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.’

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

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.

What, if anything, do historians and theorists of international relations owe to the theories and practices of the Middle Ages? This paper traces a number of themes that were intensely debated by theologians during the fourteenth century, tracking especially two different approaches to ‘the political’ on the part of neo-Augustinian voluntarists on the one hand and neo-Aristotelian intellectualists on the other. In the scholastic attempts to answer the question: ‘What are we presumed to be? And, in consequence, what is the scope of politics?’, their different views concerning the consequences of what Christians call ‘Original Sin’ and ‘the Fall’ are highlighted. Especially, the position of the voluntarists is shown to have been taken up not least by the Master of the Modern: Hobbes. The neo-Augustinian voluntarists can thereafter be seen to have provided some of the same arguments that have recently been rehearsed by contemporary ‘realist’ critics of modern liberalism who, it is argued, are negotiating the medieval in the modern.

After a period of comparative neglect, the ecclesiastical history of the Restoration has recently again attracted the attention of historians. Dr.Bosher's Making of the Restoration Settlement has luminously exposed the politics by which the Church of England recaptured the establishment, and Mr. A. G. Matthews, by tracing the biographies of the Anglicans displaced during the Interregnum and the Non-Anglicans ejected after the king's return, has shown how changes in doctrine and discipline affected the ministry during these years. Here an attempt will be made to discuss another aspect of the re-establishment: its administrative reconstruction. Dr.Bosher has shown how the exigencies of politics led to the piecemeal restoration of Anglicanism, instead of the immediate ecclesiastical revolution which, from a legal point of view, could have been attempted. That the traditional episcopal administration was thereby eventually reconstructed is of course well known, but it seems worth asking what light the administrative records of certain dioceses can throw not only on the details of how this took place, but also on the structure and character of the revived system.

The following paper contains the results of an independent study of an episode in the commercial history of this country which has been the subject of some important researches during recent years. The beginnings of mercantile adventure in Russia and other regions of Northern Europe and the Far East have been related by contemporary men of action, most of whose narratives have been carefully edited in the Hakluyt Series; but the political and economic environment of the Muscovy Company itself was still in need of elucidation from contemporary State Papers and other records. Some of these sources have been used by Madame Lubimenko, Dr. A. J. Gerson and Mr. O. T. Williams for special aspects of the subject; but a large mass of material of the first importance has remained untouched.

The Lenthall family acquired Latchford in Oxfordshire by marriage in the fifteenth century and settled there. They were lesser gentry, but Thomas Lenthall was M.P. for Oxford in 1542 and John Lenthall—the elder brother of the Speaker of the Long Parliament—was made marshal of the King's Bench prison and knighted in 1616, and he married a daughter of the Temples of Stowe. Before the Civil War at least the family might be said to belong to the rising gentry. Sir John was alleged to be corrupt and extortionate as marshal, accepting money for the improper release of prisoners. But as early as 1645 he was being harried by his creditors, and a substantial part of the estate was under mortgage in the early 1660s. The debts do not appear to have arisen directly from the Civil Wars—in which the senior line of the family took no active part—but may have been the result of Sir John's exceptionally large family. In 1678 his grandson and successor, William, raised money by a method which indicated severe financial difficulties, the sale of an annuity for twenty-one years, and in 1679 his second wife's family found him a Parliamentary seat at Wallingford to enable him to evade his creditors. In the early 1680s the various debts on the estate were bought up by Sir John Cutler, the wealthy money-lender and the hero of Wycherley's Praise of Avarice, and in 1685 were consolidated in a single mortgage of all Lengthall's propery, including his profits from the King's Bench prison, for £12,000. The rate of interest was 5½ per cent, a high rate for the period, and after 1689 the interest fell into arrears, so that by 1700 there was owing on account of this debt over £20,000. In addition, in the 1690s William incurred judgment debts of some £6,500 to two Londoners, and in 1700 had to give these creditors a second mortage on his assets. Thus by 1700 the total of his debts was well in excess of the capital value of his property, and the income from the estate was in the hands of Sir John Cutler's executors and heirs who attempted to foreclose the equity of redemption in order to sell the estate. Their attempt was frustrated by the death in 1702—in the midst of these proceedings—of William without direct issue, but leaving as his legal heirs the descendants of his numerous aunts, some living beyond the sea and others, though in England, untraceable. For this reason two private Acts of Parliament were obtained vesting the equity of redemption of the Lenthall estate in trustees to sell in order to discharge the debts secured on it.

Ten years ago a well-known Swiss writer on Middle Eastern affairs published an article on patriotism and nationalism among the Arabs. Discussing the attitude of nationalists to the past, and their tendency to substitute fanciful constructions for serious history, he quotes ‘a high Syrian government official’ as saying, ‘in deadly earnest’: ‘If the Mongols had not burnt the libraries of Baghdad in the 13 th century, we Arabs would have had so much science, that we would long since have invented the atomic bomb. The plundering of Baghdad put us back by centuries.’

Of all the myriad projects to restore the House of Stuart that known as the Elibank Plot is by no means the least interesting, and it is certainly the most obscure. So little, indeed, has it been regarded in the past that few historians have thought it worthy even of mention, though it does in fact throw considerable light, not only upon the political situation in Great Britain during the years that immediately followed Culloden, but also upon the intrigues of the leading Powers in the period preceding the Diplomatic Revolution. In view, therefore, of the obscurity in which this conspiracy has hitherto been shrouded, I must crave your permission to give some account of the authorities upon which my interpretation of it is based.

The place-names which illustrate the character of Anglo-Saxon heathenism have a special claim on the attention of historians. To scholars such as Bede, who wrote when English paganism was still within the range of living memory, it was a detestable superstition, which could not be ignored, but should not be described. Eighth-century writers, and, in particular, Bede, have preserved the names of a number of heathen gods, and recorded the occasion of a number of heathen festivals; they refer to temples, to idols, to altars, and to sacrifices, and their language suggests the existence of different ranks within the heathen priesthood. But it is only a dim impression of the pagan foreworld which can be recovered from their writings, and the points at which it can be reinforced by quotation from later authorities are very few.

Historians should be grateful to President Cleveland. It was his insistence on the arbitration of the dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the boundary of British Guiana that led to an intensive search in Spanish, Dutch, British and other archives for the evidence of European activities between the Amazon and the Orinoco during the three centuries after the discovery of America. The documents so found and printed are essential for any understanding of the historical background of the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute and of great interest to the colonial historian in general.

‘Remember’, King Alfred wrote to his bishops, sending them a copy of the translation he had made of Pope Gregory the Great's Cura pastoralis, ‘remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men’. To remedy the twofold disaster consequent on this intellectual and pedagogic failure – not just the ransacking of the churches throughout England and loss of their treasures and books, but, worse, the loss to the English of the wisdom the books had preserved – King Alfred arranged to have the young men among his subjects taught to read in the vernacular. Set-texts for this programme were to be supplied by the translating of ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’. Among these was Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, generally thought to have been translated by the king himself and to include some of Alfred's own musings. Towards the end of his text in the context of a discussion of the nature of God, eternity and the place of humanity in the divine plan, Alfred had Wisdom declare: ‘we can know very little concerning what was before our time, except through memory and inquiry, and even less concerning what comes after us. Only one thing is certainly present to us, namely that which now exists. But to God all is present, what was before, what is now, and what shall be after us. The central point at issue here is the disjunction between what an omniscient deity and frail humanity can know of the past, but it usefully introduces this discussion by linking the process of obtaining information about the past with that of personal memory.

The divergent views held by historians and sociologists as to what does and does not constitute nationalism will, I hope, provide me with some excuse for not attempting here a general definition of this phenomenon. Nor will I presume to adjudicate between the opinions of scholars like Hans Kohn who, confining their attention to Western Europe, will not hear of nationalism before the rise of modern states between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, and of historians like G. G. Coulton who, after surveying the policy of the Papacy, the life of the Universities, the internal frictions in the monasteries and the history of medieval warfare, concluded that nationalism, which had been developing in Western Europe since the eleventh century, became a basic factor in European politics by the fourteenth. My paper is concerned with the medieval history of Eastern Europe: an area which I propose to define, by combining a geographical with a cultural criterion, as the group of countries which lay within the political or cultural orbit of Byzantium. The subject is vast and complex, and I can do no more than select a few topics for discussion. These I would like to present as arguments in support of three theses.

At a time when Anglo-Russian relations show a great difficulty in being re-established after the Russian revolution of 1917, it may be of special interest to look back to a very far past in English history, when England, after having fought for freedom under the leadership of Parliament against the Stuart despotism, had created by a bloody act a republic, which was taken by Protector Cromwell into his strong hands and existed for years, until death removed his grip. Then another Charles Stuart was restored to the throne which his father had left for the scaffold.

Roger Whitley, a Flintshire royalist, outlining in 1658 the terms which Charles should offer the Presbyterians to induce them to join in a royalist rising, included a reference to the purchasers of confiscated property: ‘as for Purchases of Church, Crowne or other lands, they shall either peacibly enjoy theire possessions, or be reimbursed the charge …’. In the discussions and speculations in the two years preceding the Restoration, it was commonly assumed that the interests of the purchasers would exercise a major influence on the course of events. Some observers thought these interests presented an insuperable obstacle to a restoration; others supposed, like Roger Whidey, that in order to bring about a restoration it would be necessary to propitiate the purchasers by promising them either confirmation of their purchases or compensation. In the spring of 1660, when a restoration of the King on terms seemed the most likely outcome, James Sharp, the representative of the Scottish Presbyterians in London, thought that the indemnity and the purchases were ‘the most sticking part’ of the articles to be laid before the Convention; and the French ambassador believed that the confirmation of confiscated lands would be ‘one of the principal questions of the accommodation’. The purpose of this paper is to consider how the interests of the purchasers were dealt with in 1660.