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.

This article explores the use of empathy in historical research. Using evidence collected from a number of academic historians working in UK higher education institutions in 2022, this article uses empathy as a window into historians’ attitudes towards the professional self, the appearance of objectivity and their relationship to the historical subject. It explores the role of empathy in learning history, teaching history, in historical research including the selection of sources, and in the communication of historical research to different audiences. It discusses empathetic historical approaches, suggesting that these can be categorised into three distinct taxonomies: historical empathy, where the researcher engages with the historical subject using professional detachment to manage their affective response; historicised empathy, where the researcher employs deep knowledge of historical context to understand and appreciate the worldview of their historical subject; and empathy as historical approach, so person-centred (rather than system-centred) accounts of history. Finally, this article tests its hypotheses by exploring histories in which empathy is absent.

The British constitution is unwritten, but not unbuilt. The character of Britain's government buildings reflects the nature of its political system. This is particularly true with respect to the Houses of Parliament. They were almost entirely rebuilt after a fire, in 1834, which seriously damaged the House of Commons and adjacent buildings. The new Houses of Parliament were the most magnificent and expensive public buildings erected in Queen Victoria's reign. Their architectural evolution has been meticulously chronicled by a former Honorary Secretary of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Michael Port. But constitutionalists and historians have shewn little or no interest in the political character of the Victorian Houses of Parliament. Walter Bagehot, in his famous study, The English Constitution, published in 1867, made no reference to the newly completed Houses of Parliament. Likewise most modern books on Victorian political and constitutional history make no mention of die rebuilding.

The manning of the navy in the West Indies presented a great administrative difficulty to the English and French Governments in the eighteenth century, and brought them into conflict with several important interests. These conflicts are worth examination, because they throw light upon the problems which arose when the claims of war and business had to be adjusted to each other.

For Hotspur, honour was a thing self-evident—easy to recognise and to defend. As his name suggests, the younger Percy equated honour with battle, with the supposed clarities of spilt blood and martial conquest. We can all agree, I think, that honour was a touchstone for both the fictional and the authentic Percies, as well as for most other early modern people. However, from the distance of three centuries (as well, of course, as from the perspective of other characters in Henry IV) the concept seems considerably more complicated than Hotspur's claims imply.

On 15 April 1483, the young Venetian noble Marino Sanudo set out on a tour of the stato di terra, the Republic's mainland state, with his cousin Marco and two other Venetian patricians. Marco and his colleagues were travelling in an official capacity as auditori nuovi and syndics of the Venetian government, dispatched to hear appeals from the Republic's subjects, and to investigate the conduct of resident officials. Marino had no such responsibilities, but he left an account of his experiences in the work known as the Itinerario con i Sindaci di Terrferma.

In a well-known passage at the conclusion of his preface to the Confutation of Tyndale's Answer Thomas More expressed his fears about the possible effects of the public controversy in which he was then engaged. ‘I would advise any man’, he wrote, ‘neither to rede these heretikes bookes nor myne, but occupye theire mindes better, and standing firmely bi the catholike faithe of thys .xv.C. yere, never ones muse upon these new fangled heresies.’ It was inappropriate, More suggested, for ‘the people unlearned’ to be concerned with ‘what may well be aunswered unto heretiques’; rather they should occupy themselves ‘beside their other busines in praier good meditacion, and reading of suche englishe bookes as moste may noryshe and encreace devocion. Of which kind is Bonaventure of the lyfe of Christe, Gerson of the folowing of Christ and the devoute contemplative booke of Scala perfectionis wyth such other lyke.’

The performance of Ireland as an autonomous state since 1922 remains a contentious subject. Joseph Lee's withering critique of Irish economic backwardness and cultural parochialism, which he holds to be rooted in a narrow adhesion to the ‘possessor principle’ against the ‘performance ethic’, charts a long-term failure to rise to the challenge of statehood. It is not appropriate here to attempt even a summary of his sprawling, bristling account; I want to focus on an aspect highlit by Denis Donoghue when he reviewed it in die London Review of Books. ‘The first and most important fact about modern Ireland,’ Donoghue contended, ‘is that, after die Civil War, there was unquestioned transition to democracy.’ On this view, modern Irish history is, pace Lee, in essence a success story. As Brian Farrell put it, die capacity of die Irish parliamentary tradition to ‘encompass, neutralise and institutionalise’ the disastrous split of 1922 ‘makes die Irish experience unique among the new nation-states of the twentiedi-century world’. Tom Garvin has recendy reinforced this verdict by pointing to the surprising speed with which any tendency to military intervention in Irish politics disappeared. This after a Civil War in which die new Army—lacking any experience of subordination to the civil power— had saved die life of the infant Irish Free State. Indeed, far from witnessing the politicisation of the military, Ireland ‘rapidly became one of the most demilitarised societies in Europe’.

Considering the high personal profile and influence of Isabeau of Bavaria during her time as queen of France between 1385 and 1422, it is extraordinary that she has not been the subject of more sustained serious academic study in the past, and that so little is known about her. The woman at the centre of such a turbulent period of Anglo-French war and internal conflict is far too often dismissed in the space of a few paragraphs; even then, what is written about her is often one-sided, two-dimensional and, in many cases, plain wrong. The history of Isabeau of Bavaria so far has largely been a fabricated mixture of gossip and propaganda which has been absorbed into historical tradition and repeated so often that, to many, legend has become indistinguishable from fact. For a mere two decades it has been accepted that: ‘Isabeau ne mérite point la réputation qui lui fut faite’, and it cannot be a coincidence that the few historians who have devoted any time to research on Isabeau all have come to the conclusion that her infamous legacy is not deserved. Yet, the movement for Isabeau of Bavaria's rehabilitation has not been as prominent as it might have been: Vallet de Viriville only wrote a few articles about her, Marcel Thibault never produced the promised second part of his biography and Yann Grandeau sadly died before his research papers could be developed into a complete work. The very first line that Thibault wrote in 1901 makes the claim that: ‘L'histoire vraie et complète d'Isabeau de Bavière n'a jamais été ecrite’ and, despite recent scholarly work, this still seems to be die case almost a century later.

The object of this paper is to trace briefly the rise of a great Domesday tenant-in-chief (the only Norman to give a name to a county in the United Kingdom), to discuss in broad outline the shape and organization of his great honour in Domesday Book, and to follow the continued rise and sudden fall of the Montgomery family in the years after 1086. Attempts will be made to discuss various problems in the family's story as they occur.

This article seeks to relate the course of Edmund Grindal's disgrace to the formulation and enforcement of policy against catholics. It argues that the two were integrally related and that the nature of that interrelationship can be seen as a function of certain manoeuvres and debates about a range of issues involving the queen and her councillors and bishops and indeed members of the wider regime. The resulting exchanges were conducted in terms of the nature and relative significance of the popish and puritan threats. The aim here is to reveal the dynamics of the resulting mode of ideological politics and to show how very serious differences of approach, priority and world view could be both canvassed and contained within the consensual mechanisms and assumptions of the Elizabethan regime. Through a close analysis of one political moment the paper also hopes to demonstrate the extent to which a series of conventionally separately told stories – about ecclesiastical affairs, about foreign policy, about puritans and about catholics, about both court and local politics – need to be seen as parts of a unitary political narrative or process, the nature of which this paper is an attempt to reveal.

‘It is not more than seventy or eighty years since,’ wrote ‘A Member of the Manchester Athenaeum’ in 1844, ‘that a few humble mechanics in Lanarkshire, distinguished by scarcely anything more than mechanical ingenuity and perseverance of character, succeeded in forming a few, but important mechanical combinations, the effect of which has been to revolutionize the whole of British society, and to influence, in a marked degree, the progress of civilization in every quarter of the globe.’

The French victories over Prussia and Russia in 1806–07 enabled Napoleon to impose upon the continent a peace diametrically opposed to the interests of Britain. An essential condition of it, as was made clear in the Berlin Decree and the Franco-Russian treaty of Tilsit, was that Britain should be banished from Europe. Within a few months of the Tilsit agreement in July 1807 all the northern powers, except Sweden which kept out of the French alliance until 1810, were formally at war with Britain and were pledged to break their commercial connexions with her. It appeared that Napoleon, with the aid of Russia, Prussia and Denmark–Norway, had finally shut the Baltic to British trade and had thus made the commercial exclusion of Britain from the continent a reality. As things turned out, trade between Britain and the north of Europe, though harassed by enemy commerce raiders and impeded by French agents, was not destroyed. The Scandinavian and Baltic ports, the last in Europe to come under French influence, were never firmly closed even when Napoleon''s continental system was most effectively enforced in 1811

I want first to consider some of the statistical evidence that there was an increase in activity in the land market during the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. It has long been known that there was a substantial increase in fines levied during this period, i.e. in the fictitious suits which were, in substance, conveyances of land. Mr. Meeking observed in his introduction to the Surrey Feet of Fines for the period 1509–1558 that ‘the average number of Fines levies each Term rose so steeply that the number of Surrey Fines levied in the years 4 & 5 Ph & M (1557–8) is more than five times as great as those levied during an average year of the period 1509–1530’. Professor Stone's calculations based upon the fines for three counties suggest that the number more than doubled between 1560 and 1620. A rough count for the country as a whole shows as one would expect a more moderate but still considerable increase; the annual number in the 1580s was under 3,000; in the 1590s it was over 3,000; and by the early seventeenth century it has risen to over 4,000. Besides the evidence of the fines, some information can be derived, though for a shorter period, from the returns of the income received by the Receiver-General of the Alienation Fines; this consisted of the fees payable on the writs which initiated the fictitious suit and also on licences and pardons connected with the alienation of property held in capite. This income bore a relation to the value of the property; though the value for this purpose was not the true value, the income gives some clue to the fluctuations in the aggregate value of transactions, and not merely in their number.

The most celebrated product of the early English Renaissance was composed not in English but in Latin. It was conceived in Antwerp, completed in London, published in Louvain, and reprinted in Paris, Basle and Florence long before it was finally rendered into English, some sixteen years after its author had been executed. He was executed for refusing to adhere to the doctrine that the head of the Church was to be found in England, not in Europe.

Men of the earlier Middle Ages knew what they meant by war and peace. Their definitions are not hard to find, even though, when found, they prove to be inconsistent. They knew that there were just and unjust wars, good kinds of peace and bad, and they could envisage war and peace as two poles of a single concept. My intention is not to survey this large and ramshackle field but simply to enquire how far some of the definitions tallied with the facts of war and peace; and whether, at the end, the pressures making for peace had affected the nature of war. To ask whether Western Europe in the days of King Alfred and the later Carolingians was more or less peaceful than it had been four centuries earlier is not very meaningful, since an entirely new situation was created by the attacks of the Vikings, Arabs and Magyars; but it is meaningful to ask whether four centuries of additional experience had caused men to look at war and peace in a different way.

During the fourteenth century, Florence was one of the main centres of the republican regime in Italy, and the Florentines were increasingly aware of this position in a country which had come to a large extent under the sway of the Signoria. Florence herself had, on two occasions during the first half of the century, direct experience of the new regime: in a moderate form during the rule of the duke of Calabria (1325–8), and in its full strength during the short-lived Signoria of the duke of Athens (1342–3). The reaction in favour of the traditional communal form of government had been vigorous in both cases, but particularly so after the expulsion of the duke of Athens. The shock which the Florentines received from the events of 1342–3 helped to strengthen their loyalty to their traditional institutions and liberties for a long time to come.

ON a previous occasion I posed a question: family relations mattered, or did they? I now intend to investigate in what way they mattered. It is a complex problem. In the middle ages men were reminded more frequently than now by the varied representation of the tale of Cain and Abel that family relations are not always easy; they could be supportive, cohesive, quarrelsome or murderous. So it is reasonable to ask: why the one rather than the other? Behind that there are other questions: when did the family matter and when not? Why did it matter when it did and why when not? A long established tradition in Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been concerned with the respective roles of kinship, lordship and local association. What can be said on the same topics for the post-Conquest period? For it is plain that there can be no secure conclusions about the family unless it is correctly located and properly embedded in the matrix of social and political relationships within which men lived their lives.

Many voices prophesied a destructive war for England on the eve of the Civil War. The miseries of the conflicts in Germany had been closely followed in the earliest newspapers published in England. With the outbreak of the Irish rebellion in 1641, and the consequent bloodshed, the wars were only a step away. In 1642 newsbooks and sermons vied with each other to paint the blackest picture possible of the evils in store for England, once it seemed that, at last, the nation was to be swallowed up in the general European conflagration.

I take it that to most English readers the history of Portugal is less familiar than that of any other of the western states of Europe. One reason for this is that there are few books in English on the subject, and those which have been written are rather outline sketches than detailed studies. I imagine that the ordinarily well-informed person, if asked what he or she knew about Portugal, would reply: Oh! Vasco da Gama, Catharine of Braganza, the Methuen Treaty and the taste for port, the Lisbon earthquake, the Marquis of Pombal, and the Peninsular War. I doubt whether any Professor of History could offhand give the names and dates of the Portuguese kings.