Anniversary Address

Extract

We are emerging from a winter of global discontents, and despite the approach of spring I see no immediate prospect of improvement in world affairs, in general rather the opposite. In particular, too, we are witnessing a fashion shift in crime. Past Presidents have not chronicled changes in wrongdoing, and I doubt if in the eighteenth century the occupants of this chair in the security of our premises commented upon the popularity of highway robbery. Today, kidnapping, spreading from countries further south and east where it is endemic, and bombing, instigated from a country further west where it is not, have become the popular weapons of coercion. Indeed, the times are depressing and established ways are threatened. But we in this room, and indeed all concerned with and for the humanities, have the elixir of hope: namely, a sense of history. Despite the ‘new look’ given in this year 1980 to the Vikings, ‘traders not raiders’, I doubt if some such commendation would have encouraged a welcome from the apprehensive customers resident on these and other shores who saw them coming in their long boats. I doubt, too, if the Anglo-Saxons viewed the approach of William of Normandy with cool equanimity or, since then, our thirteenth-century forebears slept soundly during the incursion of Louis of France. Later again the shadow of Napoleon fell upon our people, to be followed within living memory by the darker shadow of the threat of German aggression: to quote Virgil, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem. And still today we remain on the alert, mindful of the great Russian bear and his enveloping hug which shuts out the light. It is, I believe and proclaim, a source of strength and consolation to men and women of our disciplines to be able to watch with a measure of detachment the movements of these great shadows over the beautiful landscape of England which itself, under our special scrutiny, reveals the changes and chances of history.