Foreign labour was an essential resource for the Nazi war economy: by September 1944, around six million civilian labourers from across Europe were working in the Reich. Any initial readiness on the part of the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe to volunteer for work in the Reich had quickly dissipated as the harsh and often vicious treatment of foreign workers became known. The abuse and exploitation of foreign forced labourers by the Nazi regime is well documented. Less well understood is why women formed such a substantial proportion of the labour recruited or forcibly deported from occupied eastern Europe: in September 1944, a third of Polish forced labourers and just over over half of Soviet civilian forced labourers were women. This article explores the factors influencing the demand for and the supply of female labour from the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, particularly after the appointment of Fritz Sauckel as Plenipotentiary for Labour in March 1942. It explores the attitudes of labour officials towards these women workers and shows how Nazi gender politics and the Nazi hierarchy of race intersected in the way they were treated.

This collectively authored article argues for a regional turn in the historical study of transnational activism. By considering not only pan-regional movements but also examples of borderland contexts, transregional connections and diasporic understandings of ‘region’, our discussion identifies fresh possibilities for investigating the evolution and functioning of transnational activism. Based on a Royal Historical Society-funded workshop held at and supported by Northumbria University, the article brings together insights from diverse locations and arenas of contestation. The first part considers literatures on three macro-regional settings – South Asia, Western Europe and Latin America – to illustrate the importance of distinctive regional contexts and constructs in shaping transnational activism and its goals. The second part turns to case studies of transnational activism in and beyond Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean and East Asia. In doing so, it explores very different notions of the regional to identify how transnational activism has both shaped and been shaped by these ideas. Taken together, the two parts highlight the role of regional identities and projects in challenging inequalities and external domination. Our analysis and examples indicate the possibilities of a regionally rooted approach for writing histories of transnational activism.

On 6 January 1378 King Charles V of France took his place in the centre of the top table at a banquet given in honour of a distinguished guest, his uncle the Emperor Charles IV. The setting in the Palais de la Cité, the company and the menu were appropriately sumptuous. Resplendent hangings covered the wall behind the marble table: the noblest guests sat at five large tables, each raised on its own platform; and divided from them by barriers were other tables with seats for more than 800 knights. The entire company was treated to three elaborate courses, each of ten dishes. Then, from its previous place of concealment at the end of the hall, a massive model of a ship emerged carrying a crowd of armed warriors, among them persons identifiable by their arms as Godfrey of Bouillon and other leaders of the First Crusade, together with Peter the Hermit, looking—we are told—as much like the descriptions of him in the chronicles as possible. Propelled smoothly along the floor by men concealed within, it crossed in front of the top table and was then turned round to face towards the centre. An even more massive structure was next brought forward—this time representing the city of Jerusalem, complete with battlemented walls and towers defended by men dressed as Saracen warriors, with the Temple high in the middle and rising still higher above it a tower on which was another figure in Saracen dress ‘crying the Law’ in Arabic. The Crusaders then descended from the ship and attacked the city with scaling ladders, from which some were made to fall off, until finally the knights entered the city, tossed the unfortunate defenders over the walls and raised in triumph the banners they had brought with them: after which the dinner finished.

Macaulay paid every schoolboy the compliment of attributing to him an omniscience which a man of learning might well envy; in what I am about to say this afternoon I fear that I may be going to the opposite extreme and expounding as new, facts with which some of my audience may have been familiar from their youth up. But if I make this mistake, I must plead in extenuation the way in which the medieval chantry has so far been treated. For, whilst almost every other aspect of medieval life has been studied as, at least to some extent, a European phenomenon, the chantry, though its prevalence throughout western Europe has been well known and its importance in the life of the later middle ages generally recognized, has been studied as a matter of local, or at most of national, history, and in many cases antiquarian or genealogical interests have been allowed to obscure the broader ecclesiastical and constitutional questions which it raises or helps to elucidate.

THE great lordships of the Welsh marches constituted a phenomenon not found elsewhere in the area subject to the kings of mediaeval England, and a comparison with the English palatinates and the great liberties of Norman Ireland reveals some very remarkable features. Many of the powers which the marchers exercised were no doubt taken over from the Welsh princes whom they displaced, but this does not in itself explain why they were able to retain such powers. In Ireland at the end of the twelfth century another Norman conquest produced another series of great liberties in which Norman lords displaced Celtic kings who had exercised the powers of independent rulers, but the lords of the liberties of Leinster, Meath or Ulster were subject to the control of the royal government at Dublin in the same way as the greater English liberties were subject to royal control, and never attained a degree of independence comparable with the position held by the marchers. The difference seems most easily explained as being due to the simple fact that the marcher position was in essentials established in the reign of Henry I, while the Norman conquest of Ireland occurred two generations later, at the time when Henry II was extending the control of the crown in so many directions.

Among the voluminous papers produced at the Admiralty during the Fisher era in anticipation of a war against Germany there is one entitled ‘Preparation of War Plans’. It is unsigned and undated, but was printed for internal circulation on 24 June 1908 and may thus form part of the work undertaken by the Naval Intelligence Division and the Naval War College in 1908–9 rather than the better-known deliberations of the ‘Ballard Committee’ of 1906–7. Its authorship must remain a matter for speculation, and it may be the product of more than one hand, but the memorandum's breadth of historical understanding suggests that the influence of two men who played a leading part in Admiralty planning at this time: Rear-Admiral Edmond Slade, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Julian Corbett, the eminent naval historian. The memorandum begins by arguing that British war plans must take into account the political dispositions and commitments of the European powers. Since 1904, it says, these have undergone a profound change, resembling the regrouping of powers which occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘The result on the peace strategy of this country has been tremendous; it has necessitated a complete reorganisation of the whole of our arrangements, and it has forced us to face east, instead of south and west.’ Even though Germany must now be reckoned Britain's chief potential enemy, the situation is still extremely fluid, and the area of greatest uncertainly lies in northern Europe.

The scope of this paper is strictly defined by its title; its subject is the judgment said to have been pronounced upon John Lackland in 1202, and nothing else. I do not intend to discuss that other judgment which John is said to have undergone, in 1203 or later, for the murder of Arthur; nor the composition of the court before which the trial, on either or both of these occasions, is supposed to have been held. With respect to the so-called ‘second condemnation’ I will only say—for the sake of making my own attitude clear—that, notwithstanding the arguments recently put forth by M. Guilhiermoz in support of its reality, I am still content to abide by the conclusion which the generality of historical scholars, on both sides of the Channel, have for the last six teen years regarded as established by M. Bémont: that the ‘condemnation of 1203’ is fictitious. My study of the evidence relating to the matter has, however, led me to form the opinion that the condemnation of 1202 is fictitious likewise. It is with reference to this point alone that I venture to offer a few considerations.

It is a curious coincidence that to-day should have been fixed for me to read a paper on my memories of the Public Record Office, for I entered as a junior clerk on 9 March, 1893, so that when I left the office this afternoon I had completed exactly thirty-five years' service.

At that time Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte had been Deputy-Keeper for just over seven years; one volume of the Calendar of Patent Rolls (1327–30)had been published, and the late Mr. W. H. Stevenson had just finished the first volume of the Calendar of Close Rolls (1307–13). The Patent Rolls have now been completely calendared from the reign of Henry III to the end of the reign of Edward VI, and the Close Rolls to the end of the reign of Henry V, although the whole of the latter calendar has not yet been published.

Mr. F. W. Buckler has put forth a theory to account for the Indian Mutiny, or, rather, has unearthed and elevated to the dignity of an hypothesis an assertion made by some of the mutineers at the time of the Mutiny, namely, that the East India Company rebelled against the King of Delhi and that the native soldiers were in duty bound to rally round him against the rebel Company.

I want to plunge into my subject by adopting that practice well known to our medieval predecessors, namely to use an exemplum, because at once it transports us into the heart of the problem to be addressed. The event is recounted by Orderic Vitalis in Book Six of his Ecclesiastical History, and describes the practice of a Norman priest called Gerold who served in the household of the great earl of Chester Hugh of Avranches (1071–1101). Gerold was, apparently, a devoted priest who regularly said the offices for the day and offered Mass, but beyond this he wanted die men of the earl's household to live a better life. That desire he discharged by telling them about how some of their forebears had lived:

To great lords, simple knights, and noble boys alike he gave salutary counsel and he made a great collection of tales of the combats of holy knights, drawn from the Old Testament and more recent records of Christian achievements, for them to imitate. He told them vivid stories of the conflicts of Demetrius and George, of Theodore and Sebastian, of the Theban Legion and Maurice its leader, and of Eustace, supreme commander of the army and his companions, who won die crown of martyrdom in heaven. He also told diem of the holy champion, William, who after long service in war renounced die world and fought gloriously for die Lord under die monastic rule. And many profited from his exhortations, for he brought them from the wide ocean of the world to die safe haven of life under the Rule.

The infliction of such a parochial topic on this Society may smack of temerity. My apology must be that the emergence of the first modern industrial societies is one of the most important of all historical developments, and that the experience of each of the areas involved is worthy of the historian's meticulous scrutiny.

ABBOTS in politics were surely a medieval commonplace, one might be tempted to say: what have these two egregious examples, Wala of Corbie (826–34, ob. 836) and Bernard of Clairvaux (1115–53), to say to us which countless others could not also say? If my two were not unique, however, they were comparative rarities, in that they became involved in politics (if that is the right word), not because of their feudal obligations, nor because they sought to propagate monastic reform on the basis of the observance of their own monastery, nor again because they associated the glory of their own house with a particular cause or royal line, but avowedly for the sake of moral principle, incurring enmities in the process, and, cloistered monks as they were, acting to some extent against the interests and wishes of their own flocks. The monk-bishop was a common enough figure, and the greatest men of this type, pre-eminently Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory the Great, have given us profound thoughts about how contemplation could and should be kept alive amidst the cares of the active and pastoral life. But neither Wala nor Bernard became a bishop, and paradoxically the latter's widespread and non-institutionalised influence might have been diminished had he done so. As one of Bernard's biographers felicitously but ingenuously put it in recounting that the saint had actually refused many bishoprics, ‘from under the bushel of his humility he gave a greater light to the church than others raised to the chandeliers’.

To the early history of the coronation oath it would be difficult to add, unless, which seems unlikely, some altogether fresh documents are discovered. In any case, the course of history is plain. The king bound himself by a threefold promise to preserve peace and protect the church, to maintain good laws and abolish bad, to dispense justice to all. This oath had been taken by English kings from the tenth century: it was taken by William the Conqueror and by his successors. But more than this, Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II all issued coronation charters. Neither Richard I nor John did so, but Henry III went back to the practice that had been followed by his grandfather, and the great charter as it was reissued in 1216 was, in effect, a coronation charter.

REREADING the thousands of words that Geoffrey Elton penned on English parliamentary history has been a fascinating and a humbling experience. The analytical power, the mastery of sources, the clarity of argument compel unstinting admiration. Although he generously acknowledged the contributions made by friends and students, he was the paramount revisionist of early modern parliamentary history.

JOHN WALKER, sometime fellow of Trinity College Dublin and arch-critic of everyone's religious opinions but his own, wrote his Expostulatory Address to the Methodists in Ireland during one of the most remarkable outbreaks of rural revivalism in Irish history. Walker, who inevitably founded the Walkerites, not only condemned Methodist acquisitiveness, but also drew up a list of its Arminian sins after the style of the eighteenth-century Calvinistic polemicists. He alleged that Methodists were idolatrous in their veneration of Wesley, hypocritical in their class-meeting confessions, irrational in their pursuit of religious experience, arrogant in their supposed claims of Christian perfection and heretical in their interpretation of the doctrines of justification and sanctification. The chief importance of Walker's pamphlet was the reply it provoked from Alexander Knox, Lord Castlereagh's private secretary. As an admirer of Wesley's transparent piety and of the beneficial influence of Methodism on the labouring classes, Knox wrote a sensitive and sympathetic riposte.

SUPERFICIALLY regarded, the foundation of the Royal Historical Society a hundred and twenty years ago belongs to that spate of foundations of academic societies and specialised disciplinary journals, on the continent and in the United States as well as in Britain, which occurred in the concluding decades of the last century and around the beginning of this. Indeed if mere date of foundation were all that counted the Society is considerably more venerable than, for example, the Royal Economic Society, which, even under its earlier title as the British Economic Association, will not celebrate its centenary until 1900, and the British Academy which will not do so for two years beyond that. The Royal Anthropological Institute is three years younger than ourselves, though admittedly it represented an amalgamation of two earlier societies, the Anthropological Society of London which enjoyed a somewhat notorious existence through the eighteen sixties and the still older Ethnological Society. Our Transactions had been published, albeit intermittently, for fifteen years before the first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886. They had not, it has to be admitted, been fifteen glorious years. Although by the mid-'eighties matters were beginning to improve and the names of some notable historians, Acton, Creighton, Seeley, appear on the membership rolls, the productions of the Society and much of its membership were far from distinguished and it still had some way to go to establish itself as a respected institution.

To talk about a London gild is to talk under the shadow of Unwin's learning. To stand in that shadow is inevitably to be overshadowed. My hope to-day is to avoid such comparison and, instead, by drawing on the records of a gild not used at first hand by him, to add something to the picture he drew.

The ‘seventeen Netherlands’ owed their existence entirely to the energies of their rulers. Until 1548 when this hotchpot of duchies, counties and lordships was united in the Burgundian circle of the Empire, the boundaries of the Low Countries had expanded or contracted according to the military and diplomatic fortunes of their princes: there was nothing natural or inevitable about them. Charles V had, for example, threatened to annexe the prince-bishopric of Münster in 1534–5, as he had added Utrecht only a few years earlier. Nor can the incorporation of the duchy of Gelre in 1543 be considered the outcome of an ineluctable historical process. Since the late fifteenth century the rulers in the Low Countries had sought to assert their control over the duchy. But there had been times when it seemed as though Gelre, which looked Januslike both up and down the Rhine, might, in combination with Jülich and Cleves, have constructed a formidable anti-Habsburg constellation into whose orbit a large part of the northern Netherlands would be drawn.

For many years, the Scandinavian place-names of northern and eastern England have been regarded as valuable materials for the historian. Their number is so large, and they present so many features which point unequivocally to their origin, that their general significance has long been apparent. Sixty years ago, the broad outlines of their distribution were already clear enough to be used in the reconstruction of unrecorded history, and, mainly through the work of J. R. Green, they were beginning to pass into the familiar body of knowledge about the pre-Norman age. The concentrations of Scandinavian names on the fringe of Cleveland and in the central plain of Yorkshire, in Lindsey and Leicestershire, and around the estuary of the Yare, are all indicated in the Conquest of England, published in 1883. The essential fact that these names are characteristic of the regions settled by the Danish armies of King Alfred's time was well established, and has lain in the background of most that has since been written about the bearing of this settlement on the evolution of Old English society.

It is perhaps surprising that no systematic study of the lord keeper's or chancellor's ecclesiastical patronage has been produced. In 1927 Jean Wilson dealt with the office of lord chancellor in the early seventeenth century but devoted a very few pages only to the exercise of his patronage. Professor Jones scarcely touched upon the matter. Yet at the very least there is a need to establish how the lord keeper administered his ecclesiastical patronage and to assess its importance. Did the various lord keepers adopt a policy? What influenced their distribution of patronage? The sources available have imposed limitations of their own: central records of presentations exist in overlapping blocks for the years 1559 to 1603; 1596 to 1616/17; and 1627 to 1640 alone. These papers are not of uniform format and the information which they can be made to yield varies in type. The papers of lord keeper Coventry, for example, are not lists of presentations but loose docquets of presentation, and these make no mention of petitioners or commenders other than the presentee. Wherever possible, however, the somewhat barren nature of the formal documentation has been supplemented by the use of diocesan and private papers.