Vernacular poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period survives in considerable bulk—nearly thirty thousand lines. It is certainly a mere fraction of what once existed. What chance has preserved is not always just what one would have chosen, and its historical value is by no means proportional to its extent. It has not been neglected as a source for Anglo-Saxon history, and I do not claim that this paper is about to add to our knowledge of the period. Nevertheless, it may be of some interest to historians to consider both the value and the limitations of Old English verse literature as historical material. I am not concerned to-day with its literary merit, and I propose to narrow my subject by confining myself to English history. The importance of Beowulf and Widsith for the student of Scandinavian history is quite another story.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the religious Orders held a strong position in England, with a fair prospect of extending their influence still further. Before the close, however, though outwardly the monasteries were more im-posing, internally there were already signs of decay. As the friars journeyed through England to execute the numerous Papal mandates, they had ample opportunities of observing the different houses of the religious, and their contemptuous remarks are therefore very suggestive. In their eyes the Cistercians were unlearned farmers, half laymen, and the Benedictines splendid epicures. Matthew Paris was stirred to wrath at the presumption of the friars in daring to criticise. He saw that the very causes which had altered the character of the other religious were at work among the friars themselves. Though scarcely forty years had passed since their founding, they were already occupied in amassing wealth and erecting stately buildings.

The proposed amalgamation of the Royal Historical Society with the Camden Society, from which we hope to see many advantages to both, has led me to submit for consideration a scheme in which both societies might collaborate for the preparation of a competent Bibliography of English History. All students are aware how singularly deficient is our liferature in the department of historical bibliography. France and Germany have now been working in this field with great industry, and more or less success, for more than a century. They have shown us many lacuncæ and not a few errors to avoid; and we may now, at any rate, perceive what schemes are impracticable and what are useless. England, which has with such energy, and I venture to think with such signal success, laboured on a series of exhaustive Calendars of her Manuscript authorities, has been curiously slow to set about a scientific bibliography of the published materials of her own history.

On this occasion, last year, when I first had the honour of addressing you from this chair, I deplored the loss of two of our leading historians—the Bishops of Oxford and London—both of whom were Fellows of our Society. Since that date two other great men, to whose illness I then referred, have been removed from us—Lord Acton and Dr. S. R. Gardiner. To my last year's address, as delivered, I ventured subsequently to add some remarks on these notable writers and men of learning, and will therefore on the present occasion do no more than remind you of their deaths, and express the hope that we may, to the best of our powers, follow their example and imitate their high endeavours in the cause of historical science.

On the corresponding occasion last year, I ventured to offer some remarks on the subject of medieval Welsh lawbooks, and more particularly on the editing of them. When edited, they serve as historical evidence. I therefore propose on this present occasion to consider the sort of historical evidence that they contain, and the kind of historical question that they raise. As I have to operate within the narrow compass of an hour, I must limit my field of view, and this can be done quite simply. A Welsh lawbook was made up of a series of what, in the absence of a recognized technical term, may conveniently be called ‘tractates’. I am going to consider just one of those tractates. It is, in more than one sense, the most easily distinguishable of them all. It is also the one that forms the very first part of the text of the Welsh lawbooks, coming immediately after the opening prologue. From its situation at the very beginning of the text, it should be the most inescapable document in the lawbooks—though, as Edgar Allan Poe demonstrated in a famous story, a document situated in the most obtrusive position is precisely the one that may most easily escape notice. It is quite a sizeable document, running to some twenty pages of modern print. It is extant both in medieval Latin and in medieval Welsh.

In the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th Series, Vol. I., pp. 28, etc., I commented upon a thirteenth-century Survey of the Manor of Martham, Norfolk, which seemed to carry back the conditions then existing (both as regards the tenants and the agriculture) to a very much earlier period. The use of the old English word “eriung” (ploughing), to describe a full villein land, implied its continuous use from Angle times all through the Danish occupation. The universal intermixture of lands held by the two classes of villeins and sokemen (by which terms alone the tenants were called), together with the obvious inter-relation of their families, pointed to a common origin and a generally accepted equality of status which was apparently still existent in the thirteenth century. In view of the fact that the manorial conditions of compulsory service had been introduced by the Bishop in 1101 for his newly-founded monastery at Norwich, it was felt not unreasonable to date back to that period the conditions disclosed in the Survey. This would bring us to within a few years of Domesday Book, where the lands are described as almost exclusively held by freemen.

“ Experiments in Exchequer Procedure ” may suggest a series of unimportant financial developments, with only a remote interest for students of medieval history, and of no value to anyone else. But finance lies at the bottom of most medieval, as well as of most modern, historical problems: the complaints of the barons in 1215 are chiefly financial in origin, while the struggle over the Charters is the central point round which our enquiry is built. Moreover, in these years changes took place in exchequer procedure which laid the foundations for the new structure which gradually superseded the old in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—a structure different from its predecessor, though the old forms were maintained, a not uncommon feature in English administrative history.

The commercial relations of England with Muscovy have been already investigated at various times by the author of this paper, by Professor Scott, by Dr. Gerson, in America, and lately by Miss Mildred Wretts-Smith; but the relations of Holland with Muscovy are, I believe, still little known.

The Order of Preachers was created under the skilled direction of two great men: Dominic of Caleruega and Jordan of Saxony. Whatever else they may have been, both were brilliant organizers; they sketched between them the most sophisticated constitutional organization known to the Middle Ages; for good or ill, they created for us the idea and technique of committee government. Both, it is clear, had tidy and lucid minds. We know that Jordan wrote excellent Latin, was capable of making plain in a few words the nature of the casting vote in general chapter, and equally capable of communicating to his friend Diana Dandalo, and to us, the inwardness of spiritual friendship and the delight of missionary work among the students of Bologna and Paris, many of whom he gathered into the Dominican Order.

This résumé of some of the problems connected with the life of Richard de Bury is complementary to three noteworthy articles by Father Ghellinck in the Révue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique for 1922-3, in which he used the Philobiblon and an abundance of other literary and record sources to place the Bishop in his setting as the greatest bibliophile of medieval Europe. That admirable contribution to the history of literature and manuscripts still leaves room, however, for some remarks on the history of Bury's life, as civil servant, diplomat, and patron of letters; and this will involve a discussion of his Liber Epistolaris.

If study of the university can have any place in the general history of society, it must be understood as a part of a much larger historical phenomenon, of whose vastness and complexity the university's records themselves make us aware. In the sixteenth century we are conscious of powerful currents of social change and energy upon which the universities floated with little or no power of control: a rapidly growing population, geographically and economically on the move; a burgeoning school system; urban wealth growing and changing location, but always under the massive dominance of London; an active land-market; rise in prices; and the work of governments, both national and local, concerned with education and its consequences. This is the setting of Tudor society, and only special optical devices will enable us to pick out the university and set it in the foreground. In the process some distortion is inevitable. An indication of the problems that occur in university history may be found in the view of a recent student of Tudor Cambridge who, while acknowledging that one contribution of the universities to the complex change within English society was ‘the creation of a more refined and integrated cultural and intellectual milieu’ centred upon London and the court, finds the truly significant contribution in a more informed, vigorous and tenacious local solidarity in the ‘country’. Another historian of Elizabethan England tells us that in the universities, ‘the interesting thing, as so often in English life, is the extent and intimacy of the social mixture’.

In rising to address you I cannot but feel that I am occupying the place of one who was illustrious not only by the accomplishment of his great work, the “History of Greece,” but by his extensive learning, his love of liberty, and his reverence for ancient institutions, combined with readiness to embrace truth from whatever quarter it might come. These qualities won him the attachment of the society in which he lived, and the admiration and respect of the nation to which he belonged.

A complaint frequently voiced by historians of Jacobitism is that their subject is plagued by a breed of authors with a passion for secret agents, romantic uprisings, and princes in the heather. It is not so often admitted, however, just how intractable the professionals themselves find the topic and their substantial failure to give any coherent account of it. Jacobitism appears as the major issue in British politics in the early-eighteenth century; it was associated with wide-spread disorder, recurrent national crises, and a series of rebellions and attempted invasions; but its actual organization and the extent of its support remains surprisingly obscure. This is partly so because the source-material is notoriously difficult to handle and ranges from a mass of ciphered correspondence in the Stuart papers to the diplomatic archives of half-a-dozen European states. To study it is to enter a world both of illusion and deliberate misrepresentation. Would-be revolutionaries tended to imagine themselves perpetually on the verge of success, while it often suited the interests of the British government to assert that the nation was threatened with subversion and imminent invasion. But the weakness of Jacobite historiography is more fundamental than a problem with the sources. It lies in an addiction to detailed narrative unsupported by adequate analysis and a fixed assumption that the importance of the movement was its potential for effecting a revolution by armed force. This paper adopts a different approach. It examines the structure of the Jacobite organization and questions whether it was at any time between 1710 and 1715 capable of realising its aims; it argues rather that its activities contributed to a great popular myth, which was to be of critical significance in the struggle of men and parties which preceded the establishment of the Whig oligarchy.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of historical reenactment of Great War battles as an effort to create what is termed ‘living history’. Thousands of people all over the world have participated in such reenactments, and their number increased significantly during the period surrounding the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. Through a comparison with representations of war in historical writing, in museums and in the performing arts, I examine the claim of reenactors that they can enter into historical experience. I criticise this claim, and show how distant it is from those who do not claim to relive history but (more modestly) to represent it. In their search for ‘living history’, reenactors make two major errors. They strip war of its political content, and they sanitise and trivialise combat.

There are few subjects in our country's history which are so enshrouded in mystery as the so-called conspiracy which was designed to place Perkin Warbeck upon the English throne. It is with great diffidence that I present the following account, which I have collected from various sources, being well aware that the subject is one which has occupied and baffled many of our ablest historians.