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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A nation may be defined as any considerable group of people who believe they are one; and their nationalism as the state of mind which sustains this belief. Broadly speaking, the sentiment of nationality is much the same in quality at all times and in all places. Its minimum content is love, or at least awareness, of one's country, and pride in its past achievements, real or fictitious; and it springs from attachment to the known and familiar, stimulated by the perception of difference–difference of habits and customs, often too of speech, from those of neighbouring peoples. The historical evidence for the existence of this positive sentiment in early times is largely inferential, a mere deduction from the struggles and mutual hatreds of tribes perpetually at war. But by the tenth or eleventh century there is evidence that medieval man was faintly stirred by the same sort of national impulses as we are, though he felt them in very different circumstances, in a different degree and, often, in relation to other objects. By the thirteenth century the fully developed medieval state had reached a momentary equilibrium, and if it was still “feudal”, it was also, in its way, a national state. Then as now, nationality was in general, though not necessarily, coterminous with a vernacular.

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.

WHEN in 1629–30 Rubens gave James I his conventional apotheosis on the Banqueting House ceiling, he also, more originally, depicted his reign's major achievements. Two stood out: the general benefits of James's rule, peace and plenty; and, given pride of place, the Union of England and Scotland.