ACCORDING to Lord Ernie, the period from 1750 to 1789 was, in spite of many dark features, the brightest period hitherto reached in the history of French husbandry, a period during which ‘we turn, as it were, from the sombre etchings of La Bruyère to the smiling pictures of Watteau’. It certainly was a time when the spirit of agrarian reform which was prevalent throughout Western Europe was blowing strongly in France, arousing great enthusiasms and aspirations. From the presses of France poured a spate of agricultural treatises, books and pamphlets deploring the existing agricultural system, proclaiming the virtues of the English system of capitalist farming, urging the emancipation of property and of sale from all restrictions in order to achieve increased production, higher profits, and the investment of more capital.

Thomas Fuller summarized our subject with brisk and depres-sing confidence:

’This is he so famous in history for cutting off the life of King Edward the Second…he made much bustling in the land, passing through the bishoprics of (Hereford), Worcester and Winchester, and died at last, not much lamented, July 18th, 1345.’

THE ‘history of ideologies’ is now very much the vogue since Professor Quentin Skinner's fine study on The foundations of modern political thought. Whether or not one agrees with all aspects of his interpretation of Bodin—and Dr Parker might argue that it fails to draw out sufficiently the moral philosopher inside the jurist, while Professor Rose might prefer to stress the Judaizing tendencies of the theorist as a central preoccupation—it is a testament to the decisive impact made by Skinner on the history of political thought that no-one has challenged his new and radical approach. It is no part of the purpose of this paper to do so. Indeed, an understanding both of Bodin's predecessors and of the ideological conflict of the 1570s which influenced the drafting of the Six bookes of a commonweale (the title given to the République by its first English translator, Richard Knolles) is fundamental before any appreciation of the theorist can be made free from distortion. It is no use at all asserting that Bodin started from scratch, even on the issue of sovereignty, where he made his most original contribution. Bodin himself minimized his originality, basing his commentary on the powers historically enjoyed by French kings. The French king had traditionally regarded his authority as that of princeps legibus solutus, as an absolute ruler above the law. If the French king had been unable to do those things described by Bodin, in the view of that author, ‘il n'estoit pas Prince souverain’. Bodin also noted the contribution of the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages to the development of his political theory and remarked that Pope Innocent IV was he who best understood the nature of sovereignty.

CHURCHILL’S views on democracy – both in theory and in practice – are of interest for many reasons. He played a leading role in the ideological battles between democracy and dictatorship in the first half of the twentieth century and he was one of the principal architects of the modern democratic world order. Yet Churchill was widely regarded, particularly in the middle phase of his career, as a reactionary and anti-democratic figure. This conundrum will be examined by considering Churchill’s attitude to the concept of democracy and democratic reform – both at home and abroad – over his long career. Churchill was born in 1874 when the great majority of adults in Britain were still disenfranchised and he died in 1965 the year when the Voting Rights Act ended electoral racial discrimination in the United States. Thus his life roughly spanned the period during which universal suffrage democracy became the basis of political legitimacy in the western world.

Although the Domesday survey has long been used effectively to illuminate many aspects of English history in the eleventh century, attempts to use it for reconstructing the contemporary rural landscape and structure of landholding have been less frequent and less successful. This has partly been caused by the fact that most commentators since the days of Maitland and Vinogradoff have concentrated on the making of Domesday rather than on its actual contents. However, even the series of Domesday Geographies by Professor Darby and his collaborators is marred by the failure to determine the meaning of the formula terra unius carucae or its equivalents. This expression has been translated in the present paper as ‘teamland’, rather than the ‘ploughland’ favoured by most modern writers on Domesday, because use of the latter synonym would prejudice the later argument by presupposing the argued identification of the Domesday ‘land for one plough’ with the field-hide or carucate found in later manorial records.

It is not the object of this paper to suggest that there is any historical foundation for the association of a social or even a national practice of duelling with the more recent political manifestation, which is usually defined according to our individual political beliefs; far less is it my intention to express any opinion of my own on the advantages or evils of a resort to arms as a means of settling the differences that arise between individuals or nations.

The first modern crisis of public secrecy was set in motion in the Spring of 1844 when a little-known Italian exile began sending himself letters in which he had placed grains of sand, poppy seeds or fine hairs. The discovery that the additional contents were disappearing in transit confirmed Joseph Mazzini's suspicions that his correspondence was being opened by Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, at the request of the Austrian ambassador. There then followed what Graham's first biographer described as a ‘paroxysm of national anger’ as the extent of clandestine domestic espionage was exposed. A powerful coalition of working-class radicals and Parliamentary Liberals came together to protest at the use of ‘the spy system of foreign states’.‘The proceeding cannot be English,’ thundered The Times, ‘any more than masks, poisons, sword-sticks, secret signs and associations, and other such dark ventures. Public opinion is mighty and jealous, and does not brook to hear of public ends pursued by other than public means. It considers that treason against its public self.’

By hook or by crook, sometimes by both at the same time, great landowners, and many of the not so great, have survived into the final decade of the twentieth century. Some of the survivors are, no doubt, clinging on by their fingernails, huddled over a single-bar electric fire in a damp and draughty room of a family mansion that is slowly crumbling over their heads, living on baked beans and memories in the manner of an A. S. Byatt novel. Many, however, are extremely wealthy. Old-established landed families provide between a fifth and a quarter of the 200 wealthiest people in Britain in the early 1990s, a proportion which has changed very little since the 1880s. But what are they for? A hundred years ago it was unnecessary to ask such a question. Meredith Townsend, who with J. L. Sanford produced two volumes on The Great Governing Families of England, writing in 1865 had little need of argument or evidence to support his statement that the great landowners were the governing class. He was more defensive in justifying his selection of just thirty-one families as the core of that class, but in 1865 it was not unreasonable to prophesy that ‘in another hundred years these thirty one families will be the marked and ticketed families among two hundred millions of English-speaking men’, and to argue that: ‘The redivision of property may ultimately shatter their power, but short of that their dignity and consideration will probably for a century steadily increase.’

MY subject this afternoon has been chosen because the emergence of majority rule in the procedure of the House of Commons provides some instructive parallels to the subject which I attempted to discuss on the corresponding occasion last year—the subject of the emergence of majority rule in English parliamentary elections. Our starting-point last year was an act of parliament, the statute of 1430 about county elections. Our starting-point this afternoon is a book: a book written in 1565 but first published in 1583, the book known as De Republica Anglorum: the Manner of Government of the Reγm of England, by Sir Thomas Smith, one of the principal Secretaries of State under both Edward VI and Elizabeth I. We start from that book because its chapter entitled “The form of holding the parliament” contains a passage of some length which provides the earliest set description of the majority-procedure of the House of Commons. The forms of that majority-procedure as described by Smith in 1565 remain basically the same in 1964. Smith emphasizes three features.

The documents printed below from the originals in the possession of Mr. J. W. Ford, J.P., of Enfield Old Park, by whom they were kindly communicated to the Society, have some interest in connexion with an obscure aspect of the ecclesiastical government of the later Tudor and early Stuart periods.

MATILDA'S epitaph, proclaiming her the daughter, wife and parent of a Henry, great by birth, greater in marriage, and greatest of all in her offspring, epitomises her standing among her contemporaries. It also explains some of the difficulty any historian must experience in attempting to penetrate her character and motives. Her role was seen essentially as an auxiliary one. The relatively few years when she played a leading part in English politics as ‘domina Anglorum’, with one very brief and ill-advised attempt to act as ‘regina Anglie’, years to which modern historians have devoted most of the pages they have allowed her, counted for virtually nothing in the summing up of her influence made in 1167. As a woman involved in politics she was assigned a woman's place: important and influential, but limited, variable, and always secondary.

Between c. 900 and the mid-twelfth century, a series of Old English vernacular chronicles were produced, growing out of the text produced at the court of King Alfred. These chronicles are collectively known as ‘the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. They have long been accorded fundamental status in the English national story. No others have shaped our view of the origins of England between the fifth and eleventh centuries to the same extent. They provide between them the only continuous narrative of this period. They are the story that has made England. This paper deals with the relationship between that story, these texts and England: how they have been read and edited – made – in the context of the English national story since the sixteenth century; but also their relationship to, the part they may have played in, the original making of the English kingdom. The focus is on developments during the tenth and eleventh centuries, when a political unit more or less equivalent to the England we now know emerged. It is argued that these texts were the ideological possession and expression of the southern English elite, especially of bishops and archbishops, at this critical period of kingdom-making. Special attention is given to their possible role in the incorporation of Northumbria into that kingdom. These chronicles were made by scribes a millennium ago, and to some extent have been reworked by modern editors from the sixteenth century on. They are daunting in their complexity. The differences between them are as important as the common ground they share. Understanding the making of these foundational texts has its own light to shed on the making of England.

This paper explores the life and activities of Hugh Hamilton Lindsay (1802–81), an East India Company official who worked at Canton from 1820. Lindsay's is a key voice in the challenge to the Company's policies in China on the cusp of the abolition of its monopoly, and to British policy on the eve of the first ‘Opium War’ with the empire of the Qing. Lindsay first made his mark on Sino-British relations by leading a covert East India Company foray north along the Chinese coast in 1832 in the ship Lord Amherst, and in widely disseminating his bullish conclusions and policy recommendations in publications and reports that followed. He is known as a bellicose pamphleteer, but a more complex picture emerges if we follow Lindsay and his commercial activities as the British fanned out from Canton into the Chinese ‘treaty ports’ opened after 1842, and across Britain's wider developing empire in Asia. His field of operations developed to include the British colony of Labuan and led him into a heated public conflict with Sir James Brooke in the early 1850s. Lindsay was never happy with the status quo: he lobbied and hectored, and in business he innovated, and pushed hard on the frontiers of British power and influence. Commercial opportunity drove him, but so did a specific vision of the ‘English character’, and notions of pride and national and personal honour.

THE modern study of urban history began in the nineteenth century, and has since continued to reflect the preoccupations of its founders. For these historians, the towns of the European Middle Ages nurtured the seeds of political democracy and economic liberalism. Consequently, two great historians of the late nineteenth century, Charles Gross and F.W. Maitland, laid down criteria for the definition of towns which stressed above all the theme of administrative independence. It was declared that fundamental legal differences distinguished the borough from other forms of community, in particular the village. Burghal status, and the features associated with itsuch as the existence of a civil constitution, the right to representation in parliament, and the free tenure of propertyhave been exhaustively analysed by subsequent writers, not-ably James Tait. This emphasis upon the legal autonomy of towns has been strengthened by the prestige of the great medieval cities of Flanders, Germany and Italy, which repeatedly exemplify the trade centre fighting or bargaining to achieve communal independence from feudal overlords and control over the surrounding countryside. In accordance with this pattern of urban development, historians have tended to seek, as a necessary first stage of growth, evidence of such a struggle for self-governing independence.

The religion of Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, foxed his contemporaries, and he has proved an equally slippery customer for those modern historians who wish to see unbridgeable confessional gulfs opening up in the 1620s and 1630s. A detailed study of him reveals ambiguities of position that confused his contemporaries and confound modern categorisation. Those who knew Dorset differed dramatically in their perception of his religion. To one French ambassador, Tillières, he was ‘un puritain’; while to William Middleton, Lord Fielding's chaplain, he appeared ‘strong for Precisians’. By contrast, another French ambassador, Fontenay, believed that Dorset ‘n’est pas trop ennemy de nostre religion' and the papal agent Carlo Rossetti thought him ‘assai fautori nell’ intrinseco dei Cattolicci’. In 1641 Sir Walter Erle even opposed the re-enfranchisement of Seaford on the grounds that ‘the lord of the town [i.e. Dorset] [was] a papist'. Dorset was called everything from a puritan to a papist—and other things besides. In dedicating his ‘account of religion by reason’ to Dorset, Sir John Suckling wrote that the tract—which was widely condemned as Socinian—‘had like to make me an atheist at Court and your lordship no very good Christian’. Whereas Professor Hexter addressed ‘the problem of the Presbyterian-Independents’, contemporary images of Dorset present the even more bizarre spectacle of a puritan-papist-pagan. Where, that is, they mention his religion at all. For time and again we find that descriptions focus mainly on Dorset's courtly and chivalric qualities. Clarendon portrayed Dorset as ‘a man of an obliging nature, much honour, of great generosity, and of most entire fidelity to the Crown’; but made no mention of his religious attitudes. When authors dedicated their writings to Dorset they consistently highlighted these same secular traits: Sir Richard Baker praised his ‘publicke vertues’, Edward May his ‘noble nature’; and even John Bastwick called him simply ‘illustrissimus’.

The antiquities of the word parliament have not been neglected either by lexicographers or by constitutional historians. The latter usually mention Jordan Fantosme and various thirteenth-century chroniclers; while the articles parlamentum in the Glossarium of Ducange and parlement in Godefroi's Dictionary are instructive although meagre in their references to record sources. But after he had studied all the references of historians and dictionary-makers, the enquirer might well be puzzled to know why certain sessions of the English king's court should in particular be called parliaments by the royal clerks. We may, however, get some way towards a plausible explanation by filling in a few of the gaps in the chain of references. For a full explanation we need to look at the working of parliamentary institutions; but that is a further step.

THE Raj still has a peculiar fascination for the British public, judging by the stream of popular books, radio and television programmes whose constant themes are the panoply of empire and the life-style of imperial rulers. Among English-speaking historians, however, approaches to Britain's Indian empire have changed markedly in the last twenty years. By the 1950s ‘Imperial history’ was a thing of the past. Gone was its admiring concentration on the men who ruled India and their measures as a way of understanding political change in the subcontinent. Attention shifted to indigenous initiatives and growth points. At first the emphasis was on India's western educated as organizers and spokesmen of a new kind of overtly nationalist politics. In the late 1960s the focus altered to whole localities within the subcontinent as it became clear that the western educated were not elites divorced from local, more traditional societies, but were still subject to its pressures, influenced by its perceptions and involved in its webs of patronage and alliance. In such an environment apparently nationalist politics were shot through with conflicts and contraditions: they were only one aspect of diverse manoeuvres for influence in society and the state structure. In the present decade the wheel has almost come full circle. Imperial overlords again receive attention: not now as architects and guardians, but as elements essential in the analysis of the changing style and content of Indian politics to the extent to which they created the framework of political life, defined its categories, means and ends.

In the five years which elapsed between Mary's accession on 6 July 1553 and her death on 17 November 1558 281 institutions to benefices vacant in Essex are entered in Bonner's Register. Ninety–three of these vacancies, or just under a third, occurred as the result of the deprivation of the late incumbent. A similar disturbance of the personnel of the clergy was taking place all over the country during these years, but the figures quoted for Essex cannot be taken as typical, for Dr. Frere found that the numbers and ratios tended to diminish the greater the distance from London.The general nature of this disturbance, however, the processes connected with it, and the problems arising out of it can best be understood when examined in relation to a particular group of the deprived clergy. As Mr. Baskerville has suggested, “it is only by a thoroughgoing exploration of the ups and downs of the lives of the clergy in an individual diocese that the course of current ecclesiastical movements can be adequately comprehended.”

For a detailed account of the activity known as the Rye House Plot the evidence available is inadequate, and the aura of mystery which surrounded the plot at its discovery on 12 June 1683 has never been wholly dispelled since. Its importance, however, lies less in the details of what it actually was than in what Charles II and his government asserted it to be, and in the use to which they put it to destroy the influence of the Whigs. It was through popular reaction to this use of it that the plot exerted the influence it did upon the revolution of 1688.

Henry VIII was a great king, and great things were done in his day. The story of his reign has been told by more than one famous historian, and in that story Scotland, as a rule, plays only a small part. Generally she appears as the ally of France used to embarrass England from time to time, as a sort of Highland dirk threatening the back of stout King Hal as he faced south—a dirk little used in fact, and in use very ineffective; witness Flodden and Solway Moss! If we may judge by the standard histories, Scotland had little to do with the action and the movement of a stirring period.