When twenty years after the Crimean War the near eastern question again absorbed the attention of Europe, among the various changes in the setting of the crisis of 1876–8 as compared with that of 1853–6 appears conspicuously the new force styled panslavism. It is the purpose of this paper to attempt some analysis of its growth and its main elements with a view to indicating its position and potentialities on the eve of the crisis of 1876.

In the present day we are often reminded that the farmhouse surrounded by hedged fields has not always formed a prominent feature of our English landscape.

At the close of the sixteenth century many fields now inclosed were still forest, fen, or rough waste land. Some formed portions of the so-called pastures where the village herds grazed in common, tended by the village herdsman, and others, again, were included in the great cornfields and meadows, known as the ‘common fields,’ which were often hundreds, and even thousands, of acres in extent.

I am somewhat daunted by the honour of opening this conference; for what I have to offer is not the product of intensive scholarship but a broad and possibly contentious argument about the whole sub-continent of West Africa (roughly bounded by the Senegal river, Lake Chad and Mount Cameroon). My underlying hypotheses will be that many so-called minority problems in contemporary Africa derive from changes introduced by the creation of colonial states, rather than from some exotic African malady called ‘tribalism’ and that African experience over the last millennium may sometimes be more relevant to contemporary problems than the received wisdom of western political science. I have some fear that, to adapt a phrase of Sir Keith Hancock, these may prove no themes for scholars.

When I was invited to read a paper on Indian history at a meeting of the Royal Historical Society I felt not only honoured by the request, but also gratified to learn that the Society intended to bring within its scope the encouragement of the study of the history of our Indian Empire, an empire whose progress and growth is a wondrous fact in the history of the world. The history of the Hindu kingdoms and the history of the government of the Mahomedans should be the special province of the Royal Asiatic Society, for no Englishman can deal with them in a satisfactory manner without a knowledge of the classical languages of the East. He must study and compare the original historians of India. The systematic study of the history of British dominion in India must be the most effectual agency in removing that ignorance (so strange and so discreditable) which prevails among all classes in England regarding the history of our Indian Empire. The responsibility for a just, impartial and stable government of India has been committed for good or evil into the hands of Parliament, and through Parliament to the electoral body of Great Britain; but the electoral body must fail to discharge that great responsibility if the reading multitude remain ignorant of the history of English government in India. It is also the duty and the interest of England that the young men who are sent from our universities to be the main instruments of administering the government of our Indian Empire in all its extensive and complicated branches should be trained to pursue the study of history in a scientific spirit, so that they may be able to apply scientific methods of inquiry to an examination in detail of the development of our administration in India. Many years spent in examining the musty documents in the Indian archives has brought home to me the value of the light which history may shed on practical problems. In India there is no problem which is old, there is no problem which is new. Measures which were supposed to be new would never have been passed if they had been studied by the dry light of history. In the Record Office under his charge the Indian civilian will generally find some material which will reward the labour of research.

For the financial administration under Henry I we have no such detailed information as is given for the reign of his grandson by the Dialogus de Scaccario. When Richard Fitz Neel composed that famous dialogue, which was completed before April, 1179, the head of the financial administration was the Treasurer, who was assisted by two Chamberlains. This arrangement was already in existence before the death of Henry I, although the Treasurer seems to have been a somewhat recent addition to the staff of the Treasury, which had previously been managed by the Chamberlains; whose title was a survival from the earlier period when the royal treasure was kept in the royal bed-chamber, and the king's chamberlain acted as treasurer ex-officio. If we can trust an anonymous poem of the thirteenth century, this primitive arrangement still existed in England under the Confessor, at least so far as the funds for the expenses of the Royal Household were concerned; indeed, Professor Tout is doubtful whether any royal treasury or treasurer, except the Chamber and the Chamberlain, existed in England before the Conquest.

Arguably, the single most important dimension in the existence of any community, medieval or modern, is its members' shared conviction that it exists, and that its existence represents a significant bond between them. The central and later Middle Ages have been viewed as a period of particular importance for the growth of such self-consciousness - and for its growth, particularly among those large political communities which Susan Reynolds suggests we call ‘regnal’, and which many medievalists appear happy to refer to as ‘national’. As Reynolds showed, communities of this sort evolved legitimising mythologies which overlay existing structures of government with notions of ancient and primal ethnic solidarity, and thus placed such communities, imaginatively, outside the normal processes of contingency and change. Challenging questions therefore arise if we call to mind the many new political formations which were established during this period, which saw the extension into neighbouring regions, by both violent and peaceful means, of the political and social forms characteristic of continental western Europe. The new settlements had not only to be organised and defended physically, but also explained and justified. A vocabulary of argument thus evolved to account for their existence and to illuminate their relationships with existing political and social structures. In formulating this vocabulary, however, writers were con-fronted by the strong impulse in medieval thought to lay upon all significant communities a veneer of timelessness, or at least of antiquity. How this obstacle was overcome for particular new communities doubtless has many specific answers. But an obstacle it must surely have been, and the study of how — or whether — it was surmounted in any given instance is thus inherently worth while.

Giraldus Cambrensis observed that the interdict laid on England in 1208 inflicted a double wound, involving as it did both the withdrawal of divine service and the plundering of the clergy's possessions. The eagerness of King John in exploiting the situation for his financial profit does not admit of doubt. The estimate of reparations for ablata and dampna arrived at in 1214 was 100,000 marks; this did not satisfy the clergy, and probably the sum was too small to cover all that the king had received by confiscations, prolonging of vacancies, dona, and fines. Although even an approximately correct estimate is now unattainable, an enquiry is still worth while to discover the king's policy and his methods of exaction during the interdict. This paper is primarily concerned with his general seizure of church property in 1208.

Hearne greatly disliked Wilkins. His diaries have many severe reflections upon the Prussian upholder of the dynasty he hated; to him ‘that rascal David Wilkins’, vain, mercenary and pushing, was the type of industrious pedant with little judgment who would edit and publish anything that he found remunerative, and spoil good material in the process. This waspish temper, that at times vents itself in scandalous comments on Wilkins's private life, may have partly resulted from the fact that Wilkins took up two enterprises with which Hearne had been in some degree concerned: a second edition of Humphrey Prideaux's Marmora Oxoniensia (which he never carried out, the work being ultimately entrusted to Michael Mattaire and published by him in 1732), and a new edition of Spelman's Concilia, ‘ the Councils’, as Hearne always called them. The antiquary had been anxious to do both. He curtly refused help to Wilkins over the Marmora, and in regard to the Councils he tells us that Atterbury had originally proposed the editing of Spelman to himself, “ but it was after my retirement upon account of the oaths; and so I thought fit to decline and waive it “. Naturally he was still interested in the project, and rather apprehensive about it after the way in which Wilkins had edited Selden's works (1726). ‘This vile editor ‘was his comment then, and he acidly notes that Wilkins had been working upon the Concilia at a much earlier date, but had been ‘put by ‘by the Archbishop in favour of some other man.

While there have been growing calls for historians to listen to the past, there are also significant barriers to integrating music in particular into broader historical practice. This article reflects on both the gains and difficulties of this integration, moving from an interrogation of the category of music to three case studies. These concern musical terms, compositional practices and cultures from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, revisiting some key debates in musicology: first, the highly charged language of sweetness deployed in the fifteenth century; second, connections discerned in nineteenth-century music history between medieval polyphony and contemporary attitudes towards time and authority; and, third, debate over the anti-Jewish implications of Handel's music, which we approach through his Dixit Dominus and a history of psalm interpretation stretching back to late antiquity. Through these case studies, we suggest the contribution of music to necessarily interdisciplinary fields including the study of temporality and emotions, but also explore how a historical hermeneutic with a long pedigree – ‘diversity of times’ (diversitas temporum) – might help to reframe arguments about musical interpretation. The article concludes by arguing that the very difficulty and slipperiness of music as a source can encourage properly reflective historical practice.

Théodore Vacquer (1824–99) was an archaeologist who excavated, directed excavations in and visited all archaeological sites in Paris between the 1840s and his death. In the latter part of his career, he served as assistant curator at what became the Musée Carnavalet, specialising in the Roman and early medieval history of the city. Taking advantage of the reconstruction of the city in the nineteenth century associated with the work of Paris prefect, Baron Haussmann, he was able to locate far more of Roman Paris than had been known before. His findings remained the basis of what was known about the Roman city until a new wave of archaeological excavations after 1950. Vacquer aimed to highlight his discoveries in a magnum opus on the history of Paris from earliest times to ad 1000, but he died with virtually nothing written. His extensive archive still exists, however, and provides the substance for this essay. The essay seeks to rescue Vacquer from the relative obscurity associated with his name. In addition, by setting his life and work in the context of the Haussmannian construction of Paris as the arch-city of modernity it aims to illuminate the history of archaeology, conservation and urban identity in nineteenth-century Paris.

This paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

Our understanding of the development of secular institutional governments in Europe during the central Middle Ages has long been shaped by an implicit or explicit opposition between royal and lay aristocratic power. That is to say, the growth of public, institutional and/or bureaucratic central authorities involved the decline and/or exclusion of noble aristocratic power, which thus necessarily operated in a zero-sum game. While much research has shown that this conflict-driven narrative is problematic, it remains in our understanding as a rather shadowy but still powerful causal force of governmental development during this period. This paper compares the changing conceptualisation of the relationship between royal and aristocratic power in the French and Scottish kingdoms to demonstrate, first, how narratives built at the periphery of Europe have important contributions and challenges to make to those formed from the core areas of Europe and, second, that state formation did not involve a decline in aristocratic power. Instead, the evidence from royal acta in both kingdoms shows that aristocratic power was formalised at a central level, and then built into the forms of government which were emerging in very different ways in both kingdoms in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Set in broader perspective, this suggests that governmental development involved an intensification of existing structures of elite power, not a diminution.

The ‘Book of Serfs of Marmoutier’ recorded the dealings the monastery had with its serfs in the eleventh century. The eleventh century itself is said to have been a time in which there was a collapse of political authority. Political and judicial institutions are alleged to have been ‘privatised’ as part of the so-called ‘feudal revolution’ that was caused by the collapse of Carolingian authority. This view has often been challenged. The Marmoutier material on serfs is discussed in relation to this debate. Do the monastery–serf relations reflect a privatisation of power? Or if the privatisation of power is an historical myth, how do we explain the highly contested nature of space, community, wealth and authority revealed in the ‘Book of Serfs’? It is argued that authority had indeed fragmented but that this was a response to a conjunction of factors apart from the collapse of the Carolingian state. To the contrary, the Carolingian rulers had encouraged the kind of lord–serf relations that we see in the ‘Book of Serfs’. What is different about our eleventh-century material is that there is more of it, and we are able to see details of social relations at a local level for the first time.

(READ 12 March 2004)

This paper begins to consider the meanings of a word that was ubiquitous in early modern culture, but which has been surprisingly neglected by historians. Focusing on printed sources and taking advantage of recent advances in digital technology, it outlines the changing uses of ‘peace’ between 1500 and 1700 and its predominant meanings at particular moments in time. The paper suggests that while these meanings were clearly derived from Christian and civic republican sources, the political conflicts of the seventeenth century saw the term politicised, appropriated and popularised in new and unexpected ways. It also argues that the semantic confusion which often attended ‘peace’ – most evident, perhaps, in its capacity to legitimise and sanction violence after 1640 – stemmed from its simultaneous role as a descriptor of society and self, and of spiritual and civil life. As a result, who should define, police and enforce peace became deeply contested issues of the course of the period. In tracing the semantics of the term in this way, the article serves as a contribution to the burgeoning historical literature on the paradigmatic vocabularies of the early modern era. It also illuminates the complicated relationship between words and concepts and the importance of both in motivating and legitimising social and political action.

Treason is a ubiquitous historical phenomenon, one particularly associated with regime instability or wartime loyalties. This paper explores the practice and prosecution of treason in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy with a special focus on some notorious wartime treason trials. It first sets the rhetoric and law of treason in a comparative historical context before assessing the legal framework supplied by the Austrian penal code of 1852. Although the treason law was exploited quite arbitrarily after 1914, the state authorities in the pre-war decade were already targeting irredentist suspects due to major anxiety about domestic and foreign security. In the Great War, the military were then given extensive powers to prosecute all political crimes including treason, causing a string of show-trials of Bosnian Serbs and some leading Czech politicians. By 1917–18, however, this onslaught on disloyalty was backfiring in the wake of an imperial amnesty: as loyalties shifted away from the Habsburg regime, the former criminals themselves proudly began to assume the title of ‘traitor’. The paper is a case-study of how regimes in crisis have used treason as a powerful moral instrument for managing allegiance. It also offers a new basis for understanding instability in the late Habsburg monarchy.

BOTH during his lifetime, and after his death, General Franco was reviled by his enemies on the left and subjected to the most absurd adulation by his admirers on the right. As the victor in a bloody civil war which inflamed passions throughout the world, that is hardly surprising. Leaving aside his personal political success in remaining in power for nearly four decades, his victory in the Spanish Civil War was his greatest and most glorious achievement, something reflected in the judgements of detractors and hagiographers alike. For the left, Franco the general was a slow-witted mediocrity whose battlefield triumphs were owed entirely to the unstinting military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini. For the right, Franco the general was the twentieth-century incarnation of Alexander the Great, of Napoleon and of the great warrior hero of Spanish legend, El Cid.

This paper investigates the representation of marital relations in some of the most successful broadside ballads published in seventeenth-century England. It explains the manner in which these have been selected as part of a funded research project, and it proceeds to question an existing historiographical emphasis on ballads in which marriages were portrayed as under threat due to a combination of wifely failings (scolding, adultery, violence) and husbandly shortcomings (sexual inadequacy, jealousy, weakness). Best-selling ballads were much more sympathetic to married women in particular than we might have expected, and the implications of this for our understanding of the ballad market and early modern culture more generally may be significant. These ballads, it is argued, were often aimed particularly at women, and they grew out of an interesting negotiation between male didacticism and female taste. Throughout the paper, an attempt is made to understand ballads as songs and visual artefacts, rather than merely as texts.

In the long ninth century, in both England and on the Continent, Christianity penetrated more deeply than before into social practice, as rulers and churchmen urged greater self-discipline on their people. This essay examines some of the ways in which the symbolism of bodily weakness, and reparability, was used to inscribe new ideas on minds, and new ideas impinged on the ways bodies were treated. Particularly close attention is paid to the evidence of poetry and prayer which both affected and reflected lives lived at court and elsewhere. This takes us to the heart of projects for political and religious correction, and reveals an unexpected amount of human agency.

(READ 26 November 2004)

It might well appear an excessively abrupt change of pace to turn from Professor Bossy's topic to my own—to move from the most personal of all manifestations of individual Christian worship to the most formidably complex institutional corporations late medieval England has to offer for our contemplation. However, there is little about medieval monasticism, that ambivalent exercise in seeking one's own route to the divine but not in one's own company, which is quite what it seems. For perhaps no audiences in fifteenth-century England would have listened to Professor Bossy's lecture with greater fascination than the monastic communities of Canterbury, Durham, Ely, Norwich, Rochester, Winchester, and Worcester cathedrals. Not only did those Benedictine monks have an obligation to pray as assiduously as any religious in the country but they were also and ipso facto required to do so in the most public and exposed of all possible arenas, the formal prayer houses par excellence as well as the ecclesiae matrices of seven of late medieval England's nineteen dioceses. Precisely how those monks would have explained what they were doing when engaged in acts of communal and private prayer is no easy matter for a modern historian to surmise; but it seems certain that many of them must have been highly concerned about the purpose and quality of their devotions, not least because they could hardly have ignored the priority placed on the oratorium and oratio within the Rule of St Benedict, to chapters of which they listened more or less attentively every day of their professed lives.

This article considers the implications of recent innovations in digital history for the relationship between the academy and the public. It argues that while digitisation and the internet have attracted large new audiences, academic historians have been reluctant to engage with this new public. We suggest that recent innovations in academic digital history, such as the highly technocratic ‘Culturomics’ movement, have had the unintended effect of driving a wedge between higher education and the wider public. Similarly, academic history writing has been slow to embrace the possibilities of the internet as a means of dissemination and engagement; and academic publishing has moved even more reluctantly. Despite these issues, this article argues that the internet offers real opportunities for bridging the divide between the academy and a wider audience. Through non-traditional forms of publication such as blogging; through Open Access policies; and through new forms of visualisation of complex data, the digital and online allow us to present complex history to a wider audience. We conclude that historians need to embrace the ‘affordances’ and ‘disruptions’ posed by the internet to render the discipline more open and democratically accessible.