On a date which cannot be exactly discovered in 1340 or early in 1341, a priest called Richard de Folville, who had long been notorious as a habitual criminal, took refuge from justice, with some of his followers, in the church of Teigh, Rutland, of which he had been rector for twenty years. After he had killed one of his pursuers, and wounded others, by arrows shot from within, he was at length dragged out and beheaded by Sir Robert de Colville, a keeper of the peace.2 In itself this sordid occurrence is of no special interest, but if we look into the long career of crime which ended thus, we may find that we have come upon something of wider significance. This Richard proves to have been one of six brothers who were all criminals, and their history has left a considerable mark in the records. Thanks to the work of a number of scholars in recent years, we now know a good deal about the apparatus of criminal jurisdiction in the earlier fourteenth century, but of what might be called the forces of disorder, indispensable though they were to the working of the system of justice, we are still very ignorant. ‘Who were the burglars, robbers, and murderers … the sleepers by day and wanderers by night? What was their political, social, and economic status?’ These questions, given here in the words of Professor Putnam, are the reason for devoting this paper to so narrow a subject as the history of one obscure midland family during the early years of Edward III.

The topic is doubly important. First, the heiress was one of the fluid elements in the social structure. By marriage, families forged links with each other, landless knights and ambitious officials made their way into the noble hierarchy, and established lineages renewed their military reputation or improved their access to government circles. If the bride was an heiress all this was underwritten by a territorial endowment far larger than the usual marriage-portion. She also brought to her husband title to office, all the legal and quasi-legal claims which came to be concentrated in her from her lineage, and sometimes even the family name of her forbears to be assumed, if not by him, then by the offspring of their marriage. So the heiress was special; she magnifies for us all the problems and consequences of marriage.

The subject of the paper which I am about to read is one that can reasonably be regarded as of only secondary interest. During the later centuries of the Middle Ages, the relations between England and Flanders occupied a position of capital importance in the history of both countries. During the centuries that preceded the Norman Conquest, these relations were much less close than they were later to become, and correspondingly little is known about their character. But they are by no means devoid of interest, even if considered only as an introduction to the more important subject of the later relations between the two countries, and a study of their history is therefore not without justification. In the main, the period covered in this paper will be the two centuries before 1066. During almost the whole of this time, the counts of Flanders were masters of the region bounded by the Scheldt, the Canche, and the sea, and I shall use the word “ Flanders ” as the equivalent oi the county of Flanders at this date.

There are two types of question that can be asked about estate-ownership. The first relates to actual families. What was the rate of turnover of landed families, i.e. what percentage appeared and disappeared in, say, each half century? What sort of families were rising and for what reasons? How many were old-established and how many were new? Which families were declining and how many were extinguished; and what were the causes of decline and extinction? Among such questions it is reasonable to ask whether the size of a family's estate made a difference to its survival, whether for example the great families of 1600 fared better or worse than the gentry in the following centuries.

This inquiry began with some sentences in James A. Williamson's magnificent study Hawkins of Plymouth:

‘In peace or war in Europe', says Williamson, ‘there was no peace beyond the line. The phrase is often quoted by people who do not explain what line they mean. The Tropic of Cancer will not by itself answer the question, neither will the lines of demarcation. “Line” is in fact a misquotation which should be “lines”. The “lines of amity” were verbally agreed upon by the French and Spanish negotiators of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. They were to be the Tropic of Cancer and the prime meridian passing through Ferro in the Canaries. On the European side of both lines the treaty was to be binding; west and south of them it was to be disregarded. The agreement was a belated recognition of what had long been the practice.’

The notion that London conforms to an urban crisis model in the seventeenth century has recently been challenged in a bold reassessment of how the City adapted to change and coped with its problems at a grass-roots level. Too much stress, it is argued, has been placed upon disorder in the capital, wrongly depicted as constantly prone to rioting and criminality, to the neglect of its ordered and stable features which enabled London to weather a period of unprecedented political upheaval without a popular uprising. Yet has disorder in seventeenth-century London received too much emphasis, and just how effective were the endeavours of municipal and other authorities to maintain peace on the streets? This paper will attempt to gauge the seriousness of the problem posed by periodic rioting in the capital, and the efficacy of measures of riot prevention and control, in the period from James I's accession to Charles I's departure from London, allegedly driven out by uncontrollable tumult and sedition, in January 1642. No answer to these questions would be complete, however, if the investigation were simply confined to the area under the lord mayor's jurisdiction, for disturbances which began in the suburbs could soon cross over the City's limits or the citizens themselves could participate in disorders outside those limits.

This exploratory essay adopts the life-cycle as a tool with which to investigate religious change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines how inherited tropes about youth and age were deployed and the ways in which the notion of generational strife was invoked at various stages of England's long Reformation. These provide insight into how contemporaries understood and experienced the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and the process by which Protestantism ‘aged’ as it progressed beyond its unruly protest phase and became institutionalised as the official faith.

EARLY medieval archaeology can be said to have its origins with the investigation of burial: with Otto III's opening of Charlemagne's tomb in 1000; with medieval and early modern reports of the discoveries of the graves of kings or warriors; and, most notably, with the discovery at Tournai in 1653 of the grave of an early Frankish king, Childeric. And, until very recently, the study of burials dominated the subject. This is only natural. Graves are easily recognisable when discovered accidentally; often they were intended to be, and have remained, a very visible part of the landscape. Surviving royal burials are, of course, very rare. But there are over one hundred thousand excavated graves of lesser personages from the period between c. 450 and c. 1000: an astonishing mass of data which forms a significant proportion of the total available evidence for the early Middle Ages and which needs to be assessed and taken into count by any early medievalist interested in the totality of the period. And it can be argued that cemeteries offer rather more opportunity than the written sources to understand the world of those below the status of kings and bishops, and to do so without the ecclesiastical bias that the written sources have. We nevertheless have to remember that graves are not the unconscious waste products of society, like most of the data studied by an archaeologist: rubbish pits, building remains and so on. Bodies were deliberately and carefully placed in the ground, along with whatever accompanied them. Those responsible for the burial made a whole series of choices about the manner in which they carried out this action. A burial, like a written text, is a product of conscious mental activity, and subject to many of the problems of interpretation and analysis with which historians are familiar.

In seventeenth-century England honour was a concept which had meaning for men in the private or domestic spheres as well as in the public spheres of their lives. Indeed, failure to prove an honourable man at home could exclude men from entering any honour community outside it. Above all else, men from whatever social status were only held worthy of honour if they could demonstrate control over their wives, children and servants. Hence honour was a concept which was vital to the upholding of male power. To achieve that power or control men were encouraged to adopt behaviour which laid emphasis on two key gender characteristics which were thought to distinguish them from women: physical strength and reason. As Sir Thomas Smith explained in 1583, God had intended to give the male ‘great wit, bigger strength, and more courage to compel the woman to obey by reason or force’. Men used their claim to reason to legitimise their authority over women; the first Marquis of Halifax explained to his daughter in a letter of 1688:

That there is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow'd upon them…Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection.

In 1945, which is beginning to seem a long time ago, Dom Gregory Dix published The Shape of the Liturgy. In the last two chapters of the book he expressed a view about the devotional and liturgical practice of the late Middle Ages which will provide a convenient starting-point for my subject. He said that the trouble about the medieval Mass was its separation of the ‘corporate offering’ assumed to have occurred in the primitive liturgy from the ‘priesthood of the priest’; the notion of worship it expressed, like the doctrine of the eucharist it exemplified, was ‘inorganic’. The effect of this was to let in, especially during the fifteenth century, non-liturgical, individualist forms of devotion which were unparticipatory and obsessed with historical facts about the life of Christ, notably with the facts of his Passion. ‘The quiet of low mass afforded the devout an excellent opportunity for using mentally the vernacular prayers which they substituted for the Latin text of the liturgy as their personal worship … The old corporate worship of the Eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind.’ Liturgical doing had subsided into inactive seeing and hearing, on the way to being engulfed in a miasma of private thinking and feeling. The Protestant reform of the liturgy amounted to pickling this pre-Reformation devotional tradition while dropping the ritual performance to which it had been loosely attached.

The lords of the March of Wales enjoyed a remarkable position within the dominions ruled by the kings of England in the thirteenth century. They were subjects of the king and held their lands, in Wales as in England, of him as feudal tenants; but within their Marcher lordships they claimed and exercised a measure of authority unsurpassed elsewhere within the king's dominions. The nature of that authority was not the subject of a contemporary treatise or of a quo warranto inquiry; but that it was of the most comprehensive seems evident enough. Within his lordship the Marcher lord was governor and universal landlord; only the lands and the affairs of the church lay beyond his reach. Jurisdictionally his competence was equally wide. Contemporary lawyers characterized it curtly by referring to the March as an area in which the king's writ did not run. That was to express the point negatively and inadequately. The clerks of the royal chancery put it more clearly and positively later when they declared that a Marcher lord was to enjoy ‘all royal rights, prerogatives and customs belonging to royal lordships, and all royal courts and other jurisdictions, … an authentic seal for commissions, writs and warrants, and power of appointing justices to hold sessions in eyre and other sessions and courts’.

This paper explores the place of domestic slaves in British families resident in India, c. 1780–1830, and the ways in which the presence of slaves within these Anglo-Indian households challenged British understandings of slavery as a practice. Drawing upon probate data, private correspondence and the Parliamentary Papers, it suggests that the history of slavery in the British empire must be situated within wider histories of family, household and kin. Located within the family and often conflated with servants, domestic slaves in Anglo-India came to be seen as dependent female subordinates whose gender and status placed them outside the emerging politics of emancipation.

Politeness was a quintessentially urban concept; the formulation of a code of polite behaviour was a response to the pressures of urban living and the cultivation and display of polite manners took place in the social spaces of the urban locale. Not all towns were equally polite, however, and the degree of politeness on display in a town became another yardstick by which to categorise and judge provincial society. London was often presented as the centre of true politeness, in contrast to provincial vulgarity, but other towns were quick to appropriate the concept and its rhetoric as a means of self-promotion. In so doing politeness underwent modification as it was reinvented as a virtue of provincial, middling urban society.

The half-century which followed the capture of Jamaica in 1655 was characterized by the consolidation rather than by the expansion of the English interest in the West Indies. In the political sphere this consolidation took several forms. The acquisition of Jamaica, by far the largest English West Indian colony, and the termination of proprietary rule in, the Caribee Islands in 1663 brought the greater part of the English West Indian empire under the direct administration of the Crown. As a corollary to this extension of Crown rule, the creation of effective institutions for the government of these and other colonies became a matter of urgent necessity. After a series of experiments in the decade following the Restoration, the constitution in 1672 of the Council of Trade and Plantations inaugurated 'a more thorough system of colonial control than had been established by any of its predecessors'. The sum effect of these developments was that London became, in a way that it had never been before, the place where all the major decisions affecting the destinies of the West Indies were taken. From London there issued not only Crown-appointed governors and a stream of Orders-in-Council, but also declarations of the King's pleasure on such minor questions as appointments to colonial judgeships and seats in colonial councils.1 To London there flowed, besides acts of colonial legislatures for approval or rejection, a torrent of complaints and petitions for redress.

THAT something remarkable was happening in England in the quarter millennium separating the late sixteenth century from the early nineteenth is plain. In Elizabeth I's reign the Spanish Armada was perceived as a grave threat: the English ships were scarcely a match for the Spanish, and the weather played a major part in the deliverance of the nation. By the later eighteenth century the Royal Navy was unchallenged by the naval forces of any other single country, and during the generation of war which followed the French revolution, it proved capable of controlling the seas in the face of the combined naval forces mustered by Napoleon in an attempt to break the British oceanic stranglehold. Growing naval dominance was a symbol of a far more pervasive phenomenon. In the later sixteenth century England was not a leading European power and could exercise little influence over events at a distance from its shores. The Napoleonic wars showed that, even when faced by a coalition of countries occupying the bulk of Europe west of Russia and led by one of the greatest of military commanders, Britain possessed the depth of resources to weather a very long war, enabling her to outlast her challenger and secure a victory. The combination of a large and assertive Navy and dominant financial and commercial strength meant that, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Britain was able to impose her will over large tracts of every continent. But her dominance did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It derived chiefly from exceptional economic success: it grew out of the corn sack, the cotton mill, and the coal mine.

The essay examines how the international Protestant identity of the English Church came to be in tension with the later assertion of sacramentalist or Catholic values within it. It chronicles how the Reformation in England came to align not with Lutheranism but with Reformed Protestantism, and compares Henry VIII's reforms with contemporary Reformations in mainland Europe seeking a ‘middle way’. Edward VI's Church is contrasted with the temperature perceptible in Elizabeth I's religious settlement – which nevertheless asserted Protestant values with no concessions to Catholicism. The anomalous role of the cathedrals in England is identified as a major source of the English Church's later deviation from mainstream European Reformed Protestantism, which itself produced attempts to recreate a Reformed Church in the English north American colonies.

(READ 7 July 2004)

COMPARATIVELY little has been written recently on the origins of the manor. The exposition given by Maitland and Vinogradoff and closely followed by Sir Frank Stenton has been modified for certain areas; it has seldom been questioned as a whole. The basis of early society, according to this view, was the free ceorl, owning absolutely one hide of land or its equivalent, and owing only royal dues, such folk-worthy and law-worthy men being associated together in free, lordless and nucleated villages. The gap between these men and medieval villeins, between these free villages and the manor, was bridged in a variety of ways. Grants of royal rights to ecclesiastics and laymen exposed the ceorls to the pressure of great lords who took advantage of economic insecurity, wars, famines, plagues, commendation and similar factors to depress them so that, in the end, in place of their free ownership of a hide, they came to hold normally between a quarter and a whole virgate or less, on most onerous and servile terms. Some place was, indeed, allowed to the creation of tenancies by lords themselves, but this was largely incidental. ‘The central course of Old English social development’, wrote Sir Frank Stenton, ‘may be described as the process by which a peasantry, at first composed essentially of free men, acknowledging no lord below the king, gradually lost economic and personal independence.’

This paper focuses on the inner workings of Mao-era China's ‘foreign affairs’ system (waishi xitong): the complex, comprehensive web of bureaucracy woven after 1949 to monitor and control Chinese contact with the outside world. It explores one of the channels along which the People's Republic between 1949 and 1976 tried to project international, soft-power messages beyond conventional diplomatic channels: the inviting of so-called ‘foreign guests’ (waibin) on carefully planned tours around China, often with all or at least some expenses paid. Earlier accounts of this hospitality have evoked a machine of perfect control, carefully judged to manipulate visitors and rehearsed to ensure flawless performances by Chinese hosts. Using memoirs and Chinese archival documents, the paper discusses the attitude of top-level leaders to such visits, the way in which trips were prepared and planned, and the successes and weaknesses of the system. It argues that the People's Republic of China's hosting programme had a domestic as well as an international purpose. Although foreigners were the official target (and indeed, Maoist China's ‘techniques of hospitality’ garnered some rich international political dividends) the government also used the preparation for and execution of hosting duties to underscore at home the triumph of the revolution.

The Byzantine Empire of the period 1081–1204 is generally con sidered to have been culturally brilliant but economically decadent. The standard against which this decadence is measured is the situation supposed to have existed during the ninth and tenth centuries when the Empire consisted basically of the Balkan coastlands, the Aegean islands and Asia Minor, and when it possessed a flourishing agriculture dependent upon a free peasantry which also supplied the manpower of its army and navy, a vital urban life, and control of its extensive internal and external trade. Its revenue was therefore assured and its coinage stable. By the twelfth century it had lost the greater part of Asia Minor which had formed the factor essential to its agricultural, military and urban life. The first two were now largely in the hands of feudal magnates who commanded ruinously expensive but unreliable mercenaries, and the trade of the Empire had fallen under the control of the Italian merchant cities. The reduced revenue was incapable of standing the strain placed upon it by increased expenses, the difference being made up by the debasement of the coinage—which caused further chaos in economic life.

The history of mentalities has now become so widely accepted that even British historians sometimes refer to it: one hardly needs to talk about mentalités any more, though the French word still sounds more modish. But the subject goes back at least to Vico. Although Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist sound old hat by comparison with mentalités the words remind us that nineteenth-century German historians were interested in the different ways past societies may have viewed the world, while F. W. Maitland and Henry Adams are obvious examples of Anglophones who in their different ways tried to understand medieval ways of thought. In 1933 Jean Guitton, a Frenchman, it is true, but one who presumably came out of that older tradition of intellectual history against which Lucien Febvre set himself, wrote about the need to study the mentalité of an age and summed up what he meant by this as ‘the totality of those implicit assumptions which are imposed on us by our environment and which rule our judgements.