One of the historian's most difficult tasks is to distinguish between mere alterations of idiom, fashion or expression, and substantive changes of attitude and behaviour from one epoch to another. Efficient reforming ministers and officials can be found at work in English central government in (I should guess) every century from the twelfth (if not earlier) to the twentieth. Yet are these men and their achievements as important in explaining the development of administration as technological innovations such as new kinds of paper, the printing press, shorthand writing, the typewriter and the duplicating machine, and finally the telephone and its electronic successors? The most characteristic features of bureaucracy in the everyday, commonsense usage of the term—pen-pushers at desks, jacks-in-office, delays, high-handedness, form-filling, record-keeping, and so on—can of course be found many centuries before there was a modern civil service; that is, one with competitive entry examinations, grades, salaries, security of tenure, retirement pensions and the rest. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the description ‘persons in offices’ or simply ‘officers’ was normal, rather than office-holders, while the designation ‘civil servants’ was slow to take hold even during the nineteenth century.

For an adequate understanding of the significance of the “keepers” and the “justices” of the peace, precise answers are needed to several questions. How frequent were breaches of the peace and crimes of violence in the reign of Edward III? Was the situation worse than in the reign of his father or than in the time of the Paston Letters? The orthodox view of the universal prevalence of violence, long ago vividly presented by the late L. Owen Pike, has been recently challenged in an article on the internal commerce of fourteenth-century England. Professor Willard's conclusion, based largely on transportation records, is that the “danger of the morrow's journey need not disturb the rest of travellers in an inn” and that “the transportation of goods (other than money) was to a high degree free from danger.” The material used by Pike, and other similar material, certainly afford arguments against so optimistic a theory. The speeches and petitions in parliament and the language of the commissions of Trailbaston, of oyer and terminer, and of the peace, imply persistent attacks on travellers, especially when going to fairs and markets, and innumerable instances of highway robbery, mayhem and homicide. Nor does the language seem exaggerated as one examines the records of courts and the cases appearing on Close and Patent Rolls. Without a quantitative analysis of all possible evidence, it is difficult to ascertain the truth as between these two conflicting opinions.

THE New World of the sixteenth century grew directly out of the Old not merely in a physical but in an intellectual sense. The men of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who found the new lands overseas, were educated in a humanistic tradition which made the classical past, especially the Roman past, alive and relevant to them. Consequently, there is an element of continuity in the thinking about the discoveries and the problems they presented on the basis of older intellectual concepts, which continues to influence much of the thought of the sixteenth century about cosmography, natural history and about the planting of colonies in lands unknown to the ancients. It is astonishing how Ptolemy remained the standard bearer of the new discoveries: maps of the New World and other novel areas, added to his Geography for the first time in 1513, continued to proliferate in edition after edition until by the later sixteenth century the original maps and text had been so overlaid with new matter that they bore even less relationship to the original than the first issue of Gray's Anatomy has to the current edition. It was much the same with Pliny: the Natural History remained the starting point for New World and Asiatic botany and zoology throughout the sixteenth century. Oviedo in 1526 paid his respects to the master before suggesting that genuine novelties could now be added to his text: well before the end of the century Pliny too had been swamped in new material, though his text was also retained intact.

The hospital was brought to England by the Normans and rapidly absorbed into pre-Conquest frameworks of land-tenure, custom and alms. These charitable houses became a recognised and popular type of house, distinct in form and development from both monasteries and French hospitals. Although its constitution was not written, the early hospital had a consistent arrangement, physical in substance and purpose: it was a form of sited alms, with regular, visible, dependent provisioning. Its customary systems of support were public demonstrations (and thus repetitive commemorations) not only of the nature of its endowment and alms, but also of the founder's intent and generosity.

The title of this paper may raise false hopes in the minds of many; and it will be well to explain what has been attempted. English writers of the later twelfth century have on the whole been neglected; and when I was investigating the life and works of Alexander Nequam, it was necessary, in order to keep a sense of proportion, to try to learn something about the schools of the time, and to look at the work of some of his contemporaries. One or two things of interest have come to light, which I have tried to set out here. But the picture is far from complete. Nothing, for example, is said about legal studies.

One of the most obvious novelties of the eleventh century is the appearance of the crowd on the stage of public events. It would not claim to rival its counterparts in Antiquity or the Renaissance in the permanence of its presence or the scale of its activity, still less in the vividness with which it can be portrayed, or the wonders of analysis that can be performed upon it by its historians. Some of them, indeed, might hesitate to distinguish categorically between the populus which attacked the clergy of Milan in 1056 or formed an army for Peter the Hermit and that which surrounded the tomb of a Merovingian saint or attended the court of a Carolingian lord. But to indulge that hesitation to the point of silence would be to grant to semantics priority over common sense. It is impossible to contemplate the events of the eleventh century, to observe the turbulence of Florence in the 1060s or the Flemish and Rhineland cities in the 1070s, to hear a Gregory VII appealing to the people to boycott their priests and spurn their bishops, a Sigebert of Gembloux lamenting ‘sudden unrest among the populace, new treacheries of servants against their masters and masters’ mistrust of their servants', or a Marbod of Rennes protesting that to denounce the errors of the clergy before the people was ‘not to preach but to undermine’, without conceding not only that a new fear of social upheaval had been generated, but that in some manner it was founded in reality, that the course of events had been changed, and changed significantly on occasion, by the availability of the force of popular indignation to those who knew how to raise it. And quite clearly ‘knowing how to raise it’ was, for the greater part of the century, a religious matter, at least in the sense that the language that stirred the passions of the mob was religious language: the cry that brought out the crowds was that priests were unchaste, or simoniacal or corrupt, a whole generation and more before it became effective to raise the shout for a commune, or against the Jews, or towards the holy places.

The rise and fall of the house of York is a story which sits uneasily towards both revolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, in general, attempts to tidy away the political process of Lancastrian and Yorkist times into the displacement of one type of régime by another always fail to convince. They do so because as a régime neither Lancaster nor York kept still long enough to be impaled on a categorical definition. The political life and death of both dynasties composes the pattern, changing yet constant, of a set of variations on the theme of an aristocratic society pre-dominantly kingship-focused and centripetal rather than locality-focused and centrifugal. In so far as the political process conformed to the social order, the households of the great were the nodal connections in which relationships of mutual dependence cohered. Those retinues, fellowships, affinities (for the vocabulary of the time was rich in terms overlapping but with nuances of descriptive emphasis) have now been studied both in their general conformation and in several particular instances; I have here attempted for the central affinity of the king over one generation not a formal group portrait but a sketch focused on the middle distance of figures in a landscape. The meagreness of household records in the strict sense is a problem we must learn to live with. But it would seem sensible to make a virtue of necessity and follow the life-line of what evidence there is to the conclusion that if an understanding of the household is only possible by attending to its wider context, so an understanding of that wider political scene requires some attention to the household.

TWO views are current concerning the political views of Thomas Cromwell. One—the more common—holds that he believed in absolute monarchy and desired to establish it in England. The Abbé Constant, summarizing (as was his wont) other people's views in language free from other people's reservations, stated it most starkly: he thought that Cromwell aimed at making Henry ‘tout-puissant’ and that his ministry was the golden age of Tudor despotism. Quite recently, an ingenious theory, buttressed with a misunderstood document, based itself on this general conviction. This view has suffered curiously little from the growing realization that the Henrician Reformation rested on conscious co-operation with Parliament and that the propagandists of the time never produced a theory of absolute monarchy. Pollard, the defender of Henry VIII's constitutionalism, seems to have held that, though the king had no ambitions for a genuine despotism, Cromwell certainly harboured such ideas. The other view, recently given support by Dr. Parker, holds that Cromwell did not bother at all about theoretical issues, that his ‘resolutely Philistine type of mind’ despised political theory, and that he never thought beyond the establishment of a sovereign monarchy. Thus, too, Mr. Baumer thought that Cromwell saw in Parliament ‘only a means of executing the royal will’, but also that he ‘had no theoretical views whatever about the relation of the king to the law’—passages hard to reconcile but suggestive of Dr. Parker's views rather than M. Constant's.

SINCE the days of John Foxe, ecclesiastical historians of the 1520s have concentrated on the Odysseys and Passions of the earliest English Protestants. Their Catholic opponents, with the notable exceptions of John Fisher and Thomas More, have been largely ignored. The object of this essay is to redress the balance by examining the English commitment to orthodoxy in the 1520s, a commitment made primarily by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, but seconded enthusiastically by the academic community. It aims not to rewrite the entire ecclesiastical history of the decade, but merely to draw attention to an important though neglected element in the story. Nevertheless, it hopes to be a contribution to the reassessment of the English Reformation that has been carried out in much recent research. The essay is primarily an investigation of polemics, rather than of politics or of popular religion. Beginning with Henry VIII's decision early in 1521 to take up the pen personally against Luther, it draws out the connection of this with the promulgation in England of Exsurge Domine, the Papal condemnation of Luther, and suggests a solution to the vexed question of the ‘real’ authorship of Henry's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. It investigates the continuation of this polemical assault on Luther by English scholars; and examines its international dimension, gathering evidence of the patronage and cooperation extended to Luther's continental opponents by the English authorities. In conclusion it proposes that the strongly orthodox commitment of the English authorities in the 1520s ebbed away only as the pressing needs of the ‘King's Great Matter’ occasioned competing, and ultimately conflicting, intellectual priorities.

We live in an age (perhaps particularly apparent to those of us who work in universities) when informality is de rigueur, its own conventions and forms to be mastered if one is to live easily and effectively with colleagues, students, acquaintances or even the members of one's family. That it was not always so is a truism which attests to the reality of social change. One of the markers of such change, or of changes in social expectation, will be the realignment of relationships between the formal and the informal and of perceptions which govern interpretation of such relationships. In an age of revolution, or revolutionary aspiration, we might expect such realignments to be particularly dynamic or, more radically, for the categories of informal and formal themselves to be called in question.

Addressing a Society consecrated to the advance of historical studies is bound to be an awesome experience: it is a particularly sobering one for me because the central argument of this paper would have been familiar to British historians writing in the early nineteenth century. In his Constitutional History of England, published in 1827, Hallam asserted, seemingly without fear of contradiction, that

‘it must be evident to every person who is at all conversant with the publications of George II's reign, with the poems, the novels, the essays, and almost all the literature of the time, that what are called the popular or liberal doctrines of government were decidedly prevalent. The supporters themselves of the Walpole and Pelham administrations … made complaints, both in parliament and in pamphlets, of the democratical spirit, the insubordination to authority, the tendency to republican sentiments, which they alleged to have gained ground among the people.’1

‘In England’, Sir John Seeley once wrote, ‘it is our custom to I alter things butto leave their names unaltered.’ Anyone who wished to test the truth of the dictum historiographically might examine the history of the word ‘mercantilism’. It has borne many, sometimes oddly conflicting, meanings, but they have had at any rate one thing in common: they have all been in some degree unpalatable to those reared in the traditions of English liberal thought. It was as the conspiracy of a mercantile minority out to line its pockets at the expense of the rest of the community that the system was first depicted by the classical economists. The interpretation of the German school of historical economists a century later was certainly no less distasteful to the liberal mind. To Bismarckian Germans it might appear seemly to condone the pursuit of aggression and covet its rewards. But even Chamber-lainites—like W. A. S. Hewins—amongst English historians had their doubts, and to George Unwin state ‘policy’ was simply a sham—the supreme illustration of the evils of bigness. The economic actions of the political body were not even the early thrustings of a lusty infant, but the morbid twitchings of disease. And Unwin, who believed that historians should be concerned with the life of communities, not with the actions of states, found more sympathizers in his profession (one suspects) than Cunning-ham, who was nearer to the German tradition. Others, misliking what they took to be the moral and intellectual confusion of mer-cantilists and their works, agreed to deny any title of coherence to folly so diverse and deplorable.

This paper argues that the meaning of consumer society has changed over the last half century, principally through the prioritisation of choice over access. It does this through an examination of the global consumer movement and a consideration of its successes and failures. It demonstrates that through the movement's own tactics, and the defeats it suffered by opponents of regulation, its earlier emphasis on the right of consumers to enjoy basic needs has given way to a greater focus on choice. Consequently, the changing fortunes of consumer activism around the world both reflect and explain the reorientation of global consumer society over the last few decades.

The importance of the Caroline Book of Orders has not gone unrecognized by historians of early Stuart England. Admirers of the personal rule of Charles I saw in it a cornerstone of that regime's paternalism. Historians of county government, while noting doubts about its centralizing tendencies, have shown it pushing local magistrates towards more efficient methods of poor relief and social welfare. Students of popular attitudes and the moral assumptions of the crowd find the Book of Orders confirming traditional values which helped to guarantee social cohesion in periods of economic crisis. Yet the origins of so remarkable an enactment have attracted little attention, beyond the unfounded assumption that it owed much to Laudian policies of ‘Thorough’. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that its genesis has no less historical interest than its impact; and that we shall better appreciate its social and political implications if we are aware of the complex forces which shaped it.

PATRIARCHY was very old when Queen Elizabeth ascended the English throne. Historians have sought its origins in die Old Testament record of the creation of Jewish monotiieism and in the social conditions of Hebrew society. They have explored die contributions of classical Greece and early Christian thinking to its development and evolution. By the time that the Tudor dynasty ruled in England, the institutionalised male dominance over women and children in die family and die extension of diat subordination to women in society in general, die scriptural patriarchy with which I am concerned, had become so deeply embedded diat it has appeared immutable. Something so permanent, something that was so given, has seemed not to deserve scrutiny by die historians of early modern England. It was socialist and radical feminists who took up die notion of patriarchy in die 1960s because they needed a concept which would help diem to theorise male dominance. From dieir contemporary perspective also, patriarchy appeared immovable and monumental. There was a tendency among them at first to study it as such: feminist historians approached die past wim die premise diat there has always been an undifferentiated and consistent male commitment to domination and control over women in every sphere of life. The conflation of patriarchy with misogyny, I suggest, produced an unhistorical patriarchy as die staple of women's history. It is only fairly recendy diat historical studies of gender have broken free from diese shackles, diat historians have begun to penetrate die discourses and strategies dirough which men have—or have not— coerced, or oppressed or subordinated women through die ages.

In 1152 King Stephen and his army began an unexpected siege of Newbury castle. The castellan, John fitz Gilbert, warned by his constable, was able to beguile the King and put the castle in a suitable state of defence. To achieve the necessary breathing space for this he surrendered a younger son, William, as a hostage. When his trickery was discovered the boy's life was at risk; it was proposed that he should be hanged or projected over the castle walls. Stephen sent messengers to John fitz Gilbert, threatening his execution. To them John gave the daunting reply that he was not particularly worried since he had the hammer and the anvil for forging even better sons. In fact the boy charmed King Stephen and survived to become Earl of Pembroke and regent of England. Whether the tale is anything more than a tall story it is impossible to say. At least it presents a problem. Family relationships mattered—or did they? In what ways and to what extent did they matter?

English historians have concentrated almost exclusively upon the constitutional and legal aspects of town development. They have concerned themselves with the borough rather than the town, with legal concepts rather than topography or social history, just as the agrarian historians have been pre-occupied with the manor rather than the village. Local historians of towns and villages have, with two or three notable exceptions, followed suit in this ill-balanced emphasis. The result is that we know surprisingly little about the economy, social structure, and physical growth of English towns before the latter part of the eighteenth century.

For our ancestors the end of the twenty-year conflict with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France came with the signing of what was called the ‘General Peace’ in April 1814. All over the country the occasion was celebrated with thanksgiving services, public feasts, open-air sports, fireworks and processions with tableaux depicting Wellington, Blucher, the Tsar Alexander and the vanquished Bonaparte. At Gainsborough in Lincolnshire the future Chartist Thomas Cooper, then nine years old, and some other boys dressed themselves up in ribbons and hats, labelled with the names of these contemporary military heroes (Cooper was Wellington), and went round the neighbouring squires and farmers soliciting money. They sang some of Bishop Ken's hymns and at theend, in imitation of what they had heard on procession day, shouted ‘Peace and Plenty! God Save the King!’ followed by three cheers, for which one benevolent old squire gave them a whole half-crown.

During 1301 the propaganda war between the king of England and the Guardians of the kingdom of Scotland reached a climax in a welter of claims and counter-claims submitted to the Pope. Differing historical mythologies were part of the arguments deployed by both parties. The English case was based on a gloss placed on one of the wondrous legends recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Britain, according to the legend, had been divided by its illustrious eponymous ruler, Brutus, between his three sons, Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Scotland, originally known as Albany, was Albanact's portion; but—and here we come to the gloss placed on the legend—he was to be subordinate to his elder brother and first-born son of Brutus, Locrine, to whom alone the royal dignity was reserved. Such was the ultimate historical basis for Edward I's claim to superior lordship over Scotland. The Scots could not be expected to accept such a tall story lying down. They did not. They countered with their own even taller tale. They insisted that Brutus's three sons were of equal standing, ‘so that none of them was subject to another’; they even queried whether Albany had ever been equated with the whole of what we know as Scotland, suggesting instead that it was the part of the original Britain which stretched from the Humber to the Forth, but no further north. They then went on the offensive, asserting that a lady called Scota, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, had conquered the northern part of Britain (if indeed it was such), expelled the Britons and renamed it Scotland in honour of herself.

THERE is a considerable body of opinion which holds that marriage in early modern England, and especially marriage among the lower orders, was uncaring, affectionless, and entered into for economic rather than emotional reasons. This view was, for example, axiomatic to those writing from a feminist perspective in the 1970s. Thus Sheila Rowbotham felt that in the pre-industrial world The peasant judged his woman by her capacity to labour and to breed more hands for toil…among the peasantry women were essential in the family economy. The peasant's wife bore children which meant more hands to toil and she laboured herself. She was like cattle, a means of production.