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.

As the Professor of Modern History at Cambridge observed in his perceptive study of England and the Dutch Wars: ‘The wars themselves demonstrated not a few of the characteristics of modern warfare; there is a foretaste here of the bitter national feeling, the unscrupulous use of propaganda against the enemy, that were to become more familiar later. To some extent these weapons of war were deliberately manufactured and exploited by governments in the time of the Dutch wars, but equally certainly they were sometimes natural and spontaneous phenomena.’ Professor Charles Wilson confined his masterly analysis to the first two Anglo–Dutch wars. In this paper, I propose to consider the same points with reference to the third of these conflicts, and to trace in outline the major shifts and vagaries of public opinion on both sides of the North Sea.

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.

It is well known that the history of Byzantium does not fit comfortably with mainstream medieval history. This paper returns to the problem in the light of two recent, if opposing, historiographical trends: first, the emphasis on the Mediterranean as a unifying factor, and second, the turn towards the comparative history of western and eastern Eurasia. Neither emphasis accommodates Byzantium well, and it is argued that however difficult it may seem to some historians, any broad approach to medieval history will be inadequate if it does not make space for the history of Byzantium.

Roger de montgomery, 1st earl of Shrewsbury, married Mabel de Bellême, the heiress of a great house which held the castles of Bellême and Alencon, Domfront and Sées, with widespread lands along the southern marches of Normandy, not only in that duchy but in the kingdom of France and the county of Maine. The importance of the family is attested by its inclusion in L'Art de Vérifier les Dates; but the standard account in that great work was superseded in 1920 by the detailed history of the lords of Bellême published by the Vicomte du Motey. Unfortunately the author's enthusiasm for his heroes overran his discretion; and as Orderic, our leading authority, paints most of them in the blackest colours, du Motey made a bitter attack on his accuracy and even on his veracity. Moreover, he made no attempt to grapple with the chronological difficulties inherent in the received descent, nor did he show any critical idea of the comparative value of his authorities; whilst his own lively imagination added picturesque details to what might otherwise have been a “bald and unconvincing narrative”.

In 1870 the Government of the day had behind it the stronger party in the country; and among its followers in Parliament were the two members for the City of London. Pass a quarter of a century, and come to the Government brought into power by the general election of 1895. Exactly the same two things may be said of it; it too had behind it the stronger party in the country; it too numbered among its followers in Parliament the members for the City of London. Only, whereas the Government of 1870 was Liberal, the Government of 1895 was Conservative. That quarter of a century had witnessed the transfer of the City of London's political allegiance from Liberalism to Conservatism; and therein the City's opinions corresponded to those of the business and moneyed classes generally. So it was, not only in the south of England, but also in the Midlands and Lancashire; though not yet at all to the same extent in Yorkshire, the north-east coast, or Scotland.

IT may seem unwise, if not downright foolish, and hubristic too, for someone who is not a historian of religion or the Church to choose such a topic as mine today. In mitigation of my offence, religion in the seventeenth century is in truth not only too important to be left to the theologians, but likewise too protean in its ramifications to re-main the exclusive preserve of ecclesiastical historians. Not that I wish in any way to slight the achievements of those scholars (some of them present this afternoon), without whose work I should not have had the temerity to attempt such a study as this at all. The problem which I wish to address is as follows: there are several interpretations of the different factions, parties and tendencies within the Church of England before 1640. There are disagreements con-cerning both the nature and extent of the differences between these groups, and the causes and significance of such divisions. There are many studies of the ecclesiastical parties and denominations which emerged on the anti-Catholic and then the anti-episcopalian side in 1641 and after, and of their part in the general history of the Civil War and Interregnum. Moving forward in time, there are studies of the restored Church and of the Dissenters or Nonconformists after 1660–2. In spite of all that has been written about Puritans from that day to this, especially about their theology, ecclesiology, liturgical practices, their moral, social and political tenets, less attention has been paid to the question of what constituted a Puritan in the first place.

Ballads are useful as a supplement to graver historical authorities, and throw a light upon the history of the past which we could not derive from other sources. It is generally not difficult to know what the great men of any day—the nobles, and statesmen, and men of letters—thought about the events which happened in their time. We have their letters, or their speeches, or their biographies; but it is difficult to know what the common people who formed the mass of the nation thought, and it is important to know this too. Here the ballads help us, because they were the literature of the populace, composed by men of the people for the people, reflecting popular feeling and helping to shape it. We may divide them roughly into three classes: firstly, there are the long narrative ballads which embody either traditional accounts of some past event or popular versions of some recent event, and show us what people believed to have happened; secondly, there is another class of ballads which express the feelings of the moment about the events of the day, and set forth the joy or sorrow of the people about something which was happening at the time. These are often satirical in their tone, and not easy to distinguish from the regular satirical poems of the period composed by professional writers.

The diary which is the subject of this paper was written by Margaret, Lady Hoby, the wife of Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, of Hackness, near Scarborough; it extends from August 1599 to August 1605. The manuscript is now in the British Museum (Egerton 2614); it was purchased from the Sydenham family, to whom it descended through Hoby's heir, Sir John Sydenham. As I hope to edit the text in full, I propose to give only a brief account of the writer, and a few extracts from the diary showing the everyday life of a country gentlewoman of that time.

THE equipment of any well-appointed counting house in the late sixteenth century would include, as a matter of course, one or more money-books illustrating and evaluating all coins likely to come its master's way. Such money-books had originated in the late fifteenth century, when the invention of printing had made it possible to illustrate the official ordonnances, tariffs, or placards listing coins approved for circulation and giving their legal values. The earliest ones were no more than flysheets: a Flemish one of 1499 illustrating the nine ‘good florins of the Electors’, an English one of 1504 illustrating two English groats and a Flemish double patard. In the early sixteenth century these flysheets grew into small brochures, as their publishers found it convenient to take account of coins not mentioned in official proclamations but found commonly in circulation. They were, in fact, becoming illustrated versions of the privately compiled lists of coins and values which are known to us from the time of Pegolotti onwards. In due course they attained the status of substantial volumes, their format being often made tall and narrow, like that of account ledgers, so that they could stand with these on the merchant's shelves.

HISTORIANS have long been interested in the subject of population, but it is only recently that they have begun to apply the formal techniques of demography to the study of population in the past. This has happened because historians have begun to ask questions about population and its relationship with the historical, social and economic environment which can only be answered if the demographic components of fertility, nuptiality and mortality can be identified and measured. Originally historians were concerned with relatively straightforward questions about population, such as the number of people alive at a given time. But knowledge of the size of a population is in itself seldom informative; it becomes meaningful when it is compared with other information, for example with the size of the population at another date, so that the direction and rate of population change can be inferred. Sometimes the bare facts of population change are all that the historian needs to know; for example some independent evidence on changes in the size of the population of England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would be a welcome addition to the current debate on the sixteenth-century price rise. But historians have seldom remained satisfied with the knowledge that population is growing or declining; very properly they have wanted to know why this was so.

Nearly ten years ago I ventured to lay before you some speculations upon the origin of impeachment, and to suggest that the classical view of its nature was not a sure guide to its historical origins. In its developed form it could be reasonably described as a trial by the lords of a person whom the commons had indicted (or nearly so) of high crimes and misdemeanours. Thus linked up with the age-old criminal procedure of the common law, the parliamentary impeachment could cast a decent veil of legality over the political realities which too often disgraced it, and could pose before the world in the reassuring robes of justice.

The Revolution of 1688 marks the beginning of an era of great importance in our foreign policy. This fact, together with the close personal supervision of foreign affairs by William III., makes the study of the diplomatic service in that reign peculiarly interesting. The following sketch does not pretend to be complete, but it is the fruit of much miscellaneous research.

In 1914 Professor Pollard read a paper before the Royal Historical Society on “The Authenticity of the Lords' Journals in the Sixteenth Century,”1 in the course of which, by revealing how inadequate a presentation of the manuscript originals was contained in the printed journals, he showed that the original journals might be a valuable field for historical gleanings. In addition to Professor Pollard, Professor. Maitland and Mr. L. O. Pike also examined the manuscript of an Elizabethan Lords' journal;2 but in 1916 two American scholars, Professors Notestein and Usher, turned to the Commons' journals of the early seventeenth century, and in advocating a critical survey of the manuscript originals, challenged the conventional view of their authenticity which an uncritical edition of them has easily created.3 The fact is, of course, that even an accurate edition of a document—and a fortiori an inaccurate one—may destroy valuable historical evidence if it convey no clear idea of the appearance of the original manuscript. It is one thing to visualise a large folio sheet of print: a materially

Elizabeth I's apparent vacillation over the Dutch Revolt is possibly the most disputed aspect of her foreign policy. On two occasions she was formally offered sovereignty of the rebel provinces, of Holland and Zeeland in 1576 and of the United Provinces in 1585. The circumstances of both offers were very similar, however different the outcomes. The course of the negotiations reveals how Elizabeth's prevarication arose from a moral dilemma: how to reconcile her acceptance of the legitimacy of the Dutch cause with her conscientious objection to territorial expansion.

ON a stifling Saturday in Texas in June 1937 a twenty-six-year-old African-American musician, Robert Johnson, stepped to the microphone in a makeshift recording studio in a disused warehouse atop a Buick showroom. Johnson had grabbed a ride west from his native Mississippi to make it to the recording session in Dallas, one more journey in a life that had been spent by and large on the road. In contemporary parlance, he was a songster: an itinerant guitarist and maker of songs who scraped together a living wherever he found it, performing on street corners and in juke joints in the Deep South, sometimes drifting north, even reaching New York City, but always heading south again. That he recorded at all came down largely to luck; luck, and the exigencies of the Great Depression, which cut deeply into record company profits and forced the so-called ‘race record’ companies, which sold to an almost entirely black market, to look for cheap talent, Southern performers with local reputations who might appeal to regional markets. Johnson was one of many who caught a talent scout’s ear in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1930s. On that Saturday in Dallas he recorded fifteen songs, among them a haunted blues called ‘Hellhound on my Trail’.

In 1855, Thakombau, chief of Bau in Western Fiji, was placed in a curious dilemma. He was recognized as the leading chief of Fiji by the United States Government, but at the same time he was held responsible for a sum of $45,000 in compensation for damage to the property of United States citizens. Thakombau had, indeed, aspired to the sovereignty of the entire island group, but he was quite unable to meet the claim. A few years later, on 8 October 1858, a promise was wrung from him to settle the account within a year. Harassed by his inability to do so, he turned to the British Government for assistance, and within a week, on 12 October 1858, he had signed a formal deed ceding the whole of Fiji to Great Britain. This document had been drawn up by the British Consul, W. T. Pritchard, who had only recently arrived in Fiji, but at once proceeded to London to urge the acceptance of the offer.

At Avignon on 24 September 1321, a wealthy, middle-aged, well-connected and widely travelled Venetian merchant, Marino Sanudo, called Torsello, presented to Pope John XXII a book which he had been composing over the previous fifteen years, the Liber Secretorum (or Secreta) Fidelium Crucis, the book of the secrets of the faithful of the Cross. The full title explained the subject matter: the protection of the faithful, the conversion and destruction of the infidel and the acquisition and retention of the Holy Land in peace and security.

This afternoon I invite you to follow me along a bypath which gives access to wide prospects. I have recently had occasion to investigate the history of Simon de Montfort's family after the battle of Evesham. I do not intend to-day to tell an old story, but to try to give to it, or rather to draw from it, the significance which it seems to possess.

The emergence of majority rule in English parliamentary elections has a twofold interest. On the one hand it concerns the history of parliamentary government in England, and in that respect it is primarily an English affair. On the other hand, however, it is relevant also to a much broader theme. Maitland once said that one of the great books that remain to be written is The History of the Majority. There are a large number of historical phenomena which could illuminate that manysided subject. One such phenomenon is the election of representatives for the Englishand subsequently for the Britishparliament. Those elections have been going on with astonishing regularity for close upon seven hundred years. So they provide for the history of the majority one thread of development which, though only single, is at any rate both long and strikingly continuous.