After her third consecutive election victory in 1987, Margaret Thatcher chose as her holiday reading Norman Gash's biography of Lord Liverpool. It was a fitting tribute from one remarkably durable prime minister to another. No one now thinks of Liverpool as a mediocrity, let alone an arch one, and the fact that many of his colleagues were more flamboyant than he was merely adds to his stature. His achievements as a statesman are emphasised by Gash, who depicts him as ‘one of the great through unacknowledged architects of the liberal, free trade Victorian state’, the first exponent of a public doctrine which, in both its economic and its moral components, would be taken up triumphantly by his successors—Peel, Gladstone, and (it might be argued) Thatcher. His achievements as a politician, meanwhile, can be measured by the fact that he sustained a fifteen year premiership, broken only by his stroke in February 1827, during a period of extreme social and economic difficulty. This seems all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the eighteenth century had seemed to demonstrate that in order to run a stable administration, a first lord of the treasury needed to be in the House of Commons.

AFTER a long period of neglect, during which historians had looked towards the petite bourgeoisie primarily to heap upon it the responsibility for fascism, the last fifteen years has seen a growing research interest in the social and political history of die world of small retail, artisanal and manufacturing enterprise. The result of diis attention has been paradoxical, on the one hand establishing the petite bourgeoisie as a focus for sustained research, while on the other confirming how difficult it is to see the owners of small retail and manufacturing enterprise as a coherent social group or social class. The combination of the owner's labour and capital widiin family-centred enterprises might indicate a distinct position for the petite bourgeoisie within the social structure, but various forces militated against a social or demographic identity for die proprietors of small enterprise: the high rate of business turnover, die limited proportion of petits bourgeois who remain in diat position through their careers, and die low rate of continuity between generations. Although political struggle was important in die formation of any class, one could go further widi respect to die petite bourgeoisie and suggest that it was only at times of political crisis and action, only through die discourse and actions of its organisations, diat a petit-bourgeois identity might emerge. It is not surprising, dierefore, diat research has focused above all on diose years between die 1880s and the First World War, when die emergence of interest groups and increasing political mobilisation seemed to offer evidence of a real petit-bourgeois identity.

A popular movement like the Rebellion of the Earls can always be treated from two distinct standpoints, the national and the local. Hitherto, the Rebellion has always been treated from the national standpoint, with the result that, so far as I am aware, there is no book dealing with the Rebellion alone. All accounts of it must be sought in general histories such as those named below. I would specially mention the chapter in the ‘Cambridge Modern History’ in which Mr. Law has anticipated all the conclusions which I have been able to draw from my own examination of the sources. The local point of view, on the other hand, has been almost wholly ignored, and affords more opportunity for investigation; to it, therefore, I have confined myself. I cannot pretend that the essay is exhaustive, as circumstances have prevented me from investigating the local sources, such as Corporation and Town Records, Parish Registers and the like. Nevertheless, this contribution may not be wholly without value, since it is based on a careful study of the material preserved at the Public Record Office and in the British Museum.

Our understanding of ties of loyalty and dependence formed at the level of the Carolingian political elite has been much improved by a great deal of excellent recent research. As mutually beneficial relationships freely entered into, they tend to be sharply distinguished from ties of dependence involving members from the lower echelons of society: the latter ties, on the contrary, are usually seen as the result of coercion, and they were long seen as emblematic of the increasingly oppressive control of local lords. Commendation for these less powerful members of society is thus often seen as tantamount to forfeiting free status. Because oppression, for legitimate reasons, has been so strongly emphasised in historical treatments of this type of relationship, paradoxically little attention has been given to what influence the lower-status party may have had on the proceedings, the extent of their negotiating ability or the range of duties and benefits involved in such agreements. But not all lower-status people made the same deals: the Frankish formularies, an important source of evidence regarding such arrangements, show a complicated situation, indicating that ties formed at this lower level need to be treated with as much nuance as higher-status relationships.

Under the general title, ‘French Crossings’, the presidential addresses over the next four years will explore intersections and relationships between cultures, periods, disciplines, approaches, historiographies and problems, all within the general field of early modern and modern French history. ‘Tales of Two Cities’ takes as its approach both comparative history and l'histoire croisée. It compares and contrasts the very differing cultural impact on each side of the Channel of one of the most influential British novels about Franco-British political culture, namely, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859). The novel has been conventionally hailed in England, especially from the end of the nineteenth century, as a parable unfavourably contrasting France's revolutionary tradition with the allegedly more humane political evolutionism of England. In France, the novel has been largely ignored or else viewed as a Burkean rant. Yet Dickens's personal attitudes towards France and in particular Paris suggests a more ambiguous and complicated history. For Dickens, modern Paris, as regenerated under Haussmann, was a brilliant success story against which he contrasted both Paris in the 1790s and the social and political circumstances he claimed to detect within English metropolitan culture in the recent past and present. Dickens views the radical and disinherited workers’ suburb of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine less, it is suggested, as quintessentially French than as quintessentially plebeian, and the prospect of a slide into revolutionary politics as a lurking threat within England as well as France.

I Must start by saying that everything in this paper must be subject to correction from two quarters. Mr. Norman Gash has written but not yet published a book entitled Politics in the age of Peel, which will be a study of the representative system in the twenty years after the Reform Bill, and which will explain to us very much that we need to understand. Secondly, all generalizations about elections are open to correction, indeed are normally in urgent need of correction, by those historians who are prepared to make a more or less intensive study of local conditions in some district. Failure to realize the significance of local conditions vitiates the value of some of the conclusions in that otherwise useful book, Mr. Seymour's Electoral Reform in England and Wales, but it has vitiated other books of more general reference than Mr. Seymour's. In fact we have all been content to describe far too much of the history of the nineteenth century in the terms of the play of a few principal actors posturing before a back-cloth painted with conventional figures, the landlord, the manufacturer, the artisan and worst of all a mass of undifferentiated ciphers without faces which we are pleased to call the middle class. The local historian, and only the local historian, can tear this cloth aside. What he will reveal will not always be a decorous picture; the artist best suited to portray it is obviously Hogarth more often than seems appropriate for the background to such highly respectable figures as Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright and William Ewart Gladstone.

I was originally provoked into a consideration of this particular problem by reading Ostrogorsky's Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates. A long-needed and courageous attempt to reconstruct the history of the empire and characterized by acute and penetrating analysis, this book is nevertheless marked by a certain unevenness of treatment. Side by side with brilliant sections on the achievements of the tenth century and the complications of the fourteenth (this latter perhaps the finest part of the book) must be set the brief and inadequate account of the years 1025–1081. Ostrogorsky is not alone. Misstatements and omissions continue, and often in unexpected places. Recent much used general histories, as for instance the third volume of the medieval section of the Glotz Histoire générale, still repeat the old emphasis on 1081 as the dividingline between a time of painful disaster and the new era of Comnenian glory.

One of the most fascinating features in the study of the history of the common law as revealed in six centuries of law reports is the possibility of tracing the growth of legal thought over long periods of time; hints, suggestions, unsuccessful attempts to establish a rule or a doctrine often appear in such sources long before the innovation has received the final approbation of the courts, and so we are privileged to watch the progress of legal speculation, to overhear the debates upon new departures, and to estimate the forces which produced or obstructed some projected innovation. It is this possibility which gives such life and vividness to legal history. In many fields of thought we are mainly confined to those considered statements of results which have been deliberately left to us by philosophers, theologians, or politaical theorists, but the historian of the common law has more intimate and more human material at his disposal.

THE geographical position of Britain made her dependent upon the Mediterranean races—with their higher civilisation and more advanced mechanical processes—for the development of the natural resources of the island.

Her distance from the central marts of the world was counterbalanced in the dawn of her history by the excellence and cheapness of her tin and hides; and in the eleventh and later centuries by the primacy of her wools in all the textile work of Europe.

The paper argues that Robert Parsons's tractThe Conferenceabout the next succession provides the immediate polemical and political context in which James VI wrote hisTrue Law of Free Monarchies. The argument is not that that tract is a simple reply to Parsons but rather a response to the position occupied both by Parsons and Buchanan, which in fact were very similar. James's pamphlet was occasioned, however, by Parsons's book and the concerns raised therein about the succession to the English throne and forms part of a concerted campaign to defend James's rights in that regard and to assert his view of kingship against the monarchomach theories of both Protestants and Catholics.

It is commonly understood the old monastic order in England confronted the King's Reformation unreformed: the houses of the Benedictines, Cistercians and Cluniacs were seemingly untouched by the spirit of renewal that charged continental congregations in the conciliar era, and their conventional patterns of observant life persisted in the face of a fast-changing world beyond the precinct walls. This paper reexamines this view. There was no formal process of congregational reform in England and the effectiveness of the order's governing bodies faltered over the course of the fifteenth century. Yet the responsiveness of the monks to contemporary trends in learning and teaching and in patterns of personal and corporate devotion may be traced in many of their manuscript records. This is indicative, certainly, of the lively engagement of individual brethren but in a number of instances it can be read as part of a collective impulse for reform that animated the house as a whole, and perhaps even networks of houses. It was an impulse that owed much to a generation of (generally, graduate) monks that rose to prominence against the background of the great church councils; their influence allowed it to flourish, albeit briefly, in the triennial sessions of the Benedictine chapters. Their interest in humanism passed to the next generation of superiors, some of whom appear to have transformed their conventual curricula. Their pioneering work perhaps also stimulated a refined conception of the monastic profession which blossomed in the half-century before the suppressions, one suffused with a sharp, one might say, antiquarian sense of the heritage of early English monasticism, and the scholarly calibre and spiritual purity of its celebrated fathers. The energy that emanated from a number of these houses in the reigns of Henry VII and his son attracted like-minded seculars into collaborations that were not necessarily claustral in focus but certainly reformist in tone. Of course, such extra-mural interest and interaction did little to defend the monastic redoubt from the assault of the Cromwellian commissioners.

WINSTON CHURCHILL combined a rhetoric of Tory democracy with a shrewd political realism in his approach to the trade unions. When class conflict was strong and law and order under threat, as in 1911–26, the rhetoric evaporated and Churchill became the champion of the anxious propertied classes. So much so that his persistent Dundee opponent, Edwin Scrymgeour, observed during the 1922 general election campaign, shortly after Mussolini took power in Italy, that it would not surprise him in the event of civil war in Britain ‘if Mr Churchill were at the head of the Fascisti party’. While this view ignored Churchill’s deep commitment to democracy and the British constitution, it did reflect concerns about his apparent revelry in the role of Defender of Order. Yet both before and after 1911–26 his approach to the trade unions was emollient.

In the reign of James I, Sir Walter Ralegh, a prisoner in the Tower and under sentence of death, occupied some of his leisure in writing a History of the World. Unfortunately, he never got beyond 130 B.C.; but in his Introduction he did pause to comment on more recent history. Now that Elizabeth I was dead, he felt able to speak quite freely about her father:

The material upon which this paper is based is largely confined to the unpublished records of a single Norfolk manor. The aim of the paper is to sketch so far as possible the conditions that within this manor effected and accompanied the decay of serfdom.

In the 1850s, school policy enjoyed very high priority in the fight against the revolution. The elementary school was to be brought back to simple subject matter, firmly grounded truths and to an education stressing authority; above all the teachers were to be given as simple a training as possible.

A feature of English social life in the sixteenth century which aroused the curiosity of foreigners and the bitterness of Englishmen was the royal right of wardship and marriage. Since 1540 this right had been safeguarded with the full apparatus of a specially constituted court of law under the direction of a high official as its master and judge. Twenty years after the creation of the Court of Wards and Liveries, William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, became its master; and he held that office from January 1561 until his death in August 1598, a period of more than thirty-seven years. The court itself remained in existence, in spite of an increasing volume of criticism, until the Civil War, when it was formally abolished by the Long Parliament in 1646. Thus, for more than a third of its existence of 106 years Burghley was its master; and since, after an interregnum of nine months, he was succeeded by his son Robert, the Cecil family in effect controlled its destinies for more than half a century. In the process they, and the court they directed, left their mark upon the society and economy of their age.

From Hildebrand to John Stuart Mill is a far cry. Yet there is a common element in the thought of the two. Both held the same purely secular theory of the civil State. Both were jealous of State interference and would have narrowed the scope of governmental action. Both held that there are limits, especially in religious matters, which the State may not over-step, and both, though in different ways, would admit the right of an oppressed people to rebel against its sovereign. Their horizons were different, and their objects looked at in one point of view are even opposed. For Mill believed in the Divine right of the individual, or something like it, while, if Hildebrand would have bound kings with chains, it was only that he might forge more enduring fetters of iron for their peoples. Yet I believe that there are links of connection between the two; and of these the earlier Jesuits were not the least important. From the days of Hildebrand down to our own time there appear to me to have been two mutually opposed theories of the State, taking different shapes according to the needs of different ages, and defended by controversial methods and arguments which changed with the facts to which they owed their force. Indeed, so Protean were their manifestations that they commonly meet with nothing but contempt from us who owe much to both theories, and have entered into the heritage prepared for us by conflicts of which we have forgotten the meaning.

Literacy and property have been among the dominant themes of early medieval history for more than a decade. Since the work of Rosamund McKitterick, Janet Nelson and others, contrary to the assumptions of an earlier generation of scholars, scholars have recognised that die written word profoundly influenced die transmission of die past and the control of the present in early medieval Europe. This was true not only in die highest circles of ecclesiastical and royal life, but also at much more humble levels across Europe. If, as Janet Nelson reminds us, even freedmen could still be referred to in die ninth century as ‘cartularii’, literally charter-men, ‘because of the written carta of manumission required by law courts as symbol and proof of liberation’, die written word reached indeed deeply into society.

The concessions presented by Archbishop Warham and representatives of Convocation to Henry VIII on 16 May 1532 have been the subject of endless controversy, while the background and circumstances of the enactment have received remarkably uniform treatment from later generations. Despite the proliferation of Reformation and Convocation histories since the eighteenth century, historians have, by and large, been content to repeat or elaborate an outline of the event first found in Wake's The State of the Church (1703). According to this interpretation, the King and Cromwell employed the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries presented in March 1532 to compel the clergy's approval of the articles of 16 May.

This paper starts from the proposition that historians of identity in the early modern period have paid insufficient attention to the significance of occupations and work. It demonstrates one possible approach to this topic by exploring the social identity of a particular occupational group – tradesmen – through a study of a particular source – printed broadside ballads. A number of important conclusions result: it argues that historians have overstated the dominance of craft-specific consciousness in the formation of early modern work-based identity (a term that is offered as a more helpful alternative to that of occupational identity), and suggests that broad-based identifiers such as ‘tradesman’ had a real purchase in contemporary discourse. It also considers the extent to which broader changes in the seventeenth-century economy – especially growing commercialisation and the increasing complexity of credit relations – affected the identity of the tradesman. Although the tension between the hard-working tradesman and the prodigal gentleman in ballad portraits suggests a growing social confidence on the part of the former, the marketplace is depicted to be as much a threat as an opportunity for tradesmen given the fragility of credit relationships. Moreover, the paper examines the gender dimensions of this occupational identity, arguing that a ‘female voice’ was central to ballad discussions of masculine ideals, and that the tradesman's patriarchal authority was generally portrayed as insecure. At its heart, the paper is an exploration of the intersection of class, gender and occupational identities in a period of economic change.