In medieval chronicles the establishment of a cathedral at Norwich is related to the simony of Bishop Herbert of Thetford and his subsequent repentance. For this sin he sought absolution in Rome and, on his return to England, moved the see to Norwich. There (and later writers have assumed that it was an act of penance) Herbert built and endowed a magnificent cathedral in which he installed monks in the place of secular priests. It is the purpose of the present paper to examine this story and to add to it what is known of the building of the cathedral and the endowment of its priory.

The motives which impelled Gustav Adolf to invade Pomerania in June 1630, and the political objectives at which he aimed in the following two-and-a-half years, were once among the classic battlegrounds of German—and, to a less conspicuous extent, of Swedish—historiography. Since about 1920 the debate has noticeably flagged. Historians have in general been content to take their stand upon positions established by the researches of Bertil Boëthius and Nils Ahnlund. No recent book on the subject has served to keep controversy alive, as the parallel controversy about Wallenstein was reanimated during the inter-war years by the works of Srbik and Pekař; and little new material of any consequence has latterly been made available.

Almost forty years ago Professor H. E. Egerton, him-self a pioneer in the modern study of imperial history, delivered to this society a paper on ‘The system of British colonial administration of the Crown colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’. He opened with the warning that ‘The most learned of historians would find it difficult to add much to the sum of knowledge in treating the subject of my paper.’ 1 The warning still stands; there is little new knowledge to be gleaned, for this is a well-tilled field.

Russian historians have taken a livelier interest in Ivan the Terrible than in any other Tsar except Peter the Great. But they have always been seriously handicapped in their treatment of him by grave deficiencies in the material at their disposal. These deficiencies are of two kinds. First, the material is very incomplete and scanty. The Moscow archives and many other Russian documentary records were destroyed during the ‘Time of Troubles’ and in the great fire of Moscow of 1626, and historians have had to try to reconstruct the history of sixteenth-century Russia from what have been called ‘accidental scraps and fragments of material’. Secondly, an appreciable part of even the material which survives, such as the Chronicles, the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky, and Kurbsky's History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, is partisan and has to be used with the greatest caution. By the sixteenth century, Russian Chronicles had begun to be written and revised to put an official gloss on events; the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky was polemical in tone and aim; and the History of the Grand Prince of Moscow was an able political pamphlet aimed at influencing opinion in Lithuania. With only fragmentary and partisan sources to draw on, Russian historians came to differ widely in their interpretation of Ivan the Terrible and his achievements, particularly in the pioneer days of historical writing. But in a penetrating sketch of Ivan's reign published in 1923 Platonov felt able to affirm that, in the course of the controversy, Ivan and his times had begun to be substantially understood, and that this ‘success’ was ‘one of the brilliant pages in (Russian) historiography, one of the decisive victories of the scientific method’.

If we may believe John Leyland, a tradition widely current throughout England in the 1530's attributed some of the costliest building of the later middle ages to warriors who had returned home laden with the spoils of France. Everywhere that the antiquary travelled, from Ampthill in Bedfordshire to Hampton Court near the Welsh border, from Streatlam in county Durham to Farleigh, Somerset, he was told of castles raised in stone and brick ‘ex spoliis nobilium bello Gallico captorurn’, sometimes of a whole mansion paid for from the proceeds of a single battle; and that not merely in the great days of Edward III and Henry V, but also when John of Bedford was ‘governor and regent’ of his dead brother's hard-pressed conquest. So Henry Vffl's subjects, not least those descended from the military captains of the Hundred Years War, were firmly convinced. Members of the Tudor nobility were willing, nay anxious, to swallow some very improbable stories about their family-origins and in a good many cases their faith in a particular forebear's achievement, indeed his very existence, may be open to question. But the fact remains that within a century of Bedford's death the spoils of France were generally regarded as at least a plausible explanation of a family's sudden wealth and of its capacity to embark upon a large-scale building project. There are signs that it had already won acceptance in the lifetime of Leyland's precursor, William Worcester, whose birth in the year of Agincourt and long residence in the household of Sir John Fastolf, the Regent's major-domo from 1422 to 1435, entitle him to speak with more authority.

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 purpose of this paper is two-fold; firstly, to draw attention to hitherto unknown manuscript materials of great value for the diplomatic, military, political and administrative history of Queen Anne's reign, and secondly, to demonstrate by the use of these manuscripts how the cabinet was organized at that time. The manuscripts in question are memoranda made by three successive secretaries of state. Robert Harley made notes of three hundred and seventy-two meetings of the cabinet or lords of the committee from 21 May 1704 to 8 February 1708; Charles, 3rd earl of Sunderland, of two hundred and thirty-six from 13 December 1706 to 4 June 1710; and William, 1st earl of Dartmouth, of one hundred and sixty-eight from 18 June 1710 to 17 June 1711. These memoranda cover the majority of the meetings of the highest executive bodies of the English government during the most vital years of the War of the Spanish Succession. Not only do they show the gradual formation of policy and the development of strategy, but they also throw a great deal of light on the influence both of the queen and of the leading statesmen of her time. These documents vary, of course, in quality. They consist of notes made by the secretary for his own use; sometimes they are little more than mnemonics. A memorandum of Sunderland's on the meeting of the cabinet on 26 March 1710 runs: ‘Board of Ordnance, & Com. of Ireland to attend on tuesday morning eleven a clock’, which is not very revealing. Sunderland, however, was rather a lazy man, but fortunately most of his notes are fuller than this. Harley, on the other hand, loved information for its own sake.

In order to render my subject manageable, I have excluded from it the literature dealing with legal history, with the general history of political ideas, and with the constitutional and political debates that preceded and accompanied the American Revolution. Each of these is a large subject in itself and would, require for its most summary treatment a separate paper. I limit myself to what has been written during the last fifty years or so about the constitutional history of the Union and of the states in their relation to the Union since the year 1783.