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.

Elizabethan travel books – and particularly the epoch-making anthologies of Richard Hakluyt – have been seen (and celebrated) as evidence of England's first great age of maritime expansion. This paper suggests, in terms first suggested by F. O. Matthiessen, that the work of the translator was closely connected with that of the voyager and the merchant. The role played by the translation of Classical and Continental materials is crucial to understanding the intellectual and practical outlook of those involved in overseas ventures and, in particular, to contextualising Hakluyt's patriotic claims and strategies in hisPrinciple Navigations(1598–1600).

Anecdotal evidence is much beloved of architectural historians, particularly in their attempts to recreate the social context in which architectural practice took place. But there are dangers inherent in its use. Using examples relating to the West End house in the periodc. 1765 toc. 1785, this paper argues that architectural historians should be wary of tacking on such evidence to corroborate what they read from built evidence; rather they should treat the body of anecdotal evidence as a source worth investigating in its own right. Only then will they unearth new readings and new understandings which elaborate and sometimes contradict received interpretations of architectural forms.

What could or should be visually represented was a contested issue across the medieval Christian and Islamic world around the year 800. This article examines how Islamic, Byzantine, Carolingian and Palestinian Christian attitudes toward representation were expressed, and differed, across the seventh and eighth centuries. Islamic prohibitions against representing human figures were not universally recognised, but were particularly – if sometimes erratically – focused on mosque decoration. Byzantine ‘iconoclasm’ – more properly called iconomachy – was far less destructive than its later offshoots in France and England, and resulted in a highly nuanced re-definition of what representation meant in the Orthodox church. Carolingian attitudes toward images were on the whole far less passionate than either Islamic or Orthodox views, but certain members of the elite had strong views, which resulted in particular visual expressions. Palestinian Christians, living under Islamic rule, modulated their attitudes toward images to conform with local social beliefs. Particularly in areas under Orthodox or Islamic control, then, representation mattered greatly around the year 800, and this article examines how and why this impacted on local production.

When, in the 1970s, historians of the recent past began seriously to explore the uses of oral history they were, as Alistair Thomson points out in this volume, much criticised for uncritical reliance upon the frailties of human memory. Not all such criticism was misplaced, but, as Thomson describes, the past quarter-century of scepticism and experience has immensely refined the ways in which the method is used and its outcomes interpreted. Yet many historians continue to value documentary over oral sources to a surprising degree, given the extent to which documents throughout history have been derived from oral sources, or were written versions of unspoken memories. If there are serious methodological problems confronting interpretations of the recent past which depend upon memory, such problems arise at least equally for other time periods. The value of the essays which follow, and of the conference at which they were read, is in the focus on the common methodological problems posed to historians and anthropologists of very different time periods and cultures by memory and its oral and written expression: issues of what people do and do not remember, of why and how memory is used to interpret past and present.

We might flatter ourselves that the idea of a spin doctor is rather a modern one, but I wonder. Obviously enough, powerful rulers have always had their coterie of close advisers. But in the medieval Muslim world there is one outstanding example of something rather more than this: the team of three counsellors that Saladin assembled who watched over his interests and, crucially, his reputation, with unflagging devotion for decades. Two of them were, by any standard, intellectual stars who could have turned their multifarious talents in many directions but who chose rather to dedicate them to a man whom they not only admired but also loved. One of them, the poet ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, was a Persian with a truly awesome command of Arabic, a gift which he delighted to exhibit in and out of season. His pyrotechnic performances, solid with metaphor, saturated with puns, wordplay, alliteration, assonance and verbal acrobatics, are such a nightmare to understand that generations of Western Orientalists – and indeed Arab scholars too, for that matter – have recoiled from the task of editing certain of his works. Sometimes in his writings manner eclipses matter, but he is also capable of reaching heights of solemn eloquence, as in his paean of triumph at the recapture of Jerusalem, or his threnody on the death of Saladin. The other, the Qadi al-Fadil – his title means ‘The Excellent Judge’ – though only a somewhat pedestrian poet, was an acknowledged master of the epistolary prose that was de rigueur in Islamic chanceries, and for centuries his letters were regarded as models of their genre. His appearance, hunchbacked and skeletal, made him the butt of the court's satirical poets, but his political skills were beyond reproach, and indeed in his master's absence he governed Egypt for a time. It has been said that biography adds an extra terror to death, but in that respect Saladin need not have worried. For Ibn Shaddad, the third member of this distinguished triumvirate, who joined the team after the fall of Jerusalem but thereafter never left Saladin's side and therefore saw him in good times and bad, was a plain man with a plain style. But he rose to the occasion and crafted a biography of his hero Saladin that lets the facts speak for themselves. He has no time for stale panegyric; instead, his admiration for Saladin shines through his account at every turn, and it is he who laid the foundations for his master's posthumous celebrity. The lecture will explore the impact of these three men on the Saladin legend, which transformed a minor Kurdish warlord into an emblem of chivalry, piety and military glory which captured the hearts and the imaginations of Muslims for centuries to come – and still does.

The foreign policy of England from 1589 until 1595 was dominated by the fear that Spain would take advantage of the French civil wars and the friendship of the Catholic League to secure control of the Channel coast from Brest to Calais. How dangerous this would be to England, we may easily judge from the fact that, years earlier, Menendez had seen in the establishment of a Spanish naval base at the Scilly Isles a means at once of crippling English sea-power and commerce and of rendering easy an invasion of the country. Indeed, the least to be feared should the French ports fall into Spanish hands would be, as the veteran English captain Sir Roger Williams said, that “then must we at the least keep garrisons in all our port towns and send our ships royal in good numbers always to convoy our merchants.” The danger was most acute between 1590 and 1592, when the invasions of France by Parma from the east and the presence of a Spanish army in Brittany to the westward confronted English statesmen with a peculiarly difficult and complex problem. It was this problem that the expedition to Rouen in 1591 was intended to solve.

It is the special boast and glory of the English currency that for more than a thousand years it has maintained its original weight and purity in a far higher degree than any of its neighbours. In the whole course of our history only one severe shock has been given to the credit of the English coinage, the one with which this paper deals. Save in this one single case, the currency has been spared by even the worst, the weakest, and the most unfortunate of our rulers. In the clash of the Norman Conquest, in the evil days of King John, in the long thriftless administration of Henry III., in the anarchy of the Wars of the Roses, in the sharpest stress of the Great Rebellion, no ruler of England ever laid hands on the coin of the realm to alloy its purity or cut down its size. It is true that in the attrition of the ages the first of English coins, the venerable silver penny, has sunk to about one-third of its original weight. Offa, its first creator, struck it to the standard of 22 grains; Queen Victoria's Maundy penny of to-day weighs 7¼ grains. But this shrinkage has been due not to deliberate dishonesty in any series of kings or ministers, but to the variations of the ratio between gold and silver in the last five centuries, since the day when Edward III. first added gold money to the currency of the realm.

The hispanic-converso predicament developed over a considerable period of time and was the consequence of intolerance. It affected both Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity, frequently under extreme pressure. The former are generally known as conversos and the latter as moriscos. The rise of intolerance involved a reclassification of notions of purity and danger, most notably during the reign of Henry IV of Castile. It also eventually entailed the establishment of an Inquisition. But intolerance was not simply a matter of religion, for both conversos and moriscos found that their habits, customs, and styles of life were viewed with suspicion and hostility. This, then, was their predicament. This paper will consider the predicament in the light of developing intolerance, and brief attention will also be devoted to the possibility that conversos encoded secret predicament messages in literary works. The emphasis is on the kingdom of Castile but, where apposite, examples have been used relating to Portugal, the Crown of Aragon, and Italy.

This paper examines the important but obscure late Georgian architectural history of the Palace of Westminster and attempts to put architectural developments in their historical contexts in order to gain insight into the dynamic relationship between public architecture, public policy and the public perception of the nation and its values. The substantial but lost work of the architects Sir John Soane and James Wyatt at the Palace form the core of the study. From this perspective, the design competition of 1835–6 was not the beginning but the culmination of four decades of intense struggle over the form and meaning of architectural interventions at the Palace.

IN attending a conference on ‘The Eltonian Legacy’, most of us are here to pay tribute to a teacher or a patron. I am here for the no less heartfelt, but rather trickier, task of paying tribute to a much-missed sparring partner. My first encounter with Geoffrey Elton was at long range, through his review of The Crisis of Parliaments, which I can now describe, recollecting it in tranquillity, as my first encounter with Test Match bowling. It was a bit like taking guard in one's first Test to find oneself facing Curtly Ambrose. Like many such encounters, it gave rise to a firm, but always competitive, friendship.

WHEN writing his monumental history of the British army, Sir John Fortescue devoted just two paragraphs to the military implications of the Union. He noted that Union greatly simplified British military affairs in general and that this was an excellent thing for historians, driven to distraction by the confusing archival situation produced by the pre-Union military relationship of the two countries. The Irish military historian, Sir Henry McAnally, was equally succinct, merely remarking that `military matters had not bulked largely in the Union debates'. In ways they were both right. Although none of the eight articles of the Union refer to the army, it was understood that the assimilation principle, which regulated other branches of the public service and the church, would apply to the army. Yet, beneath and perhaps because of the delusive brevity of these bare facts, lies a seriously under-researched subject with wider ramifications, both in the short and longer term. Before these issues can be developed, it is first necessary to set the context by describing the pre-Union military background Ireland and then outlining the formal changes wrought by the Union.

This paper is concerned with the way in which news was handled by the four main London dailies, The Times, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph and the Standard which, by the late 1870s, enjoyed the largest circulations. They differed from each other considerably in character and history, and in the kind of historical record which they have left behind. Much more is known about The Times than about any of the others. In the 1860s it was a 16-page paper, costing 3d, with a circulation declining slowly from 65,000 to 60,000. The fact that it could maintain this circulation, when it was three times as expensive as its main rivals, is by itself evidence of the value that contemporaries placed upon it. It had far greater assets than any of its rivals, and the Walter family were willing to invest heavily in the paper as and when funds were needed. Its greater resources were shown, partly in its technical equipment, and partly in the range and quality of writing in the paper itself. The Times had more correspondents reporting more frequently and fully from more European capitals than its rivals, and much of its prestige had been derived from that fact. It also employed in London a staff of educated writers such as George Brodrick and Robert Lowe. Unlike its rivals it could afford to pay salaries which enabled it to impose on its writers the condition that they wrote for it exclusively. (The lives of a number of notable late nineteenth-century journalists show that they tried to make up income by writing too much simultaneously, for too many different publications.)

When I remembered that I had to address the Society to-day I thought at first of choosing some subject remote from the troubles of the moment, something analogous to my former addresses on the development of historical studies in England. But it was not possible to do so. The events which are in progress now have too absorbing an interest to permit us to abstract ourselves from them, for which of us is not in some way or other intimately affected by them? Besides that, these events have for any historian not merely the interest which all of us share, but an interest of a very special kind. The historian sees in action before his eyes the abstractions he has been reading about in books all his life: the struggle of races, the conflict of opposing ideas, the operation of economic laws, the development of historical tendencies, and perceives what these phrases really mean when they are translated into facts. There has been no such open conflict of ideals since the wars of the French Revolution. There has been no such huge conflict of races since the time when the Teutonic peoples moved westward to overthrow Roman civilisation and plant their own in its place. One of Milton's similes for the Satanic host pictures their coming:

‘A multitude like which the populous North Poured never from her frozen loins to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons Came like a deluge on the South, and spread Beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands.’

Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, states that the disturbances in Scotland which preceded- the Bishops' Wars came as a shock to the English councillors of King Charles I. It seems probable that they came as a shock to King Charles himself. The unexampled authority that his father James VI had succeeded in establishing for the Crown in Scotland—an authority Which he continued to exercise at long range when he became king of England—was something which Charles I had learnt to take for granted.

The object of the present paper is to put forward a new theory in explanation of the curious list of old English districts with their hidages, or what purport to be their hidages, which is to be found printed in Birch's Cartularium Saxonicum (vol. i., 414), and to which attention has often been drawn, but most recently by Professor Maitland in his ‘Domesday Book and Beyond’ (p. 506) under the name of the ‘Tribal Hidage.’

When someone who is not a specialist thinks of Italian Renaissance politics, he or she probably thinks first of Machiavelli – Machiavelli the cynical, Machiavelli the revolutionary. But if you read the writings of Machiavelli's contemporaries – not so much perhaps the political theorists (except for Francesco Guicciardini, to my mind a far more interesting political thinker than Machiavelli), as the active politicians of the day, Machiavelli does not seem anything like so revolutionary. Next to their clear-eyed realism and knowledge of men and affairs, Machiavelli's extremism can seem naïve.

Few topics in ecclesiastical history have demanded so much revision and revaluation as the papal collation of benefices. Earlier generations of historians, even if they treated with reserve the criticism of provisions voiced by Matthew Paris, nevertheless regarded the successive general reservations from 1265 to 1362 as a glaring invasion of the rights of ordinary collators: juris ordinariorum locorum usurpacio, as Dietrich of Niem called them in 1410. Papal provisions of whatsoever category were represented as acts of administrative intervention which aroused national feeling, especially in this country, to statutory counter-measures; as an abuse, not only because they introduced the non-resident alien into the English dioceses, but also because they diverted the normally resident incumbent from his cure in order to defend his title at the Court of Rome.

When I had the honour of addressing this Society a year ago, I spoke to it of our past history and hinted that I might at some future time have something to say about our present work and our future prospects. I do not wish to-day to grapple with the whole of such large subjects, but there are special reasons why I should as soon as possible call your attention to some particular aspects of them. My motives are largely practical. A movement has been maturing for some time which has for its object the promotion of international co-operation in historical work. During the last year it has reached the definite stage of creating a permanent international organisation of historical scholars for the promotion of co-operative undertakings on a large scale. It is an important movement and one which historians should have greatly to heart. It has attracted very little attention in this country and there is a danger lest we should not take our full share in the work in which we are now invited to play a part. I wish to give to it all the publicity that I am able, and to make an appeal to serious historians to do what they can to help it forward.