GENERAL medical practitioners are a dominant element within the medical workforce. They are the largest specialism, currently accounting for about two-thirds of the senior medical personnel employed by the National Health Service (NHS). They exert a strong political influence by virtue of their importance in the British Medical Association (BMA) and its complicated representative and negotiating machinery.

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.

DominusRex et Regina mandarunt hie breue suum sub Magno Sigillo suo Thesaurario et Baronibus huius scaccarii directum Cuiusquidem breuis tenor sequitur in hec verba. Philippus et Maria dei gracia Rex et Regina Anglie His-paniarum Francie vtriusque Sicilie Ierusalem et Hibernie fidei defensores Archiduces Austrie Duces Burgundie Mediolani et Brabancie Comites Haspurgi Flandrie et Tirolis Thesaurariis et Baronibus suis de Scaccario salutem Tenorem cuiusdam certificacionis coram nobis in Cancellaria nostra retornate ac in filaciis eiusdem Cancellarie nostre de Recordo residentis vobis Mittimus presentibus interclusum Mandantes vt inspecto tenore certificacionis predicte vlterius inde pro nobis fieri faciatis prout de iure et secundum legem et consuetudinem Regni nostri Anglie fuerit faciendum. Testibus nobis ipsis apud Westmonasterium xxijdo die Octobris Annis regnorum nostrorum tercio et quarto. Wa. Hare. Et tenor certificacionis vnde in brevi predicto superius fit Mencio sequitur in hec verba.

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.

One of the more pleasant aspects of academic life is the informal chat between a professor and a young historian when they plan together a very necessary and illuminating book. It will be agreed that the subject is of high interest from several points of view, that the material is adequate—indeed, abundant, and that it might well prove to be a magnum opus upon which a respectable reputation could be built. Some of the main problems of the subject will be briefly indicated, some daring guesses will emerge (of course, suitably qualified with the remark that ‘there may be nothing in it, but it might be worth looking into’), and a wealth of references will be given to the more obscure foreign periodicals.

Ballads about events which happened during the reigns of the later Tudors are far more numerous than those which relate to the reigns of their predecessors. They fall naturally into three classes. There are a few traditional ballads, probably handed down by word of mouth, committed to writing much later, and generally not printed till the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The authors of these are unknown; in the shape in which we possess them they may be the work of more than one hand; in many cases it is certain that they have been pieced together and reshaped by modern editors.

Exceptions, minorities, non-conformities, individual refusals and small group actions, these are words with which historians of the French Resistance learn to live. The words allow social detail to flourish, but they stand in the way of general social conclusions and question the kind of class representation which seems so convincing in René Clément's film of the resistance of railway workers, La Bataille du rail (1946), but which cannot be sustained for the working class as a whole. Is there a social history of the Resistance? Are all generalities suspect? The French nation as a category is far too large, so is the working class, and equally so the bourgeoisie and the peasantry: it has often been argued that social and political categorisation of the Resistance is nothing but a captivating mirage, tantalising every new interpreter who sets out to give much needed structure to empirical research.

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 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.

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.

Originalist jurisprudence, which enjoins a faithful adherence to the values enshrined in the late eighteenth-century Constitution, has become a prominent feature of contemporary American conservatism. Recovering the original meaning of the Constitution is far from straightforward, and raises major issues of historical interpretation. How far do the assumed historical underpinnings of originalist interpretation mesh with the findings of academic historians? To what extent has the conservative invocation of the Founding Fathers obscured a lost American Enlightenment? Nor is ‘tradition’ in American Constitutional law an unproblematic matter. How far does a desire to restore the original meaning of the Constitution ignore the role of ‘stare decisis’ (precedent) in America's common law heritage? It transpires, moreover, that the various schemes of historical interpretation in American Constitutional jurisprudence do not map easily onto a simple liberal–conservative divide.

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.

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.)

In the following paper the term ‘Ancient Briton’ is applied to the whole of the mixed races which inhabited this island prior to the Teutonic irruption. They consisted of the two Celtic families (the Gaels and the Brythons, or Cymri), and the pre-Celtic races. On the divisions of the latter anthropology has not yet decidedly pronounced, though it seems probable that they were not homogeneous. In any case the principal pre-Celtic type at present discovered, which may generically be termed Iberian, and which appears to correspond with that of the original neolithic inhabitants, was dark, small, and short, the average stature being only sixty-three inches. The pure Celt, on the other hand, was extremely tall, the average stature being sixty-nine inches, and that of the Saxon sixty-seven. This agrees with the statements of Polybius, Strabo, and Ammianus Marcellinus as to the height of the Celt, and at the same time accounts for the Britons being spoken of as short and thick-set. For in this country the Celt was found mixed to a large extent with the short pre-Celtic race or races. The people, therefore, that the Saxons had to contend with were, on an average, of shorter stature than themselves. They varied, no doubt, in different parts of the country, but probably the purest Iberian blood, and consequently the shortest stature, would be at the bottom of the social scale. If any pure Celtic blood remained in the country it would be chiefly in the east; and it is to the permanence of this, rather than to the superior stature of the Angles over the rest of the invaders, that I attribute the height of the present inhabitants of the Anglian districts. The prevailing physiognomy of East Anglia also supports this view; the tall stature, brown hair, grey eye, and arched nose of the pure Celt is not uncommon there.

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.