L upold VON Wedel, author of the account of a journey through England and Scotland, 1584–1585, belonged to a noble German family, who still possess large estates in the North of Germany and in Scandinavia. He was born on the 25th of January in the year 1544, at Kremzow in Pomerania. Being a younger son, it was the intention of his family to prepare him for a learned career, and consequently after his father's death he entered the Latin School at Stargard, Pomerania. The lad, however (for he was only about eight years old), showed no intention of spending a quiet, studious life either at home or at school, his wish being to see foreign countries; and it is to this passionate desire that we owe the production of this very interesting journal of travels, military expeditions,&C., which he gives us in his own words.

After the rising of 1745 the Highlands were rapidly tamed: within quite a short period the young men who in a past generation would have rallied to the support of their chiefs in domestic disputes, were gradually drawn off to fight in foreign wars, to settle in the colonies, or to help govern India. By the time of the great Sutherland clearances of 1807–20 the Highlands had been so far pacified that scarcely a hand was raised against the destruction of much-loved homes. Gradually the impression got abroad that the descendants of Rob Roy were gentle creatures, a bit rough perhaps in their habits, but easily domesticated and loyal to the powers that be in church and state. And this impression seemed to be confirmed by Queen Victoria's experiences at Balmoral, and by the friendly reception given to the wealthy tourists whom the works of Sir Walter Scott lured to the Highlands.

THE relationship between law, the power of participants in disputes, and the structure of society and politics is always a complex one. It is also, not surprisingly therefore, controversial in writings on jurisprudence, modern law, and legal history. In this paper I argue for the importance of legal norms in the conduct of disputes in England in the period between the Norman Conquest and the early Angevin legal reforms. This importance is certainly related to the extent of Anglo-Norman royal power. However, in a wider context I shall argue against any necessary, simple, and direct link between political structure and the existence and influence of legal norms.

The purpose of this paper is not to discuss in detail the trade relations of England in the fifteenth century with other nations of Europe, but to endeavour to arrive at some conclusion as to the political and social standing of alien merchants in this country during the century by a consideration of the chief measures adopted to regulate their dealings. The insight which this consideration will give us into the nature and motives of the attitude then generally held by Englishmen towards these merchants will assist us greatly in arriving at some definite acquaintance with the economic theories of the period.

HUMAN beings are in a perpetual dialogue with the past from their vantage point in the present. St Augustine put this most succinctly when he discussed what he thought of as ‘three times’, that is, ‘a present concerning past things; a present concerning present things and a present concerning future things. For these three are in the spirit and I do not see them elsewhere: the present concerning past things is memory; the present concerning present things is perception; the present concerning future things is expectation’.

In his Ymagines Historiarum, Ralph de Diceto paused in his chronicle of Henry II's reign to reflect on the circumstances and significance of the appointment of three chief justices of the realm in 1179. Ever anxious for the efficient and impartial administration of the law, Henry had diligently sought out lovers of justice who would not be corrupted by high office; he tried, without success, many classes of men: abbots, earls, tenants-in-chief, members of his household, even his closest personal advisers. When at last all else had failed, he raised his eyes to heaven; and, passing over those who could be swayed by worldly influences, he resorted to the sanctuary of God, and appointed as archjusticiars of his realm the bishops of Winchester, Ely and Norwich. If his earlier choices had shown too little respect for him, an earthly king, these at least would act in careful fear of God, the King of kings. And if it should be argued that in assuming this task the bishops would act in despite of the strict letter of canon law, there could be urged in reply the constraint of the king and his good intentions, pleasing alike to God and men.

Almost forty years ago Professor H. E. Egerton, him-self a pioneer in the modern study of imperial history, delivered to this society a paper on ‘The system of British colonial administration of the Crown colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. He opened with the warning that ‘The most learned of historians would find it difficult to add much to the sum of knowledge in treating the subject of my paper.’ 1 The warning still stands; there is little new knowledge to be gleaned, for this is a well-tilled field.

ARGUMENT about the consequences of the Conquest is perennial and probably unresolvable. Exponents may be found of the full range of possibilities from essential continuity to catastrophic change. Yet amid all the diversity of opinion there is a piece of common ground: it is generally agreed that the Norman rulers not merely appropriated the governmental system of their.Anglo-Saxon predecessors but ran it more efficiently. Managerial efficiency is indeed commonly regarded as a Norman characteristic. In the early twelfth century the kingdom of Sicily and the kingdom of England were the two most prosperous, orderly, and astutely governed states in Europe. Both were under Norman management. Wherever else we find the Normans in their century of astonishing expansion they appear as irresistible take-over bidders, moving in upon and merging with any society, whatever its traditions and institutions, treating both lordship and government as aspects of business management, exploiting the assets and extracting the profits more effectively than the previous owners. So it seems a wholly reasonable assumption to attribute the development of royal government in the first two generations after the Conquest to a combination of managerial efficiency and the Norman rulers' need to get more out of their kingdom than their predecessors.

IN June 1536 Thomas Starkey, a royal chaplain, humanist, and ‘commonwealth man’, wrote to Henry VIII concerning the Act passed in the spring of that year suppressing monasteries worth less than £200:

many ther be wyche are mouyd to iuge playnly thys acte of suppressyon of certayn abbays bothe to be agayne the ordur of charyte & iniuryous to them wych be dede bycause the foundarys therof & the soulys departyd seme therby to be defraudyd of the benefyte of prayer & almys dede ther appoyntyd to be done for theyr releyffe …

—to which he argued that the common weal of all took precedence over arrangements made for the private weal of the individual. Moreover, in answering those who would argue for ‘rather a just reformatyon then thys vthur ruynose suppressyon’, he went on,

for though hyt be so that prayer & almys dede be much to the comfort of them wych be departyd, & though god delyte much in our charytabul myndys thereby declaryd, yet to conuerte ouer much possessyon to that end & purpos, & to appoynt ouer many personys to such offyce & exercyse, can not be wythout grete detryment & hurt to the chrystian commynwele … & though hyt be a gud thyng & much relygyouse to pray for them wych be departyd out of thys mysery, yet we may not gyue al our possessyonys to nurysch idul men in contynual prayer for them …

Starkey was certain that the possessions of monasteries had been given to the ‘end and purpose’ of providing spiritual benefits for the ‘founders’, to help the passage of their souls through Purgatory.

The paper surveys almost fifty women-authored texts of the 1790s, asking what they reveal about the gendering of space in elite houses, about the meaning of buildings and landscapes for women and about women's aesthetic preferences. They imply that elite houses had largely ungendered public, private and intermediate spaces. Castles had negative meanings for women, but not ‘olden time’ houses; there was some disapproval of exclusionary landscapes and an idealisation of country life (but not for hunting) and of rural cottages (but not rural villas). A neoclassical aesthetic was endorsed by women writers alongside sensibility and the picturesque.

M. Depoin begins his brief account of Waleran by remarking that his “existence mouvementée pourrait faire l'objet d'une thèse attrayante, ou serait mise en relief la vie d'un grand feudataire anglo-francais au XIIe siecle.” As his suggestion has been neglected on both sides of the Channel, I have ventured to attempt the task.

The subject of this paper is the financial aspect of shipmoney; that is, it attempts to discuss the following questions. How much money was actually levied on the ship-money writs? How was that money spent? How was it assessed and collected? As a form of direct taxation how does ship-money compare with a subsidy? The materials on which it is based are mainly the Audit Office Declared Accounts, the assessments in the Council Register, and the letters of instructions sent with the King's writs by the council to the sheriffs. These letters were substantially the same from year to year, with considerable additions dealing with points which had arisen in the course of the collections.

The study of Law Merchant in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which I venture to read to the Society to-day arose out of some work upon the business of eighteenth-century merchants. I approach the complex problem of the Law Merchant therefore not from the point of view of the law courts but as the merchant himself approached it, by way of the problems of commercial intercourse.

At the end of the First World War, the British government attempted to return to the pre-war policy trade-off of fixed exchanges rates on the gold standard, capital mobility and free trade, which entailed a sacrifice of domestic monetary policy. But the attempt proved difficult between 1919 and 1931 when the pursuit of international economic polices was constrained by a growing concern for their domestic economic and political repercussions. In the 1930s, a new policy trade-off emerged: managed exchange rates, capital controls and protectionism, with a greater concern for domestic monetary policy. The essay explains the reasons for the emergence of constraints and the subsequent abandonment of the pre-1914 policy trade-off in terms of five variables: changes in the performance of the economy and its impact on different actors; the politics of the national debt and the constraints on interest rates; the impact of capital exports on debt repayment and as an alternative to interest rates in influencing the exchanges; an adjustment in assumptions about flexibility of wages and costs; and a breakdown in the political culture of free trade and gold.

In 1887 Charles Booth addressed the Royal Statistical Society on the condition and occupations of the inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets, after which Leone Levi, a well-known statistician of the hard school, posed a testing question:

‘Who was a poor man? … The author [Andrew Mearns, writer of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London] had not mentioned the causes of poverty … His own impression was that poverty proper in the district which had been described was more frequently produced by vice, extravagance and waste, or by unfitness for work, the result in many cases of immoral habits, than by real want of employment or low wages.’

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.

Among the many and complex problems with which the history of Europe in the Middle Ages—and especially the earlier period of the Middle Ages—teems is the character of the intellectual heritage transmitted to medieval men from classical and later Roman imperial times. The topic has engaged the attention of many scholars, amongst them men of the greatest eminence, so that much which fifty years ago was still dark and uncertain is now clear and beyond dispute. Yet the old notions and misconceptions die hard, especially in books approximating to the textbook class. In a recently published volume on the Middle Ages intended for university freshmen there is much that is excellent and abreast of the most recent investigations; but the sections on early medieval education and scholarship seem to show that the author has never read anything on that subject later than Mullinger's Schools of Charles the Great.

‘COULD I only satisfy myself that D’Israeli believed all that he said, I should be more happy: his historical views are quite mine, but does he believe them?’ Lord John Manners, who wrote these words at the height of the Young England episode in 1843,1 has never lacked for company in his puzzlement. ‘The question’, says Lord Blake, ‘echoes emptily down the years. We can answer it no more certainly today than Lord John Manners could then.’2 Yet if the answer is elusive, so, in a sense, is the question: that is, the question which will most help us to understand the character of Disraeli’s ideas and their relation to the form and conduct of his career. The question whether Disraeli believed in the literal descriptive and moral truth of the views he propounded, if that is what Manners was asking, is not only unanswerable but also, perhaps, unimportant—unimportant, that is, if what we are concerned with is the genesis and instrumentality of Disraeli’s political postulates rather than their status as ‘principles’.

In accordance with the decree “In singulis regnis’2 of the fourth Council of the Lateran, 1215, the hitherto unconnected monasteries of the Black Monks of St. Benedict in England, as in other countries, were required to unite themselves by holding every three years, a general or provincial chapter of the heads of all their independent houses, and the work of the chapters was to be enforced by triennial visitations made by the monks themselves, as distinct from those made by the bishops. Until the constitutions of Benedict XII in 1336 the monks in the provinces of Canterbury and York met in separate chapters: after that date there was a single chapter for the whole of England.

In a much-cited statement Ernest Renan once commented that the nation was a daily plebiscite. Whereas the state's essence are institutions and laws, the nation exists first and foremost in the consciousness of the population. How strongly a population identifies itself as a nation differs over time and from one section or class to another. The nature of the external challenges facing a community will also help to determine its sense of identity. Though different groups and individuals may all claim membership of the same nation, they may still disagree radically about the institutions, memories, symbols and values which embody that nation and make it worthy of allegiance.