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.

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’.

In August 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, so precipitating a crisis in the Bretton Woods system which was not successfully resolved by the Smithsonian agreement in December 1971. The pound was soon free to float and the role of sterling as a reserve currency was seriously weakened. The members of the European Economic Community attempted to create stability between their own currencies, which left the British government in a dilemma about whether to join the European monetary experiment to complement membership of the Community. The address considers the tensions and difficulties facing the Conservative and Labour governments of the 1970s, and the response of the Thatcher government after 1979. The trade-off in the ‘trilemma’ between the three variables of exchange rates, capital movements and domestic monetary policy changed in a major way.

On the centenary of General de Gaulle's birth in November 1990, hundreds of historians, politicians and statesmen gathered in Paris to discuss his life. Their deliberations were published in seven volumes running to several thousand pages. The participants included former opponents who now declared themselves ‘posthumous Gaullists’ or ‘remorseful’ ones. The whole occasion seemed to fulfil André Malraux's prediction: ‘Everyone is, has been or will become Gaullist.’ Of those who were not, never had been, or would never become Gaullist, little was said.

This article explores the political and intellectual circumstances which led to the efflorescence of cultural institutions between the foundation of the National Gallery in 1824 and the National Portrait Gallery in 1856: the transformation of institutions of public culture from haphazard and rather amateurish institutions to ones which were well organised, with a strong sense of social mission, and professionally managed. This transformation was in part owing to a group of exceptionally talented individuals, including Charles Eastlake, Henry Cole and George Scharf, accepting appointment in institutions to foster the public understanding of art. But it was not simply a matter of individual agency, but also of coordinated action by parliament, led by a group of MPs, including the Philosophical Radicals. It was much influenced by the example of Germany, filtered through extensive translation of German art historical writings and visits by writers and politicians to Berlin and Munich. It was also closely related to the philosophy of the utilitarians, who had a strong belief in the political and social benefits of the study of art. Only the Royal Academy refused the embrace of state control.

In the past decade, scholars of the here-and-now have (re)discovered the concept of enclosure, applying it with considerable zeal and in a bewildering variety of situations: from the securitisation of the Internet, and patenting genes, to attempts to privatise urban ‘public’ spaces, the English ‘enclosure story’ is presented as a given, a narrative that is set in stone. One critical aspect of this account is that enclosure was exported to Britain's overseas colonies in a one-way process. This paper shows, however, that from the early sixteenth century – and insistently so from the late eighteenth century – arguments for the enclosure of English commons and wastes were framed using techniques and discourses deployed overseas: the languages and practices of colonialism. Commons and wastes, so the paper argues, were not just increasingly seen as empty spaces, but the peoples that inhabited them were written as if they were uncivilised and unable to manage the land. Further, arguments for the enclosure of wastes were made as an alternative to Britain's overseas imperialism. The paper traces a variety of debates and proposals that collectively constitute a coherent body of ‘internal colonial’ thought.

The association between liberty and the Anglo-Saxons has been rendered mythical by later retellings, both in the Middle Ages and afterwards. This later history notwithstanding, it is argued here that liberty occupied a significant place in the early English documentary record. Originally part of the cultural and linguistic inheritance from late antiquity, the notion of liberty was deployed by English churchmen in defence of monastic freedom from the eighth century onwards, creating an archival legacy which was rewritten and imitated in later centuries, becoming fixed in institutional memory as fiscal and legal freedoms bestowed on the populations of monasteries and towns by pre-Conquest kings.

AS with many aspects of his career, Churchill’s attitude towards the Soviet Union and Communism has generated considerable debate. The same statesman who urged war on the Bolshevik regime in 1919 – likening it to ‘troops of ferocious baboons’ or ‘a culture of typhoid’ – also urged co-operation with Stalin in the 1930s; he spent his last years in office calling for a summit meeting to reduce Cold War tensions, having himself stirred up those tensions with the 1946 Fulton Speech, where he coined the term ‘Iron Curtain’. Where one historian has concluded that ‘ideologically- based anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism were Churchill’s most abiding obsession for some forty years’, placing emphasis on the rhetoric of the intervention period; another historian recognises that Churchill’s language never reached such intensity again, that he sought to work with Stalin despite the latter’s purges and that even the Fulton Speech praised the Soviet war effort, welcoming ‘Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world’.

This article explores some of the ways in which historians can, and should, engage with current debates about the environment. What we often think of as ‘natural’ habitats in Britain – heaths, ancient woodland, meadows and the like – are largely anthropogenic in character, and much of our most familiar wildlife, from rabbits to poppies, are alien introductions. The environments we cherish are neither natural nor timeless, but are enmeshed in human histories: even the kinds of tree most commonly found in the countryside are the consequence of human choice. The ways in which the environment was shaped by past management systems – to produce fuel, as much as food – are briefly explored; and the rise of ‘rewilding’ as a fashionable approach to nature conservation is examined, including its practical and philosophical limitations and its potential impacts on the conservation of cultural landscapes.

This article is intended to suggest an approach to the global history of the First World War that can provide a method of managing the potentially unwieldy concept of global conflict by understanding it through the war's impact on localities. By concentrating on four relatively small but significant cities; Oxford in England, Halifax in Nova Scotia, Jerusalem in Palestine and Verdun in eastern France, which experienced the war in very different ways, it looks at both the movement of people and things and the symbolic interconnectivities that made the war a ‘world war’. This local focus helps challenge both the primacy of self-contained national history and the focus on the violent interaction of the opposing sides which are the more normal ways of narrating the war. It does not deny the usefulness of these traditional structures of narration and explanation but suggests that there are different and complementary ways the war can be viewed, which create different emphasis and chronologies.

This paper investigates the way in which the ‘problem of poverty’ in Ireland was encountered, constructed and debated by members of the Irish intellectual and political elite in the decades between the Great Famine and the outbreak of the land war in the late 1870s. This period witnessed acute social upheavals in Ireland, from the catastrophic nadir of the Famine, through the much-vaunted economic recovery of the 1850s–1860s, to the near-famine panic of the late 1870s (itself prefigured by a lesser agricultural crisis in 1859–63). The paper focuses on how a particular elite group – the ‘Dublin School’ of political economists and their circle, and most prominently William Neilson Hancock and John Kells Ingram – sought to define and investigate the changing ‘problem’, shape public attitudes towards the legitimacy of welfare interventions and lobby state officials in the making of poor law policy in this period. It suggests that the crisis of 1859–63 played a disproportionate role in the reevaluation of Irish poor relief and in promoting a campaign for an ‘anglicisation’ of poor law measures and practice in Ireland.

‘OH, A paper on Geoffrey and religion’, sneered a friend: ‘that won't take you long!’ But it did: it took ages. For many of us, I am sure, thinking about Elton's work and influence has been an autobiographical experience, surveying our own intellectual development in relation to his. For the first time, I read right through the fat file of twenty-five years of letters from Geoffrey (and I will be quoting from some of them). I recalled the first visit of the man my little daughters called ‘The Teddy Bear’, and how he delighted them with a description of Disneyland. Elton in Disneyland is indeed a thought to conjure with! And I was reminded of all I owed to him. Although this conference has been dubbed ‘Oxford's revenge’ and Geoffrey's graduate students are not giving papers, many here stand in his debt: my own life as a historian was a constant epistolary debate with Geoffrey, and it has been a lengthy and nostalgic business trying to sort it out.

During the schism in the papacy, when France recognised the pope at Avignon and England the pope at Rome, the relations between Cluny and the English province were broken off completely; Urban VI and Boniface IX put the English Cluniacs under the provisional government of the archbishop of Canterbury and the priors of Thetford and Bermondsey, who nominated priors as vacancies occurred and summoned provincial chapters. When England and France both recognised Pope Alexander V in 1409 and the schism came to an end, it was not possible to revert to the earlier relations between the mother-houses in France and their dependencies in England. National feeling against French superiors had been intensified by the long wars, and some French monasteries had sold their English possessions. The abbots of Cluny aimed at recovering all the rights which they had lost during the wars and the schism.

If anyone were to ask where he ought to look for the Roll of Agincourt he would probably be told that he would find it in the ‘History of the Battle,’ published by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1827, in which there are seventy-two pages of printed matter containing ‘the names of the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, Servitours and others that wer withe the Excellent Prince King Henry the Fifte at the Battell of Agincourt’; and if he wanted to know (as which of us would not?) whether one of his ancestors took part in the fight he would look through that list and if he found the name he would probably say, ‘It's all right, he was there!’ but if he didn't he might say, ‘Rubbish! You mustn't expect me to be convinced by such a mass of confusion as that!’ Such a man's difficulty is the one that I want this learned society to look into this afternoon, and in venturing to set before you the dry bones of the skeleton of what is really a very complicated question I need not say that I am here to-day with the very greatest diffidence, for I expect that there are many experts present who will say of the contents of my paper that ‘that which is true is not new and—’ you know the other half of the epigram. I speak, therefore, under a natural feeling of stage fright such as seized upon Henry Buckle when he first faced a Royal Institution audience and felt inclined at the beginning to run away there and then, though I cannot venture to hope for the success he achieved before he sat down at the end. At the risk, however, of wandering among platitudes, I will, if you please, assume conventionally that some at least in this audience may be as ignorant of the main features of my problem as I was myself when I attempted to look into it several years ago. I was then seeking for such first-hand evidence as might still exist for the details of the campaign that ended with the great battle of St. Crispin's Day and whether there was any hope of getting on to firm ground in dealing with the conflicting statements as to the numbers and composition of the force with which Henry V set sail from Southampton in August 1415 and ten weeks later fought the wonderful fight that had such far-reaching effects on the course of the history, not only of our own country and of France, but on that of the whole of Western Europe.

Recent historical investigations tend to push the fundamental causes of the American Revolution farther and farther back into the eighteenth century. It is, therefore, passing strange that the significance of the Canadian expeditions of the first decade of that century should have been neglected. These projects played an important rôle in bringing about a friendly co-operation between the continental colonies and the mother-country; they were no unimportant part of the military and naval phases of the war of the Spanish Succession; and they raised in a pointed way the whole question of sea power. In addition, the expeditions were used as pawns by the English in the diplomatic game, which eventually culminated in the treaty of Utrecht; they showed in a clear way the entire problem of imperial defence, as well as some of the tendencies in British and French imperialism in the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, such attempts at co-operation between colonists and mother-country revealed the superlative importance attached to colonial commerce by each of them, and helped create that most vexatious question of colonial paper money. Such a joint expedition against the French in North America was not only a contest between Whigs and Tories in England, but it finally became a struggle between the two great Tory rivals of the reign of Queen Anne.

Queen Victoria wrote in a famous letter to her grandson William II, on June 12th 1899: “I never personally attacked or complained of Prince Bismarck, though I knew well what a bitter enemy he was to England and all the harm he did.” Why did Queen Victoria call Bismarck “a bitter enemy to England”? Obviously her remark was meant in a purely political sense. It was well known, as well to Queen Victoria as to anyone else in that period, that Prince Bismarck had a strong personal liking for England. He had known English and indeed had spoken the language well as a youth, not as well as he spoke French later on, but we have it from reliable witnesses that he was quite able to express himself fluently. There were times when he would hesitate, and instead of the ordinary word would find a most original and telling phrase. Lord Goschen, too, has borne witness to “his racy style of speech.” Until he reached old age Bismarck displayed an astonishing intimacy with Shakespeare and was very fond of Walter Scott.

What angler has not been, if he be not still, a reader of Izaak Walton? And what reader of Izaak Walton has not observed his frequent quotations from Dubravius, and been amused by that wonderful account of the victory of a frog over a pike, of which Dubravius declares he was himself an eye-witness, but which reads far more like a dream than a reality? And the name of this same Dubravius has lately been brought before the public by Mr. Frank Buckland, as that of the author of an excellent recommendation in the management of fish-ponds, a means of producing food so sadly neglected in this country, viz.: to draw off the water every third or fourth year and sow a crop of oats on the rich mud collected at the bottom. It may not therefore be uninteresting, if I give a brief account of the life and writings of Dubravius, who was a man of considerable mark in his day in the political and ecclesiastical, as well as in the pisci-cultural world.

In calling the attention of the fellows to some of the leading points in the history of one of the most remarkable confederations which the world has ever seen, and in endeavouring to arrange these into an harmonious and intelligent narrative, I feel that I owe no apology, except at least to the extent to which my labours may be found deficient or defective: for it is in the direction of such original inquiries as the present that our Society may perform its more useful offices. England played a most prominent part in the history of the Hanseatic League; but in this regard has found heretofore no historian, while Germany has several. Hence the present attempt, the results of which, gathered from many sources, are presented without further preface.