When I last had the honour to address this Society, I was on the point of starting for a tour in America. During some eight months I traversed the United States from sea to sea, from Boston to Virginia and from New York to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, finishing up in Canada, which I crossed from Victoria and Vancouver to Quebec and Montreal. I visited many universities and colleges and lectured at some thirty of them. I inspected numerous libraries and had speech with many score of historians. There was much that was. wonderful and strange to see and hear, but it was seldom that I could realise that it was a foreign country. If Quebec seemed a city of a France that had known no Revolution, and Santa Fe took one back to a small Spanish city with an intrusive Anglo-American element, the common tongue was a great link between the wanderer and his new friends, and he was never more bucked up than when he was assured by a leading newspaper of no mean city that, despite his strong English accent, his public orations were nearly always easily intelligible!

For an adequate understanding of the significance of the “keepers” and the “justices” of the peace, precise answers are needed to several questions. How frequent were breaches of the peace and crimes of violence in the reign of Edward III? Was the situation worse than in the reign of his father or than in the time of the Paston Letters? The orthodox view of the universal prevalence of violence, long ago vividly presented by the late L. Owen Pike, has been recently challenged in an article on the internal commerce of fourteenth-century England. Professor Willard's conclusion, based largely on transportation records, is that the “danger of the morrow's journey need not disturb the rest of travellers in an inn” and that “the transportation of goods (other than money) was to a high degree free from danger.” The material used by Pike, and other similar material, certainly afford arguments against so optimistic a theory. The speeches and petitions in parliament and the language of the commissions of Trailbaston, of oyer and terminer, and of the peace, imply persistent attacks on travellers, especially when going to fairs and markets, and innumerable instances of highway robbery, mayhem and homicide. Nor does the language seem exaggerated as one examines the records of courts and the cases appearing on Close and Patent Rolls. Without a quantitative analysis of all possible evidence, it is difficult to ascertain the truth as between these two conflicting opinions.

William ofLouth, Bishop of Ely, died on 25 March, 1298, and was buried on the south side of the choir of the cathedral church between two pillars near the high altar, on the spot on which a magnificent altar tomb under a canopy was set up in his memory. After the funeral, as was the custom, the prior and monks assembled in the chapter-house and chose proctors to carry the news of the bishop's death to Edward I and to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Inhis masterly account of the administrative activities of the Wardrobe, ProfessorTout has necessarily been led to say something of its system of accounting; but his treatment of it has been to a great extent incidental to the wider aspect of his subject. In a paper read before this Society in March 1923, Mr. Charles Johnson supplemented Professor Tout's work by a study of the system of account in the Wardrobe of Edward I. The system employed in the Wardrobe of Edward II during the first seventeen years of his reign was essentially the same as that of his father's time. For this earlier part of the reign, then, all that I propose todo is to supplement Mr. Johnson's account by a more detailed examination of certain points, a thorough understanding of which is of some importance to those who may have to interpret the evidence of these accounts on questions of constitutional and administrative history. In addition to this, it is hardly necessary to repeat that the reign of Edward II is of extreme importance in the history of the Wardrobe as a period of far-reaching reforms.

There are few statesmen in English history who have been so completely the victim of their circumstances as Thomas Osborne, Lord Danby. He was Lord High Treasurer of England 1673–1679, an office which combined those of the Modern Chancellor of the Exchequer and Minister of Foreign Affairs, as well as that of the Chief Executive Officer of the Realm. In all these duties Lord Danby displayed conspicuous ability, and attained considerable success. He was certainly one of the most able financiers of those times. He entered office just after the responsible government of the day had repudiated its national obligation to its creditors, and declared a “Stop of the Exchequer.” Trade was almost stagnant; every channel of revenue was drained at its source by Royal gifts and pensions; the financial ability of the Government was thoroughly discredited in commercial circles; the ordinary revenue of the country was inadequate to meet its needs. Yet out of this chaotic and insolvent condition Danby produced order, solvency, credit and prestige in the commercial world. His work in the Treasury would bear comparison with the ablest of the Chancellors of the Exchequer of England.

Diplomatic relations between England and Switzerland have their beginning in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII, chagrined at the success of the French at Marignano, sent Richard Pace as his ambassador to the Cantons, with instructions to secure the participation of the Swiss in an invasion of the Milanese to be undertaken by Imperialists and Swiss mercenaries in the pay of England. Pace had little difficulty in recruiting some 12,000 men from the V Cantons of Uri, Schwyz, Zürich, Basel and Schaffhausen, and 2,000 from the Grisons, and in March 1516 a Swiss-Imperial army descended into the Lombard plain under the joint leadership of the Emperor Maximilian and Galeazzo Visconti. The expedition proved a dismal failure, and all efforts made by Pace to induce the Swiss to take part in a second invasion of Italy failed signally. The conclusion of peace between France and the XIII Cantons on 29 November 1516, deprived the English mission of its essential purpose—the utilisation of anti-French sentiment in Switzerland—and in the autumn of 1517 Pace was recalled. The diplomatic intercourse between England and Switzerland in the years 1515–1517 was occasioned purely by the political exigencies of the moment and was founded upon no permanent basis of common interest, political or religious. Hence the mission of Pace has little significance for the development of Anglo-Swiss relations in later centuries.

During the period from 1839 to 1841, when the Concert of Europe intervened in the second Syrian war between Sultan Mahmoud and Mehemet Ali Pasha of Egypt to save the Ottoman Empire from destruction, Lord Palmerston the British Secretary of Foreign Affairs energetically opposed a return to the status quo ante helium in the Levant, risked the development of a serious international crisis in Near Eastern affairs, and played a leading rôle in the negotiation and execution of an arrangement by which Syria and Crete were restored to the direct rule of the Sultan and by which the authority of Mehemet Ali was confined to Egypt. The story of these developments is a familiar one; yet it is not generally known that at the same time when Palmerston was energetically attempting to exploit events in the East to bring about a settlement of the Turco-Egyptian Question in the interest of the Sultan he was also actively elaborating and extending a policy for the rejuvenation of Turkey which he had outlined in a period of peace in the Levant between 1833 and 1839.