Hugh hale bellot, who died at the age of 79 on 18 February 1969, became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1928, and served it as a member of Council, to which he was elected in February 1931, as Honorary Secretary (1934–52), and finally as President (1952–56), for more than twenty-five years. He was primarily responsible for the transformation of the library from the miscellaneous collection it was into the efficient tool for the student of British history it now is. Texts and Calendars: an analytical guide to serial publications, edited by E. L. C. Mullins, provided in 1958 the guide he had proposed to one of the re-organized sections of the library, and Council properly associated it with his name. He was wholly responsible for initiating and, in the face of great difficulties, for carrying through to completion, the series of bibliographies of Writings on British History from 1901 to 1945, devoting much of the last years of his life to editing the volumes for 1901 to 1933 and donating £1,000 to the Society in aid of their publication. It was a source of great satisfaction to him that the Institute of Historical Research should have agreed in 1965 to assume the task of continuing the series.

The infliction of such a parochial topic on this Society may smack of temerity. My apology must be that the emergence of the first modern industrial societies is one of the most important of all historical developments, and that the experience of each of the areas involved is worthy of the historian's meticulous scrutiny.

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.

In 1660 someone transcribed into the ‘Town Book’ of Belfast a copy of ‘Verses presented to General Monck’:

Advance, George Monck, and Monck St George shall be,

England's restorer to its liberty,

Scotland's protector, Ireland's president,

Reducing all to a free parliament;

And if thou dost intend the other thing,

Go on, and all shall cry God save the king.

Preoccupation with the policies of governments as a major theme in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is now unfashionable with economic historians. However, masters of Oxford colleges and professors of social history can afford to be out of fashion. According to Mr Hill, ‘The Middle Ages in industry and internal trade also ended in 1641, when the central government lost its power to grant monopolies and to control the administration of poor relief. Attempts to prohibit the activities of middlemen, whether in industry or agriculture now ended…Guild regulations and the privileges of town oligarchies, long opposed by the common lawyers, became far more difficult to enforce…in the long run England's economic liberty, unique at that time in Europe, had a stimulating effect, especially noticeable after 1688 confirmed the political gains of the earlier revolution.’ Or as Professor Perkin claims '… the landed rulers of England… from the Restoration adopted the dynamic policy of laissez-faire in internal industry which Adam Smith… was to advocate in foreign trade.’ ‘Laissez-faire… was the direct consequence of the breakdown at the Civil War of the “Privy Council” system of central control.

It is an accident of birth that has brought to a retired College Tutor the honour of giving the first Prothero lecture. To declare my interest at once, it happens that Sir George Prothero's wife was my mother's sister; both my parents died before my sister and I could remember them. We occasionally stayed as children with the Protheros at 24 Bedford Square, but I hardly began to know my uncle better until I was an undergraduate in the last three years of his life, and I was still too raw to get much deeper than the sense that here was a quiet, dignified man, obviously distinguished but overworked and tired. He died in 1922 at the age of 73. There were no children. Before she died in 1934, Lady Prothero gave me the diaries which he had kept with hardly a break for fifty years, and some bundles of letters to him, mostly 1914–18.I am ashamed to say that I hardly did more than skim these diaries and letters until, after my retirement, I was asked by this Society's Council to look over the papers and letters which Prothero had bequeathed to the Society. These came to it on his widow's death, along with most of his historical library, and with his residuary estate.

Even in his lifetime Henry Beaufort was a controversial figure. The Londoners envied his wealth and detested his policies; Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, denounced him as an ambitious schemer and a traitor; both pope and king punished him for his disobedience. Yet more than once he was extolled in parliament for his generosity, loyalty, patriotism and wisdom in affairs of state. These official encomiums preserved his reputation for a generation after his death. Upon them Stubbs built his pic ture of the cardinal as the defender of the Lancastrian constitu tion, the maintainer of Henry V's conquests and the wise seeker after a timely peace. ‘Far sighted and patriotic in his counsels’, he became ‘the mainstay of his house’, ‘ready to sacrifice his wealth and labour to the king’. It was scarcely Beaufort's fault that, at his death, the tokens of Lancaster's fall were already apparent. A different, less favourable, view originated with Edward Hall and was popularized by Shakespeare. In the scheme of retributive justice with which the new historiography clothed the Wars of the Roses, the cardinal and his family appeared as the principal fomenters of dissension. Hall's own detestation of Wolsey added a touch of venom to his strictures on the pride and avarice of Wolsey's predecessor.

As the Hudson's Bay Company prepares to celebrate its tercentenary it is not mere academic perverseness which prompts a paper on a period in the Company's history when it was threatened with extinction. Longevity has its own fascination, and crucial in the story of the Company's growth into one of the great business enterprises of the modern world was its survival amid the bitter criticism directed at chartered companies in the eighteenth century. Small and apparently vulnerable, it showed unexpected stubbornness in resisting attacks which overwhelmed several of its fellows. The controversies which buffeted the Hudson's Bay Company also help to illuminate those mercantile pressure groups working against monopolies in the mid-eighteenth century, and reveal something of the friction at home which accompanied the steady expansion of British commerce overseas.

I hope the Society will not think that I am wasting its time in taking the European tradition of historical writing as the general theme of the addresses that I am required to deliver during my term of office. Although there have been many studies of the wide range of problems that fall under the general heading of historiography, the study of the aims, methods and limitations of the historians of the past has been somewhat neglected, in this country at least. There are of course some conspicuous exceptions. The historical attitudes and aptitudes of St Augustine, Gibbon and Macaulay have been examined again and again. But outside the great names comparatively little has been done to examine historical works for what they can tell us about the way in which historical writing is affected by the intellectual presuppositions and environment of the writer. As historians we are generally content to use the chronicles and histories of the past quite simply as quarries of facts that require to be sifted and purified to make them usable for our purposes, but do not require any profound investigation of the principles of selection, emphasis or composition that determined their preservation. This is how Stubbs dealt with the many chronicles that he edited so admirably. They were the raw material for his own works and those of other historians. He examined them for reliability, and he asked whether they provided new facts that could not be found elsewhere.