In my address last year I tried to offer some explanations for the great change of direction in Britain's territorial empire in the second half of the eighteenth century: the failure of empire over much of North America coinciding with the beginnings of great acquisitions in India. I would like now to look more closely at the American débâcle. In trying to account for it, I stressed the yawning gap between British ambitions as they developed from mid-century and any capacity to realise them in the colonies, where, in the absence of a strong imperial presence or adequate machinery to enforce metropolitan wishes, the effective working of the empire depended on the willingness of local populations to co-operate. In the 1760s the majority of the colonial elites refused to co-operate with what they regarded as new departures from the long-established constitutional conventions of the empire. British attempts to resolve the ensuing crisis by armed coercion were to be frustrated in seven years of unsuccessful war.

Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party in November 1990, but both she and the political ideology to which her name has been appended continue to fascinate pundits and scholars. Indeed, since Thatcher's resignation in November 1990, curiosity about her political legacy has, if anything, increased, fuelled in part by the memoirs produced by the ex-premier herself and a large number of her one-time Cabinet colleagues. Since the early 1980s the bulk of work that has appeared on Thatcherism has been dominated either by what one might describe as the ‘higher journalism’ or by political science scholarship, both of which have been most exercised by the questions of what Thatcherism was and where it took British politics and society. In this essay I want to look at Thatcherism from an historical perspective and thus ask a different question, namely where did Thatcherism, and in particular the political economy of Thatcherism, come from?

Given that Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party in 1975 this might seem a logical starting-point from which to track Thatcherism's origins. Some have argued, however, that Thatcher's election in itself was of little importance, in that the Conservative party's leadership contest in 1975 was a competition not to be Edward Heath, and that Thatcher won because she was more obviously not Edward Heath than anyone else. This emphasis on the personal aspects of the leadership issue necessarily plays down any ideological significance of Thatcher's victory, a point often reinforced by reference to the fact that key elements of the policy agenda that came to be associated with Thatcherism, notably privatisation, were by no means clearly articulated in the late 1970s and did not appear in the Conservative Election Manifesto of 1979.

On the centenary of General de Gaulle's birth in November 1990, hundreds of historians, politicians and statesmen gathered in Paris to discuss his life. Their deliberations were published in seven volumes running to several thousand pages. The participants included former opponents who now declared themselves ‘posthumous Gaullists’ or ‘remorseful’ ones. The whole occasion seemed to fulfil André Malraux's prediction: ‘Everyone is, has been or will become Gaullist.’ Of those who were not, never had been, or would never become Gaullist, little was said.

The eighteenth century is a lost era in the history of English bible translation. The long tenure of the King James, or Authorised Version (AV), has caused historians to overlook the existence of the scores of translations which were attempted between 1611 and 1881–5, when the Revised Version was published. Darlow and Moule's Historical Catalogue of English Bibles lists the publication of at least forty-four new English translations of bibles, testaments, individual books, or groups of books between 1700 and 1800. There were many more translations of biblical texts than these, however, as the recent and more comprehensive catalogue by W. Chamberlin has conclusively demonstrated. Many have been lost to historical sight, or were never published, which could have easily been the fate of the celebrated translation by Anthony Purver, were it not for the patronage of the wealthy physician and fellow Quaker, Dr John Fothergill.

Among the more striking literary creations of Herman Melville is a short story entitiled ‘Bartleby’. The eponymous hero is a law-clerk who gradually withdraws from his employer's power, and ultimately from the world, by meeting all requests – to copy texts, to quit the premises, to co-operate with the authorities of the prison to which his intransigence finally leads him – with the phrase, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Melville's existential fable is disquieting on all sorts of levels and it has, perhaps, a special resonance for historians. The story's narrator is Bartleby's employer, a tranquil elderly man baffled by the latter's stubbornness. One of the problems the narrator faces is the shortage of sources: ‘this man … was one of these beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except trom the original sources and … those are very small’. After Bartleby's death, the narrator learns that he had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, and the story ends with a vision of piles of lost ‘dead’ documents and artefacts whose texts and meanings remain unread and beyond recall. As a text haunted by notions of unknowability and by the crushing weight of dead letters, ‘Bartleby’ seems to speak directly to some of the pre-occupations of historians in a post-modernist era.

The title of this essay can be interpreted in two ways. One possibility might be to show how our times in their thinking, patterns of behaviour, and institutional structures still continue to be shaped by that distant era of the Middle Ages. In other words, one could show the lingering impact of the Middle Ages until the present day. This sort of approach brings many things to mind: the division of Europe into East and West, through the Roman and the Byzantine church; medieval philosophy and the influential reception of Roman law and its effects which can still be discerned today; knighthood and courtly culture; the development of the ‘modern’ state; the continuing influence of social groups and their systems of values and institutions such as vassalage, the university, and the city state; and last but not least, the division into competing states and nations that is so distinctive for Europe.

Authors of the surge of economic tracts and treatises published in late seventeenth-century England generally agreed that foreign trade underpinned the wealth, health, and strength of the nation. The merchant was hero

the same to the body politick as the liver, veins and arteries are to the natural; for he both raises and distributes treasure the vital blood of the common weal. He is the steward of the kingdom's stock which by his good or ill-management does proportionably increase or languish. One of the most useful members in a state without whom it can never be opulent in peace nor consequently formidable in war.'

When, in the 1970s, historians of the recent past began seriously to explore the uses of oral history they were, as Alistair Thomson points out in this volume, much criticised for uncritical reliance upon the frailties of human memory. Not all such criticism was misplaced, but, as Thomson describes, the past quarter-century of scepticism and experience has immensely refined the ways in which the method is used and its outcomes interpreted. Yet many historians continue to value documentary over oral sources to a surprising degree, given the extent to which documents throughout history have been derived from oral sources, or were written versions of unspoken memories. If there are serious methodological problems confronting interpretations of the recent past which depend upon memory, such problems arise at least equally for other time periods. The value of the essays which follow, and of the conference at which they were read, is in the focus on the common methodological problems posed to historians and anthropologists of very different time periods and cultures by memory and its oral and written expression: issues of what people do and do not remember, of why and how memory is used to interpret past and present.

Literacy and property have been among the dominant themes of early medieval history for more than a decade. Since the work of Rosamund McKitterick, Janet Nelson and others, contrary to the assumptions of an earlier generation of scholars, scholars have recognised that die written word profoundly influenced die transmission of die past and the control of the present in early medieval Europe. This was true not only in die highest circles of ecclesiastical and royal life, but also at much more humble levels across Europe. If, as Janet Nelson reminds us, even freedmen could still be referred to in die ninth century as ‘cartularii’, literally charter-men, ‘because of the written carta of manumission required by law courts as symbol and proof of liberation’, die written word reached indeed deeply into society.

‘Remember’, King Alfred wrote to his bishops, sending them a copy of the translation he had made of Pope Gregory the Great's Cura pastoralis, ‘remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men’. To remedy the twofold disaster consequent on this intellectual and pedagogic failure – not just the ransacking of the churches throughout England and loss of their treasures and books, but, worse, the loss to the English of the wisdom the books had preserved – King Alfred arranged to have the young men among his subjects taught to read in the vernacular. Set-texts for this programme were to be supplied by the translating of ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’. Among these was Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, generally thought to have been translated by the king himself and to include some of Alfred's own musings. Towards the end of his text in the context of a discussion of the nature of God, eternity and the place of humanity in the divine plan, Alfred had Wisdom declare: ‘we can know very little concerning what was before our time, except through memory and inquiry, and even less concerning what comes after us. Only one thing is certainly present to us, namely that which now exists. But to God all is present, what was before, what is now, and what shall be after us. The central point at issue here is the disjunction between what an omniscient deity and frail humanity can know of the past, but it usefully introduces this discussion by linking the process of obtaining information about the past with that of personal memory.

Between 1068 and 1070 an extraordinary dispute was settled at Bonneville-sur-Touques in Normandy. Duke William, who had recently become king of England, and his wife Matilda, heard the story of a contested property at Bayeux which centred on the identity of a rented child. The story goes as follows. A man called Stephen had married a widow called Oringa by whom he had a small son (puerulus) who lived only a short while. When the boy died, Oringa substituted for him, without her husband's knowledge, the son of a woman called Ulburga at Martragny (Calvados, c. Creully), to whom she paid an annual sum of 100 solidi. Stephen made the boy his heir and left him his property. When first Oringa and then Stephen died, the boy's natural mother emerged and demanded rent from the couple's surprised relatives. The family refused to pay and Ulberga turned to Duke William and his wife Matilda. Having heard die case Duke William, in consultation with Archbishop John of Rouen, Roger of Beaumont and others, decided that an ordeal of the hot iron would be die most appropriate way to establish the truth. William and Matilda sent their chaplain Rainald to Bayeux to organise the ordeal, which took place in the monastery of Saint-Vigor in the presence of Rainald himself, two named archdeacons, Robert Insule and his wife Albereda, Euremarus of Bayeux and many otfier good men (meliores homines) of Bayeux. Ulburga emerged unscathed from the ordeal by fire and therefore her son was returned to her.

When someone who is not a specialist thinks of Italian Renaissance politics, he or she probably thinks first of Machiavelli – Machiavelli the cynical, Machiavelli the revolutionary. But if you read the writings of Machiavelli's contemporaries – not so much perhaps the political theorists (except for Francesco Guicciardini, to my mind a far more interesting political thinker than Machiavelli), as the active politicians of the day, Machiavelli does not seem anything like so revolutionary. Next to their clear-eyed realism and knowledge of men and affairs, Machiavelli's extremism can seem naïve.

For students of the interaction between oral and written forms of communication the early modern period provides an important case study. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far from being an oral society; and yet it was not a completely literate one either. On the one hand, old vernacular traditions had long been infused and supplemented, or corrupted and destroyed, by the written word; on die other hand, only a certain part of the population could read and write or ever relied on the products of literacy. Indeed, as Keidi Thomas has suggested, ‘it is the interaction between contrasting forms of culture, literate and illiterate, oral and written, which gives this period its particular fascination’.

Social historians of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have tended to see literacy as a modernising force which eroded oral tradition and overrode local identities. Whereas the increasing literacy of the period has long appeared an important constituent element of Tudor and Stuart England's early modernity, custom has been represented as its mirror image. Attached to cumbersome local identities, borne from the continuing authority of speech, bred within a plebeian culture which was simultaneously pugnacious and conservative, customary law has been taken to define a traditional, backward-looking mind-set which stood at odds to the sharp forces of change cutting into the fabric of early modern English society. 1 Hence, social historians have sometimes perceived the growing elite hostility to custom as a part of a larger attack upon oral culture. In certain accounts, this elite antipathy is presented as a by-product of die standardising impulses of early capitalism. 2 Social historians have presented the increasing role of written documents in the defence of custom as the tainting of an authentic oral tradition, and as further evidence of the growing dom-nation of writing over speech. Crudely stated, orality, and hence custom, is seen as ‘of the people’; while writing was ‘of the elite’. In this respect as in others, social historians have therefore accepted all too readily John Aubrey's nostalgic recollections of late seventeenth century that Before printing, Old Wives tales were ingeniose and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civil warres, the ordinary Sort of people were not taught to reade & now-a-dayes Books are common and most of the poor people understand letters: and the many good Bookes and the variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt the old Fables out of dores: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-good-fellowe and the Fayries.

Exceptions, minorities, non-conformities, individual refusals and small group actions, these are words with which historians of the French Resistance learn to live. The words allow social detail to flourish, but they stand in the way of general social conclusions and question the kind of class representation which seems so convincing in René Clément's film of the resistance of railway workers, La Bataille du rail (1946), but which cannot be sustained for the working class as a whole. Is there a social history of the Resistance? Are all generalities suspect? The French nation as a category is far too large, so is the working class, and equally so the bourgeoisie and the peasantry: it has often been argued that social and political categorisation of the Resistance is nothing but a captivating mirage, tantalising every new interpreter who sets out to give much needed structure to empirical research.

Almost half a century ago, the famous British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard suggested that anthropology is actually a form of historiography, thus initiating a debate about the relationship between the two disciplines which has continued sporadically ever since. His statement was a reaction to the claims of Radcliffe-Brown, a founding ‘father’ of British social anthropology, that social anthropology was a kind of science, whereas Evans-Pritchard sought to claim it for the humanities.

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.

At the end of the eleventh century, in the wake of the First Crusade, a Latin principality was established at Antioch, in northern Syria. Founded by the crusade leader Bohemond (1098–,c. 1105), this Latin community experienced a period of territorial expansion under the energetic rule of his nephew, Tancred (c. 1105–12), followed by seven years of less aggressive leadership by Roger of Salerno (1113–19). The principality suffered a serious setback with the defeat of its army at the evocatively named battle of the Field of Blood in 1119, during which Prince Roger was slain. Power then passed to a regent, King Baldwin II of Jerusalem (1118–31), until Bohemond II (1126–30), the son of Antioch's first prince, arrived in northern Syria.

Arguably, the single most important dimension in the existence of any community, medieval or modern, is its members' shared conviction that it exists, and that its existence represents a significant bond between them. The central and later Middle Ages have been viewed as a period of particular importance for the growth of such self-consciousness - and for its growth, particularly among those large political communities which Susan Reynolds suggests we call ‘regnal’, and which many medievalists appear happy to refer to as ‘national’. As Reynolds showed, communities of this sort evolved legitimising mythologies which overlay existing structures of government with notions of ancient and primal ethnic solidarity, and thus placed such communities, imaginatively, outside the normal processes of contingency and change. Challenging questions therefore arise if we call to mind the many new political formations which were established during this period, which saw the extension into neighbouring regions, by both violent and peaceful means, of the political and social forms characteristic of continental western Europe. The new settlements had not only to be organised and defended physically, but also explained and justified. A vocabulary of argument thus evolved to account for their existence and to illuminate their relationships with existing political and social structures. In formulating this vocabulary, however, writers were con-fronted by the strong impulse in medieval thought to lay upon all significant communities a veneer of timelessness, or at least of antiquity. How this obstacle was overcome for particular new communities doubtless has many specific answers. But an obstacle it must surely have been, and the study of how — or whether — it was surmounted in any given instance is thus inherently worth while.