My text is taken from Macaulay, who wrote of the Cavalier Parliament of 1661–78:

‘The great English revolution of the seventeenth century, that is to say the transfer of the supreme control of the executive administration from the crown to the House of Commons, was, through the whole long existence of this Parliament, proceeding noiselessly, but rapidly and steadily. Charles, kept poor by his follies and vices, wanted money. The Commons alone could legally grant him money. They could not be prevented from putting their own price on their grants … that they should be allowed to interfere with every one of the king's prerogatives, to wring from him his consent to laws which he disliked, to break up cabinets, to dictate the course of foreign policy and even to direct the administration of war’

The confiscation and redistribution of the estates of the supporters of Simon de Montfort after the battle of Evesham plunged much of England into confusion. Such was the magnitude and violence of the social upheaval that even after the publication of the Dictum of Kenilworth in October 1266, and the general surrender of the rebels in the following summer, had brought organized resistance to an end, the country was still tense and uneasy. In August 1270, King Henry III abandoned his intention of accompanying his son the Lord Edward on crusade and made it known that he had taken this decision because ‘the prelates, magnates and community of the realm, consider it neither expedient nor safe that both of us should leave the kingdom’. Yet when Edward returned to England as king in August 1274, only seven years after the capitulation of the last rebel stronghold of the Isle of Ely, the situation had undergone a striking transformation. The bulk of the Montfortians had already regained possession of their lands and were being reassimilated into the political community. The theme of this paper is the nature of that recovery, and the light it throws on the operation of the land market and the character of the rebellion of 1264–7.

The medievalist who goes to Pavia will visit first and most reverently the church of San Pietro Ciel d'Oro. It is an eighth-century foundation, reformed by Cluny in the tenth and much rebuilt and altered over the years. But you do not go to it for the architecture, nor for the gilded ceiling—long tarnished; you go to salute the relics: in the crypt, Boethius; on the high altar St Augustine of Hippo. There you have the categories of medieval scholarship, which found its subject-matter in Augustine and its language in Boethius. These are easy generalizations. What we must consider are the harder, practical questions of Boethius' entry into the western academic tradition. To what extent and why was he an influence on the learning of the early Middle Ages? He conveyed the classical heritage to the medieval west, no doubt— but how and when?

At Avignon on 24 September 1321, a wealthy, middle-aged, well-connected and widely travelled Venetian merchant, Marino Sanudo, called Torsello, presented to Pope John XXII a book which he had been composing over the previous fifteen years, the Liber Secretorum (or Secreta) Fidelium Crucis, the book of the secrets of the faithful of the Cross. The full title explained the subject matter: the protection of the faithful, the conversion and destruction of the infidel and the acquisition and retention of the Holy Land in peace and security.

World history was once taken for granted as the only sensible basis for understanding the past. Christians could do no other than begin with creation and fit subsequent details into the framework of divine revelation. This ordering of the past survived into the seventeenth century as Bossuet and Walter Raleigh may remind us. But with the revival of antique letters, a different model for historical writing asserted itself that could not fit smoothly within the Christian epos. In effect, Thucydides and Tacitus challenged Augustine, presenting the history of states and their interaction as a self-contained whole. Guicciardini and Machiavelli wrote their histories accordingly, dismissing as irrelevant the world historical framework that had seemed essential to earlier believers.

‘Men dred tresson wher they it finden’ wrote an anonymous fifteenth-century translator of the Song of Roland, the earliest and greatest of all chansons de geste which take treason as their major theme. In later medieval France men did not have far to search before they found evidence justifying concern with that particular topos. Treason was often associated with its sister sedition in contemporary chronicles, memoirs, pamphlets, sermons and political allegories, even in figurative representations of that betrayal, most notorious to medieval men, by Judas of his Lord. The long war with England naturally posed delicate problems over the loyalty and allegiance of many involved in conflict through no choice of their own. Aspects of what happened when individuals changed sides and whole provinces bent before force majeure in recognizing a new sovereign, thereby incurring the stigma of rebellion against a former lord, have recently been much discussed. Plots to deliver castles and towns are without number. Siege warfare, so characteristic of the period, encouraged such behaviour. Surviving interrogations reveal both serious and improbable schemes to over-throw royal authority, in which great provincial princes were often implicated. Thousands of letters of pardon recite, frequently in the graphic words of the guilty, the extent of innumerable individual acts of treachery towards the French crown. The use of spies and informers, coded and cryptic messages, poisoning, assassination, torture, bribery and blackmail, pre-arranged meetings with mysterious figures and also the invocation of intangible occult forces, sorcery, divination and black magic, to attain political ends, all these are integral to the most notorious cases of treachery.

The ‘seventeen Netherlands’ owed their existence entirely to the energies of their rulers. Until 1548 when this hotchpot of duchies, counties and lordships was united in the Burgundian circle of the Empire, the boundaries of the Low Countries had expanded or contracted according to the military and diplomatic fortunes of their princes: there was nothing natural or inevitable about them. Charles V had, for example, threatened to annexe the prince-bishopric of Münster in 1534–5, as he had added Utrecht only a few years earlier. Nor can the incorporation of the duchy of Gelre in 1543 be considered the outcome of an ineluctable historical process. Since the late fifteenth century the rulers in the Low Countries had sought to assert their control over the duchy. But there had been times when it seemed as though Gelre, which looked Januslike both up and down the Rhine, might, in combination with Jülich and Cleves, have constructed a formidable anti-Habsburg constellation into whose orbit a large part of the northern Netherlands would be drawn.

A complaint frequently voiced by historians of Jacobitism is that their subject is plagued by a breed of authors with a passion for secret agents, romantic uprisings, and princes in the heather. It is not so often admitted, however, just how intractable the professionals themselves find the topic and their substantial failure to give any coherent account of it. Jacobitism appears as the major issue in British politics in the early-eighteenth century; it was associated with wide-spread disorder, recurrent national crises, and a series of rebellions and attempted invasions; but its actual organization and the extent of its support remains surprisingly obscure. This is partly so because the source-material is notoriously difficult to handle and ranges from a mass of ciphered correspondence in the Stuart papers to the diplomatic archives of half-a-dozen European states. To study it is to enter a world both of illusion and deliberate misrepresentation. Would-be revolutionaries tended to imagine themselves perpetually on the verge of success, while it often suited the interests of the British government to assert that the nation was threatened with subversion and imminent invasion. But the weakness of Jacobite historiography is more fundamental than a problem with the sources. It lies in an addiction to detailed narrative unsupported by adequate analysis and a fixed assumption that the importance of the movement was its potential for effecting a revolution by armed force. This paper adopts a different approach. It examines the structure of the Jacobite organization and questions whether it was at any time between 1710 and 1715 capable of realising its aims; it argues rather that its activities contributed to a great popular myth, which was to be of critical significance in the struggle of men and parties which preceded the establishment of the Whig oligarchy.

The problem of treason in the first half of the twentieth century is at its most acute for the historian of Britain in contemplating the Irish dimension. Treason against the realm up to 1922 meant treason against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The dissolution of that Union, and the subsequent progress of twenty-six of the Irish counties to the status of a Republic in 1949, has built up a retrospective assumption on both sides of the Irish sea that such dissolution was inevitable. The British Tory and the Irish nationalist, similar in many cultural attitudes, agree on this point: the perpetual irreconcilability of the two countries and the inevitability of their disunion absolves the Tory from anxiety that the causes of Irish separation may have lain in British failure, and that they have comparative significance for possible future English divergence from Wales and Scotland; while the Irish nationalist separatist, the child of the Easter Week Rising of 1916, insists that Ireland never accepted British rule, and that the insurgent handful who took up arms in 1916 were acting on behalf of a people who secretly had been demanding such separation since the Norman invasion of 1169 and would continue so to do until the end of time.

There are certain moments in history when major events, individual experience, and ideology coincide to such a remarkable extent that historians have to pause and look up from their patient plotting of the vagaries of humanity. One such moment was the summer of 1940 in France.

In 1152 King Stephen and his army began an unexpected siege of Newbury castle. The castellan, John fitz Gilbert, warned by his constable, was able to beguile the King and put the castle in a suitable state of defence. To achieve the necessary breathing space for this he surrendered a younger son, William, as a hostage. When his trickery was discovered the boy's life was at risk; it was proposed that he should be hanged or projected over the castle walls. Stephen sent messengers to John fitz Gilbert, threatening his execution. To them John gave the daunting reply that he was not particularly worried since he had the hammer and the anvil for forging even better sons. In fact the boy charmed King Stephen and survived to become Earl of Pembroke and regent of England. Whether the tale is anything more than a tall story it is impossible to say. At least it presents a problem. Family relationships mattered—or did they? In what ways and to what extent did they matter?