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.

An enquiry into the office of Deputy-Lieutenant, as created by the Tudors, might be said to belong, strictly speaking, to military history. But it belongs also to the history of local administration, for not only was the organisation of county levies an integral part of local government, but that type of military rule which prevailed under the Tudors touched the common life of the country at many points, and those matters with which the Lieutenant and his Deputies could be called upon to deal in the service of the Crown demanded at least as much administrative skill as aptitude in the military arts.

After years of intense specialization in historical studies —in the history of ideas, of science, of historiography; in economic history, diplomatic history, administrative history, social history, legal history, world history, which last is fast becoming another specialism—there is perhaps no subject of historical enquiry that would not benefit from an attempt to amalgamate the results of all these disciplines. This is certainly true of international relations. The valuable labours of diplomatic historians have done no more than erect a scaffolding of established facts. In the work of understanding and explaining those facts we have not made much progress since von Ranke and Albert Sorel. Von Ranke's famous essay in interpretation, ‘The Great Powers’, was written more than 125 years ago, before the rise of specialist studies. For this reason, as well as on account of the preoccupation of his generation with national mission and divine intention in a universal scheme, it necessarily fell back on a mystical conception of the society of states, on a spiritual conception of the role of the individual state—on what must now be regarded as general history of the worst kind.

The idea that certain periods and certain countries were outstanding in their contribution to civilization is as old as the writing of literary and art history. ‘All ages have produced heroes and politicians’, wrote Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV; ‘all peoples have experienced revolutions: all histories are practically equal for him who does not want to remember anything but facts. But whoever thinks and, what is rarer still, whoever has good taste, will count only four centuries in the history of the world.’ According to Voltaire, one needed to remember only the Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Rome of Caesar and Augustus, Medicean Italy, and France in the century of Louis XIV. Almost two hundred years earlier, Vasari had pointed to the same phenomenon in Italy. In the introduction to his Life of Michelangelo he says that God in his mercy had shown pity on the vain endeavours of man by sending down to earth a spirit who could work perfection in every art and profession, in painting, sculpture and architecture, no less than in moral philosophy and poetry. And since Florence was more deserving of this grace than all other cities, because of the great and marvellous achievements of Cimabue and Giotto, of Donatello, Brunelleschi and Leonardo, he wanted ‘to crown the perfection merited by all these achievements through one of her citizens’.

Nearly thirty years ago, Dr Caroline Skeel searched both the public records and local archives for material relating to the ‘Council in the West Parts of the Realm’ established by Henry VIII. She could find out practically nothing about its proceedings, but, in a paper read to this society, she did put forward a number of suggestions regarding the purpose of the council and the reasons for its comparatively short life. These suggestions have been the basis for the necessarily brief references to the Council of the West in subsequent histories of the period. It has become generally accepted that the council was established for the purpose of tightening up the machinery of justice and administration in an unsettled part of the kingdom, and in particular as a means of forestalling the trouble which was expected to follow the dissolution of the monasteries in the region. Its early disappearance has been attributed to various causes, sheer redundancy, local opposition and Henry's desire to placate the common lawyers.

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.

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.

BEFORE the smoke of the Irish rebellion of 1798 had cleared, the British prime minister William Pitt was convinced of the necessity of a legislative union between Britain and Ireland. He broached the subject seriously with his cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, on 2 June and by 4 June the joint post master general, Lord Auckland, an expert on Irish commercial affairs, was brought into Pitt's confidence. Pitt told Auckland that he and Grenville had been able to: ‘see daylight in almost everything but what relates to trade and revenue.' The subject of this paper is to discover how matters of trade and revenue were arranged in the Act of Union and to discuss some of the political difficulties which arose from implementing these arrangements. As the evolution of ministers' thinking is documented, the authorship of some points can be precisely identified and the thinking and tacit economic forecasting brought to light. This paper will suggest that the arrangements were intended to be generous to Ireland and contrasts with an Irish nationalist interpretation of the subject articulated in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then the difficulties that politicians experienced in executing policies within the framework laid down by these articles are considered. The whole vice-regal system of government was by no means guaranteed in the immediate post-Union period as it worked against the chancellor of the Irish exchequer in his attempts to manage Irish public finance.

The ‘right of public meeting’ has historically been a key demand of extra-parliamentary political movements in England. This paper examines how public assembly came to be perceived as a legally protected right, and how national and local authorities debated and policed political meetings. Whereas previous histories have suggested that a ‘liberal governance’ dominated urban government during the nineteenth century, this paper offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between people and the state. It points to rights paradoxes, whereby the right of free passage and to ‘air and recreation’ often conflicted with the demand for the right of political meeting in challenges to use of public spaces. Local authorities sought to defend the rights of property against political movements by using the common law offences of obstruction and ‘nuisance’. By the first half of the twentieth century, new threats of militant tactics and racial harassment by political groups necessitated specific public order legislation. Though twentieth-century legislation sought to protect certain types of assembly and protest marches, the implementation and policing of public order was spatially discriminatory, and the right of public meeting was left unresolved.

In the two centuries after 1700 there occurred upwards of twenty million marriages in England and Wales. It is perhaps forgivable, therefore, that this paper has about it the air of an interim report. It might be thought doubly foolish for an individual, and in this field a professedly amateur investigator, to embark upon any enquiry into past demographic behaviour when there exists that formidable, professional task force, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. At the last count it had within its lockers, for example, ‘aggregate analyses’ of over 550 English parishes. To provide information about the ages at which people married, however, the Cambridge Group appears to be relying primarily upon ‘family reconstitution’ techniques. It is not necessary to explain these techniques or to describe the remarkable light they have shed on the vital events of the past. With such tools the Cambridge Group have not only crept literally between the sheets of history; its individual members have not been abashed at publishing their preliminary findings. Yet obscurity remains and with it the thought that family reconstitution may not prove entirely adequate to the insistent demands for more information on when and why people married. For the undertaking of full family reconstitution both registration and record survival have to be good, and the method is undermined where there is a great deal of migration, albeit temporary or permanent. Unfortunately many of the most interesting demographic questions revolve around urban behaviour, and town records may be deficient on many of these counts, especially in that vital and perplexing period from about 1780 to 1840.

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 paper identifies an English ‘national myth’ of sea-power, based on the folk-memory of the Elizabethan naval war, which powerfully shaped public attitudes and political choices throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This myth associated true, patriotic and ever-victorious English sea-power with political liberty, financial profit and, above all, Protestantism. The public judged successive governments on their willingness and ability to realise this programme. Most of them failed on one or both counts, until the elder Pitt made the myth work, and the French revolutionaries changed the rules.

To all who are well versed in the current accounts of the dissolution of the English monasteries it will at once be evident that the date 1532 does not fall within any of the familiar stages of that revolution. It is usually said to have been begun by Wolsey, who obtained in 1524 and 1528 papal authority to suppress some houses, with the assent of the king and their other founders, and endow his two new colleges with their property. Towards the end of 1528 Henry himself extorted from the Pope a similar bull for the benefit of the royal foundations of Eton and King's College; and afterwards, at his request, others were issued (the last being dated 31 August 1529) authorising the cardinal to unite very small convents with larger ones, and to establish new cathedrals endowed with monastic lands. The fall of Wolsey and the meeting of the Reformation Parliament ended this stage, during which some thirty insignificant houses had been suppressed. The next familiar episode occurred in 1534: the extinction of the Order of Observant Franciscans in England. But meanwhile, as modern historians have failed to note, the very important house of Austin canons at Aldgate, Holy Trinity or Christchurch (the names were interchangeable) had fallen: the first monastery dissolved by the king, with no shadow of authorisation from the Pope.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 was perhaps the single most destructive event in twentieth-century Chinese history. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to how war was experienced in the Nationalist-controlled area (‘Free China’) under Chiang Kaishek. Two autobiographical texts are examined here, one a sequence of reportage from the early war years by the journalist Du Zhongyuan, and one a biji (notebook) written immediately after the war's end by the social scientist Xu Wancheng. By choosing particular modern or anti-modern genres and styles to write in, the authors expressed a wider sentiment about the war's ambiguous role in modernising China. Du's work hopes to create modernity from destruction; Xu's suggests that modern warfare has created chaos.

SINCE the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before the nineteenth century, it may fairly be asked what they signify when applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The simplest answer is a pragmatic one: by radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church or society which would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream puritan-parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines. In the Parliament I therefore exclude here the ‘political Independents’, alias the War Party, other than the handful of pre-1647–8 republicans. In the Assembly I exclude the ‘Five Dissenting Brethren’, who were the spokesmen of moderate Congregationalism, but outside it I include some religious Independents whose radicalism will be presently defined. To borrow another nineteenth-century figure of speech, if we look to the Left of the mainstream Puritans and Parliamentarians, what a bewildering profusion of groups and individuals appears. It is scarcely necessary to have studied the period at all to be familiar with the names of many such sects or movements, if not perhaps of all: Anabaptists, Antinomians, Behmenists, Brownists, Comenians, Diggers, Familists, Fifth-Monarchy Men, Grindletonians, Levellers, Mortalists, Muggletonians, Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, and Socinians. Yet simply to reel off such a list is to omit many interesting and remarkable groups and individuals: would-be reformers of the professions and of law, medicine and education, free-traders, agricultural improvers, philo-semites and proto-feminists, to mention only some of the most obvious. Any reader of Thomas Edwards' Gangraena and other contemporary commination or of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down and his other writings will be familiar with most of them and no doubt with others too.

In the allegorical romance of Le Jouvencel, King Amydas complained to his son-in-law of the ‘slow poison in my stomach which will one day kill me.’ The romancer,—Jean de Bueil, admiral of France and count of Sancerre,—was referring to the presence of the English within France during the last phase of the Hundred Years War. Charles VII, with his habitual pessimism, was pictured in the Jouvencel taking counsel from his advisers on the best means of ridding his kingdom of the English. That object was achieved in fact as well as in romance between 1449 and 1453. A medal struck to commemorate the expulsion of the English carried the optimistic legend:

When I was made, everyone in France, without dispute, obeyed the prudent king, loved by God;—except at Calais which is a strong place.

Modern political history begins with the French Revolution. This is not merely because the Revolution began a diffusion of institutional innovations—universal suffrage, rights of association and publication, and so forth—which have been the political shibboleths of advanced societies ever since. It is also that there then appears the modern vision of politics. The term ‘vision’ is deliberately chosen, because it does not imply any necessary or objective correlation with the facts of political life. It is a name for a chosen way of seeing things, a persuasive account of the facts, not the facts themselves. Intransigent opponents have been able to agree on this vision and in finding it inspiring or clarifying. Its essence is a presentation of politics as a struggle between two enduring forces or principles. Sometimes these forces are sharply contrasted, sometimes they are only the opposite ends of a spectrum whose middle ground makes precise distinctions hard (though never impossible). Such modifications of the model do not matter; it is the enduring conflict which is crucial. Whatever names they bear—progress and reaction, liberalism and conservatism, movement and order, Left and Right—in this vision these principles are always at war, and that is what politics is about.

The story of Cromwell's seizure of Jamaica (May, 1655) has been told in detail drawn from English and from Spanish sources. Far less has been written of the hard fighting, by sea and land, which the invaders found necessary during the next five years, because of the Spaniards' resistance to the English occupation. It is the purpose of this contribution to describe that resistance, especially from March, 1656, when the Jamaicans took the offensive (after receipt of some small relief from Cartagena de Indias), to May, 1660, when Don Cristóbal Ysassi Arnaldo, last Spanish governor of the island, withdrew to Cuba, undone by the disaffectionof the negroes who had been his chief support.