The fact that Spain is, to date, the only western European country which has ever been an Islamic colony still seems to banish her to the fringe of her neighbours' historical consciousness. Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs rests with the Spaniards themselves. In most cases and in most periods, the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, used the Pyrenees as an intellectual, as well as a physical, barrier, and considered the Peninsula's problems as distinct from those of the rest of the European continent. A strong reason for adopting this approach is the remarkable co-existence of Islamic, Christian and Jewish civilization between 711 and 1492, which placed Spain and Portugal within both medieval Christendom and the Islamic world of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The successes of co-operation between the three religions which were achieved during this period are worthy of greater recognition than they generally receive, but the intention here is to investigate the causes of the failures which brought co-existence to an end, concentrating on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in a large, late-medieval Castilian town.

During the Anglo-American Conference last July I made the acquaintance of an American Professor who was engaged in a special study of Anglo-Spanish relations in the eighteenth century. She (for the Professor was feminine) made some observations that interested me. She said that the century was often described as the period of a second Hundred Years' War between England and France, but that this might be more accurately described as a Hundred Years' War between England and Spain. She added that the cause of that war was trade disputes. I, with my head full of the asiento and the permitted ship, replied that there were constant quarrels about colonial trade, but she contended that England was equally interested in the domestic trade with Spain itself. Subsequently she was kind enough to send me some interesting papers on Spanish history in the eighteenth century which she had contributed to the Smith College Studies in History.

The text of the forged Letter of Prester John which began to circulate in Europe about the year 1165 was settled and printed by Professor Fr. Zarncke more than sixty years ago, and although later scholars have added their contributions to the subject and fresh manuscripts have come to light, students as a whole must still base their studies on Professor Zarncke's learned and painstaking work.

The Will of Sir Jerome Alexander, a parchment transcript of which is preserved in the Chief Probate Office, Dublin, is a document of more than ordinary interest; even with its cumbrous repetitions we owe no apology for producing it in full:–

“In the name of God Amen. I, Sr Jerome Alexander of the City of Dublin, one of the unprofitable servants of Almighty God, being of a perfect sound disposing memory, praised bee God, this three and twentieth day of March in the yeare of the Raigne of our Soveraigne Lord Charles the Second of that name by the grace of God of England, Scotland, Fraunce and Ireland King Defender of the Faith &c. the two and twentieth, and hereby renounceing and admitting and declareing all former Wills and Testaments by mee at any time heretofore made to bee utterly void & of none effect, doe declare this to bee my last true Will and Testament in manner & form following and doe now soe declare it to bee. And first of all I resigne my soul into the hands of Jesus Christ my blessed Saviour and Redeemer, confidently trusting and assureing myselffe in by and through his onely merritts and mediation to receive life everlasting; and I doe hereby profess myselfe to dye as I have allways lived, a sonne of the Church of England, which is the most absolute and best forme of government in all the world,’ twere to bee heartily wished that it were practised in all the Churches of Christendome, and my body I commend unto the earth from whence it came to receive decent and comely buryall, without any greate pompe or ceremonies whatso-ever, not doubting but at the last day it shall bee raised againe and united unto my soule with it for to partake of immortall and everlasting happiness.

My purpose is to trace the development of the study of one particular century in our national history, to show how the knowledge we now possess of it was acquired; how gradually the darkness which overhung the time was dissipated and the truth part by part revealed, and finally by what hands this work was achieved; and by what general causes its progress was promoted or retarded.

AS far back as 1877 H. S. Sweetman brought to the notice of Irish scholars a letter which Robert de Ufford, justiciar Ireland, wrote to Edward I in 1277 and the king's answer. The justiciar told the king that ‘the Irish offer 7,000 marks for a grant from the king of the common laws of the English, and much desire to have an answer thereupon’. In his reply the king said that he had deliberated with his council, and that ‘it seemed meet to them that a grant of English laws should be made, because the laws which the Irish use are detestable to God and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed laws’. But it was first necessary to obtain the common consent of the people, or at least of well-affected prelates and magnates of Ireland; and the justiciar was accordingly instructed to hold a conference and ascertain the opinion of such suitable persons.

It would be impossible, even if it were desirable, within the limits of this essay, to give a detailed account or even an adequate summary of the causes of the outbreak of the Second Civil War ; but I may be permitted to dwell briefly upon the military conditions under which the crisis was to be met.

The first of modern colonial empires, the dominion of the Portuguese on the coasts and seas of Africa and India is in one sense more interesting than any of its successors. For it is, of course, essentially and peculiarly connected with the beginnings of that expansion of Europe and Christendom which, above all else, marks off the modern from the mediæval world. In other words, the growth of Portugal through discovery into a position of commercial and naval leadership is of general value to the whole of the Western world, in a way that is not shared by the similar and later growth of Spain, Holland, France or England. The development of these states belongs mainly to their own history. Immensely as they influenced one another, they none of them, to the same extent as Portugal, opened the way by which alone Europe could expand at all. None of them can rival her in the credit of breaking down the middle wall of superstitious terror which parted the unknown worlds along and beyond the ocean from the Christendom of Dante and Chaucer. None of them, in the same special originative way, can claim the glory that Camoens claims for his nation, the glory of

Opening up those wastes of tide,

No generation openèd before.

‘Failing help from God and Saint Martin, the canons found it necessary to renew their complaint before the lord Hugh, their abbot and count’.

‘For almost six years’, the canons of Saint-Martin de Tours had been trying to regain possession of land in the neighbouring diocese of Poitiers. They complained that through ‘the cupidity of Frankish men’ they had been deprived of two estates; and, because ‘they could never get justice for their claim’, they were asking their lay-abbot, Hugh, for his advice. Hugh counselled them ‘to go again and put their claim to the lord Count Ebles, his special friend’ and to Ebles' own faithful men (iterum ad domnum Ebolum comitem, suum specialem amicum, et praescriptos suos fideles). Where God and his saint had not come to the canons' aid, cooperation between the two most powerful laymen of these regions broke this judicial deadlock: after intervention by Counts Hugh and Ebles, the viscounts of Thouars recognised that they had unjustly deprived Saint Martin of his property, and the two estates could be returned to the community of Saint-Martin once diey had renounced their possession of the villae of Curçay and Antogné.

In my third year of office I may, I hope, congratulate the Society on the satisfactory condition disclosed by the report which is in your hands.

The volume of ‘Transactions’ for the year 1902–3 contains some valuable papers based on original research and providing a varied entertainment for the historical reader. They show, as usual, a dominant interest in British history, a fact of which I do not complain; but I should be glad if the sphere of our activity were more frequently extended, so as to take in ancient and foreign history as well.

It is with no little diffidence that, in giving my first presidential address, I follow in the steps of so many distinguished predecessors—men notable in various walks of life—historians, statesmen, administrators, diplomatists. The Royal Historical Society has had the good fortune to be presided over by such men as George Grote, Lord John Russell, Lord Aberdare, and Sir M. E. Grant Duff. My immediate predecessor in this chair, Dr. Ward, whom we so unwillingly released from his presidency to fill a larger sphere of usefulness as Master of Peterhouse and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, is known to most of us here as the author of an admirable history of the English drama, the biographer of Chaucer and Wotton, the translator of Curtius's ‘History of Greece,’ and a distinguished writer on various epochs of German history. We have all of us admired the combined courtesy, dignity, and learning with which he discharged the duties of President during his too short tenure of the office but probably only Members of the Council are fully aware of the energy and enthusiasm which he threw into the task of directing the efforts of the Society. To him is chiefly due the successful initiation of a movement for the promotion of advanced historical study in this great but ill-provided capital, which has issued in the establishment, I am glad to say, of two lectureships in the higher branches of historical learning. We parted from him, as I have said, most reluctantly, but we feel confident that the qualities which so fully justified our choice here will insure him full success in the position which he now holds—the practical headship of one of our two great and ancient Universities.

The primary source material for the art historian is of course the work of art, and this in itself places him in a fortunate position because the permanent relevance of the work of art is, I take it, self-evident. For the art historian, the work of art is an historical fact, pre-selected for generally accepted aesthetic reasons. But the work of art has no absolute meaning: it does not exist in a vacuum. It has both what we might call a history and a geography—the history being that record of interpretation and evaluation which accrues to the work of art from the moment of its creation down to the present day; and the geography being the particular artistic and social context of its original creation. The history can at times be very misleading: it is obvious that each generation is going to interpret the past as it wishes, and no judgment can be objective. So it is the geography that is more important, and this is extremely difficult to define. But if we are to understand the work of art, we need to enquire into the circumstances of its creation: we must ask, what did this painting or sculpture or building signify when it first appeared? Only from such specific investigations can one proceed to general propositions about the state of art at any particular moment, and perhaps also about the state of society which produced the art.

In the eastern part of the Duchy of Burgundy, in a region which now forms the southern portion of the Côte-d'Or Department, lies Cîteaux. The country around, after gently sloping from the hills on which Dijon stands, some four or five leagues to the north, here expands into a rolling plain formed by the basin of the Saône, and not far away southwards there is the junction of this river with its tributaries, the Doubs and the Denthe. The Côte-d'Or hills to the north-west protect it from some of the more violent storms, and under their shelter and through the congenial nature of the soil has grown up the great vine-growing industry of the district. Around Cîteaux in old days the country was wild, marshy, and a tangled mass of scrub, and even to-day the soil here is marshy, and there is an abundance of pools. The name itself shows the nature of the place: in its older form Cisteaux, or Cistercium, it seems to be derived either from Cisternæ, which Du Cange explains as ‘a marsh with stagnant pools’; or from Cistels, as the Bollandists give the form of the word; or Citeals, which is the form of the word preferred by Courtépée, with a variant Cisteauls. These last are explained as old French words meaning marsh rushes. Whichever be the correct derivation, the fact pointed to is the same; the word itself shows the swampy, unpromising nature of the country. But here was to spring up the mother-house of one of the greatest and most powerful of the religious orders of the Church, which some ot its adherents could claim to have been the mother of 10,000 dependent houses, 4,000 male, and 6,000 female, by the seventeenth century.

The Franks were the most successful of the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and the problem of the nature and date of their settlement, bound up as it is with that of the origins of the linguistic frontier in Belgium, is one of the most complex of early medieval history. It is also one of the most interesting, for whatever solution we find for it must influence our interpretation of the historical evolution which gave rise to the Frankish monarchy on the one hand and to the modern Belgian state on the other. It involves a multitude of interrelated questions: the origins of the population, language and customary law of the Germanic (Flemish) part of Belgium; the alignment of the linguistic frontier between Flemish, Walloon and German; the extent of Germanic colonization in the former Latin-speaking regions of northern Gaul; and the agrarian organization and the forms of land settlement in the same region.

In the middle of the seventh century Rome became again, as in ancient times, the ‘centre of the universe’. Thousands of pilgrims came from distant lands, Spain, Gaul, and Britain, to worship at the shrines of the saints. We are told how these pilgrims, when first they caught sight of Rome in the distance, would fall on their knees, chant hymns, and march down to the city. Arrived there they would seek shelter in the various pilgrim-houses, where they would find fellow-countrymen to act as guides to the churches and catacombs; and after their return to their own country they would spread wonderful tales of the greatness and magnificence of the holy town and of the Papacy, until others were moved to set out on a like pilgrimage. Thus the bond between the nations and the ‘Mother of Mankind’ was stronger than one of mere political needs and advantages. It was religious zeal which sent the first newly converted Anglo-Saxons to Rome. In 689 Csedwalla, King of Wessex, after ruling for two years, took ship to Rome, seeking, as the greatest earthly honour to which he could attain, baptism in the atrium of St. Peter's. The Romans of old had been accustomed to see kings of distant lands either as captives following a triumph, or as vassals pleading before their tribunals. Their descendants now for the first time saw a barbarian king in their city. He was led by the Pope to the baptistery in the Lateran, and there on Easter Sunday, dressed in a white robe, his long hair loose, and bearing lighted tapers in his hand, he was baptised from Constantine's porphyry bow and given the name of Peter.

Though with the passing of October 14 the major junketings are perhaps over, the year is still 1966, the nine-hundredth anniversary of the Norman Conquest of England, and such an occasion, I trust, is a sufficient excuse for reading a paper to you on the subject. There are many more qualified than I to undertake the task, but at least I can claim to have been working—though scarcely alone—on a book about the Conquest over the last few years, and the vastly enjoyable experience has prompted certain thoughts which become increasingly strongly held as I progress. Some of those thoughts I should like now to put together into what I hope may be a coherent pattern.

Postmodernism is now firmly established as a critique of historical narrative; this paper looks at its implications for architectural history, where the built object is viewed through many texts. The example of the department store in Paris shows how the process of writing history has been simplified to serve different purposes, while the complexity of different viewpoints and contradictions within and between them can be restored and emphasised to give a more truthful historical account. Cubist painting is proposed as a useful analogy for reconciling this process of historical representation to Postmodern thought.