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the family is attested by its inclusion in L'Art de Vérifier les Dates; but the standard account in that great work was superseded in 1920 by the detailed history of the lords of Bellême published by the Vicomte du Motey.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.

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.

This paper is a preliminary study of the relative indebtedness of the Husite movement in Bohemia to the English reformers of the latter half of the fourteenth century on the one hand, and the native Čech predecessors of Hus on the other; but it will also raise questions of historical method and of the influence of nationalism on modern historiography, which will perhaps justify the infliction on you of a subject remote from the topics usually discussed by this Society, and one which you will perhaps deem arid and uninvitingly recondite in itself.

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.

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’.

This lecture seeks to historicise the so-called cancel culture associated with the ‘culture wars’ waged in Britain in c. 2020. Focusing on empire and on the domestic, British impacts of Georgian-era imperial material cultures, it argues that dominant proponents of these ‘culture wars’ in the public sphere fundamentally distort the British pasts they vociferously claim to preserve and defend. By failing to acknowledge the extent to which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British men and women themselves contested imperial expansion under the aegis of the East India Company – and decried its impact on British material culture, including iconic stately homes – twenty-first-century exponents of culture wars who rail against the present-day rise of histories of race and empire in the heritage sector themselves erase key layers of British experience. In so doing, they impoverish public understanding of the past.

The question of whether Ireland had been conquered by England has received some attention from historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, mainly because it preoccupied William Molyneux, author of the influential The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698). Molyneux defended Irish parliamentary rights by denying the reality of a medieval conquest of Ireland by English monarchs, but he did allow for what could be called ‘aristocratic conquest’. The seventeenth century, too, had left a legacy of conquest, and this paper examines evidence of consciousness among Irish Protestants of descent from ancestral conquerors. It considers how and why this consciousness took a more pronounced sectarian turn during the 1790s. Williamite anniversaries, increasingly associated with the Orange Order, became identified in the Catholic mind as symbolic reminders of conquest. Thanks to the protracted struggle for ‘Catholic emancipation’, this issue continued to feature in political debate about Ireland well into the nineteenth century, while the passing of the Act of Union (1800) revitalised the older debate about whether England could be said to have conquered Ireland. Liberal Protestants and Catholics contended that England had invariably intervened to prevent any possibility of reconciliation between conquerors and conquered. Thus the language of conquest remained highly adaptable.

Castles are some of Japan's most iconic structures and popular tourist destinations. They are prominent symbols of local, regional and national identity recognised both at home and abroad. Castles occupy large areas of land at the centre of most Japanese cities, shaping the urban space. Many castles have their roots in the period of civil war that ended in the early seventeenth century, and now house museums, parks and reconstructions of historic buildings. The current heritage status of Japan's castles obscures their troubled modern history. During the imperial period (1868–1945), the vast majority of pre-modern castles were abandoned, dismantled or destroyed before being rediscovered and reinvented as physical links to an idealised martial past. Japan's most important castles were converted to host military garrisons that dominated city centres and caused conflict with civilian groups. Various interests competed for control and access, and castles became sites of convergence between civilian and military agendas in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper argues that castles contributed both symbolically and physically to the militarisation of Japanese society in the imperial period. The study of these unique urban spaces provides new approaches to understanding militarism, continuity and change in modern Japan.

Perhaps no phrase is so evocative of inter-war British foreign policy as is ‘collective security.’ Yet surprisingly, despite this obvious centrality—what political figure did not at one time or another express his views regarding collective security?—there remains a missing dimension regarding our understanding of the part collective security played in British foreign policy during the critical decades of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.

It is an accident of birth that has brought to a retired College Tutor the honour of giving the first Prothero lecture. To declare my interest at once, it happens that Sir George Prothero's wife was my mother's sister; both my parents died before my sister and I could remember them. We occasionally stayed as children with the Protheros at 24 Bedford Square, but I hardly began to know my uncle better until I was an undergraduate in the last three years of his life, and I was still too raw to get much deeper than the sense that here was a quiet, dignified man, obviously distinguished but overworked and tired. He died in 1922 at the age of 73. There were no children. Before she died in 1934, Lady Prothero gave me the diaries which he had kept with hardly a break for fifty years, and some bundles of letters to him, mostly 1914–18.I am ashamed to say that I hardly did more than skim these diaries and letters until, after my retirement, I was asked by this Society's Council to look over the papers and letters which Prothero had bequeathed to the Society. These came to it on his widow's death, along with most of his historical library, and with his residuary estate.

When Charles II. announced his impending marriage with Catharine of Portugal, the inclusion of Tangier in the Princess's dowry was the most popular clause of the marriage treaty.

English hopes ran even higher round the little African port than over the companion gift of Bombay, for Tangier, situated almost on the north-west point of Morocco, lay in the direct trade route from the Levant to Western Europe. The English Consul at Lisbon pointed out that it might from its position become a magazine for all the Levant, a port which would be used by the Spanish West India fleet homeward bound to Seville or Cadiz, in order to avoid the high duties imposed by the Crown of Spain in its own ports—valuable asset this in case of war with Holland, Spain, or France.

‘Quel grand ministère!’ wrote Princess Lieven to Lord Aberdeen on 26 December 1852. ‘Mais quel curieux spectacle, vous, Lord John, Lord Palmerston! Qui est le fou qui eût osé prédire cette trinité?’

The princess's surprise at this alliance was shared by her contemporaries, among whom the old Tory Lord Londonderry could hardly contain his indignation, writing of it to Clarendon as ‘this grandissima Coalition-Composition (which either seems to have dropped from the skies or been conjured in the regions below)’, and adding that ‘so utterly meretricious … and apparently indelicate and inexplicable alliance was never before contemplated, much less seen’. It is true that some form of alliance had long been expected as the logical solution to the problem of weak minority government that had persisted since 1846, but it was not envisaged in the form, which it ultimately took in December 1852, of an all-embracing union of the Whigs and the former followers of Peel. As late as February 1852 Gladstone had spoken of union with the Whigs as the ‘least natural position’ for Peel's followers, and his opinion was shared by others.

Last December we considered the work of the Maurists, who were at once a product and an ornament of a very brilliant phase of French learning and scholarship. This afternoon we turn to another great nation in what was, perhaps, the golden age of its influence upon the thought and academic disciplines of Europe.

In the Domesday Survey villani, bordarii, cotarii, and servi included the great majority of the rural and also of the whole population. The intermixture of these classes created the apparently homogeneous mass of the villeins of the feudal age. No one has ever tried to work out for statistical purposes the rich store of information concerning the sub-division of these classes that is accumulated in the manorial records and in the State surveys of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the best modern authorities convey the impression that villeins holding in villeinage were typical of the feudal village and formed the bulk of the rural population.

At the time of the so-called German colonisation to the east of the Elbe, German merchants and artisans entered the Brandenburg Mark, whose rivers, woods, and marshes stretched from the Old Mark to the west of the Elbe to the New Mark to the east of the Oder. The immigrants brought with them the economic methods and social organisation of their homeland. Town life, self-government, and trade quickly developed everywhere, whether the new town was established on an uninhabited site, or on the site of a Slavonic village which gave its name to the new settlement, or a walled town or fortress of the Slavs was transformed into a German town.

The history of agricultural technique in the Middle Ages is a subject of obvious importance and interest, but in England, at least, it has never been systematically studied. It is true that the main outline of agricultural practice has been made familiar, as a result of the study of manorial documents, but there has been little attempt to investigate technical questions in detail, or to distinguish between the practice of different parts of the country. One branch of agrarian economy, sheep and cattle farming, has been almost entirely neglected, in spite of the fact that wool and hides were the staple export of England. Nor is it only the technique of farming which awaits investigation; the whole subject of estate management in the Middle Ages is almost untouched. Historians have in the main been content to study manorial organisation and those problems of tenure and of labour which can be observed in a manorial framework; it is the legal rather than the economic side of agrarian history which has chiefly interested them.

The medievalist who goes to Pavia will visit first and most reverently the church of San Pietro Ciel d'Oro. It is an eighth-century foundation, reformed by Cluny in the tenth and much rebuilt and altered over the years. But you do not go to it for the architecture, nor for the gilded ceiling—long tarnished; you go to salute the relics: in the crypt, Boethius; on the high altar St Augustine of Hippo. There you have the categories of medieval scholarship, which found its subject-matter in Augustine and its language in Boethius. These are easy generalizations. What we must consider are the harder, practical questions of Boethius' entry into the western academic tradition. To what extent and why was he an influence on the learning of the early Middle Ages? He conveyed the classical heritage to the medieval west, no doubt— but how and when?

The titles which have been borne by English sovereigns, in common with those of many other exalted personages, were formerly more remarkable for the splendour of their sound or the curiosities of their historical associations than for the accuracy with which they expressed the rights and powers which belonged to, or were even claimed by, their possessors. The kings of England called themselves kings of Scotland when their whole territory beyond the border consisted of the town of Berwick. They were called Lords of Ireland in times when no English soldier could venture beyond the Pale. They claimed the dignity of King of France when they had not held a foot of French ground for a century; and finally, ever since the time of Henry VIII., they have been styled “Defenders of the Faith”—a title which, taken in its original meaning, declares them to be the defenders of a branch of the Christian faith of which they are the hereditary arch-opponents.

Under the generic title, ‘French Crossings’, this Presidential Address explores the history of laughter in French society, and humour's potential for trangressing boundaries. It focuses on the irreverent and almost entirely unknown book of comic drawings entitled Livre de caricatures tant Bonnes que mauvaises (Book of Caricatures, both Good and Bad), that was composed between the 1740s and the mid-1770s by the luxury Parisian embroiderer and designer, Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin, and his friends and family. The bawdy laughter that the book seems intended to provoke gave it its nickname of the Livre de culs (Book of Arses). Yet despite the scatological character of many of the drawings, the humour often conjoined lower body functions with rather cerebral and erudite wit. The laughter provoked unsparingly targeted and exposed to ridicule the social elite, cultural celebrities and political leaders of Ancien Régime France. This made it a dangerous object, which was kept strictly secret. Was this humour somehow pre- or proto-Revolutionary? In fact, the work is so embedded in the culture of the Ancien Régime that 1789 was one boundary that the work signally fails to cross.