The story of the English farmers of the customs has hitherto concerned historians mainly because of its bearing on the history of the House of Commons. By their control over the customs and through the influence they exerted over the other English merchants, these financiers obstructed the efforts of the commons to establish parliamentary control over indirect taxation. The nature of this challenge has been clearly explained by George Unwin and Eileen Power. Edward III wished to finance the war with France by levying a heavy subsidy on exported wool (ultimately 40s. per sack) over and above the traditional light duty of 6s. 8d. per sack. The subsidy was disliked by the producers of wool, because they were convinced that it pushed down the price of wool in England. The commons who voiced this opposition were, however, powerless to prevent the collection of the subsidy as long as the wool merchants were willing to sanction its continuance and as long as the king could find English business men who would make satisfactory advances on the security of this revenue. Unwin has discussed in detail one set of developments that gradually ended this challenge to parliamentary control over indirect taxation. He was able to show how the leading financiers, by their selfish behaviour, destroyed the unity of the English wool merchants, made impossible further concerted action by merchant assemblies and forced the majority of the merchants to act in future ‘with and through the commons’.

From the institution of resident diplomatic missions in the fifteenth century a basic distinction has been drawn between ambassadors, either ordinary or extraordinary, and ministers of less eminence, often described as residents. By the late seventeenth century, however, various intermediate grades had become established. For example, a decree of the States of Holland, passed on 29 March 1651, mentions ‘ambassadors, resident envoys, agents or other ministers’. Much the most important intermediate rank was that of envoy extraordinary, which under Louis XIV became much commoner than before, while the gulf between the envoy and the mere resident grew steadily. The title of resident is said to have been degraded when the lesser German courts gave or even sold the title to persons who had no diplomatic functions at all. The increasing use made of envoys in the seventeenth century was partly due to a desire for economy, but at least as much to the desire of sovereigns to avoid or at least reduce the number of quarrels between ambassadors where there were several ambassadors at the same court and no generally accepted rules of precedence. Thus Frederick William, the great elector of Brandenburg, is said not to have appointed any ambassadors. There was a similar reluctance at Genoa and in Sweden and elsewhere in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. When Cobden proposed and carried in the Select Committee of 1850 on Public Salaries the abolition of embassies he was much less of a radical than his contemporaries thought.

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.

‘In England’, Sir John Seeley once wrote, ‘it is our custom to I alter things butto leave their names unaltered.’ Anyone who wished to test the truth of the dictum historiographically might examine the history of the word ‘mercantilism’. It has borne many, sometimes oddly conflicting, meanings, but they have had at any rate one thing in common: they have all been in some degree unpalatable to those reared in the traditions of English liberal thought. It was as the conspiracy of a mercantile minority out to line its pockets at the expense of the rest of the community that the system was first depicted by the classical economists. The interpretation of the German school of historical economists a century later was certainly no less distasteful to the liberal mind. To Bismarckian Germans it might appear seemly to condone the pursuit of aggression and covet its rewards. But even Chamber-lainites—like W. A. S. Hewins—amongst English historians had their doubts, and to George Unwin state ‘policy’ was simply a sham—the supreme illustration of the evils of bigness. The economic actions of the political body were not even the early thrustings of a lusty infant, but the morbid twitchings of disease. And Unwin, who believed that historians should be concerned with the life of communities, not with the actions of states, found more sympathizers in his profession (one suspects) than Cunning-ham, who was nearer to the German tradition. Others, misliking what they took to be the moral and intellectual confusion of mer-cantilists and their works, agreed to deny any title of coherence to folly so diverse and deplorable.

The origins of that strange amalgam of constitutional and religious issues which provoked England's civil war have not yet been fathomed. The painstaking researches of the historians of parliament have established that from early in Elizabeth's reign, the Commons assumed an increasingly Puritan complexion; from the 1621 Parliament until the last stormy session before the Personal Rule, the constitutional crisis came forward to meet and merge with the religious in the first of the three stirring resolutions voted by an expiring Commons in defiance of Mr. Speaker. Yet, the identification of sacred concerns with secular by the few hundred who sat in St. Stephen's was not the norm for the greater England beyond Westminster. Parliament had moved further and faster in the 1620's than had the country, the constitutional questions alone having been bruited about the countryside. The religious issue—the growing divergence in faith and practice within the Church—had not been generally perceived by a nation largely unaware of Laud and his adherents on the one hand and the ‘Preciser sort’ of Puritans on the other. During the Personal Rule, however, the religious issue became a matter of common knowledge, concern, rumour, and controversy. Under the impact of Laudianism, Puritanism grew more extremist. The inexorable destruction of the Elizabethan settlement, ground between an ever more rigid orthodoxy and an increasingly radical heterodoxy, forced the countryman to choose sides in matters religious. Once the identification of religious heterodoxy with political opposition was accomplished, the necessary ingredients for civil war were mixed, awaiting only the loosening of royal and episcopal authority in the Long Parliament in order to work their destructive ends.

When Pirenne contributed an article entitled ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne’ to the first issue of the Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire in 1922, he can have little realized how the ideas he there put forward were to be developed. His paper was designed as a protest against the traditional and deep-rooted conviction of western scholars that Latin Christendom was the direct and almost the sole heir of classical antiquity. Its argument was the now familiar one that Greco-Roman society survived with little change the shock of the Germanic invasions, and that it was only the appearance of Islam upon the scene that pushed the centre of Latin Christendom away from the Mediterranean and made possible the emergence of a new cultural unit based upon the land mass of western Europe. Medieval Christendom was not a continuation of the Roman world but something new, and Muhammed was a necessary precursor of Charlemagne

Almost everywhere in southern Asia, forms of government have derived from the Hindu concept of kingship. The Sukraniti, a medieval political treatise, provides a statement of later Hindu belief:

The King is the ruler, protector, and benefactor of the people …he is lord of this earth because of his deeds in the previous births … The King should make the subjects acquire the habits of performing their duties by the use of his terrible sceptre… The Prince who is virtuous is a part of the gods….

Ayear ago our theme was the work of the Bollandists. Their name suggests immediately, to all acquainted with European historiography, the name of another body of religious, many of them the contemporaries of Henskens and Papebroch, and it would be impossible to omit from even the shortest list of great historical enterprises the achievement of the Maurists. The two bodies of men and their work, nevertheless, have little in common save an equal devotion to accurate scholar-ship. What impresses us in the history of Bollandism is its continuity of spirit and undeviating aim over more than three hundred years, during which a very small but perpetually self-renewing group has pursued a single narrowly defined task, which is still far from completion. With the Maurists, on the other hand, it is the magnitude, the variety and the high quality of the achievement that strikes the imagination. While the Bollandists, a small family in a single house, have in three centuries produced in major work no more than a row of sixty-seven folios, the Maurists, in a little more than a hundred years, published matter enough to stock a small library, and left behind them letters, papers and transcripts which have been used and exploited by scholars for nearly two centuries since. Indeed, it would be both impossible and alien to the scope of our interests to attempt the briefest survey of Maurist scholarship in its entirety, and my remarks to-day will be confined to their publications on European history after the decline of the Roman Empire. Who were the Maurists, and wherein lay their peculiar excellence?