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.

In the early months of 1327 the communities of the Angevin kingdom of Sicily were ordered to send representatives to Naples, there to discuss means of opposing ‘the lord Lewis, duke of Bavaria: qui in Italiam transire disposuit et regnum Sicilie invadere, servans antiquum odium belli et interitus Corradini.’ The reference to the last Hohenstaufen in this contemporary comment on Lewis' Italian enterprise is at first sight surprising. During the half-century following Conradin's execution the prestige of the empire in German hands had fallen steeply in the estimation of western Europe; all the activity of Dante's emperor could not disguise that fact. From time to time the Angevins at Naples urged the abolition of the institution, as something of which the usefulness was now outworn. Other solutions were being talked of, such as the setting up of a separate hereditary kingdom in Lombardy or the transference by election or papal provision of the imperial title to the ruling house of France. Perhaps too much importance has been attributed to some of these schemes, though there is no reason to doubt the seriousness of French ambitions to acquire as much as possible of the western possessions of the empire. But their frequent recurrence, together with the known weakness of the German kingship, does indicate a climate uncongenial to a repetition of the themes of Hohenstaufen imperialism by a German ruler in the third decade of the fourteenth century. Consequently Lewis' conflict with the papacy has an anachronistic air. Long ago Gregorovius cast a stereotype destined to wear well, when he wrote that ‘this afterpiece’ was saved from being ‘an utterly unbearable caricature of a great past’ only by the ‘progress of human thought’ with which it was associated.

AT the beginning of April 1658, Charles II‘s most intimate advisers were giving up their hopes of an English rising and a royalist expedition from Flanders backed by Spanish arms. They now turned their thoughts in two other directions. The meeting of the long-drawn-out Imperial Diet at Frankfurt had given the English exiles in the Spanish Netherlands reason to believe that the house of Austria, in order to prevent further French interference in German affairs, would give support to the house of Stuart as a convenient and easy way of embarrassing Louis XIV's ally, Oliver Cromwell. It was also recollected that the Cardinal de Retz and Charles II had already had dealings with each other in Paris in 1652, so that the now-exiled Cardinal was considered as a suitable intermediary to secure Catholic support. When the postponement of the invasion of England was finally decided by the middle of the month, the crestfallen English Royalists were told that their king intended to go to Frankfurt to treat in person with the Electors. The Comte de Marchin, on whom Charles had recently bestowed the Order of the Garter, had preceded him with letters of compliment to the Elector of Mainz and the Spanish ambassador, the Conde de Peñaranda. This plan did not develop very far and, by June, a visit by the king to Spain was being hopefully encouraged by Henry Bennet, the royalist ambassador in Madrid.

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.

THE Gordon Riots made a profound impression on contemporaries. They took place at a time of acute political crisis, at the most dangerous moment of the American war, when the country, after numerous defeats and counteralliances, found itself virtually isolated. At their height, on the night of 7 June 1780, London appeared to onlookers to be a sea of flames. ‘I remember’, wrote Horace Walpole on the 8th, ‘the Excise and the Gin Act and the rebels at Derby and Wilkes’ interlude and the French at Plymouth, or I should have a very bad memory; but I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames!' Sébastien Mercier, in his Tableau de Paris, wrote nine years before the attack on the Bastille that such ‘terrors and alarms’ as were spread by Lord George Gordon in London would be inconceivable in a city as well-policed as Paris.

THE English hierarchy in the period between the Norman Conquest and the death of Edward II has attracted the attention of a number of modern scholars. Recently Mr. Pantin has extended those studies in an outline survey of the episcopate for the whole of the fourteenth century. The primary object here is to fill in with more detail the background of that out-line for the reign of Edward III. I shall, however, break up one of his categories into four. In general I shall suggest that care must be taken not to exaggerate the importance of bishops with experience in the royal administration or of those with high aristocratic connections. I shall seek to classify the 85 bishops in order to show their origin, their experience and, in the case of the aristocrats, their social class. In a century when civil servants might also be scholars like Richard of Bury, or when monks could hold great offices of state like Simon Langham, any attempt at an exclusive division into categories is bound to be artificial. Exclusive percentages will not, therefore, be relied on. Bishops may occur in one or more categories.

THE story of Liverpool's carrying trade with the Far East and with Australia embraces many fields of human endeavour and is of interest in demonstrating how individuals in the exercise of their functions as entrepreneurs, merchants and shipowners can adapt their ideas and influence the course of a country's economic growth.

‘My Lord Somebody’, wrote a colonial pamphleteer in 1764,—‘My Lord Somebody has a friend, who has a cousin who needs a place, or stands in somebody's way, and so we may come by a governor.’ What was said, justly or unjustly, about governors was believed likewise of the lesser officers of the crown. My subject is the history of two of these placemen, Peter Leigh (1711–59), chief justice of South Carolina from 1753 to 1759, and his son Egerton (1733–81), attorneygeneral from 1765 to 1781.