During the past year the Society has sustained one loss that overshadows all others. It is not for me to attempt to appreciate the value of the substantial contributions to the published sources of English history to which Mr. James Gairdner devoted himself so assiduously; I can only attempt to express the feeling which many of us here must share on the loss of our friend. I well remember the intense interest with which I read his ‘Life of Richard III.’ when it was first published in 1878, and the pleasure which I felt many years after in coming into contact with a man whom I admired so much. His constant kindliness and readiness to interest himself in and encourage the work of young men are not things to be readily forgotten. The chronicling of the blanks left in the roll of our officials and members is the saddest part of a President's duty. In my first address I expressed our sense of loss sustained through the death of Dr. Charles Gross; at this distance of time we can see more clearly than was possible four years ago how fruitful his work was. This year great progress has been made in the attempt to carry on the Bibliography of British History which he began, and during the last few weeks I have been impressed anew with the freshness and thoroughness of his studies, as I have been trying to look into and amplify the argument of his essay on Scottish Municipal History.

My purpose is to trace the development of the study of one particular century in our national history, to show how the knowledge we now possess of it was acquired; how gradually the darkness which overhung the time was dissipated and the truth part by part revealed, and finally by what hands this work was achieved; and by what general causes its progress was promoted or retarded.

It is nearly one hundred years since the Congress of Vienna met, yet there has not been produced a standard work to which we can turn with confidence for a complete and detailed exposition of transactions which rearranged the whole map of Europe. Often as its errors have been exposed and its principles criticised, the exact methods by which it sought to achieve its purposes are to a certain extent still unknown. The mass of evidence has slowly but surely accumulated, but since Sorel attempted to do once more what Thiers had already done, to write the history of the Congress from the French point of view, no historian has given us any considerable description of its work. By Treitschke and Oncken we have valuable but by no means complete accounts, and meanwhile much work has been done on parts of the Congress which makes it probable that the time has arrived for a reconsideration of its whole scope to be attempted, and perhaps some commonly accepted judgments to be revised. The fascinating articles, which Professor Fournier has given us, as preliminaries to his great work on the Congress, show how much new evidence is at the disposal of the historian.

No one in these days will be disposed to deny that Castle-reagh has not invariably encountered that fair play at the hands of historians to which a long record of devoted service should entitle him. It is the purpose of the present paper to contribute a discussion upon the original instructions drawn up for the use of the British minister at the meeting of the Allies in 1822, in so far as these instructions bear on the relations between France and Spain; to show that an examination of the premises upon which the conclusions drawn from those instructions are based must render those conclusions fallacious; and to exhibit this view in connexion with certain events.

The last surviving son of Earl Godwin was named Wulfnoth. He had been kept prisoner by King William the Conqueror, and was released on William's death, but only for a short time. His name was not a common one, not more than fourteen persons who bore it in the eleventh century being recorded in Searle's ‘Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum,’ and only about nine in the tenth. The name of Wulfnoth is purely Old English. So, too, are the names of some of the other children of Earl Godwin—namely, Lêofwine, Êadgŷth, Ælfgifu and Êadgifu. But the names of Earl Godwin's other sons, Swegen, Harold, Tostig and Gyrth, are Dano-Norwegian in immediate origin. Even the name of Harold is Scandinavian, the true Old-English and West-Saxon form being ‘Hereweald.’

There are three sources, distinct in character, which supply materials whereby historians may be able to study the military characteristics of the period under discussion. The authentic Government records, existing either in printed form, as Palgrave's ‘Writs,’ Rymer's ‘Foedera,’ ‘Statutes of the Realm,’ and the like, or among the vast mass of original documents still lying unpublished in the Public Record Office, show the conditions of military service under the King. Numerous chronicles, as those of Geoffrey le Baker, ‘Annales Londonienses’ and others, the works of partisan clerks or monks, which form the second source, give a prejudiced and often an exaggerated account of the movements of Lancaster, Mortimer and the King, marked by an inaccuracy which was doubtless due to the writers' dependence upon second-hand information. The third source is that which has recently been made more accessible, though not to the extent which may be desired, by the publication of various local records in the Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commissioners and of such useful works as the ‘Calendars of the City of London Letter Books’ and Miss M. Bateson's ‘Calendar of the Records of the Borough of Leicester.’ This new source of historical facts has an advantage over the other two in that it deals with events chronicled at the very time of their occurrence, and also places on record, without comment, mere statements of facts, including also the personal evidence of the chief actors in, and originators of, the incidents under consideration. The great historical value of this third source calls attention to the need for further publications of borough records such as the Memoranda Rolls of the City of London, a calendar of which Dr. Reginald Sharpe has now commenced. It is from these Memoranda Rolls, which contain letters from the King and from Henry of Lancaster, that the present paper attempts to throw new light upon the history of Mortimer's ascendency during the years 1327 to 1330.

One of the most striking phenomena of the financial history of the thirteenth century was the introduction and the rapid increase in use of the principle of national direct taxation of personal property. In the first half of that century the successor of the danegeld, the carucage, was dropped from the financial system; scutages as well as the other feudal dues were proving to be difficult to collect; and it remained to develop new methods of raising a revenue. The new principle of direct taxation of personal property was shown to be both workable and remunerative during the reign of Henry III, and it was seized upon with avidity by Edward I during the financial strain caused by his wars with Wales and France. During the fourteenth century the lay subsidies, as such taxes may be called, were levied frequently whenever there was a special need.

One of the religious communities dissolved in the reign of Henry VIII was described in its deed of surrender as ‘prior et conventus domus fratrum ordinis sanctae Crucis juxta Turrim Lond. vulgariter nuncupatae The Crossed Fryers’ —the house of the brethren of the Holy Cross, popularly called the ‘crossed friars’; a house whose memory is kept alive by the street near the Tower of London known as ‘Crutched Friars.’ The object of this paper is to give some account of the order to which it belonged, and to attempt to determine the number of its establishments in this country. It will be shown that its members were canons regular, and, assuming this for the moment, something must be said in regard to their designation as the crossed, crouched, or crutched friars.