide a valuable litmus with which to test the qualities of the late-medieval church. Nevertheless, there is a danger that the fascination of the Reformation question, together with the bias of documentary sources on lay religion towards the latter end of the medieval period, may impoverish our appreciation of the ways in which, for a thousand years, Christians in Britain had been shaping their religious lives. To take a long view of religious voluntarism may help to put the developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a proper perspective. There has also been a tendency, in discussion of lay religious life in the late middle ages, to accept the institutional framework as given. Yet in practice that framework was both adjustable and expressive of a wide range of lay initiatives in religion. That men and women were prepared to lend material support to a variety of religious institutions is apparent from any medieval collection of wills or set of churchwardens' accounts. But what, exactly, was expressed by such support? This is not an easy question to answer. Any assessment calls for an understanding of the medieval parish, not as a legal abstraction, nor yet as a supposedly ‘natural’ community of inhabitants, but as a more or less adaptable framework shaped by, and in turn shaping, the lives of the members. The evidence of religious activity, from processions to church-building, is, so far as it goes, not hard to find. But what of the parochial structure which gave meaning to these gestures, and which could in turn be modified by them?

This address tracks the choices made by students at English schools (O-Level, GCSE and A-Level) and at British universities (undergraduate degree) of what subjects to study over the whole of the period since the Second World War. There are marked long-term trends towards a greater diversity in subjects studied, especially at A-Level and degree level, and this tended to reduce over time the dominance of science, to the advantage of a range of subjects including social studies, traditional humanities and latterly creative arts. These trends reflect (most of all) the growing size and diversity of the student body staying on to further study, but also the broadening of the labour market which this more diverse body of students is entering, and social and cultural changes favouring creativity and self-expression in education. The address closes with a reflection on the possible significance of a very recent halting and even a reversal of these trends in subject choice, to the apparent benefit of the sciences.

This essay examines the frequency of medical interventions paid for on behalf of the dying in provincial southern England through a study of approximately 18,000 probate accounts in three dioceses (Canterbury, Chichester and Salisbury). Very substantial increases in the propensity to obtain medical relief are noted for all status groups in almost all areas. It seems that, depending on status, individuals in the south-eastc.1705 were between four and twelve times more likely to seek a medical strategy when faced with a serious, life-threatening illness or injury than their counterpartsc.1585. This increase in the use of medical strategies in the face of life-threatening ailments was not accompanied by a commensurate increase in the number of practitioners serving the population, but it was accompanied by a rise in the number of practitioners who were described as ‘doctor’ by their clients. It would appear that the medicalisation of the dying in southern England came about through surgeons and physicians more frequently supplying medicines, more regularly acting as general medical practitioners and more often travelling to see their seriously ill patients, regardless of the nature of their qualifications. Finally, the implications for general attitudes to medicine among the seriously ill and dying are discussed, with the conclusion that, by 1700, a form of medical individualism had developed whereby individuals came to see medicines as a natural means of supplementing divine healing power and even a way of facilitating the healing power of God.

(READ 21 May 2004)

This address explores the writing of history in Britain during the Georgian and Victorian eras, arguing for the need both to trace British historiographical genealogies along routes that extend from Europe to the Indian subcontinent and to acknowledge the importance of material histories for this evolution. Focusing on military men who served in the East India Company during the Third Anglo-Maratha and Pindari War (1817–18), it examines the entangled histories of material loot, booty and prize on the one hand, and archival and history-writing practices developed by British military officers on the other. Active in these military campaigns and in post-conflict administration of conquered territories, a cadre of Company officers (assisted by ‘native’ interlocutors trained in Indian historical traditions) elaborated historical practices that we more conventionally associate with the Rankean historiographical innovations of the Victorian era. The Royal Historical Society's own history is shaped by these cross-cultural material encounters.

‘Men dred tresson wher they it finden’ wrote an anonymous fifteenth-century translator of the Song of Roland, the earliest and greatest of all chansons de geste which take treason as their major theme. In later medieval France men did not have far to search before they found evidence justifying concern with that particular topos. Treason was often associated with its sister sedition in contemporary chronicles, memoirs, pamphlets, sermons and political allegories, even in figurative representations of that betrayal, most notorious to medieval men, by Judas of his Lord. The long war with England naturally posed delicate problems over the loyalty and allegiance of many involved in conflict through no choice of their own. Aspects of what happened when individuals changed sides and whole provinces bent before force majeure in recognizing a new sovereign, thereby incurring the stigma of rebellion against a former lord, have recently been much discussed. Plots to deliver castles and towns are without number. Siege warfare, so characteristic of the period, encouraged such behaviour. Surviving interrogations reveal both serious and improbable schemes to over-throw royal authority, in which great provincial princes were often implicated. Thousands of letters of pardon recite, frequently in the graphic words of the guilty, the extent of innumerable individual acts of treachery towards the French crown. The use of spies and informers, coded and cryptic messages, poisoning, assassination, torture, bribery and blackmail, pre-arranged meetings with mysterious figures and also the invocation of intangible occult forces, sorcery, divination and black magic, to attain political ends, all these are integral to the most notorious cases of treachery.

In 1811 the Solicitor-General of Ireland was prosecuting at Clonmel some members of two agrarian societies of the Ribbon type, the Caravats and the Shanavests.

What (he asked) is the first object of these savage associations, to enforce the commands of which you are nightly plundered of your arms? It is the regulation of landed property and its produce, it is the vain and idle attempt to fix a maximum for rent and to prescribe the price of labour, it is the frantic project to prevent the transfer of property and to frustrate the exertions of industry. The nature of things, still more than the operation of positive law, has decreed that property should find its own level; and it is the first principle of a commercial country, and the first consequence of national prosperity, that property should be in a state of perpetual transfer and circulation.

There is said to be a crisis in historical studies whose collapse some predict. I think myself that the word crisis gets over-used, and I am convinced that history as a subject of study and instruction will survive. We may find fewer students of it in schools and universities, but we shall stop well short of the retreat (itself, it seems to me, now halted) that has befallen the classical languages. People will continue to read history, even serious history, and people will continue to write history, even good history. Still, there are enemies, some lurking in thickets, some boldly skirmishing across the plain, and while their peashooters cannot kill they can and do hurt. Those sufficiently out of date still to think that what gets the customers is rele-vance continue to proclaim that history is irrelevant to a forwardlooking—indeed, a progressive—society; and since their numbers include a good many who decide what happens in colleges of education, in schools, and (worst of all) in the Department of Education and Science, their obscurantism is not to be ignored. I do not here, in this company, need to defend or justify the study of history, but I feel urged to warn historians that they would be well advised to consider and state their case: at the very least we cannot any longer take it for granted that society will as a matter of course accept us at our own valuation and therefore support us. Today, therefore, on this last occasion that I address this body as President, I should like to consider the grounds on which I would argue that no healthy society can afford to abandon the professional study of the past at its highest, most intensive, and to all appearances least practical level. I cannot now also attend to the history that is told to the generality: one thing at a time.

Looking at the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, it seems to me that we still lack a comprehensive view of what changed during this period, where we should set its boundaries, and how we might interpret the salient characteristics of the century. Perhaps, we have been both too general and too specific, simultaneously seeking with the synthesisers to explain too much and with the more specialised monographic literature to explain too little.

Something of the atmosphere of trench warfare, with its immobility and its desperation, has overcome the historiography of early Tudor politics. The most spectacular impasse concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn. Three scholars have recently set out and defended against one another divergent explanations of her fall. Professor Ives and Professor Warnicke can agree that Dr Bernard is wrong: Anne cannot possibly have been destroyed by a masterful and jealous king who may reasonably have believed her guilty of multiple adultery as charged. Dr Bernard and Professor Ives can agree that Professor Warnicke is wrong: Anne's fall cannot be attributed to her miscarriage of a deformed foetus, awakening the king's fears of witchcraft and its sixteenth-century stablemates, sodomy and incest. Professor Warnicke and Dr Bernard can agree that Professor Ives is wrong: Anne cannot have been ousted by a factional plot at court, coordinated by Thomas Cromwell and cynically using fabricated charges of adultery to hustle the king into destroying the queen and her partisans at a single blow.

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to establish any permanent settlements in the Atlantic world. As a result, any balance sheet of empire drawn up on Elizabeth's death in 1603 would have valued prospects in the Mediterranean and the East Indies more highly than possibilities in the Americas.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939, General Franco celebrated his victory by decreeing that full military honours be accorded to two statues of the Virgin Mary. The first was Our Lady of Covadonga, patron of the first great reconquest of Spain through the expulsion of Islam in the middle ages. Now, after removal by her enemies ‘the Reds’ during the Civil War, she had been restored to her northern shrine in Asturias, marking the completion of what the decree described as the second reconquest. The other statue was of Our Lady of the Kings (de los Reyes) in Seville, invoked—so the decree ran—during the battle of Lepanto against the Turks in 1571 and the battle of Bailén agaínst the French in 1808, and invoked once more in the first desperate days of the military rising in July 1936, when a victory for the ‘Red hordes’ in Seville might have changed the whole course of the war. In Covadonga and Seville, in the undefeated stronghold of the Virgin of the Pillar in Zaragoza, and across the length and breadth of the country, the Virgin Mary had saved Spain and deserved every honour and tribute. It was equally true that from far north to far south, Franco and his armies and his Nazi, Fascist, and Islamic allies had made Spain safe for the Virgin Mary. There would be no more desecrated churches, no more burned statues, no more banned processions, just as there would be no more socialists, anarchists, communists or democrats. Spain would be Catholic and authoritarian, and Spanish women could concentrate their energies on emulating Mary, and being good wives and mothers or nuns.

The importance of the reign of king John in the history of English financial administration is now recognized. In part this is due to the relative abundance of official records. For the twelfth century yields little beyond scattered charters and the series of pipe rolls, while the principal series of chancery enrolments begin under John, and for his reign too we possess, although not in continuous series, exchequer enrolments the like of which have not survived from earlier reigns. Of necessity, therefore, much of our detailed knowledge of early financial administration must be based upon what we can learn from this period. And then again, by the time John came to the throne, the exchequer system, as it had been devised and developed by the administrators of the twelfth century, quite obviously required adjustment to deal with the growing mass and complexity of financial transactions.

This essay proposes a new view of demonology, arguing that it was not just a set of theological and legal writings but could also form part of a literature of entertainment. Demonologists frequently used literary techniques such as the dialogue form, hyperbolic set-piece descriptions of the dance or the Sabbath, told stories to pique the reader's interest, and employed humour, salaciousness and horror. Their work intersected with that of artists, influenced by classical images of witches, who began to produce elaborate panoramas of the Sabbath. The cultural legacy of demonology was immense. Through theFaustbuchof 1587, which borrowed from demonological treatises, demonology influenced drama and even figured in the development of the early novel.

Framed by consideration of images of treasurers on the books of the treasury in thirteenth-century Siena, this article uses evidence for the employment of men of religion in city offices in central and northern Italy to show how religious status (treated as a subset of ‘clerical culture’) could become an important object of negotiation between city and churchmen, a tool in the repertoire of power relations. It focuses on the employment of men of religion as urban treasurers and takes Florence in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a principal case study, but also touches on the other tasks assigned to men of religion and, very briefly, on evidence from other cities (Bologna, Brescia, Como, Milan, Padua, Perugia and Siena). It outlines some of the possible arguments deployed for this use of men of religion in order to demonstrate that religious status was, like gender, more contingent and fluid than the norm-based models often relied on as a shorthand by historians. Despite the powerful rhetoric of lay–clerical separation in this period, the engagement of men of religion in paid, term-bound urban offices inevitably brought them closer to living like the laity.

CEREMONIAL played an important part in the actions of the Yorkist kings. Their sumptuary laws and the incorporation of the minstrels and later of the heralds are examples of the concern felt by Edward IV and Richard III for the outward forms of public life. Of especial interest are those solemnities by means of which the Yorkist dynasty announced its possession of the crown. Ceremonies such as these provide what may be called the iconography of kingship.