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.

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.

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.

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.

Attempts to distinguish modern theories of refinement led eighteenth-century writers to highlight the moral integrity of a new code – politeness – in which outward civilities could be read as the manifestation of inner social virtues. To sponsors of polite culture this assurance was indicative of the superiority of modern manners manifest in the Lockean polite `person'. Yet the possibility and validity of synthesis remained a subject for debate; partly because of the difficulty of communicating character, partly because of the potential exploitation of a supposed congruity between outer expression and inner motive. In response, late century theorists sought to reinvigorate aspects of Locke's ideal through a culture of sensibility which both developed and criticised the existing polite code. But prone to similar weaknesses, sensibility was itself abandoned in the nineteenth century as writing on morals and manners diverged, and the distinctive, enlightened concept of politeness gave way to etiquette and a modern regimen of social dos and don'ts.

He that will fraunce wynne, must with Scotland first beginne.

WHEN I tell people that I'm studying English strategy in the Hundred Years War, the response is very often something to the effect of ‘did they really have “strategy” in the middle ages?’ This idea, that strategy was absent from the medieval period, remains deeply embedded in the historiography of the subject. Sir Charles Oman, probably still the best-known historian of medieval warfare, wrote of the middle ages that ‘the minor operations of war were badly understood, [and] strategy— the higher branch of the military art—was absolutely nonexistent. Professor Ferdinand Lot said much the same. Other scholars have argued that the medieval commander ‘had not the slightest notion of strategy’, or that ‘never was the art of war so imperfect or so primitive.’ But the truth is that most medieval commanders did not show ‘a total scorn for die intellectual side of war’ nor ignore ‘the most elementary principles of strategy’; nor is it fair to say that ‘“generalship” and “planning” are concepts one can doubtfully apply to medieval warfare.’

In medieval chronicles the establishment of a cathedral at Norwich is related to the simony of Bishop Herbert of Thetford and his subsequent repentance. For this sin he sought absolution in Rome and, on his return to England, moved the see to Norwich. There (and later writers have assumed that it was an act of penance) Herbert built and endowed a magnificent cathedral in which he installed monks in the place of secular priests. It is the purpose of the present paper to examine this story and to add to it what is known of the building of the cathedral and the endowment of its priory.

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.

In 1890 America was at peace, the golden age appeared to be at hand; unfettered by the miseries of European strife, in prosperous rather than splendid isolation, the American people confidently looked forward to an even more exciting future. But a new age of danger was rapidly approaching; the nineteenth-century conditions of American safety—geographical isolation, the British fleet, as it turned out, the ‘hostage’ of Canada in American hands, and the balance of power in Europe—were passing away. The era which had seen the new world fattening on the follies of the old was coming to an end; soon the follies of the old world impinged on the peace and prosperity of the new. Within three decades the contest for world power fought out in Europe, and the rise of the youngest of the great nations, Japan, was to endanger the safety of the United States. Yet few Americans recognized the full import of these changes and the need for fresh policies.

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.’

Among the major political events in a century of momentous political change in Ireland the Kildare rebellion of 1534–1535 has been accorded a special significance by contemporaries and historians alike. The downfall of the most renowned Anglo-Irish noble family and the personal tragedies of the doughty old earl and his dashing young heir, gave the story an aura of romance that caught the fancy of the Elizabethans—it inspired an Elizabethan drama— and partly accounts for its prominence in popular histories. More scholarly commentators have emphasized its significance as a water-shed in the history of English government in Ireland. The subsequent course of events reveal it as a point of transition from the medieval to the early modern phase of Irish political history, the juncture at which the hold of Anglo-Irish feudal magnates on crown government was broken and at which the period of uninterrupted super-vision from England began.

The origin of that court of equity which sat at Westminster as the court of duchy chamber has prompted more than one guess, but none of the guesses has reached the truth. Their authors, in applying the Lucretian principle ex nihilo nihil fit and by searching for a definite act of creation, have forgotten an equally profound truth so well emphasised in medieval English history, that few of our great institutions were created all at once, or sprang into life completely armed like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus. Most of these writers have seen in Henry IV's accession to the throne a sharp dividing line in the history of the duchy of Lancaster, which in fact it was not. The charter by which Henry IV regulated the status of the duchy in 1399 expressly provided for a continuance of the existing administration.

Another factor in obscuring the origin of this court has been a confusion with the chancery court of Lancashire. This chancery was set up by a definite act in the middle of the fourteenth century and revived soon after; in the course of time it acquired an equity jurisdiction similar to that exercised by the royal chancery. But its jurisdiction was, and still is, limited to Lancashire, whereas the court of duchy chamber had a much wider range. This confusion is apparent in legal works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Coke continued the misconception, with the result that even modern writers of repute have been led astray.

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.

Concealment has proved one of the most inscrutable aspects of the land market following the English Reformation. It has received only passing reference in standard works on the period, and the gravity of the problem has never been fully appraised by historians, even though the discovery and disposal of concealed property exercised administrators and speculators alike more than any other aspect of the land market for much of the reign of Elizabeth, and consequently left an abundance of documentation.

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.

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.

The belief that the common people of England had little real sympathy for either side in the civil war—that they were mere cannon-fodder, targets for plunder, at best deferential pawns—has a long and respectable ancestry. Many of the combatants believed it, noting the automatic changes of local attitudes when news came of distant vic-tories or defeats. In postwar politics too they knew it was ‘safest to be in favour with the strongest side’. When they fought, it was because they had no alternative. How often, Anthony Ascham lamented, ‘ambitious or angry men forme subtilties and pretences, and afterwards the poore people (who understand them not) are taken out of their houses … to fight and maintaine them at the peril of one anothers lives’. Survival on the margin of subsistence was the universal motive. ‘The people,’ Sir Arthur Haselrig declared, ‘care not what Government they live under, so as they may plough and go to market.’ Looking back after 1660, men as various as Hobbes and Baxter took the same line. ‘There were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes, but would have taken any side for pay or plunder,’ Hobbes tells us. Baxter has been as often quoted: ‘The poor plowman understood but little of these Matters; but a little would stir up their Discontent when Money was demanded.’

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.

How should information about distant places be collected? How should it be made available to the reading public? And how far could it be trusted? Such questions were posed by the expansion of exploration and travel during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the leading scientific authorities, the making of accurate observations, the use of precise instruments, the methodical collection of specimens and the writing of narratives provided the principal means by which knowledge itself could travel. Yet the relationship between metropolitan science, travel writing and field observation remained fraught with difficulty. This essay considers a variety of ways in which the experience of disturbance shaped the culture of exploration during the nineteenth century, focusing in particular on writing, collecting and sketching.