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.

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 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.’

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.

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)

August The Fifth, 1914, was a cool, windy day at Mitchels-town. County Cork: but the guests at the houseparty in the Castle were not really conscious of the chilly breeze that whisked the clouds over the tops of the Galtee mountains that stood towering behind the Castle. Here during the afternoon the guests moved about the sunny, gusty terraces and talked, in little low groups, of the War. In retrospect, however, both this garden-party and those who attended it have a significance, dramatic and historical. August the fifth was the day after the War broke out; the garden-party was one of the last ever held in the Castle; and it was not a very ordinary group of people who talked of the War, and of whether its coming would avert the calamity of Home Rule.

The publication of the Chronicles and Memorials of GreatBritain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, known familiarly as the Rolls Series, was the outcome of a movement set on foot early in the nineteenth century by Henry Petrie. Petrte (1768-1842), who began life as a dancing master, made himself a learned and zealous antiquary, and acquired a knowledge, unrivalled in his day, of the materials for early English history. He was patronized by the second earl Spencer (1755-1834), then engaged upon the enrichment of Althorp library, and in 1818 a meeting of noblemen and gentlemen was convened at Spencer House to induce the government to support a scheme for printing the early sources of British history. The project was approved by the then prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and took shape in an humble address of the House of Commons to King George IV (25 July 1822), begging for the publication of manuscript sources of history; as a result of this Petrie, who had been appointed Keeper of Records in the Tower of London in 1819, assembled extracts from various sources for the period before the Norman Conquest, which were published posthumously in 1848 as Monumenta Historical Britannica. This was a selective collection, modelled on the Recueil of the Maurist Dom Bouquet, which Guizot had continued in France. Petrie's Monumenta was inordinately costly, while it failed to give real satisfaction to historians.

The 1530s always remained classic Elton territory, in spite of later and fruitful excursions into the Cecilian world and beyond. How distinctive were the thirties? Are we still justified in talking about a ‘Revolution’? In a historical climate which puts the accent on continuities, such talk has become unfashionable. Productive reform was characteristic of the Wolsey ministry, of the reigns of Henry VII and of Edward IV, and perhaps had its origin with Margaret of Anjou's regime. Equally historians are now very aware of the gap between aspiration and reality, the sheer difficulty of effecting real change, and especially in such areas as religious practice. They are also aware of how un-revolutionary in many respects were the succeeding years; of how many of the initiatives of the thirties were not followed up in the later year of Henry VIII or even in the otherwise revolutionary reign of Edward VI; above all of the Elizabethan regime with its avoidance whenever possible of confrontation and its attempts to recreate many of the ancient continuities. The thirties did represent a watershed in very many areas, did introduce changes which would be difficult if not necessarily impossible toreverse. But to try to make the thirties the fulcrum around which English history revolves is to invite refutation and the probability that the degree of real change will be underestimated as a result. Where, for instance, Tudor Revolution in Government deals with the particular it remains a remarkable work: inevitably sharpened by subsequent research, but none the less pointing in the right direction on changes in die financial departments, and above all in the evolution of a formal Privy Council.

In the first three decades of the sixteenth century the ecclesiastical courts were harshly criticized.1 This criticism had had a long history, but it was sharply focused (at least in London) by the case of Richard Hunne.2 The unpopularity was used by Henry VIII, with great skill, to bring Convocation into subjection, and ultimately to force its acceptance of the royal supremacy. Convocation was intimidated in 1531 by a charge of praemunire for their exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction,3 and in 1532 by the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries.s But why was this Supplication submitted? Apparently it was not a diplomatic move to reinforce Henry’s papal negotiations; nor can it be seen simply as a means devised by Cromwell to deprive the clergy of their legislative rights. As Dr Kelly has shown, most of the Supplication was not about these rights. The fact that they subsequently proved crucial should not lead us into confusing intention and result. The intention of the document is to attack the ecclesiastical courts quite as much as the legislative power of the Church. Clauses 2–7 deal directly with judicial problems. What exactly lies behind this intention? Why were the courts so unpopular and felt to be so threatening?

A very large number of ballads written during the reign of James I have been preserved in various collections, though the dates of these productions are often obscured by the fact that those editions of them which have survived bear the imprint of publishers of a later time. The ‘Stationers' Registers,’ so far as the entry of ballads is concerned, were very carelessly kept during the twenty-two years that the king's reign covered, and during some years only two or three appear in the lists. Of those which can be dated, many are amorous and romantic ballads, or illustrate the general aspects of the social history of England during the whole century rather than the limited period with which we are concerned. There remain, however, after all these deductions, a considerable number of still extant ballads which supply a kind of commentary on the political events of the reign, and show what the feeling of the people was at the time when those events happened.

ROBERT BACON is the first Dominican master at Oxford about whom anything certain is known. Prof. J. C. Russell has collected those details about his life which can be found in chronicle and record sources. To summarize:—Bacon was already a master in 1219, when he was presented to a living at a church in Oxfordshire. He resigned in 1227, probably in order to become a Dominican; he is said to have received the habit from Jordan of Saxony, who was in Oxford in 1229/30. Bacon continued his teaching until his death in 1248. He was a friend of Grosseteste and a friend and schoolfellow of St. Edmund Rich, and he seems to have shared their views on politics. Matthew Paris tells us that Bacon preached an outspoken sermon before the king and certain bishops in 1233, when the barons had refused to meet Henry at Oxford. The king would never have peace, Bacon said, until he removed the bishop of Winchester and Peter des Rievaux from his counsels. Paris couples Bacon with another English Dominican, Richard Fishacre, who died in the same year, in a glowing tribute to the two friars. Both had a great reputation for scholarship, ‘in theologia et in aliis scientiis’, and for preaching: ‘populis gloriose praedicaverunt verbum Domini’. Bacon served on a number of commissions and was active in connexion with the Oxford Jewry. Professor Russell concludes that ‘these tasks show him a man of business ability often entrusted with responsibility’.

I Am going to talk to you about a period of Dutch history which is very little known in England, and as in the eighteenth century Holland had hardly any contribution of her own to make to European history, it is not likely ever to become very popular. Yet, apart from the fact that even a process of decay may be an interesting object of study, it took statesmen both in Holland and outside a considerable time to realise that the great days of the Republic were over for good. Their finding out was a matter of importance from the point of view of the European, and particularly of the English, historian, and this will properly be the subject of my paper.

The confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the supporters of Simon de Montfort after the battle of Evesham plunged much of England into confusion. Such was the magnitude and violence of the social upheaval that even after the publication of the Dictum of Kenilworth in October 1266, and the general surrender of the rebels in the following summer, had brought organized resistance to an end, the country was still tense and uneasy. In August 1270, King Henry III abandoned his intention of accompanying his son the Lord Edward on crusade and made it known that he had taken this decision because ‘the prelates, magnates and community of the realm, consider it neither expedient nor safe that both of us should leave the kingdom’. Yet when Edward returned to England as king in August 1274, only seven years after the capitulation of the last rebel stronghold of the Isle of Ely, the situation had undergone a striking transformation. The bulk of the Montfortians had already regained possession of their lands and were being reassimilated into the political community. The theme of this paper is the nature of that recovery, and the light it throws on the operation of the land market and the character of the rebellion of 1264–7.

‘The criminal law’, said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen with his usual trenchancy, ‘stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite’. The basic reason for the existence of the criminal law is not to punish ‘offences against society’ (whatever they might be) but to allow the private passion for revenge to be released in a controlled way.

ON TRIAL for his life in the spring of 1537 for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace Robert Aske from the Tower supplied a retrospective explanation of northen resentment at the dissolution of the monasteries, at that stage still very much in progress and nowhere near completion. Of all the recent changes in religion, he in particular grudged against the statute of suppressions, and so did all the country, because the abbeys in the north gave great alms to poor men and laudably served God: in which parts of late days they had small comfort by ghostly teaching. And by the said suppression the service of God is much minished, great number of masses unsaid and consecration of the sacrament now not used in those parts, to the decrease of the faith and spiritual comfort to man's soul, the temple of God ruffed and pulled down, the ornaments and relics of the church irreverently used, tombs of honourable and noble men pulled down and sold, no hospitality now kept in those parts…

Also the abbeys was one of the beauties of this realm to all men and strangers passing through the same; also all gentlemen much succoured in their needs with money, their younger sons there succoured and in nunneries their daughters brought up in virtue, and also their evidences and money left to the uses of infants in abbeys' hands, always sure there…

An ultra-slow motion serial whose episodes appear at intervals of twelve months needs a recapitulation of the story so far, however excellent the retentive capacity of scholars in comparison with soap opera audiences. The characters in question are the landowners, great and not so great, and the landed families who were already wellestablished on their estates and in their country houses in late Victorian Britain: and also the newcomers who have continued, throughout the twentieth century, to purchase landed estates and country houses. The main plot concerns the structure and distribution of landownership, and I have suggested that reports of the virtual disappearance of great estates in the last hundred years have been greatly exaggerated. There have been great changes, but while some individuals or entire families have fallen off the boat others have clambered aboard, so that in the 1990s perhaps one-third or more of the land of Britain is held in sizeable estates of 1,000 acres and upwards, compared with radier over one-half in the 1890s. The changing composition of the cast of landowners, and the wildly fluctuating fortunes of particular members of the cast, have fascinated many observers of the social and political scene, and these features provide the sub-plots. The undoubted decline of landed and aristocratic political and social predominance, leading to the virtual elimination of their influence on public life, and the equally undoubted decline, impoverishment, and extinction of some once great and famous landed families, have tended to become confused as cause and effect in some accounts.

I. The current fashion which despises ‘drum and trumpet’ histories has affected the ordinary estimate of certain historical personages: the man who was merely a great commander, who did not obviously devote himself to constitutional changes and the amelioration of the lot of the people, secures but faint praise from a democratic age. This is noticeably true of current language in regard to Edward III.; his reign is dismissed as ‘brilliant,’ and his achievements condemned as ‘barren,’ and these depreciatory judgments are confirmed by other circumstances. There was something hollow and unreal in the chivalry of his Court; it was self-conscious and theatrical; while it is difficult to believe that the claim to the French Crown, which was put forward at the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, was altogether serious; it rested on such special pleading and was pressed so fitfully. It is obvious, too, that at the end of the reign the country was much exhausted by the long struggles in which the King had engaged, and it is easy to accuse him of pursuing his own personal ambitions lightly and recklessly.

Descriptions of Tudor England by French visitors are scarce, but in the 1560s and 1570s a renewed interest in ‘all things English’ is perceptible amongst the French elite. The new religion, parliament, the eventuality of a royal marriage and genuine curiosity in such a strange country contributed to distract the attention of a few Frenchmen from Italy and Spain. In the 1580s, a major change was to occur: more books on England were being published in French, but their sole purpose was religious propaganda and many were translations of English pro- or anti-Catholic pamphlets.

This paper presents findings from a larger research project that addresses the production, content and reception of sex education broadcasts produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Independent Television in the 1960s and 1970s. More than educational aids, these programmes were vehicles of communication with explicit and implicit messages regarding sexual morality and the nature of childhood. With a focus on the broadcast media and their modes of address to children, this paper connects sex education content with classroom practice and broadly questions how broadcasts portrayed and authorised certain images, types of knowledge and methods for teaching children about sex.

History is not an exact science. In describing and seeking to resurrect—or at least reconstruct—past societies, historians make use of concepts which bear a double freight of meaning. Unlike the elements, atoms and molecules of natural science, which—however much they are artefacts of the inquiring scientist's mind rather than natural ‘givens’ of the outside world—cannot answer back, the terms which historians use to describe the human world are themselves not only part of the way in which that past world was lived and experienced by the historical actors, but are also part of the way in which historians see, experience and act in their own social and political world. Historical concepts at any level of abstraction beyond the most basic and immediate empirical reference are also part of broader contemporary debates.