THE story of Liverpool's carrying trade with the Far East and with Australia embraces many fields of human endeavour and is of interest in demonstrating how individuals in the exercise of their functions as entrepreneurs, merchants and shipowners can adapt their ideas and influence the course of a country's economic growth.

The occasion which gave rise to these notes was the discovery three years ago, at Blickling in Norfolk, of the diplomatic papers of John Hobart, second Earl of Bucking-hamshire, who was ambassador to the Court of Russia from 1762 to 1765. These were entrusted to me by their owner, Constance, Marchioness of Lothian, to examine and catalogue, and among them, it soon became evident, were notes and memoranda relating to questions of a much earlier date than that of Lord Buckinghamshire's mission, which it was of interest to trace to their source.

Ashrewd Italian visitor, writing of England more than four hundred years ago, remarked:—“There are scarcely any towns of importance in the kingdom excepting these two: Bristol, a seaport to the West, and Boraco, otherwise York, which is on the borders of Scotland; besides London to the South.” Now York was not a port, though it traded far afield through Hull; London was a port, but it was so much else that its story is confusingly complex; moreover it was not by the Thames but by the Severn that Englishmen first found a pathway to the New World at the end of the Middle Ages. Hence Bristol, then the second port in England, is of peculiar interest to the student of the still unwritten history of English commerce in the fifteenth century—a history unchronicled, but not unrecorded, and quite as significant as the wars abroad and the strifes at home which have too often earned for the century a character of futility.

The Royal Historical Society, with the assistance of Mr. J. F. Chance, Mr. Wickham Legg, and Dr. D. B. Horn, has rendered and is still rendering valuable assistance to the study of diplomatic history. The most direct service so far has been the issue of a series of volumes giving selections from the Instructions to British envoys at foreign courts between 1689 and 1789. I devoutly wish that some well-timed benefaction might enable us to make these volumes more complete and less selective. In the meantime, while we cast envious eyes upon the sumptuous volumes which have been published in France, and upon the still more complete series issued before the War by the Imperial Society of Russian History, we have to be grateful for what this Society can give us. Its latest contribution is Mr. Legg's third volume of Instructions to our ministers in France, which was sent out to Fellows of the Society last month. The present paper was provoked by that volume, which I read in proof, and is designed to be a commentary upon that part of its contents which refers to the so-called War of the Polish Succession (1733–5). The contentions which I put forward represent convictions formed long ago, but these convictions have been strengthened and vivified by the documents in this volume. Limits of time forbid quotations from other authorities, but anyone who may desire a more detailed study can turn to Professor Vaucher's Robert Walpole et la Politique de Fleury (1731–1742), where ample references can be found.

My interest in the forfeitures of 1388 was first roused by an examination of the printed inventories of the reign of Richard II, undertaken in the hope of finding references to pictures painted for the king. The examination was necessarily brief, as there is little in print except Gloucester's great inventory of 1397, a few wills, some short lists in the calendars of Close Rolls and the inventories, chiefly of forfeitures, published in Palgrave's Kalendars and Inventories of the Treasury. Palgrave naturally suggested a search in the Record Office, and I soon became aware of a considerable body of material there, relating to the forfeitures of 1388. Though none of it turned out to be directly useful for my original enquiry, it seemed to have sufficient historical interest to deserve discussion.

EARLY on the morning of 14 November 1793 the Montagnard deputy, Chabot, woke up Robespierre and denounced a plot to destroy the Convention by corrupting some of its members and slandering those who could not be bought. He produced as evidence 100,000 livres in assignats which he said had been given to him to buy the signature of Fabre d'Eglantine to a fraudulent decree concerning the liquidation of the East India Company.

The particular phenomena of the crisis of 1621 in England have been examined in another connection' by the aid afforded in the State Papers, Domestic and Foreign, at the Record Office. That the movement—one, namely, of an unprecedented change in the relative values of the precious metals towards the close of the sixteenth century, bringing with it disturbance in the monetary standards and economic and social life of the chief States of Europe—was not restricted to England is demonstrable, and might safely be presumed. In the case of those other States, however, the nature of the evidence available differs from that revealed in such welcome fulness by the English State Papers. For Holland the chief authority is the huge Plakkaat book, a collection which takes the place of our Statutes of the Realm plus (our one great desideratum yet) a book of proclamations of the King in Council. In the case of Germany the want of a central rule rendered impossible anything like a statute or an imperial proclamation of sufficient authority to bind the various constituent parts of the empire. To face the monetary evils which beset her to even a greater and more pernicious degree than they did England, Germany was reduced to the less effectual system of local mint unions between the circles or contiguous princes.

Professor Ashley on The Character of Villein tenure, and its Relation to InclosureInherent Improbabilities of Professor Ashley's Theory: (I) From the Yorkist Position; (2) From the Tudor Policy; (3) From Absence of EvidenceThe Acts of 1488 and 1515 for Restraint of InclosuresLimits of the Commission of 1517The Returns of the Record Office and of the Lansdowne MS.IllustrationsAreas embraced in ReturnsAbsence of Uniformity in Returns. Examples. Inclosures: (1) By Tenants; (2) By LandlordsCharacteristics of the Returns for the Different CountiesSympathetic Description of EvictionsBoldness and Impartiality of the CommissionersThe Commissioners call Attention to the Losses of Tenants by InclosureLegal Position of Persons concerned mentioned in Yorkshire, where Persons evicted clearly not CopyholdersIndications of Tenure in Herefordshire, Hants, and Norfolk. No Sign of Evictions of CopyholdersInclosures of Demesne Lands by Farming Tenants, with and without EvictionsInclosures by Lords with EvictionsInclosures by CopyholdersWhat Class of Tenants were evicted? The Evidence supplied by the Herefordshire ReturnsThe Persons so described Tenants at Will at Common LawThe Gloucestershire Cases of Evictions of CopyholdersThe Commissioners' View of the Duke of Buckingham's ProceedingsReport of the Surveyors of the Duke of Buckingham's Estates. His Expropriations of FreeholdersThe Duke of Buckingham's Arbitrary Conduct a Cause of his RuinCorroborative Evidence derived from the Statutes that the Persons evicted were not Copyholders.

In a mood of understandable frustration, the British minister in Bangkok sent a telegram to the head of the Far Eastern department of the Foreign Office in June 1941, referring to the tedious economic discussions he was conducting with the Thai government, saying:

I am disturbed by the contradictory tone of the telegrams sent to me from His Majesty's Foreign Office … Some of them breathe that broad and statesmanlike spirit which I have learnt to respect and admire over a period of nearly forty years. Others strike a shrill and petulant note which is new to me … I have an uneasy feeling that you people in Downing Street live in an ivory tower as regards Thailand …

On previous occasions I have chosen as the subject of my address at the annual meeting of this Society a historical theme suggested by my studies. Three historical addresses, each of which involved careful preparation, are, I venture to think, as many as a President of the Society need feel it his duty to deliver. Yet I think that I should have inflicted a fourth upon the Society if some special considerations had not combined to divert me from what is certainly the safer, and is perhaps the more profitable course. Moreover, it so happens that the period of my presidency has been a time of significant development in the organisation of historical study in this country. The history of this Society has been affected by the general movement. We have tried deliberately to adjust ourselves to it, and to take a leading part in it. I decided, therefore, to make my last appearance in the chair an occasion for a review of current developments and for some reflections upon them.

In a recently published work the author has presented biographical details of the Poets Laureate of England; the object of this paper is to place before the Royal Historical Society in a concise form all the reliable information he has obtained as to the origin of the office. From the appointment of Chaucer about five hundred years have elapsed, and during that period a long line of poets have held the title of Laureate. For the first two hundred years they were somewhat irregularly appointed, but from the creation of Richard Edwards in 1561, they come down to the present time without interruption.

It is now three years since Wilhelm Levison, one of the last of the great Monumenta editors, died at Durham. Among the tasks he left unfinished were two of major importance to those whose concern is with Frankish studies. The first, a much-needed edition of the Lex Salica, he seems to have brought no nearer completion than had his predecessor, Bruno Krusch, or any other of the long line of Monumenta scholars who broke their hearts in the attempt to unravel it. The second, the completion of the new Monumenta edition of the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, to supersede that of Arndt and Krusch, was a good deal further advanced. In fact, the text itself had already appeared in print under the name of Bruno Krusch alone, although it was an open secret that a great part of the burden of editing had fallen on Levison's shoulders. What remained—and still remains—to be published is the critical introduction, w*here Levison is under-stood to have developed views on the manuscript tradition that owed less to Krusch than to Krusch's own master, Wilhelm Arndt. While this introduction remains unpublished it is hazardous for others to proceed very far with work based on the text of the Historia Francorum. My own intention here is to do no more than to present an interim report on some of the ways in which historians have been using Gregory in the twenty years since the publication of Dill's and Dalton's books; for they were the last English scholars to whom Frankish studies seemed important for themselves. My debt to them is great.

ON 4 MARCH 1848 Hungarians were excitedly debating the devastating criticisms of their country's rulers pronounced before assembled members of the diet the previous day by the popular tribune, Lajos Kossuth, the culmination of a campaign of agitation which stretched back a decade and more. Kossuth called for a constitutional transformation, with a responsible ministry, full legal equality, and the abolition of all privilege. The following month his programme was conceded wholesale by the authorities, under pressure from the sans-culottes of Budapest, and prostrate before their own Viennese revolution—for Kossuth's speech had played a major part in unseating Metternich there. Six months later power passed to a fully secessionist Hungarian regime, in which Kossuth enjoyed near-dictatorial sway. The ensuing civil war, during which the dynasty was declared deposed, took a further year to contain; its outcome appeared to be a complete breakdown of mutual confidence between king and country.

Spain's concern with the eastern shores of North America during the earlier part of the sixteenth century had been a peripheral one. Exploration under official and private auspices, both along the coasts and into the interior, had yielded a rich harvest of information, but, down to 1561, projected and attempted settlements and missionary enterprises alike had failed to lead to the establishment of any permanent foothold in Florida or on the coast further north. Spain was nevertheless determined, then and later, to deny the North American lands to any foreign power. But if the preservation of her monopoly rights underlay Spain's resistance to foreign intervention, her occupation of Florida from 1565 onwards and her continued concern to eliminate attempted foreign settlements there and further north in the later sixteenth century was governed by more specific and practical considerations.

In Vol. XL of the ‘Camden Miscellany,’ published by this Society, there appears the text of the charter granted, to the city of Salisbury in the year 1656, under circumstances which are described by the late Dr. S. R. Gardiner in his ‘History of the Protectorate,’ as well as by the Director of the Society, on whom devolved the task of editing the transcript which had been made for Dr. Gardiner from the city muniments.

The Home Rule crisis of 1885–86 is generally held to mark a water-shed in the history of Anglo-Irish relations. This it undoubtedly does, though not necessarily for the reasons commonly advanced. The crisis was certainly important in the sense that it obliged the Liberal and Conservative parties to define their attitudes towards Irish self-government and thus to demonstrate to the Irish nationalist party in the House of Commons that their main hope for the future lay with Mr Gladstone and those Liberals who had remained faithful to him after his declaration in favour of Home Rule. But the course of events during 1886 demonstrated just how far the Irish demand still was from being met. The inadequacies of the Home Rule Bill itself, the split in the Liberal party, the firm negative of the Conservatives, the violence of the Ulster Protestant reaction, the veto of the House of Lords which had not even to be deployed in 1886 but was there for future use when necessary—all these things suggested that Home Rule, if it came at all, would not happen overnight at the waving of any Parnellite wand, but would require years, perhaps decades, of labour before it came within sight of achievement.

This paper revisits two generations of highly talented and significant historians who flourished in Britain between c. 1870 and 1920. George Prothero stood high among them and he, with his brother Roland, receives a good deal of attention at the centre of the argument here. But others stood still higher: Tout, Firth, Poole, Acton, the incomparable Maitland; and the purpose of the piece is to present a portrait of the British historical profession as a whole during a crucial period of its formation by using the Protheros’ experience as a platform from which to depart. The journey inevitably begins with that Prothero experience seen as a microcosm of greater tendencies; but it soon winds away toward Germany and Scotland and France; we pause to admire fresh perspectives yielded in what had become an age of edition and what would become an age of economic and social history. Of course the track leads also to Sarajevo and the implications of European war for a fledgling profession. All this itinerary lends an opportunity, therefore, to think through some of the themes and characteristics which made this period of development distinctive; but it also warns and guards against reducing these years to a time of ‘transition’, remarkable only for what would follow it. The personalities and achievements discussed here deserve better of us and recommend that we devote more energy to considering the features of the age of Prothero, for their own sake and in their own terms.

This paper explores aspects of Anglo-Scottish relations in Elizabeth's reign with particular emphasis on the idea of dynastic union and the creation of a Protestant British kingdom. It begins by examining the legacy of pre-Elizabethan ideas of Britain and the extent to which Elizabeth and her government sought to realise the vision of a Protestant and imperial British kingdom first articulated in the late 1540s. It then focuses on the issues arising from the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots and her long captivity in England. The dynastic implications of Mary's execution in 1587 are highlighted and it is argued that Elizabeth's policy towards James VI and Scotland betrays little or no interest in developing a truly British agenda.

Oakwell Hall, Birstall, Red House, Gomersal, and Bagshaw Museum, Batley, are three historic properties which lie at the heart of the old Yorkshire woollen manufacturing district, west of Leeds, where factory production emerged out of a dual economy that combined farming and making. Each effectively represents a key stage in that evolution. Here we examine how the real history of such houses, focusing especially on Red House, which epitomises the dynamic era when its owners helped build up domestic manufacturing to global success, could pay dividends in connecting people to the real social and economic history of their area.