To trace the influence of writings is a task in which full attainment is impossible. Yet the attempt is worth making, especially when the writer under consideration was in some sort a pioneer, the first to write a constitutional treatise in the English language, and likewise the first, in all probability, to write a legal treatise for the benefit of English laymen. Few English lawyers can have had so varied a career as that of Sir John Fortescue. Born some time between 1390 and 1400, he lived to see the ‘unquiet time’ of Henry IV, the ‘victorious acts’ of Henry V, and the ‘troublous season’ of Henry VI, which ended in the overthrow of the Lancastrian dynasty, and the apparently firm establishment of the Yorkist line. In early manhood he became a serjeant-at-law; in 1442 he was made Chief Justice of the King's Bench; in 1443 he was sent on various special commissions; in the critical year 1450 he acted as spokesman of the Judges in relation to the trial of Suffolk, and four years later he delivered the Judges' opinion on the important case of Thorpe. During the early stages of the Wars of the Roses Fortescue was actively engaged in various extra-judicial duties; in 1461 he was present at the battle of Towton, and a few months later he fought against Edward IV at Ryton and Brancepeth. Between 1461 and 1463 he wrote the ‘De Natura Legis Naturae’ and various tracts on the succession question, and in 1463 he accompanied Queen Margaret and her son into exile in Flanders and France, where he remained till 1471. During his sojourn abroad he wrote the ‘De Laudibus Legum Angliae,’ and drew up memoranda on the political situation and a programme for the restored Lancastrian government. Fortescue took a prominent part in the conclusion of the agreement between Margaret and Warwick in 1470, and accompanied the queen and her son to England, landing at Weymouth on the very day of Warwick's overthrow and death at Barnet. Less than a month later he was taken prisoner at Tewkesbury, and Prince Edward was slain; before long Henry VI also died, and there was nothing before the loyal Lancastrian but to accept the clemency of the conqueror, Edward IV. His pardon passed the Great Seal, he was made a member of the King's Council, and before very long he obtained (1473) the reversal of his attainder and the restoration of his estates at the price—hard for a lawyer to pay—of refuting in writing the arguments he had formerly adduced against Edward's title. An interesting reference to this treatise is made by Coke.

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 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.

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.

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.

Russian historians have taken a livelier interest in Ivan the Terrible than in any other Tsar except Peter the Great. But they have always been seriously handicapped in their treatment of him by grave deficiencies in the material at their disposal. These deficiencies are of two kinds. First, the material is very incomplete and scanty. The Moscow archives and many other Russian documentary records were destroyed during the ‘Time of Troubles’ and in the great fire of Moscow of 1626, and historians have had to try to reconstruct the history of sixteenth-century Russia from what have been called ‘accidental scraps and fragments of material’. Secondly, an appreciable part of even the material which survives, such as the Chronicles, the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky, and Kurbsky's History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, is partisan and has to be used with the greatest caution. By the sixteenth century, Russian Chronicles had begun to be written and revised to put an official gloss on events; the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky was polemical in tone and aim; and the History of the Grand Prince of Moscow was an able political pamphlet aimed at influencing opinion in Lithuania. With only fragmentary and partisan sources to draw on, Russian historians came to differ widely in their interpretation of Ivan the Terrible and his achievements, particularly in the pioneer days of historical writing. But in a penetrating sketch of Ivan's reign published in 1923 Platonov felt able to affirm that, in the course of the controversy, Ivan and his times had begun to be substantially understood, and that this ‘success’ was ‘one of the brilliant pages in (Russian) historiography, one of the decisive victories of the scientific method’.

The history of internationalism has tended to focus on power centres in the Global North – London, Geneva, New York, Paris – and institutions like the League of Nations, United Nations and UNESCO. What happens when we flip our perspective, and view internationalism from the point of view of the decolonising South? What do we get when we shift our focus from world leaders to the internationalism of activists, intellectuals, feminists, poets, artists, rebels and insurgents operating in Asia and Africa? Moreover, how are our methods of researching and debating international history – in universities, archives and conferences in the Global North – structured by economic inequalities, colonial legacies and visa regimes that limit participation by scholars from the South? This paper considers how we might decolonise both the content and the methods of international history, focusing especially on leftist internationalism and South–South connections in Southeast Asia and the wider Global South.

One of the abiding characteristics of the English gentry has been its system of social gradation. And yet the origins of this system have received relatively little attention from historians. Of course, we are well used to describing a local society of knights and esquires in the fourteenth century and of accommodating the addition of gentlemen, albeit with some hesitancy, in the fifteenth. Historians have highlighted the sumptuary legislation of 1363, which points to the gentility of the esquire, and the Statute of Additions of 1413 which gives legal recognition to the mere gentleman. We may understand that neither piece of legislation is to be taken entirely at face value. Nevertheless they are recognised to be significant markers in the evolution of a graded gentry.

THE legacy of Sir Geoffrey Elton to the study of Tudor politics can only be described as paradoxical. For all his reputation as a doyen of what has been termed the Cambridge school of high political history, studies of politics comprise but a small section of his œuvre. He never wrote a substantial account of an episode in high politics in the manner of Maurice Cowling or J. C. D. Clark. If one excludes his textbooks, political subjects are treated primarily in his essays. Even these, though, are not numerous. The section ‘Tudor Politics’ in Studies I contains eleven essays and papers. Four are reviews, two are introductions to reprinted biographies, two are essays on Thomas More and two are the famous studies of Henry VII and Henry VIII (‘Rapacity and Remorse’ and ‘King or Minister?’), which are essentially analyses of personality. Only one article, the early ‘Decline and Fall’, deals with a specific political episode. For a man whose doubts about biography as an exercise are well known, there is a striking amount of biographical material here. Elton's real contribution is to be found in his later essays. Studies 3 contains the ‘Points of Contact’ trilogy, ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and ‘Arthur Hall’. ‘Hall’, ‘Piscatorial Politics’ in Studies 4 and the final section of Parliament of England form a distinct corpus of Elizabethan political studies.

The subject of my paper is the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh. I propose to confine what I have to say to that subject, and consequently to consider legal rather than historical matters, as far as the two can be distingished, but I hope that some of my audience may deal with the points that I may have to notice from that wider point of view which it is so necessary to take into account if our national system of law is to be properly appreciated.

Return of writs has been considered an essential privilege of the greater liberties in medieval England, because it entitled liberty-holders to exclude the sheriff and hence to execute royal writs through their own bailiffs. Maitland construed it thus when discussing borough privileges, and again when he included it among the powers of lords exercising ‘the highest justice’. Although return of writs had acquired this meaning by the time Edward I died, neither the king's lawyers nor liberty-holders understood it in this way in the thirteenth century. Each side interpreted it differently. The conflict which ensued has attracted little attention hitherto, yet return of writs can only be understood in its context. This struggle has also a wider significance, as it illuminates the attempts of Henry III and Edward I to impose a new definition of royal sovereignty on libertyholders. The present paper will argue that the franchise of return of writs was the product of conflict between king and magnates.

An inquiry into the life of George Wishart presented few attractions. Believing that he claimed the gift of prophecy, Mr Hill Burton describes him as “a visionary.” Mr Froude charges him with preaching without authority and with illegally assuming the priestly office. Professor Lorimer alleges that, in his early ministry, he denied the doctrine of the Atonement. Mr Tytler has sought to prove that he intended murder, by conspiring against the life of Cardinal Beaton. Having ventured on the elucidation of his history, I have investigated the charges brought against him, with care and, I trust, impartiality. The result will be found in these pages. Meanwhile I may summarise my deductions, and say that the martyr has, from the inquiry, come forth unstained. He did not claim prophetic powers; he preached with canonical sanction; he did not act as a priest or ordained clergyman; he taught the doctrine of the Atonement throughout his whole ministry; he did not conspire against Beaton, and if he knew of the conspiracy he condemned it.

It is now generally admitted that of the two principal Jacobite risings, namely the Fifteen and the Forty-Five, the former, although it never came so near to success as the latter, was infinitely better conceived. Yet those who have not studied it in any detail cannot but be astonished at the alarm which it caused the Government of the day. Mar was a far more contemptible commander than Prince Charles Edward or Lord George Murray, while, on the other side, Argyll was greatly superior to the luckless Cope. As for the English Jacobites, the distinction between their behaviour in 1715 and 1745 seems to have been without a difference, for if a few of them did take up arms on the earlier occasion their intervention had no appreciable effect. In these circumstances it is only natural that the question should be asked what justification there is for the statement that the Fifteen was so much more dangerous to the new dynasty than the Forty-Five. The answer lies in the Jacobite activities in the South and West of England during the twelve months that followed the death of Anne, and, in view of their importance, it is surely no exaggeration to say that they have not hitherto received the attention which they deserve.

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.

Very little is known about the early history of English mercantile venture into the far Eastland. Although some ambitious traders from this island steered their course through the Sound in the fourteenth century, or earlier, and in the fifteenth century seem to have aspired to some degree of common action, it remains true that, previous to the foundation of the Eastland Company in 1579, there was no important body of English merchants organised to trade in the Baltic.