For the past 40 years the dominant influence over architectural history, and in particular over stylistic analysis, has been the Modern Movement. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, architectural history has been seen through the teleological spectacles of the Modernists who viewed architecture as a progressive force leading inevitably towards the ultimate triumph of Modernism. At its most obvious this can be seen in studies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architecture which concentrated on those strands that could be said to have been the precursors of Modernism, while ignoring powerful contemporary factors which do not fit in with the Modernist thesis, like the strength of Classical architecture in the 1930s. But even when discussing earlier periods the same basic assumption has prevailed, that architectural style should be seen as progressive. Thus what became important was identifying new fashions and tracing the precedents. As architectural style always moved on, anything that was not innovative or seemed to be regressive was assumed to be old fashioned and the result of ignorance or lack of skill, and consequently of little interest. With die collapse of Modernism, or at least of the assumption that Modernism is the only acceptable way in which to build, and with the revival of older styles which 10 years ago were thought to be dead and buried, this teleological approach to architectural history needs revision. The study of Gothic Revival architecture in England is one area that is revolutionised by the removal of Modernist assumptions.

It is useful, for the sake of my topic today, that since I declared my title the Republic of Zaire (in May 1997) changed its identity, or at least, resumed one of its former names, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The change is also a nuisance, because the new/old name revives the likelihood of confusion not only with ex-Zaire's neighbour across the Zaire River, the Republic of Congo, but also with the people called BaKongo, who owned the name in the first place. I will try to explain all that in a moment.

During the past thirty years most historians have acknowledged that it is anachronistic to describe Louis XIV as an absolute monarch. Many of them have turned their attention towards the various elite groups whose power and privileges coexisted with those of the crown in the very different, and sometimes fiercely separatist, provinces which formed the kingdom of France. A few have attributed such great influence to local nobles and institutions that the royal government seems to have been reduced to impotence. This impression, clearly too extreme, has been created first by a preoccupation with those issues and periods where the crown was in conflict with many, or in the case of the Frondes with almost all, of its leading subjects, and a disregard for the more numerous occasions when the king and at least some élite groups had identical or compatible purposes. Secondly, it has arisen from a neglect of the informal channels of communication which were often more important than the formal administrative structure for linking the court and the provinces, and for conducting the everyday routine of government. The most important of these was the network of ‘brokers’, often influential governors and bishops, by which provincial requests for highly prized royal patronage—whether titles, orders, offices, privileges or pensions— were conveyed to the ministers and to the king himself. The possibility of personal advancement was a vital consideration for members of the upper social échelons as they calculated their responses to ministerial instructions and enquiries.

In the late fourteenth century the kin' council in England came to have its own secretariat. The old ad hocarrangements for writing its documents were replaced by a paid ‘clerk of the council’ charged to write records of business done and preserving some sort of council archive; by the early fifteenth century it had become normal practice to record not only many decisions but the date and the names of those present at the time; and these arrangements continued unbroken through the fifteenth century and were considerably expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sometimes, and this is the exception rather than the rule, somedecisions were entered in books or journals, such as the ‘Book of the Council’ covering the years 1421 to 1435, but the normal method of recording decisions was in the form of endorsements on draft documents or petitions, sometimes in the form of memoranda. In 1500 many thousands of these documents must have existed on the files of chancery and the privy seal, particularly the privy seal, where they had been sent to authorize the issue of letters giving effect to council decisions. Since then, unfortunately, most have been destroyed or dispersed. Some, in general the more striking items, were taken from the files by Sir Robert Cotton, came to the British Museum, and were published by Sir Harris Nicolas in the 1830‘s. The others, the more numerous, are in the Public Record Office in various collections, and are almost entirely unpublished.

This article builds upon the work of the late Professor Sir Rees Davies and other scholars interested in the medieval March of Wales, and draws attention to the place, roles and experiences of the noblewomen in a region usually considered the preserve of the warrior lord. In focusing on the aristocratic widow, for whom records are relatively abundant, it examines the widows’ experience of dower assignment and of estate and castle management on a frontier district. It contends that, among other things, those who allocated dower to the widows of the region deliberately eschewed the frontier hotspots, and that the normative relationship between female lord and castle was at once improved and restricted by the warlike nature of the region. A final section examines the life and career of the often overlooked Isabel de Mortimer (daughter of Roger de Mortimer of Wigmore and sometime wife of John FitzAlan III), revealing her critical part in holding the Shropshire frontline on the eve of the final conquest of Wales (1282–3). The case is made that we cannot fully understand the aristocratic Marcher society without including women in our histories.

Between 1068 and 1070 an extraordinary dispute was settled at Bonneville-sur-Touques in Normandy. Duke William, who had recently become king of England, and his wife Matilda, heard the story of a contested property at Bayeux which centred on the identity of a rented child. The story goes as follows. A man called Stephen had married a widow called Oringa by whom he had a small son (puerulus) who lived only a short while. When the boy died, Oringa substituted for him, without her husband's knowledge, the son of a woman called Ulburga at Martragny (Calvados, c. Creully), to whom she paid an annual sum of 100 solidi. Stephen made the boy his heir and left him his property. When first Oringa and then Stephen died, the boy's natural mother emerged and demanded rent from the couple's surprised relatives. The family refused to pay and Ulberga turned to Duke William and his wife Matilda. Having heard die case Duke William, in consultation with Archbishop John of Rouen, Roger of Beaumont and others, decided that an ordeal of the hot iron would be die most appropriate way to establish the truth. William and Matilda sent their chaplain Rainald to Bayeux to organise the ordeal, which took place in the monastery of Saint-Vigor in the presence of Rainald himself, two named archdeacons, Robert Insule and his wife Albereda, Euremarus of Bayeux and many otfier good men (meliores homines) of Bayeux. Ulburga emerged unscathed from the ordeal by fire and therefore her son was returned to her.

The position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

This paper explores the impact of polite codes of manners within the home and in marriage. It focuses on marital violence as a manifestation of impolite behaviour, and argues that codes of politeness could offer benefits for wives faced with violent husbands. Instead of silencing discussion of marital violence, ideas about polite behaviour enabled women to define unacceptable male behaviour in marriage, and to find new ways of responding to violence. A case study of one marriage breakdown shows how within the culture of polite manners and sensibility, nervous illnesses became a powerful way for genteel women to signal violent or sexual abuse.

Italy is reputedly the most regional of European nations, yet it is a regionalism of an unusual kind. In most countries, the regions are territories, often with well-marked natural boundaries, containing a variable number of major towns and cities. Behind them there is usually a long history of social and political identity, often leading back to a feudal kingdom or principality; quite often the region is thought of as the home of a particular tribe or people, and regional culture has deep roots in folklore and popular tradition. Typical regions of this kind are Aragon and Catalonia, Anjou and Brittany, Saxony and Bavaria; in Italy only the islands and the South, and the frontier area of Friuli conform to this pattern. Elsewhere, the modern regions or provinces have little historic reality behind them; the social unit was much smaller, and the strongest focus of loyalty was the union of the city and its territory on which both the classical civitas and the medieval commune were founded. Strongly ‘human’ rather than natural in character, the Italian city-regions were upheld by the in-tense particularism of the dominant classes rather than the populace. The more or less autonomous city-state was the natural political expression of this feeling, which nevertheless survived the establishment of the renaissance territorial state with little modification. The multi-centred regional culture for which Italy is famous depended on the sense of separate identity found in the dominant classes of the city region, whether it was politically independent or not; it was a matter of learned men and wealthy patrons rather than popular traditions.

Monastic reform is generally understood as a textually driven process governed by a renewed interest in early monastic ideals and practices in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and focusing on the discourses of reformers about the Egyptian ‘desert fathers’ as the originators of monasticism. Historians have suggested that tropes about the desert, solitude, etc., drawn from early texts found their way into mainstream accounts of monastic change in the period c. 1080–1150. This paper challenges this model by proposing that considerations of ‘reform’ must take into account parallel movements in Greek Orthodox monasticism and interactions of practice between the two monastic environments. Three case-studies of non-textually derived parallel practices are discussed, and the importance of the Holy Land as a source of inspiration for such practices is advanced in place of Egypt.

In the history of post-war womanhood in Britain, women's self-help organisations are credited with little significance save for ‘helping mothers to do their work more happily’. This paper suggests that the do-it-yourself impetus of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded as integral to understanding how millions of women negotiated a route towards personal growth and autonomy. Organisations like the National Housewives’ Register, the National Childbirth Trust and the Pre-School Playgroups Association emerged from the grass roots in response to the conundrum faced by women who experienced dissatisfaction and frustration in their domestic role. I argue that these organisations offered thousands of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence and that far from being insufficiently critical of dominant models of care, women's self-help operating at the level of the everyday was to be one of the foundations of what would become, by the 1970s, the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives.

My lecture will start with a kind of prelude. I am going to show you a work of art which, though unconnected with Gregory VII and the movement of church reform that bears his name, will help to set the stage for our discussion proper. The scene of my prelude will not be eleventh-century Italy at all, but rather the court of the Norman kings of Sicily in the twelfth century. I hope you will not lose patience during what may seem a rather irritating detour and agree with me in the end that this is a case of the longest way round being the shortest way home.

Cultural factors have often been invoked to explain parliament's decision in 1807 to outlaw slave carrying by British subjects but they have only infrequently been cited in efforts to explain why the Atlantic slave trade itself became so large in the three centuries preceding 1807. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by looking at ways in which inter-cultural dialogue between Africans and Europeans and related adjustments in social values and adaptations of African institutional arrangements may contribute to improving our understanding of the huge growth in market transactions in enslaved people in Atlantic Africa before 1807. In exploring such issues, the paper draws on important theoretical insights from new institutional economics, notably the work of Douglass North. It also attempts to show how institutionally and culturally based developments in transatlantic slave trafficking, the largest arena of cross-cultural exchange in the Atlantic world before 1850, may themselves help to promote understanding of the much broader historical processes that underpin economic change and the creation of the modern world.

The literature about the medieval state is enormous. Many very distinguished scholars, especially in Germany, have given their ripest thought to the problems which the word “state” suggests when it is applied to medieval society. In recent years several manful efforts have been made to extricate the subject from the trammels of law and philosophy. In Germany, for example, Georg von Below, Fritz Kern and, latest of all, Heinrich Mitteis, have, each in his own way, tried to deal with it as earlier writers, like Waitz, Ranke and Ficker, dealt with it. They have approached it from a political or social or economic point of view, and have made themselves independent, so far as they could, of the categories of the jurists and the generalisations suggested by a study of medieval political thought. Even these exceptional men have not found it easy to avoid categories of their own.

I Esteem it a very great honour indeed to be allowed to lecture before this learned Society, which among its members numbers so many eminent men.

You will probably think that my subject lies far out of the way and is only of very small importance to the study of English history.—But it is my proud conviction that the Norsemen, my ancestors, also have contributed to the moulding of the English nation and of the British Empire. These times, however, lie far back. It is now nearly 900 years ago since Vikings' fleets used to land on the shores of the British Islands and many centuries since the tongue of the Norsemen was spoken here, except in the far away Orkneys and Shetland. Nearly everything that could remind us of them has disappeared. Those times are long ago forgotten when the Scandinavian peoples were feared by other nations, and were of some consequence in European politics. Since then the British nation has spread its sway all over the world, and its destinies lie not in Europe only, but beyond the seas. It is therefore not to be wondered that the English have forgotten their Norse ancestors. There was, however, a time when the fortunes of the British Islands were closely intertwined with those of Northern Europe, a time when these Islands and Denmark, Norway and Sweden seemed destined to form part of one great empire and had comparatively little to do with the outside world.

The terms bureaucracy and bureaucratization are altogether loaded with emotional connotations. In order to get beyond this and to reach an understanding of what is actually meant when we talk of bureaucracy and bureaucratization it is worth while turning to Max Weber. Weber was among the first sociologists to discuss systematically the consequences of bureaucratization for Western societies. He developed an ideal-typical theory bureaucratization which has been extremely influential far beyond the confines of sociology as such. Undoubtedly it is of major interest to historians as well, for though systematic in its intent, it draws on a wide range of historical cases; furthermore, it was intended to throw light on significant historical developments, in particular the processes nowadays associated with the concept of modernization. Indeed, Günther Roth pointed out recently with good reason that Max Weber's retreat from history was in fact strategic rather than fundamental; his ideal-typical systematizations were meant to serve as tools and guidelines for empirical historical research just as much as for sociological analysis. ‘Socio-historical models (such as bureaucracy, patrimonialism, feudalism or the charismatic community) are useful to us in so far as they organize historical knowledge in a specifically sociological way, that is, in the form of generalizations that emphasize the general and repetitive side of history without assuming the existence of laws in any strict sense.’ Moreover, in Weber's methodology ideal types are then used in a genuine historical manner.

I HAVE entitled my paper ‘What is Psycho-History’, in obvious imitation of an illustrious predecessor in analysing Clio’s nature and character. For reasons that will be clear later, I have come to think that psycho-social history may well be a better title than psycho-history for the inquiry that seems to be emerging, but since ‘tradition’, that is about ten years of effort by historians and psycho- analysts, has gone on under the latter rubric, I shall retain it here.

I have put together here a certain number of facts of some interest. A good deal of my material is already common property, and may be found in the volumes of the Records Commission or in Mr. Joseph Bain's ‘Calendar.’ Yet some is new, simply because the old manuscript catalogue of the Exchequer Accounts in the P.R.O. was not so good or systematic as the present printed catalogue, and therefore a gleaner in the field traversed by Mr. Bain may yet pick up much. I have already used or referred to some documents, partly in a paper read some years ago to the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archæological Society, partly in a work on Bannockburn which the Cambridge University Press has just published. I was ambitious to put before this Society some results of my researches, as this is the sixth centenary year of that battle, yet hesitated to offer a paper on the battle itself. But one cannot look at any of the facts without reference to that epoch-making event, and so I tried to find a thread upon which to string them. The most suitable title for my paper seemed to be ‘The Development of Mounted Infantry,’ because, although some of the documents illustrate the fortunes of an infantry which was very much not mounted, it was just the striving of the English leaders after Bannock-burn to find the most suitable type of soldier and the most suitable tactics, a striving necessitated by failure and the terrible experiences of the northern counties at the hands of the Scottish raiders, that at last produced the finest fighting man of the middle ages, viz. the horse-archer.

Although the cult of the saints was so prominent an element in medieval religion, decrees controlling it occupy a comparatively small place in the medieval canon law. In the Decretum of Gratian, composed about nineteen years before Alexander III became pope, there are only two decrees of importance which seem to concern the canonization of saints. They come from the two chief periods of legislation on this subject, the fifth and the ninth centuries. The first of them is a canon of the so-called fifth Council of Carthage (401 A.D.) which was perpetuated in the West in the Dionysian and Hispana collections, and was among the canons chosen from the Dionysiana by Charles the Great as specially relevant to his time. The second was passed in 813 by the Council of Mainz and under the influence of the same emperor. Together they appear in the collections of Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres and then in the Decretum of Gratian where they remained in effect the only written legislation on the subject until the time of the fourth Lateran Council.

I have just been reading “Three lectures by the late Sir Israel Gollancz,” printed for private circulation and kindly lent to me by Dr. Hubert Hall, in which the following passage occurs: “Long before Shakespeare thought of dealing with the theme, when Shakespeare was still young—a school-boy—the story of the Jew with reference to the same story that we have in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice had been enacted on the English stage. As early as 1579 we have a reference to it, but the play was lost; we know it only from Gosson's reference.” The author goes on to explain that” in 1579 we have already two elements that make up The Merchant of Venice; the Pound of Flesh motive on the one hand and, on the other, the Choice of the Caskets, combined into one play, The Jew, ‘representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers, and the bloody minds of usurers.’