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.

Rather than examining the navy as a professional fighting organisation, this essay approaches the institution as one in which a range of masculine identities and lifestyles were constructed. From this perspective, its focus is on the material culture of naval uniform, and the function of uniform in defining and communicating particular understandings of class and masculinity. It demonstrates that the respective uniforms of various ranks associated their wearers with specific clusters of stereotyped socio-cultural qualities and characteristics, and indeed with substantially different incarnations of masculinity. The essay also relates the design of naval uniform to much wider class- and gender-related debates within British society during the period.

Folklore experts have shown that for a legend to be remembered it is important that it is historicised. Focusing on three case-studies from early modern Germany and the Netherlands, this article explores how the historicisation of mythical narratives operated in early modern Europe, and argues that memory practices played a crucial role in the interplay between myth and history. The application of new criteria for historical evidence did not result in the decline of myths. By declaring such stories mythical, and by using the existence of memory practices as evidence for this, scholars could continue to take them seriously.

Historians are in general agreement on the problem of United Kingdom food supplies during the First World War. The broad picture is as follows; during the first eighteen months or so of the war, supplies both from home and abroad were well maintained. The government therefore had no need to intervene, either in procuring or distributing food, although it took certain measures to safeguard future supplies for the Army. During 1916, however, the position changed; there had been poor harvests both in the United Kingdom and the Americas (the chief source of imported food), and the German High Command were known to be planning a new, ‘unlimited’ submarine campaign, with the aim of sinking as much shipping as possible (whether British or neutral), in order to drastically curtail imports of food and war material, and thus force a British surrender.

The Lincoln diocesan records have long been well known to historians both for their great bulk and importance and for their accessibility. Before the Reformation the diocese covered eight and a half counties; even in 1541 it lost only Northampton, Rutland and Oxford, with the result that it was divided into completely separate portions, Lincolnshire and Leicester in the north, Buckingham, Bedford, Huntingdon and part of Hertfordshire in the south. Its size alone will account for the vastness of the collection. That the muniments are accessible is due to the work of the late Canon Foster, in recognition of which the Pilgrim Trust established the present record office, as the result of a request for assistance by the bishop of Lincoln. In this Society the work of Canon Foster is so famous as to make any comment on it by me superfluous, if not impertinent, but it would be impossible to speak of the records without reference to him. For my own part, I regard it as my chief privilege to attempt to carry on his work: to try to continue on the lines laid down by him is in itself a liberal education in the care and use of manuscripts.

The most detailed contemporary ethnographic representation of early nineteenth-century Ireland can be found in the reports produced by the Poor Inquiry of 1833–6. Despite their richness, however, these reports remained marginal to contemporary policy discussions and public debate. This is normally, and correctly, attributed to the unpopularity and impracticability of the specific recommendations of the Inquiry. This paper argues that the marginalisation of the reports was also due to their discursive originality. It focuses on the voluminous oral evidence which was collected and published by the Inquiry. This evidence was taken in public from large groups representing all social classes, and much of it was printed verbatim. This method was unique among state reports of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom, and unusual in social discourse more generally. It emerged from an equally unusual conception of truth as social consensus, a theory which the Inquiry adopted in order to overcome what it saw as the socially fragmented nature of representation in Ireland.

Studies of preaching in England during the 1640s and 1650 have focused on the high-profile sermons, preached before the parliament on fast days and other special days of thanksgiving, relying in particular on analysis of preachers’ texts as published in print. This paper explores ways of placing the fast sermons in broader contexts, drawing on the lively scholarship on early modern sermons that presents them as events as well as texts, dynamic encounters between preachers and hearers. This paper thus explores the responses of conscientious hearers to sermons in London in the 1640s and 1650s, through a variety of notes kept by pious Puritans, broadly sympathetic to the parliament's cause, including the artisan Nehemiah Wallington, John and Katherine Gell from the provincial gentry and John Harper, a city fishmonger. For these hearers, sermon note-taking had enduring purposes, for reflection, meditation and discussion, sometimes across generations; recording the immediate political context or the polemical arguments of the fast sermons was not necessarily their priority. Hearers’ notebooks place the fast sermons within a broader context of attendance at more ‘routine’ pastoral and didactic preaching in London parishes, revealing also that a preacher like Stephen Marshall, best known for his dynamic sermons before the parliament, spent most of his time on less controversial series of sermons on central issues of Protestant faith. Note-taking practices suggest that too sharp a contrast between polemical and routine preaching would be misleading; the fast sermons could be apprehended in a variety of ways by conscientious Puritan hearers, while sermons with a more pastoral focus nonetheless exhibited clear signs of the tensions and dilemmas provoked by the religious conflicts of the period.

It is with the greatest diffidence that I venture to present a paper upon a subject which has attracted the attention of a line of eminent historians and genealogists, but still remains one of the most obscure in twelfth-century history. No subject could be more tantalising for an historian than the career of Ranulf de Gernons, fourth earl of Chester. Its importance is manifest in the history of the palatine earldom; in the history of a great Welsh resurgence; in the history of Stephen's England, where the extent of the earl's hereditary possessions and his policy of self-aggrandisement and consistent inconstancy made him a dominating factor in the political and military situation; and above all it is of absorbing interest to the student of feudalism.

‘BRITISH history’, or ‘the new British history’ – a field which the present writer is over-generously credited with inventing some twenty-five years ago – seems to have reached a point of takeoff. At least two symposia have appeared in which the method and practice of this approach are intensively considered, and there are monographs as well as multi-author volumes – though the latter still preponderate – in which it is developed and applied to a variety of questions and periods. Its methodology remains controversial, and it may be in its nature that this should continue to be the case; for, in positing that ‘the British isles’ or ‘the Atlantic archipelago’ are and have been inhabited by several peoples with several histories, it proposes to study these histories both as they have been shaped by interacting with one another, and as they appear when contextualised by one another. There must be tensions between such a history of interaction and the several ‘national’ histories that have come to claim autonomy, and it is probable that these tensions must be re-stated each time a ‘British history’ is to be presented – as is the case in the present paper.

In early April 1955, on the eve of his retirement as prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill gave a farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street, at which the principal guests were Queen Elizabeth II and the duke of Edinburgh. At the end of the evening, as he escorted his sovereign to her car, the cameras caught the leave-taking scene: Churchill, full of years and honour, wearing the Order of the Garter which she had given him, and the Order of Merit which her father had bestowed, bowing to the queen, whom he had earlier saluted as ‘the young, gleaming champion’ of the nation’s ‘wise and kindly way of life’. This sunset tableau, combining regal youth and statesmanly age, was reminiscent of Winterhalter’s picture, painted one hundred years before, which had depicted the venerable duke of Wellington doing homage to the young Victoria, to Prince Albert, and to their son, Prince Arthur of Connaught, on the first of May 1851. For Churchill, like the Iron Duke before him, was not only her majesty’s greatest subject: he was also an ardent admirer of the institution of monarchy, and of the person and the character of the last British sovereign he himself would live to serve. Indeed, according to his wife, Clementine, he was ‘Monarchical No 1’.

This paper focuses on the campaign to reform the Irish poor law in the 1860s. Debate on poor law reform highlighted fundamental divisions over the principles underlying the New Poor Law as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the poor law system in Ireland particularly within the Catholic community. Led by the leading Catholic cleric, Archbishop Paul Cullen, critics of the Irish poor law sought to lessen reliance on the institution of the workhouse and to expand outdoor relief thus bringing the system closer to its English model. The poor law authorities supported by the Irish landed elite fought successfully to maintain the limited and restrictive nature of the system fearful of the consequences of extending local discretion. The paper reveals the contested nature of poor relief both in principle and in practice, and the centrality of social issues to Irish political debate in decades after the Great Famine.

THE political, administrative and social consequences of the union of Great Britain and Ireland, and even more the eventual unravelling of the structures it created, have for the greater part of the past century provided Irish historians with a major theme. By contrast the measure itself has received little sustained analysis or discussion. F.R. Bolton's monograph, first published in 1966, remains – more than three decades later – the standard reference. In part this is a tribute to the depth, breadth and penetration of Bolton's account. But there is also at least the suggestion that the negotiation and passage of the union legislation, during 1799–1800, is to be seen as unproblematic, a relatively straightforward event providing a terminus or a starting point for discussion of the more complex and challenging periods on either side.

The paper shows how the important theological and Anglo-biblical term ‘Covenant’ was formulated in the course of successive biblical translations, from the original Hebrew and Greek to the King Kames Bible. It suggests that the use of the term in English biblical versions reflected – and in turn propelled – the increasingly prominent Covenant theology. Once coined in the vernacular Scriptures, moreover, the term was applied to religious political alliances: from the Scottish Covenants of the 1590s to the English Solemn League and Covenant, 1644, studied in the paper.

This article explores the ideas circulating in England c. 1000 about the fate of the soul after death, the afterlife and the Last Judgement. It looks at the discourse concerning these topics in the sermons of the Blickling Homilies, Vercelli Book and in sermons by Wulfstan and Ælfric, and argues for lively debate c. 1000 concerning the imminence of the End. It suggests that these texts, especially those by Wulfstan and Ælfric, should be seen in dialogue with one another, and argues that the recent revised dating of Wulfstan's apocalyptic sermons places them in relation to political and legal developments. It argues for a political dimension to this debate and highlights the responses of the king, Æthelred the Unready – demonstrated in diplomatic evidence – which suggests a heightened concern for his own salvation and for that of his family at this date. It places this royal anxiety not only in relation to ideas about the year 1000 and the End of the World but also in relation to the preaching in the homilies of Vercelli Book and of the Blickling collection concerning the fate of the soul and the higher standard of Christian conduct born by the wealthy and by those in responsibility. It concludes by emphasising the multiple and varied thinking about the Last Judgement in England c. 1000.

There can be few institutions which have so successfully eluded the serious historian as the Duchy of Cornwall, for only one aspect of its history and administration, that of its jurisdiction of the tin mines, has been adequately treated; its curious legal relation to the Crown, and to common law, its political importance in reference to Council and Parliament, and its economic significance as one of the largest landowners in England, all await detailed investigation. For such an enquiry there is abundant material available, both in the series of “Duchy of Cornwall Records” and “Miscellaneous Books” in the Augmentation Office of the Exchequer, at the Public Record Office, and in the fine collection of Ministers' Accounts, Assession Rolls, Court Rolls and other documents, preserved at the Duchy of Cornwall Office; a collection to which I am much indebted to Sir Walter Peacock, for giving me access and to Mr, Rollo Clowes, its custodian, for invaluable assistance in working at it.

The second decade of the eighteenth century in Europe was an era of administrative experiment and reform. In certain respects, these were as impressive as the measures ofso-called ‘enlightened’ absolutists after the Seven Years War. The earlier, like the later, period discloses the attempt of governments to undo the consequences of prolonged warfare; in this case, also, in some areas, to soften the fearful effects of disease which decimated populations and their livestock in 1710–14, during the last major visitation of bubonic plague in the history of central Europe. Peter the Great tried to give a more settled form to the changes hastily improvised to take the strain of his war with Sweden. Frederick William I set to work on those schemes which led to the resettlement of derelict areas in East Prussia, and to the organization of the General Directory. In France, leaving aside the abortive constitutional reaction afterLouis XIV's death, the gigantic problem of the debt was tackled by orthodox financiers and administrators as well as by John Law. In this setting, it seems worth asking whether the Austrian Habsburgs, faced by similar problems, sought similar remedies. Such an inquiry may help to give a clearer picture of the main outlines of European development immediately after 1713, in the period which is still occasionally regarded as a featureless interim between the fiercer climaxes of the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War on the one hand, and the age of Frederick, Catherine and Maria Theresa on the other.

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

Almost half a century ago, the famous British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard suggested that anthropology is actually a form of historiography, thus initiating a debate about the relationship between the two disciplines which has continued sporadically ever since. His statement was a reaction to the claims of Radcliffe-Brown, a founding ‘father’ of British social anthropology, that social anthropology was a kind of science, whereas Evans-Pritchard sought to claim it for the humanities.

There can be no doubt that the records of archdeacons' courts, and, indeed, of all ecclesiastical courts, have been very generally neglected by both custodians and students. This is evident from the comparatively small amount of work that has appeared based upon records of this sort: only rarely are they drawn upon for evidence. And but an infinitesimal fraction of what is known to exist has ever been published in any form. In short, the field is almost untouched.

UNTIL the eighteenth century, British naval operations rarely strayed outside the strictly European theatre. Engagements in North American waters were isolated enterprises, having little connection with the decisive area of battle which lay off the west coast of Europe in the vicinity of the British Isles. This concentration of forces in home waters was deter-mined as much by structural, technical and hygienic deficiencies as by strategic doctrine. Disease and gales were always the worst enemies, and in the manner bf continental armies, the ships of the Royal Navy sought winter quarters in or after November. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, improvements in naval architecture and the technique of navigation, as well as methods of preserving food and protecting health (slight as they may appear to this age), enabled ships to keep at sea for longer periods, and at greater distances from their home ports.