Page 224, Offler, H. S. for Reichsgat read Reichsgut

The following notes were put together in response to a suggestion that workers in other fields might be interested to hear something of our problems and the solutions we are finding for them. I have addressed myself to such readers and have tried to avoid both the minute and the technical. I have confined myself to four topics largely from considerations of space. An article that covered the whole ground could have been little more than a select bibliography, and what I thought was wanted in this case was an indication of what the books contained. The selected topics have been chosen partly with reference to the amount and importance of the work that has recently been devoted to them, and partly because of their special relevance to the subject in hand. Thus much could have been said of the very interesting development of views as to origins and the pre-conquest period in general or of the important advances that have been made in the understanding of revenue, taxation and finance, but it will probably be agreed that these had to make way for such subjects as constitutional theory and parliament. Reasons for certain other obvious omissions will be given later.

The complicated series of disputes which followed the York election of 1140–1 is familiar in broad outline to all students of the period. From a small beginning the strife came to involve almost every person of importance in England, and many on the Continent, and lasted, in its ramifications, for some twenty years. Yet the history of this controversy, though it could not fail to receive some notice in any detailed account of the times, has not hitherto been set out in full with complete accuracy. This failure has been due in part to the nature of the records, which are scattered among English chronicles, papal documents and Cistercian sources, and can only be fully used by one who has them all before his eyes simultaneously; many of those who have treated the episode obiter have failed thus to assemble them with completeness. In part also it has been due to gaps in the evidence at more than one crucial point, which have thrown all historians back upon conjecture. These gaps, in part, still exist, but it so happens that within the last few years a number of independent studies have reconstructed much of the narrative that was hitherto dark, and some important documents have come to light; it is therefore possible to arrive at something approaching to a clear view of the whole business.

Among the actors on the political stage of post-Bismarckian Germany Kiderlen-Wächter occupies a place apart. His robust and rather gross personality stands out from the surrounding throng of shadowy figures, beloved by few, disliked by many, ignored by none. To this day the question is asked what he would have done had he been at the helm in 1914, and whether perchance he might have averted the rush of the avalanche. The Swabian Bismarck, as Naumann called him, impressed his contemporaries as the ablest German diplomatist of his generation with the possible exception of Marschall von Bieberstein. His admiring biographer and friend Dr Jaeckh declares that he came too late and went too soon.

No aspect of fifteenth-century Florence can be completely without interest, although a bare minimum may seem to attach to a study of the Jews during this period and of their connexion with the city finances on the one hand and the establishment of a Mons Pietatis on the other. Yet the economic foundation on which the magnificent artistic and literary superstructure rested is clearly important, and that not only for the fortunes of the Medici and other ruling, or rival, families, Strozzi, Pazzi, Tornabuoni and the like, but also where it affects the daily lives of the popolo minuto, tailors, potters and fishermen, or those craftsmen who by their labours built the church of San Spirito and the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Nor can we disregard a chapter of history which closes with some of the most direct and the most practically effective of the sermons of Savonarola.