The idea that certain periods and certain countries were outstanding in their contribution to civilization is as old as the writing of literary and art history. ‘All ages have produced heroes and politicians’, wrote Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV; ‘all peoples have experienced revolutions: all histories are practically equal for him who does not want to remember anything but facts. But whoever thinks and, what is rarer still, whoever has good taste, will count only four centuries in the history of the world.’ According to Voltaire, one needed to remember only the Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Rome of Caesar and Augustus, Medicean Italy, and France in the century of Louis XIV. Almost two hundred years earlier, Vasari had pointed to the same phenomenon in Italy. In the introduction to his Life of Michelangelo he says that God in his mercy had shown pity on the vain endeavours of man by sending down to earth a spirit who could work perfection in every art and profession, in painting, sculpture and architecture, no less than in moral philosophy and poetry. And since Florence was more deserving of this grace than all other cities, because of the great and marvellous achievements of Cimabue and Giotto, of Donatello, Brunelleschi and Leonardo, he wanted ‘to crown the perfection merited by all these achievements through one of her citizens’.

The course of events, military and diplomatic, which led from the battle of Poitiers (19 September 1356) to the ratification of the treaty of Brétigny (24 October 1360) was fully worked out, half a century ago, by Delachenal, in his great Histoire de Charles V. His narrative, and his treatment of the policies and ambitions underlying the events, have won general acceptance. He had studied the French evidence apparently exhaustively and showed himself to be well acquainted with the English documents. It was he who first suggested that a document bound up into Cotton MS. Caligula D.III was a draft of the terms agreed upon in May 1358, and this, among other things, enabled him to give a connected and intelligible account of the diplomacy of these years, which is poorly documented even by medieval standards.

Nearly thirty years ago, Dr Caroline Skeel searched both the public records and local archives for material relating to the ‘Council in the West Parts of the Realm’ established by Henry VIII. She could find out practically nothing about its proceedings, but, in a paper read to this society, she did put forward a number of suggestions regarding the purpose of the council and the reasons for its comparatively short life. These suggestions have been the basis for the necessarily brief references to the Council of the West in subsequent histories of the period. It has become generally accepted that the council was established for the purpose of tightening up the machinery of justice and administration in an unsettled part of the kingdom, and in particular as a means of forestalling the trouble which was expected to follow the dissolution of the monasteries in the region. Its early disappearance has been attributed to various causes, sheer redundancy, local opposition and Henry's desire to placate the common lawyers.

The Norman conquerors of England had at first little cause to seek connexions with the empire of the Salian kings and they had nothing to fear from it. Before William sailed on his expedition, he enlisted, it is true, not only the goodwill of the papacy, but also that of the young Henry IV. Henry, who at the age of fifteen had by German custom reached his majority, seems to have made it known that men from Germany could go to host with William, should the latter wish it. Some of the Flemish knights who took part in the venture may have come from those fiefs of the count of Flanders which were held of the empire rather than of the kingdom of France. Bruno, in his Book on the Saxon War, would have his readers believe that the Salian king, when preparing his revenge against the Saxon rebels in 1074, sent for help also to William, who is supposed to have replied that he dared not leave England. But in the same year, only a few months earlier, it had been rumoured that the Conqueror was advancing against the Lotharingian frontiers of the Reich and about to seize Aachen at the invitation of Archbishop Anno of Cologne.

The office of the justice of the peace developed during the fourteenth century from that of the keeper of the peace who held inquests and received presentments, and the process has been traced in great detail by Professor Putnam. In 1925, Professor Cam assigned some records of a keeper's inquests to 1277 and so carried the beginnings of the earlier office well back into the thirteenth century. Custodes pacis of a still earlier period Professor Cam dismissed as ‘extraordinary’ keepers, ‘whose existence is explained by the special conditions arising out of the struggle between the king and the baronial party’. But these earlier keepers are not confined to the period of civil war; a survey of them is necessary to the history of the justice of the peace, and it is this which the present paper attempts to provide. Lambard's description of these early keepers is useful as a starting-point:

The Sheriffs I call ordinary Conservators of the Peace, because their authority was then ordinary, always one, and the same well enough knowen: But the extraordinary Conservator, as he was endowed with an higher power, so was he not ordinarily appointed, but in times of great trouble only, much like as the Lieutenants of shires are now in our days. And he had charge to defend the coasts and country, both from foreign and inward enemies, and might command the sheriff and all the shire to aid and assist him.

The earliest keepers supplemented the sheriffs in the policing of the countryside, especially in times of crisis and during the threat of invasion; and these ‘great troubles’ were frequent enough to make the keeper an increasingly permanent official.

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.

Last December we considered the work of the Maurists, who were at once a product and an ornament of a very brilliant phase of French learning and scholarship. This afternoon we turn to another great nation in what was, perhaps, the golden age of its influence upon the thought and academic disciplines of Europe.