It is now widely agreed that the economy of western Europe contracted in the later Middle Ages, but the causes of this depression and its time-limits are still disputed. Professor Postan argues that the depression was intimately connected with a decline in population beginning early in the fourteenth century and brought about by the operation of Malthusian checks and soil exhaustion. His argument may be briefly summarized. Population grew rapidly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the cultivated area was continuously extended. By 1300, however, both processes had gone too far. The plough had invaded marginal lands—in this context the term means poor lands—unsuited for permanent cultivation and subject to soil exhaustion. The precarious balance between population growth and the means of subsistence depended on the possibility of fresh colonization. When this was at an end, as it was, to all intents, by 1300, Europe was left with a population which it could not feed. Early in the fourteenth century, therefore—perhaps even in the 1290's—famine and disease brought about a long-continued rise in the death-rate, and this, later to be intensified by the plague, aggravated the decline in productivity. Thus the famine of the years 1315–17 was not merely a tragic episode of a kind likely to occur as long as the harvest of one year provided the bread of the next; it marked a turning-point in demographic history.

The first difficulty which confronts the student of the English forest is to be found in the ambiguity of the terms which are used to describe it. In its proper sense the word “forest” denotes either the whole area in which the king's game is protected by a special law, or a separate administrative district within it. But there are other and looser uses to which the term is put in the records. In the first place, it is frequently applied to mere woods in a forest area. Thus the wood of Islip, near Oxford, known by the distinctive name of “Cauda Aliz” or “La Quealiz,” appears at one time as a part of the forest of Brill, at another as a separate forest coupled with it. Brill, in its turn, was merely a part of the forest of Bernwood, which was itself a member of the “Forest between the bridges of Oxford and Stamford”.

THERE is a popular and reasonably accurate view of pre-colonial government in Africa which believes that Africans were governed by rulers who are usually referred to as chiefs. While there were some societies in Africa where authority was exercised in a less obviously hierarchical fashion, most African polities were dominated by individual rulers whose legitimacy depended, as in so many other parts of the world, upon descent and by their near monopoly of material or spiritual means of coercion. Historians of Africa have obviously been interested in the fate of these institutions over time and have broadly concluded that by the twentieth century these monarchies were dying institutions. There are several studies of very varied cases which range from the virtual extinction of chieftaincy at the hands of colonial powers to others in which colonialism deprived traditional rulers of absolute sovereignty and did so by shielding them from the simultaneous corrosion and vitalisation of modernisation. Like most generalisations, this is caricature. But it is fair to say that modern historiography has regarded chiefs and chieftaincy as the peripheral tags of a pre-modern order; where chieftaincy survived into the second half of the twentieth century, it was because of the un-natural, instrumental preservation of these archaic forms of government and value allocation, by colonialism.

Oral history, defined by Ronald Grele as ‘the interviewing of eyewitness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction’, is an invaluable and compelling research method for twentieth-century history. It provides access to undocumented experience, including the life of civic leaders who have not yet written their autobiographies and, more significantly, the ‘hidden histories’ of people on the margins: workers, women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and members of other oppressed or marginalised groups. Oral history interviews also provide opportunities to explore particular aspects of historical experience that are rarely recorded, such as personal relationships, domestic life, and the nature of clandestine organisations. They offer rich evidence about the subjective or personal meanings of past events: what it felt like to get married, to be under fire, to face death in a concentration camp. Oral historians are unique in being able to question their informants, to ask the questions that might not have been imagined in the past and to evoke recollections and understandings that were previously silenced or ignored. We enjoy the pleasures – as well as the considerable challenges – of engaging in active, human relationships in the course of our research.

A Year ago I took as my theme the origin of that comprehensive but limited view of human progress which dominated European historical thought from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. This idea of historical development had the great merit of embracing every aspect of human life from the first moments of history to the last days. It brought together in a single pattern of development the improvement in man's material condition, the discovery and perfecting of the sciences, the movement of empires, and the enlargement of man's spiritual life. Taken as a whole it was one of the grandest expressions of the beneficent unity of nature, reason, and revelation, which has stamped the chief products of European culture during the greater part of its history. From the time of Hugh of St Victor to Voltaire, it continued despite many setbacks and aberrations to be refined and enlarged by scholarship–and never more confidently than in the last moments before its collapse. In the end the system collapsed as a result of a totally unexpected failure in the foundations on which it was based.

I hope the Society will not think that I am wasting its time in taking the European tradition of historical writing as the general theme of the addresses that I am required to deliver during my term of office. Although there have been many studies of the wide range of problems that fall under the general heading of historiography, the study of the aims, methods and limitations of the historians of the past has been somewhat neglected, in this country at least. There are of course some conspicuous exceptions. The historical attitudes and aptitudes of St Augustine, Gibbon and Macaulay have been examined again and again. But outside the great names comparatively little has been done to examine historical works for what they can tell us about the way in which historical writing is affected by the intellectual presuppositions and environment of the writer. As historians we are generally content to use the chronicles and histories of the past quite simply as quarries of facts that require to be sifted and purified to make them usable for our purposes, but do not require any profound investigation of the principles of selection, emphasis or composition that determined their preservation. This is how Stubbs dealt with the many chronicles that he edited so admirably. They were the raw material for his own works and those of other historians. He examined them for reliability, and he asked whether they provided new facts that could not be found elsewhere.

England was a rich country in the eleventh century, far richer than most neighbouring parts of the continent, and this explains the many raids and attempts at conquest which the English suffered in that century. It was the wealth of England, not the inadequacy of the English defences, that tempted so many continental adventurers to come here in search of loot and tribute.

‘The “county”’, said Maitland, ‘is not a mere stretch of land, a governmental district; it is an organized body of men; it is a comnumitas’. For the most part it has not been medievalists who have taken up that theme but historians of the early modern period. Much recent writing on the politics of sixteenth and seventeenth century England has turned on the county and its institutions, for it was there that the ambitions and loyalties of the gentry often found expression and the factions and rivalries of the 1640s first developed. The grand dénouement of the Civil War has stimulated historians to look beneath national and parliamentary affairs to the attitudes of the shires, which so frequently obstructed and distorted the policies devised at Whitehall and Westminster.

It is one of the functions of government to preserve in contentment and balance that society which it rules. Some of the tasks involved in that general purpose are familiar enough. Government exists to maintain peace in the nation—to prevent disturbance, punish crime, and generally ensure that people can lead their lives without threats from others. Government must therefore provide the means for resolving disputes peacefully: it must administer justice and be seen to do so. In addition, since no society can ever stand absolutely still, government is charged with the task of reviewing existing relationships—relationships of rights, duties, burdens and privileges—with an eye to supplying reform, that is, changes designed to keep the general balance and contentment from deteriorating. Most discussions of problems of government revolve around these points. Analysis has concerned itself with the machinery available for discharging these tasks, and assessment has concentrated on establishing the degree of success obtained.

Historians, particularly medieval historians, are vulnerable to the charge that they concentrate their attention upon success—on the successful dynasties, institutions and ideas—and that they thereby misrepresent the past. Thus the political historian sees the ninth century as the crucial period in the evolution of a unitary English kingdom. The four powerful and independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existing in 800—Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex—had been reduced by the end of the century to one, Wessex. But this was achieved not through the assertion of West Saxon supremacy—the overlordship that Egbert won in 829 lastedbut a year—but by the destruction of the other kingdoms by Viking conquest and their partial replacement by new Viking states. Though it is clear to us with hindsight that Alfred's claim to be the ruler of all the English not under Danish rule was the germ of the unification of England under his descendants, no one can have known, when Alfred died in 899, that new Viking armies were not being raised in the Scandinavian homelands to crush the remaining English kingdom. At that time, for most Englishmen, the deepest impression must have been of the defeat and destruction of the English polity and culture.

God Almighty predestinated me to be the ame damnèe of France.’ So wrote Jeremy Bentham on 9 June 1789. It was a moment of frustration for a man who already felt a great opportunity slipping away from him. Opportunity above all was what the French Revolution meant for Bentham. Forty when the States General were summoned, he had for twenty years been convinced of his genius for legislation. Much of that time he had spent upon an immense but never completed Code of law. In 1785 he had gone to Russia, to join his brother Samuel and (he hoped) lay his Code before the Empress Catherine. But Catherine never saw either the Code or its author. Bentham remained secluded in western Russia, translating his work into French; and when the empress visited the district he stayed—stubbornly diffident—in his cottage.

This article examines aspects of the environmental history of the Russian steppes in the long term and in a comparative framework by focusing on the work of the prominent Russian scientist Vasilii Dokuchaev in response to the drought and harvest failure that afflicted large parts of the steppes in 1891. Dokuchaev analysed the causes of the disaster in the long-term context of natural and human-induced changes in the environment. He drew up a plan to address the environmental constraints on agriculture in the region, and led a scientific expedition to examine the feasibility of putting parts of his plan into practice.

(READ 22 October 2004 AT THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND)

The essay is concerned with the retreat from the British empire and specifically with the Scottish aspects of that process. It is now acknowledged that the Scottish role in the imperial project was central. Hence there is a special interest in tracing the response to the end of empire north of the border. Several historians and political scientists have argued that imperial decline was likely to destroy one of the key foundations of the Anglo-Scottish Union. This essay challenges these assumptions by demonstrating that imperial decline failed to produce much political concern in Scotland. The possible reasons for this are considered.

The history of the body is of course contested territory. Postmodern interpretations in particular have moved it from a history of scientific knowledge of its structure and function toward histories of the various meanings, identities and experiences constructed about it. Underlying such interpretations have been large and important claims about the unfortunate consequences of the rise of a political economy associated with capitalism and medicalisation. In contradistinction, this paper offers a view of that historical process in a manner in keeping with materialism rather than in opposition to it. To do so, it examines a general change in body perceptions common to most of the literature: a shift from the body as a highly individualistic and variable subject to a more universal object, so that alterations in one person's body could be understood to represent how alterations in other human bodies occurred. It then suggests that one of the chief causes of that change was the growing vigour of the market for remedies that could be given to anyone, without discrimination according to temperament, gender, ethnicity, social status or other variables in the belief that they would cure quietly and effectively. One of the most visible remedies of this kind was a ‘specific’, the Peruvian, or Jesuits’ bark. While views about specific drugs were contested, the development of a market for medicinals that worked universally helped to promote the view that human bodies are physiologically alike.

IT was a dark November night in 1680 when a gang of masked men burst into Robert Robinson’s isolated house, waking the household with the clatter of their riding boots, swords and muffled curses, and snarling at Robinson, ‘Old rogue, where is thy money?’ After ransacking the room and breaking open a chest, another of the gang ‘did hold a Bible to Robert Robinson to swear whether he had any more gold or silver than what they had taken from him’. Robinson swore that he had no more and ‘Mr Lodge did laugh when he heard Robert Robinson sworn.’ Now the burglary of Robert Robinson’s house near the village of Old Hutton, Westmorland, at about 1.00 am on 4 November 1680 had some very odd features, but none so curious as Mr Lodge’s laughter when the old man was forced to swear. Edmund Lodge was the local schoolmaster and curate. In 1678 he had leased Robinson’s house for three years and the old man was now a ‘tabler’ or lodger in his own home. In time Lodge would move on to be the vicar of Clapham in Lancashire, where he died in 1696. But before then he would be tried and acquitted as one of this band of coiners and robbers. Some of these same desperadoes said that the raid on Robinson’s house had been Lodge’s idea. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Lodge had told the thieves that Robinson had more than £40 in a chest ‘ready to be taken away’; and when the gang broke in, Lodge indulged in a lot of phoney-sounding play-acting with them – one thief shouting at him, ‘damn you for a dog, hold your peace or I will cut your flesh from your bones’.

The use of French in England during the later middle ages has frequently been discussed, but rather surprisingly a large body of relevant documents has hitherto been almost entirely neglected. The documents in question throw much light both on the purposes for which French was used in this country in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and on the classes who employed it, and show that its use was more widespread and that it persisted longer than is generally supposed.

At its lowest and most popular, verity concerning the war between England and France in the fifteenth century was slipped into the minds of its recipients by such itinerant chansonniers as the one who, according to Louis XI, ‘se soit mis a aller par nostre royaume pour chanter et recorder chancons, dictez et records touchant les bonnes novelles et advantures qui nous sont survenues et surviennent chacun jour au bien de nous et de nostre seigneurie’; it could be found obfuscated in the mysteries of semi-heraldic prophecy, to which even so respectable a figure as Christine de Pisan in her old age contributed; its sediment settled in commonplace note-taking on both sides of the Channel.

This paper revisits the question of the impact of the 1848 revolutions on governance and administration across the European states. Few historians would contend that the immediate post-revolutionary years saw a ‘return’ to pre-1848 conditions, but the transitions of the 1850s are usually presented as episodes within a narrative that is deemed to be specific to the respective nation-state. This paper argues that the 1850s saw a profound transformation in political and administrative practices across the continent, encompassing the emergence of new centrist political coalitions with a distinctively post-revolutionary mode of politics characterised by a technocratic vision of progress, the absorption into government of civil-society-based bodies of expertise, and changes in public information management. In short, it proposes that we need to move beyond the restrictive interpretation implied by the tenacious rubric ‘decade of reaction’ towards recognising that the 1850s were – after the Napoleonic period – the second high-water-mark in nineteenth-century political and administrative innovation across the continent. The paper argues, moreover, that these transitions took place on an authentically European basis and that they only come fully into focus when we survey the spectrum of governmental experiences across the European states. The paper closes with some reflections on the broader implications of this reappraisal for our understanding of European history in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century.

Over recent years, questions concerning the character and direction of social change in colonial India have become increasingly complex. Until the 1960s, it remained possible to conceive the coming of British rule as representing ‘the beginnings of modernisation’ and to write Indian history in terms of an ‘heroic’ struggle to fulfil the civilising mission: ‘heroic’, in the British sense, because it largely failed. Except among a narrow stratum of elites, Indian society obviously refused the West's invitation to ‘usher it into history’ and India's culture moved very little towards convergence with the West's.

This study argues that the experience of government, though more clearly articulated after 1400, did not engender realpolitik and made princes and ministers, both the old nobility of service and the newer graduate careerists, more acutely aware of issues of conscience. It traces the anxieties provoked by political experience, their relation to the new spiritual literature addressed to persons with active responsibility, and their resolution after 1410 in a new, tough, realistic but morally sensitive approach to government, associated above all with Henry V of England.