THE words ‘Churchill’ and ‘party’ lie in uneasy company. Winston Churchill is regarded as the least orthodox and party-minded of all those who stood in the front rank of British politics during the twentieth century, always navigating by his own compass. This view is shaped by Churchill’s remarkable egotism and the well-known incidents of his career: the two changes of party allegiance, the coalitionism of 1917–22, the rebellious ‘wilderness’ years of the 1930s, and the premiership almost above party in 1940–5. It has been reinforced by the preponderance of biography in the writing about Churchill, and especially by those which regard him as a ‘great man’. Churchill tends to be removed from his political context and separated from his peers, and there is a reluctance to see him in any conventional light. As a result, by far the most neglected aspect of Churchill’s life has been his party political role, and in particular his relationship with the Conservative party.

The view that Philip II was the secular arm of the Counter-Reformation still survives. It is based on the assumption that his own words and claims must be taken at their face value, and on the fallacy that because the religious motive was sometimes present in Spanish policy, therefore it was always present and was the most important motive. The popes he had to deal with took a different view. They considered that Philip II, like his predecessors, used his prestige as a Catholic sovereign to pursue objectives that were essentially political. A characteristic summary of the papal view of Philip II's foreign policy was given in 1589 with reference to his ambitions in France: ‘The King of Spain, as a temporal sovereign, is anxious above all to safeguard and to increase his dominions … The preservation of the Catholic religion which is the principal aim of the Pope is only a pretext for His Majesty, whose principal aim is the security and aggrandisement of his dominions’. It is true that Sixtus V had a deep and personal aversion to Spain and a low estimate of its king, but these opinions were not peculiar to one pope. There were conflicts between Philip II and almost every pope with whom he dealt, which makes it impossible to explain those conflicts in terms of personalities and points to some deeper and more permanent cause.

This paper presents an alternative interpretation of Scottish politics between 1945 and 1970, a period that witnessed the decline of a once-powerful Unionist tradition, the revival of Liberalism and the rise of the Scottish National party (SNP). While existing accounts have focused principally upon social and economic factors, this study foregrounds the role of ideology and rhetoric. During the 1940s and early 1950s, Scottish Unionists were, like their Conservative colleagues elsewhere in Britain, able to construct a popular, but essentially negative, anti-socialist coalition that prioritised the defence of individual liberty. This electoral alliance, defined by opposition to Labour's programme of nationalisation and expressed via an individualist idiom, was able to attract broad support; it was, however, always provisional, and proved increasingly difficult to sustain after the Conservative party returned to office in 1951. It was, this paper suggests, the fragmenting of this anti-socialist coalition in the late 1950s and early 1960s that created the opportunity for both the Liberals and the SNP to present alternative renderings of this individualist appeal, and to emerge as credible political alternatives. Crucially, by the 1960s, individual liberty was beginning to be understood in constitutional rather than economic terms.

The communist regimes of Eastern Europe carried a particular set of assumptions about the way past, present and future related to one another. In the case of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR), these assumptions manifested themselves in official language and propaganda as a defence of the regime's dynamic and forward-looking historicity against the ‘ahistorical’ and ‘nostalgic’ modes of understanding that supposedly typified the historical consciousness of its West German adversary. By this view, the German Federal Republic – and the capitalist West more generally – lacked both a meaningful past and a meaningful future. This article investigates how the East German regime articulated its historicity as a direct expression of its state identity. In particular, it examines how it sought to rationalise newly emerging historical and cultural practices in the GDR within the framework of a modern and progressive socialist historicity, and how it deployed these as an argument against the ‘nostalgic’ practices of the Federal Republic.

Derwentdale is the valley through which the Derwent runs on the north-west side of the county of Durham. In this valley one of the first Anabaptist churches was gathered in the time of the Protectorate, and here, in the early years after the Restoration, a dangerous plot was formed, which presently ramified through the length and breadth of England. The object of this design, in the words of the man who discovered it, was

‘to rise in rebellion against the government, and to destroy Parliament, and murder all Bishops, Deans, and Chapters, and all other ministers of the Church; to break all organs, and further to kill all the gentry that should either oppose them, or not join with them, and to destroy the Common Prayer Book, and to pull down all Churches.’

Ayear ago our theme was the work of the Bollandists. Their name suggests immediately, to all acquainted with European historiography, the name of another body of religious, many of them the contemporaries of Henskens and Papebroch, and it would be impossible to omit from even the shortest list of great historical enterprises the achievement of the Maurists. The two bodies of men and their work, nevertheless, have little in common save an equal devotion to accurate scholar-ship. What impresses us in the history of Bollandism is its continuity of spirit and undeviating aim over more than three hundred years, during which a very small but perpetually self-renewing group has pursued a single narrowly defined task, which is still far from completion. With the Maurists, on the other hand, it is the magnitude, the variety and the high quality of the achievement that strikes the imagination. While the Bollandists, a small family in a single house, have in three centuries produced in major work no more than a row of sixty-seven folios, the Maurists, in a little more than a hundred years, published matter enough to stock a small library, and left behind them letters, papers and transcripts which have been used and exploited by scholars for nearly two centuries since. Indeed, it would be both impossible and alien to the scope of our interests to attempt the briefest survey of Maurist scholarship in its entirety, and my remarks to-day will be confined to their publications on European history after the decline of the Roman Empire. Who were the Maurists, and wherein lay their peculiar excellence?

The great offices of state have their origin in the offices of the royal household of the Norman kings, most of which offices existed in Normandy before the Conquest. The duke of the Normans had his stewards and his butlers, his chamberlains and his constables, when he invaded England; and when he became king of the English his officers accompanied him. For they were still his personal officers; who served him wherever he might be. It was not until his dominions were divided between his sons that occasion arose for the appoint; ment of separate officers for England and Normandy; and after Henry I had recovered Normandy from his brother, he did not maintain separate officers for the duchy. It was not until 1133 that Henry I took the first step towards the division of the chief offices by granting to Aubrey de Vere the office of master chamberlain of England, while the Tancarville family remained hereditary master chamberlains in Normandy.

The paper examines the upbringing of five teenagers between 1671 and 1860. It is based on close reading of their diaries. It deals with the relationship between these teenagers and their parents, siblings, friends and tutors or governesses. Politeness, it is argued, was a framework of behaviour which, learnt and observed, made sense of social life. For boys it was rooted in a training in the classics; for girls it meant a training in manners and the social accomplishments which were believed to guarantee a good marriage. English politeness was inculcated across the board in the higher social ranks. The paper considers a few of the human stories that lay behind this inculcation.

Croatia's entry to the EU in July 2013 signalled an association with Europe which was anticipated in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the regular use of antemurale (bulwark) rhetoric. This rhetoric was one of the salient characteristics of the period's crusading discourse, as the task of mobilising Christian assistance for regions confronting the Ottoman advance, and in so doing defending the faith as a whole, created a two-way traffic of information and arguments between the embattled frontline states and centres of power in the European interior. This paper investigates the distinctively Croatian features of antemurale language. The exposition of Croatia's role as an antemurale reveals the extent of the country's embrace of humanist ideals and techniques, enabling prominent lobbyists like Tomaso Negri to convey Croatia's plight with finesse in orations delivered at Rome, Venice and elsewhere. The written output of the humanists also shows that Croatia's dismemberment occurred at a time when national identity was forming, and the emphasis placed on the country's relationship with fellow-Catholics reinforced the tendency to look westwards. In addition, Croatia provides a telling example of the tension between centre and periphery in the person of Andrija Jamometić. When he dramatically called for the deposition of Sixtus IV in 1482, Jamometić included neglect of the crusade against the Turks amongst the accusations directed against the pope.

In a brilliant chapter in the ‘Cambridge Modern History’ the late Professor Maitland, dealing with the circumstances of the passage of Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity through the House of Lords, remarks: ‘Unfortunately, at an exciting moment there is a gap, perhaps a significant gap, in the official record, and we cease to know what lords were present in the House.’ This is a summary of a more detailed examination contributed by Maitland to the English Historical Review which reads as follows:—

‘It is well known that the Journal of the House of Lords becomes suddenly silent at the most exciting moment of this momentous session. It leaps from Saturday, April 22, to Monday, May 1; in other words, it leaps over the days on which the Supremacy Bill (No. 3) and the Uniformity Bill were receiving the assent of the House of Lords. Is this due to accident or is it due to fraud? The question springs to our lips, for we have every reason to believe that the journal ought to have recorded the fact that not one lord spiritual voted for these bills, and that every prelate who was present voted against them. This fact might indeed be notorious; but notoriety is not evidence, and in the then state of constitutional doctrine the Queen's ministers may have wished to deprive their adversaries of the means of “averring by matter of record” that the first estate of the realm was no party to the religious settlement. With some slight hope that the handwriting might be more eloquent than print, I obtained permission to see the original journal. It made no disclosure. In the first place, the work is so neat and regular that it looks, not like a journal kept day by day, but like a fair text made at the end of the session from notes that had been taken as the session proceeded. In the second place, the practice was to devote one page—or rather one side of a page—to every day, whether there was much or little to record. The session of Saturday, April 22, is described on the back of a page and ends with an adjournment to the next Tuesday; the session of Monday, May 1, is described on the front of the next page. Even if the book were unbound it would, I fear, reveal no more; for, as we apparently have to deal with a clean text made at the end of the session, any inference that we might be disposed to draw from the distribution of quires and sheets would be highly precarious, and “This may or may not have been an accident” would have to be our last word.’

Amongst problems in eighteenth-century history that of the relationship between seigneur and the rural community continues to intrigue the social historian. The simple fact that in 1789 rural France took upon itself the destruction of the seigneurial régime by widespread attacks on châteaux resulting in the burning of terriers and other seigneurial registers, attacks which constituted perhaps the most single-minded aspect of revolutionary activity in 1789, has presented subsequent generations of historians with a number of problems which have never been satisfactorily resolved but which, given their obvious import, have been periodically aired in light of recent research. Such is my purpose here. In the historiography of the peasant movement two works have shaped the historian's approach more than any other. The most consequential, and without doubt one of the most brilliant works ever written, was Georges Lefebvre's La Grande Peur (1932) which sought to analyse the mechanics of the peasant movement and to delineate a number of epicentres, such as Burgundy, in order to show the ripple of a panic movement along river valleys and significant arteries and to make apparent which parts of France, like the Seine valley and the Beauce, were quite untouched by rural revolt. In so doing Lefebvre raised the inevitable question which has beset historians ever since, that is, why here and not there? Lefebvre was himself drawing upon the researches of Philippe Sagnac, Quomodo jura dominii aucta fuerint regnante Ludovico sexto decimo (Le Puy, 1898). Although he did not invent the idea, Sagnac gave, in this work, some documentary underpinning to the concept of ‘la réaction féodale,’ a systematic attempt on the part, of the seigneur to increase his levies in the last decades of the old régime.

Cobbett remains best known to historians and to a wider audience as one of the two or three major figures in the popular radicalism of the early nineteenth century: one of the leading actors in the agitations which eventually led to the Great Reform Act of 1832 and a persistent tribune of the people at a time of profound economic and social change. Fundamental to his influence and reputation was his career as a popular journalist, in his own time regarded as a phenomenon and capable of almost single-handedly turning the labouring poor from machine-breaking and insurrection into more peaceful and productive paths. Famously, Cobbett was envisaged in Bamford's Passages in the Life of a Radical as the instrument whereby the disturbances of the post-war years were channelled into parliamentary reform. Opening his account of 1816 with a great litany of riot, insurrection and distress, Bamford noted that it was also in 1816 that Cobbett wrote his Address to the Journeymen and Labourers, published in November 1816 as the sole contents of the first cheap edition of the Register, priced at twopence. Cobbett's linking of ‘our present miseries’ to the need for parliamentary reform had an immense circulation, reaching an estimated 200,000 within two months. Its effects were no less dramatic according to Bamford:

… the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of ‘South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns.

The purpose of the following essay is to form some estimate of the place occupied by the King’s Council in the political and administrative machinery of England during the eventful reigns of the Lancastrian and Yorkist Kings, while an attempt must also be made to discover the source of its power, to exhibit the means whereby it hoped to control the entire government, and to trace the fluctuations of its long conflict with the monarchy.

It is well known that organisation of bishoprics and parishes came late to the greater part of Scotland, beginning probably with the gradual spread of Norman influence in the late eleventh century and becoming marked in the time of David I. Before that time the Celtic church was predominant in the region between Forth and Spey, which was the main seat of the monarchy, and there were strong Celtic influences in the Highlands, Clydesdale and Galloway. The church was mainly monastic and missionary with religious communities serving wide areas; though in addition Skene has hinted at the existence of tribal churches in the north-east lowlands. Lothian, a part of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, was peculiar, for it resisted Celtic influences and looked, ecclesiastically, towards Durham; but any parochial organisation it may have had was rudimentary. In general it can be said with truth that ecclesiastical Scotland was completely transformed by the coming of the Normans. Owing to lack of sources twelfth-century Scottish history is obscure; but something at least may be discovered from the charters, which have been in print for over a hundred years and still remain unexplored. And it was in the hope that a reconstruction of church organisation during the transition period might help to illuminate the social history of Scotland that this paper was undertaken. I have concentrated on one subject: the structure of parishes and the relation of local lay and ecclesiastical authorities, because it is a crucial one: and one region, southern Scotland, because there Norman influence was strongest. If in the absence of special studies on the subject my conclusions must remain tentative, they may at least indicate the problems and provoke wider discussion from which the truth will emerge.

The short Latin treatise to which I give the above title claims the attention of all who study the mediaeval history of England, in several respects. It is one of the earliest Latin compilations of English law written by a jurist; it serves to explain some Anglo-Saxon ordinances and to reconstruct their text; it contains the only trace, though hidden under a foreign form, of some Anglo-Saxon legal articles; and it sheds some light on the English constitution about A.D. 1100, especially on the remnants and traditions of an earlier policy.

From a selfish point of view the historian has reason to be grateful for war, for it has been a prodigious generator of record and stimulator of commentary and chronicle. This, I suppose, is merely another way of stating the adage ‘Happy is the country which has no history’. In modern times it seems to have become normal for the belligerent powers to produce massive official histories of the wars in which they were engaged. These will serve to demonstrate that the cause was just, that the population, troops and civilians alike, displayed exemplary courage and fortitude, that their leaders had an unerring grasp of strategy and could inspire love and devotion, and above all that the country concerned somehow acquired, under the strains and shock of war, a unity, even a personality, which transcended the pre-occupations, the ambitions, squabbles, triumphs, boredom and tribulations of the host of individual men and women who happened at the time to compose it. There seems, in contrast, to be much less enthusiasm for the idea of an official history of a country in peacetime, save (no doubt significantly) in the case of totalitarian, collectivist countries whose régimes are perpetually conscious of the need for self-advertisement and self-justification.

LIKE Jacobitism and Chartism, the study of the influence of the French Revolution on British politics and public opinion has attracted a good deal of sentimental interest, but it is a curious fact that with the exception of Professor Alfred Cobban's anthology (The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800 (1950)), A. H. Lincoln's Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800 (1938), and a few scattered articles comparatively little appears to have been published since 1926 on the subject. It has therefore never been examined in the light of those trends in historiography associated with the names of Unwin and Namier.

Any historical contrast between the manner in which the two major wars fought in the first half of the twentieth century came to an end has to start from the same sets of reference points. Neither the war of 1914–18 nor that of 1939–45 was a single war. Each comprised and interrelated set of wars. Their endingsfound the victors unready and surprised, their preparations for the processes of peace-making unrehearsed and unconcerted. The processes of peace-making themselves were therefore long drawn out in time and overtaken by subsequent events.

The Hereford Map is drawn upon a single pentangular skin of very high quality and, presumably, expense. It measures some 5′2″ by 4′4″ at its longest and widest points, and has, in addition to the world map from which it takes its name, a number of ornamented borders, inscriptions in Latin and Anglo-Norman, and illuminated scenes. The map thus has a great many claims to the attention of medieval historians, art historians and linguists, but I would single out three. Firstly, as a result of the loss of the Ebstorf Map, the Hereford Map is now die largest and most elaborate medieval mappa mundi known to have survived. Secondly, it is still one of the most difficult there is of the genre definitively to date, place and understand; this in the face of over more than one hundred and fifty years of effort on the part of a whole series of accomplished scholars and cartographers, effort of which the recent short and penetrating book by Professor Harvey is a triumphant example. Thirdly, though the map is rightly now regarded by the Hereford Cathedral Chapter as one of its greatest treasures, and is quite beautifully cared for and displayed in Hereford, we are still all a little hazy about how it got there in the first place. Professor Harvey suspects it may originally have been made in Lincoln, a suspicion to which I might perhaps now bring a little additional support. But if it was made in Lincoln, how, then, did it come to Hereford, when did it come and, perhaps most importantly of all, why?

This paper surveys the political career and personal life of Simon de Montfort. Derived largely from the author's biography of Montfort, it lays stress on his initial position as an outsider in English politics whose military abilities, diplomatic usefulness and personal charisma fostered his rise to power at the court of Henry III, but who subsequently fell out with the king and eventually became his fiercest opponent. It describes his position as lord of the honour of Leicester, from which town he expelled the Jews, and it goes on to assess the paradoxical and contrasting elements in Montfort's character, which combined deep piety and religious fervour with avarice and a self-seeking desire for his own and his family's advancement. It argues that personal differences, based largely on a strong sense of grievance and reflecting some of these character traits, rather than constitutional principles, lay behind his opposition to Henry III. It concludes by reviewing Montfort's role in the period of baronial reform and rebellion, 1258–65, and by describing his legacy, both to Henry III in his later years and to Edward I.