This paper explores the way in which nineteenth-century travellers to Salonica conveyed in writing the experience of travel to, and in, this Ottoman city. Their descriptions of the city indicate the power of certain aesthetic tropes in shaping their impressions. The claims of the picturesque were pre-eminent for decades but they coexisted with other rationales for travel – in particular the value of the direct impression conveyed by a landscape impregnated with classical and Biblical associations. Nor were most travellers insensible to the changing political prospects for the Macedonian port. The historical value of such works lies less in their reliability as testimony to the changes in the city itself than in the way they express patterns of authorial cultural taste.

In the course of his somewhat unorthodox career in science, the physiologist John Scott Haldane occasionally turned to biography to portray the aims and values that he associated with such a career. But the same concerns can also be discerned in his scientific writings which drew, in large part, on experiments he conducted on himself. For Haldane, biology, as the science of life, was inseparable from biography, as the depiction of a life in science; and he embodied both these enterprises in his own autobiological investigations. Analysing these connections in Haldane's work serves to illuminate the contested role of science in the growth of professional society and the emergence of the intellectual aristocracy.

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.

Some illustrations of the existence of a conservative north are at once apparent on even the most superficial examination of Scottish history in the seventeenth century. No historian has failed to notice, for instance, the fact that the strongest opposition to the National Covenant was concentrated in and around Aberdeen. It was in Aberdeen that the ‘doctors’, or theological professors of the university, denounced the Covenant and challenged its spokesmen to a debate in July 1638, and it was in Aberdeenshire that the Marquis of Huntly remained an unrepentant royalist during the years of the Covenanters' ascendancy.

‘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’.

The St Albans chroniclers, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, present a unique version of the documents of 1215. This, as it appears in Wendover's chronicle, consists, first, of a text of Magna Carta drawn from the 1215 version for its introduction and first clause, and thereafter from the re-issues of 1217 and 1225; secondly, of a text of the Charter of the Forest based on the versions of 1217 and 1225, and in the St Albans version falsely attributed to King John; finally, of a version of the forma securitatis of 1215 which includes sections found nowhere else, either in record or in chronicle. It is, in short, a complete muddle, and it was not improved by Matthew Paris, for he copied it into his Chronica Majora and then later proceeded to patch it with sections drawn from the 1215 text.

The ‘Warthegau’—officially the ‘Reichsgau Wartheland’, with its capital in Posen (Poznan)—was the largest of three areas of western Poland annexed to the German Reich after the defeat of Poland in 1939. In the genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ it plays a pivotal role. Some of the first major deportations of Jews took place from the Warthegau. The first big ghetto was established on the territory of the Warthegau, at Lodz (which the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt). In autumn 1941, the first German Jews to be deported at the spearhead of the combing-out process of European Jewry were dispatched to die Warthegau. The possibility of liquidating ghettoised Jews had by then already been explicitly raised for the first time, in the summer of 1941, significantly by Nazi leaders in the Warthegau. The first mobile gassing units to be deployed against the Jews operated in the Warthegau in the closing months of 1941. And the systematic murder of the Jews began in early December 1941 in the first extermination camp—actually a ‘gas van station’—established at Chelmno on the Ner, in the Warthegau.

In a paper presented on St George's day one may be forgiven for thinking of England, and not even simply of England as a nation but of provincial England, described by Professor Everitt as ‘a union of partially-independent county states’. He and other historians have paid fruitful attention to the ‘county communities’—and the urban communities too—of Tudor and Stuart England. But much of their research has been devoted to the period before 1660, and most of what little we know about the provinces under Charles II and James II is concerned with economic change, landownership, the professions, political faction and religious persecution. Recent work on government in the localities during the Interregnum has suggested that, contrary to earlier suppositions, ‘changes are often hard to seek’ and that local authorities carried out their duties ‘in much the same way as their predecessors’. Nevertheless, the impression survives that after the Restoration provincial government, like Punch, was not what it had been, that it did not recover from the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, that local governors were left to their own devices, and that inertia set in largely because of ‘the long decline in central interference in local administration’.

Only twice in the early seventeenth century, in 1624 and 1640, was the ‘political nation’ in England united. On both occasions, the determination of policy was surrendered by an unwilling king and the assistance of Parliamentary leaders sought. Both led to war and a sharpening of domestic political conflict. But such similarities were no more than superficial. The war which was envisaged in 1624 was foreign and external; the one which ensued in 1642 was civil and internal. In 1624, the co-operation of the Parliamentary leaders was freely solicited; in 1640, there was no alternative. The initiative which lay with Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham at the earlier date was in the hands of the Earl of Bedford, Pym and St John in November 1640. One was a prelude to the period of ‘Personal Government’, the other, ultimately, to that of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.

Historians of the crusades have given most of their attention to the major crusading expeditions, especially to the first, and to the surface history of the Latin states in Syria, especially to that of the kingdom of Jerusalem. They have shown less interest in those conditions in western Europe from which all crusading activity grew. It is true that the roots of the movement prior to the First Crusade were traced by Erdmann in a magisterial study which remains the most important contribution made to the subject during the present century. But the First Crusade was not the end of the matter. European sentiment about the crusades and the Latin states continued to develop during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond. Even in the twelfth century there was a body of opinion which was highly critical of crusading activity and this grew in the course of time; but the main weight of conventional opinion in the later twelfth and earlier thirteenth century came to accept the crusade, and the maintenance or recovery of Latin possession of the Holy Places, as a Christian responsibility.

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, many contemporaries observed a striking phenomenon: that children were especially active in the boycotts of sugar produced by enslaved people. First-hand accounts often suggested that children's activism was unilateral and unmediated, whereas historians of British abolitionism have tended to assume that children were passive recipients of antislavery literature and adult influence. Engaging with both the historiography on British abolitionism and the new histories of childhood, this article examines the nature of juvenile engagement within the sugar boycotts. Collecting together some of the extensive but dispersed evidence of juvenile antislavery across the country, and focusing upon a case study of the Plymley household of Shropshire during the early 1790s, we explore the intricacies of children's involvement. Children's agency, we argue, needs to be understood as a specific, historicised phenomenon. Adults often chose to represent children's abolitionist activities as self-determined, for their participation in the boycotts affirmed both adult positions and their own child-rearing practices. However, whilst adults frequently solicited particular types of juvenile response, children often responded independently and in unexpected ways, negotiating their own positions in relation to their parents, siblings, and peers. We situate juvenile antislavery as a recursive process, operating within complex, intergenerational interactions.

Strangely enough, it is only during the last few years that constitutional historians have turned their attention to the origin of impeachment. Yet it was one of the most spectacular of parliamentary proceedings, often a decisive weapon in political warfare, and of such proved usefulness that it came to be regarded as an inherent function of any representative legislature, and as such it figures not only in the American constitutions but also in so recent a document as the Weimar constitution of 1919.

Gregory became pope in the summer of 590, to succeed his predecessor who had been carried away by the plague. Nearly fifty years had passed since the first outbreak of the plague in the time of Justinian. Let the plague serve as our signpost to a period of upheaval across Europe. If the 530s were the ‘age of hope’ a disastrous reversal began in the 540s. The succeeding half-century was a time of collapsing hopes and darkening horizons: the prospect of imperial reconquest and peace receding after 540, never to be more than ephemerally and precariously realized; the dreams of spiritual and political unification revealed as illusory; war, plague and the obscure workings of ‘demographic forces’ combined to turn the Italy of Boethius into that of Gregory the Great in the course of some sixty years. The contours of the societies of late Antiquity were becoming displaced to produce a new social landscape. Some of this transformation has left visible traces in our evidence and has been extensively studied; much of it has been concealed from us, either through lack of evidence or through failure to ask the right questions. It is only in recent years, to take one example, that the subtle shifts in Byzantine religiosity and political ideology discernible in the later sixth century have begun to cohere into something like a unified picture of a ‘new integration’ of culture and society in the towns of the Eastern Empire. How far the world of Western Europe was exposed to analogous changes may be a question impossible to answer; in any case, it needs approaching piecemeal and with the necessary discrimination of time and place.

In the early modern period the amenities of the upper-class house provided for approved modes of polite behaviour, while the initial, piecemeal display of antique ornament in the sixteenth century expressed the status and the education of the governing class. In the seventeenth century a more classically correct architecture would spread in a climate of opinion in which approved behaviour was increasingly internalised and external display less favoured. The revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was in superseding architectural languages that had lent themselves to the expression of status with a national style that did not.

Few stories in English Economic History are better known than that of the Peasants' Revolt at St. Albans. Wat Tyler's dramatic career is indeed more familiar, but its interest has long been recognised as more strictly political than social. Kent was rising against taxation and an unpopular foreign policy rather than against manorial conditions. The maxim “In Kent there is no villenage” had just enough truth in it to put the Kentish men on a different footing from their brothers in other counties.

The importance of Flambard in Rufus's reign has always been acknowledged. All the chroniclers, in more or less strident language, put him in the forefront of those responsible for Rufus's exactions and lay the blame chiefly on him for the misfortunes they relate. Stubbs in working out his idea of constitutional development gave Flambard a more determined position in this scheme than he had ever held before. It will first be useful to see what kind of picture of Flambard he and, later, Freeman evolved. The chief difficulty Stubbs had in Rufus's reign was to find some guiding hand for the “hardening and sharpening” of feudalism which in his view was going on at that time, and for the introduction of new feudal practices. He required some single and unscrupulous innovator to account for a process which he thought time alone would not have brought about. Stubbs, looking from the point of view of constitutional development, explained the evolution of the conditions described in Henry I's coronation charter as the work of Flambard. The charter showed, for instance, heirs to feudal fiefs having to buy back their lands on the death of the holder instead of merely paying a relief—a stringency which he explained by the discovery of a legal mind working out feudal principle.

The course of events, military and diplomatic, which led from the battle of Poitiers (19 September 1356) to the ratification of the treaty of Brétigny (24 October 1360) was fully worked out, half a century ago, by Delachenal, in his great Histoire de Charles V. His narrative, and his treatment of the policies and ambitions underlying the events, have won general acceptance. He had studied the French evidence apparently exhaustively and showed himself to be well acquainted with the English documents. It was he who first suggested that a document bound up into Cotton MS. Caligula D.III was a draft of the terms agreed upon in May 1358, and this, among other things, enabled him to give a connected and intelligible account of the diplomacy of these years, which is poorly documented even by medieval standards.

If an attempt were made to define the tendency of political thought in England during the fifteenth century, it would be destined to failure unless it gave expression to opposing views of the character of the time. Here, as elsewhere, the historian's most difficult task is to form not merely generalisations that will sum up part of the facts, but generalisations that will take account of all the facts, however irreconcilable they may seem. The task of establishing general statements about the fifteenth century is especially troublesome, for the character of no century in English history is more open to conflicting interpretation. The reason for this conflict is not the so-called transitional aspect of the period, for every century is transitional, and every historical generalisation must express a transition of some sort. The source of the conflict goes much deeper than that, and is to be found rather in the sheer contradictoriness of our evidence.

The opinion has recently been expressed by a competent student of the sixteenth century that the inclosures of that period, both those which turned the old open fields into sheep farms, thereby evicting husbandmen from their holdings, and those which hedged in severalty the common pastures, were almost entirely responsible for the greater revolts which occurred under Tudor rule. Mr. Pollard specifies this cause of social discontent as mainly operative in the Pilgrimage of Grace, Wyatt's rebellion and that of 1569, as well as those of 1549, both east and west. Such a view ascribes, I think, an exaggerated importance to the inclosing movement of the time and fails to take due account of the combination of motives, political, religious, and social other than agrarian, which acted concurrently, though often at cross purposes, upon all classes, high and low, of a people which was passing reluctant and uncomprehending through an agitated era of transition. The thread of inclosure discontent, it is true, may be traced more or less plainly in these popular uprisings, but as only one of a tangled skein. Yet it is certainly a hasty generalisation, which, laying emphasis on this single element in a complex problem, declares that the masses who took part in all these cbellions were composed of ‘men who had been evicted from their tenements or who had been ground down to the verge of poverty by the loss of their rights to common—men who had nothing to hope from the existing social condition, and nothing to lose in case of failure.’

‘Edward I’, said Stubbs, ‘had made his parliament the concentration of the three estates of his people; under Edward II, Edward III, and Richard II, the third estate claimed and won its place as the foremost of the three.’ While the resounding emphasis is Stubbs's own—his common sense was of the kind called robust—the sentiment expressed was then and for long afterwards the traditional one. It is only of late years that opinion has swung to the opposite pole and maintained with an equal want of compromise the absolute insignificance of the commons in the political struggles of the later middle ages. The first open challenge to tradition came, I think, from Professor J. E. Neale in 1924. Mainly concerned to trace the growth of free speech in parliament under the Tudors, he found himself confronted with a medieval background to his subject which seemed to him at variance with the course of its later development. The prologue, as it were, anticipated too much of his play. In a bold attempt to refashion it, he outlined a theory which did not at first attract much attention from medievalists, but which has recently, thanks to Mr. H. G. Richardson, begun to enjoy a considerable vogue among them.