One evening early in the war, the First Lord of the Admiralty and Mrs Churchill invited the Prime Minister and Mrs Chamberlain to dine. By a happy chance the conversation turned to Chamberlain's early life in the Bahamas. He told the story of the struggle to recruit the family's fortunes by growing sisal on a remote and windswept island in the Bahamas, ‘living nearly naked, struggling with labour difficulties and every other kind of obstacle, and with the town of Nassau as the only gleam of civilization’. Chamberlain described how, for all his exertions, the scheme had failed. In the Chamberlain family, it appeared, it was felt that though they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost £50,000. ‘I was fascinated’, Churchill recorded after the war, ‘by the way Mr. Chamberlain warmed as he talked, and by the tale itself, which was one of gallant endeavour. I thought to myself, “What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!” ‘

The title of my paper may well seem to threaten a mere essay in local antiquarianism, yet I shall have failed to achieve my main purpose should nothing more than this emerge. The purpose at least does not lack ambition, since I seek to outline a fresh scheme of attack upon some important and neglected problems of Tudor social history. No one would dispute our need to know more of the nation's mental interests, of the dissemination of ideas, of Tudor culture within its social setting, than may be gleaned from the histories of English literature. Of their nature, such works afford relatively little provender to the social historian. From the many hundreds of Tudor writers, they must select meagre samples upon an aesthetic basis, whereas to the historian the great mass of mediocre literature reveals more than do the few works of genius. Knowing the ordinary Elizabethans, one finds ‘the Age of Shakespeare’ among the more misleading of labels. Again, the literary observers tend to unbalance a period by concentrating upon its forward-looking as opposed to its declining elements. For similar reasons, their attentions stray too seldom from the letters of the metropolis and hence must underweight that majority of literate Englishmen who read and wrote in the provinces. Yet from our viewpoint, the most serious of all their limitations is their tendency to focus too narrowly upon vernacular literature. For the historian of ideas, the very concept ‘English literature’ represents a most violent abstraction from an age when so many readers and writers still operated in the Latin language.

The fourteenth century is an important period in the history of aristocratic retinues in England not only because it was a period of some considerable activity on their part, but because it was one in which their leaders, adapting themselves to the general change in the structure of society, began to develop new forms of retinue organised on the principle of personal contract in place of the old feudal principle of tenurial loyalty.

The relations between Peel and his party form a familiar theme, and even in this centenary year of his death there seems little to be gained from a restatement of the problem, or at least from a restatement in the old polemical terms. Yet in raking over the ashes of that controversy one must always be struck by the paradox inherent in Peel's position. If Peel destroyed his party, he destroyed his own handiwork. The man that twice ‘betrayed’ his followers ranks in British political history as the creator of the first modern parliamentary party. The contrast may be stated in the words of M. Halévy: ‘the statesman who ten years before had accomplished such an outstanding work of party organization by a most intelligible reaction had come to execrate the very notion of party politics’. Clearly if we accept the sharp contrast we must also accept the revulsion of feeling to which Halévy alludes. But another line of approach might be to inquire whether the Peel of the thirties was different in any essential aspect from the Peel of the forties. If the contrasting elements in Peel's career have been emphasized at the expense of the elements of continuity, the task is not so much to explain as to explode the paradox.

IN 1965 a very distinguished Bentham scholar read a paper to this society on Bentham and the French Revolution. During the period dealt with by that paper Bentham became an honorary citizen of France (largely through his friendship with Brissot), but he remained little known either in Britain or on the Continent. Thirty years later, he was world-famous. In 1825 members of the Colombian Congress in Bogot were quoting Bentham at each other much as eighteenth-century Englishmen had quoted Cicero in the House of Commons; and among the leaders of the Decembrist mutiny of the same year in St Petersburg were men who confessed to having been influenced by Bentham's works. In 1829 a weekly newspaper was appearing at Boston, Massachusetts, which carried his phrase the greatest happiness of the greatest number as its motto, while a journal called L'Utilitaire was being published at Geneva to propagate his ideas. This paper will not tackle the large and controversial subject of the extent and significance of Bentham's influence. It will address itself to questions that are more limited, though they have some bearing on the larger topic. These questions are: how did those outside the circle of his followers react to his ideas, and what attempts were made to challenge or refute them?

IN March 1802, the peace treaty of Amiens was signed, resulting in a two-way flow of travellers across the English Channel. Among those arriving at Dover was Joseph Fiévée, printer by trade, littérateur by vocation, and latterly politican by profession. It is said that he was commissioned by Bonaparte himself to report on affairs in London. In any event, his findings were published in the Mercure and reprinted in a work whose title, Lettres sur l'Angleterre, et réflexions sur la philosopkie du XVIIIe siècle, challenged comparison with the most famous of French commentaries on England, that of Voltaire. It reads as polemic rather than analysis, confronting what Fiévée took to be serious errors made by his countrymen when they wrote about Britain. But little of the book was what one might expect of such a work. Fiévée was not primarily interested in British politics, law and government, but in the character and manners of the people. His conclusions may be summed up in one of his many generalizations. ‘If civilization … is the art of rendering society pleasing, agreeable and congenial, the English constitute the least civilised nation of Europe.’

This article uses a combination of court and Kirk (Church of Scotland) session records, and several sets of letters written by the mothers of illegitimate children to explore how such children were loved and cared for in eighteenth-century Scotland. It argues that legitimacy, as well as class and gender, mattered in the love and care that children received. Illegitimacy also had an impact on who mothered, fracturing the bond between the biological mother and child, for a mothering given by other mothers, including wet-nurses, grandparents and, later, employers. Its conclusion is that how a child was mothered, the love and care they received, were products of a child's positioning – gender, class, legitimacy, parentage – in the world. Love was a social product, framed and shaped by and through the social, economic and legal networks in which the child was positioned. Whilst the legitimate child, both in law and social practice, might have expected its care to be framed primarily through the nuclear family, the bastard child belonged, as the law suggested, to the community, requiring its mothering to be dispersed.

England north of the Humber and the Mersey in the early twelfth century has in the past tended to be discussed in the context of the development of the monarchy. The Normans moved into the northern counties later and in fewer numbers than the south, and in the wake of the Norman settlement the north came to be more fully integrated into the southern kingdom. A fresh perspective on the period is gained by comparing Henry I's rule over the north with that in other regions of England, Wales and Normandy. Its keys were old-style dynastic politics and patronage, and his achievement that of bringing peace to the region.

TWO hundred years ago today, on 22 January 1799, French troops forced their way into the city of Naples. In doing so, they confirmed the authority of the Neapolitan Republic which had been proclaimed, one and indivisible, the day before by a group of patriots who had taken control of the Castel Sant'Elmo, the fortress on the hill immediately above the centre of the city. Thus began the last of the revolutions which can be regarded as the offspring of the great French Revolution of 1789. There is no denying that the Neapolitan Revolution, like its predecessors in northern Italy and elsewhere, depended on French military intervention. The patriots were not in control of the city before 22 January, and needed the French to quell the popular violence and disorder which had swept the city for the previous week. And when, after three months, the French withdrew their forces, the republicans' hold on the city was too precarious to last more than a few weeks.

This essay outlines a theory of modernisation that is related to changes in the German lands. Modernisation is defined as societal transformation from corporate to functionally specialised institutions. The focus is upon institutions as modes of power (coercive, economic, cultural) and how these modernise through processes of social evolution. Specific types of change are considered for the periods 1800–15 (coercive-political power), 1815–48 (economic power), the revolutions of mid-century (cultural power) and the era of German unification (coercive-military power). A concluding section considers the main patterns of modernisation over the whole period and the kind of modern social order that had been achieved by 1880.

(READ 23 January 2004 AT THE GERMAN HISTORICAL INSTITUTE, LONDON)

WERE tendencies in the direction of regional difference in the later Russian Empire outweighing tendencies in the direction of homogeneity? In view of the fact that the empire fell apart in 1917, it looks as if the emphasis ought to be on difference. A good case, however, can also be made for homogeneity. I shall therefore be proposing that the regions of the Russian Empire occupied a more or less constant position on an imaginary `divergence–coalescence spectrum'. Admittedly, the contest between divergence and coalescence ceased to be equal during the First World War and the empire collapsed. This imbalance, however, turned out to be temporary. The empire re-emerged under a new name at the end of 1922 and for sixty-nine years thereafter occupied more or less the same place on the divergence–coalescence spectrum that it had occupied before it collapsed. So I shall be arguing that, except under extreme duress, the empire was stable. It is this stability I wish to draw to your attention. One's natural inclination is to think of the later Russian Empire as a hotbed of change. I have argued in a recent article that the inclination should be resisted in analyses of work-patterns. I shall argue today that it should also be resisted in the field of regional diversity. To make the case, I shall divide what I have to say into three parts, the first on divergence, the second on coalescence and the third on the First World War.

When, on 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill’s public response was immediate and unambiguous: in a broadcast to the nation he proclaimed that ‘any man or state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid ... It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.’ He also referred to his own past as an opponent of Communism: ‘I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it, but all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding.’ This seminal broadcast has cast a long shadow both backward and forward from 1941 in its effect on how most historians and biographers have seen Churchill’s attitude to the two principal dictatorships of the twentieth century.

The word “Wardrobe” has associations for the modern The Wardrobe. historian which he will find very misleading if he takes them back to the end of the thirteenth century. Even at the beginning of the reign of Edward I, the Wardrobe included all the Household departments (i.e. those called in modern times by the names of the Lord Steward, the Lord Chamberlain, and the Master of the Horse), and besides these the Household troops, and something more or less corresponding to the Army Clothing Department. Towards the end of the reign, when everything was on a war footing, it comprised the War Office and the Admiralty as well. Indeed it is hardly too much to say that it included all the spending departments except the Office of Works. It thus controlled a very large number of sub-departments, some of which acquired administrative independence in the following reign, in the Treasurership of Walter de Stapledon.

The historical importance of Henry I.'s charter of liberties has been fully recognised by the leading writers of our time. Shortly quoted and confirmed by Stephen and Henry II. in their charters of liberties, it was called Magna Carta in the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not earlier; its influence on the constitutional struggle under King John has been often pointed out from the St. Albans chroniclers. Messrs. Round and Hall but lately showed its remarkable use in a French document of the same age. No apology, therefore, is needed, if herewith a first attempt is ventured to ascertain its authentic words from 28 texts. It has to be reconstructed, as none of the more than thirty originals once existing is preserved to us. Many former editors have, indeed, picked up in their notes one or other of the numberless variations between the manuscripts, but they have not tried to distinguish scribes' errors, intentional alterations, forging tendencies, and the differences resulting from the fact that several exemplars of equal authenticity went out from Westminster on or shortly after that fifth of August 1100, when Henry was crowned.

Although Bologna was still the foremost studio in Italy, at least inthe study of law, Padua was by the mid-fifteenthcentury a strong rival, and foreign students were attractedthere and to Ferrara by the fame of Guarino da Verona. Indeed, the popularity of the studio of Ferrara was directlydue to the appointment of Guarino as the first Professor of Rhetoric there in 1436.

The story of the overthrow of Fox and North has often, been told. Since the publication of the papers of John Robinson it has been very generally held that public opinion did not express itself at the 1784 election to any great degree. Professor Laprade pillories the view that Pitt was carried into power by a frenzied wave of popular hostility to the Coalition as the incorrect view of every historian from Lecky to Dr. Rose. The landslide theory was indeed unquestioned till the publication of Robinson's papers. Since then it has been generally dismissed. In fact, some writers have accepted the popular hostility theory without consideration of the circumstances of an eighteenthcentury election; they were naturally taken for granted by contemporaries to whom they were all too familiar.

The following list of ships' names occurring in documents of the reign of James I. (March 24, 1603, to March 27, 1625), has been compiled mainly from the following sources:

High Court of Admiralty, Records.

State Papers Domestic, Ireland, Colonial, East Indies, America, Venice.

Historical MSS. Commission, Reports.

Customs Rolls.

Exchequer, Warrants for Issues, Issue Rolls, and K. R. Memoranda Rolls.

MSS. (various) British Museum.

Letter Book of the East India Company (Birdwood and Foster).

Letters received by the East India Company (Stevens).

Purchas, his Pilgrims.

Hakluyt Society, Publications.

Camden Society, Publications.

The ideal of the regular canons originated in the fumbling, sporadic response of public opinion in the Western Church to that programme of a complete common life for clerical communities to which the Lateran Councils of 1059 and 1063 had given oecumenical recognition. It had at that time taken root only in central Italy and the extreme south of France. Thereafter it spread rapidly in most of southern and north-eastern France, though in Normandy there was no house of regular canons until c. 1119 and none in Brittany till 1130. The order flourished in the Rheims area from an early date, and it is here, in the seventies of the eleventh century, that we find the first traces of the Rule of St. Augustine being adopted by regular canons. Yet it was long before regular canons uniformly served this Rule, and in the second and third decades of the following century writers as far apart as Liége and Ravenna would speak of it very cavalierly.

THE Novelle of 1908, or to use its full title, ‘A Law to amend paragraph 2 of the Law concerning the German Fleet of 14 June 1900’, was not a very large piece of legislation. The entire text read as follows:

‘With the exception of ships destroyed, battleships and cruisers shall be replaced after 20 years. Active life extends from the year of appropriation of the first instalment on the ship to be replaced to the appropriation of the first instalment of the replacement ship. For the period 1908–1917, construction of replacement ships will follow the plan in Appendix B.’

SOCIOLOGY is a discipline that employs abstract concepts to express general propositions about social behaviour, relationships and processes. From its beginnings, sociology was as much concerned to interpret the past as to explain the present. The early sociologists were historicists and evolutionists who explained the past by imposing a pattern of order upon it, and who readily took the less developed contemporary societies of their own time as images of the remote past of their own societies. It is to those thinkers, Comte, Spencer and Marx, if not precisely to the issues that occupied them, that sociologists still turn in tracing their intellectual descent—not to the early social surveyors, Charles Booth or Frederic Le Play.