It has probably occurred to many people that a slight air of unreality overhangs our conception of the relations between church and state in England in the twelfth century. We know the main questions at issue, and something at least of the personalities engaged upon them. We possess much correspondence—ill edited, on the whole, but still illuminating. We have also much biographical matter. Above all, in the Constitutions of Clarendon we have an official statement of what the king claimed, and his bishops could not deny to be the ancient customs of the realm. It is not surprising that the twelfth-century church in England has sometimes been treated by modern writers in a way which would suggest that little more remains to be learned about it.

It is perhaps not surprising that the central thread of manorial land law should be found in the pauper problem; for one of the most urgent needs of any age or society is the prevention of destitution. The “sturdy beggar” and “such as walk by night and sleep by day” were the terror of Plantagenet as well as Tudor, while the distress of the aged and impotent was as bitter in the thirteenth as in the sixteenth century, though voiced by no popular poet or press. The Court rolls of the Abbot of Crowland's manors of Oakington, Cottenham and Drayton give constant evidence of the effort consciously or unconsciously made to obviate these unproductive elements of the population, which might become a burden upon the efficient classes.

History in a literary form was a remarkably late growth in Roman letters. Cicero declares several times in unmistakable terms that in his day “History is absent from Roman literature.” Twice he discusses the previous writers of Roman history, the annalists such as Fabius Pictor, Cato and Piso. He makes it clear that he found them very unpalatable because of their jejuneness: “erat enim in historia nihil aliud, nisi annalium confectio…unam dicendi laudem putant esse brevitatem.” Only Coelius Antipater stood out from the rest as one who made some attempt to achieve a pleasing style, but even he “ut homo, neque doctus, neque maxime aptus ad dicendum, sicut potuit, dolavit.” It is obvious that the basis of this criticism is purely literary and not historical, and that the demerits which Cicero censures in the older school of annalists, when considered as literature, may to a certain extent be considered as merits, if their historical value is to be weighed amongst the sources of Livy.

The struggle between Frederick II and the papacy is the most dramatic of all the medieval contests between Regnum and Sacerdotium and has naturally attracted many historians. Frederick's relations to the church of his Sicilian kingdom is a less obviously dramatic theme and has never been treated except incidentally as one of the contributory causes of friction between pope and emperor. It is, however, worthy of independent study, providing as it does a corrective to the idea of Frederick engaged in almost ceaseless warfare against the church, which one derives from excessive concentration on papal and imperial manifestoes. A study of Frederick's Sicilian constitutions, of his charters to churches and his letters to officials and ecclesiastics, reveals a ruler who is far from being the inveterate enemy of churchmen and of church privileges.

The vicarage system has already attracted a number of historians and owing to their investigations the main points in its origin and development are well known. The subject, however, still presents difficult problems, and it is in the hope of contributing towards a solution of some of these that the present paper has been prepared.

Christian relics have never received their due attention in history. Historians, justly suspecting the authenticity of the more eminent of them, have tended therefore to put them all to one side, forgetting that even a forgery can have its historical value; and only the theologians have taken notice of them, in their relations to the apocryphal improvements on Christian thought and story. This neglect is undeserved; for there are some of them that not only throw important sidelights on the history of their times, but even have played an active part in the moulding of that history.

The authorship of the Vindidae has been a vexed question for 350 years, and perhaps it is not likely to be solved. The book belongs, in the main, to a body of Huguenot literature which appeared after 1572 and was concerned with the dangerous question of the right of resistance. A good deal of this literature was sedulously and obstinately anonymous. There was a reason. If a writer advocated resistance, and, still more, if he advocated or even condoned “tyrannicide,” he would be committing himself to something as abhorrent to the general opinion of his age as “Bolshevism”is to the general opinion of ours. If in addition he backed his opinions by his name, and his name were that of a known adherent of the Calvinist cause, he would be committing that cause to certain obloquy and possible danger. He would be trespassing beyond the bounds of cautious and guarded discretion which Calvin had imposed upon himself in this matter: he would be giving to the enemies of Calvinism the very handle which they desired. In these conditions anonymity flourished: pseudonyms were rife; and calculated puzzles were set to baffle future ages. Not only are we confronted by problems of authorship: we have also to face other and lesser problems. Sometimes, for example, the place and the date of publication are falsified. There was indeed a particular reason for such falsification. Printers as well as authors—perhaps even more than authors—had to be wary; and a genuine place and date of publication afforded too easy a clue.

The swing of the pendulum of historical opinion about Peterborough is in less violent oscillation than formerly, and is tending to become stationary at a middle point. The original belief that he both took Barcelona in 1705 and relieved it in 1706, and much else besides, based on Freind's and Carleton's contemporary eulogies, still held the field when Macaulay wrote his essay on the War of Succession in Spain, in the intervals of speech-making at his Leeds election of 1832. The reaction culminated in the refusal to believe that Carleton's memoirs were written by Carleton at all, or that Peterborough either took or relieved Barcelona; these later views found their extreme expression in Colonel Parnell's War of the Succession in Spain (1888), a work both learned and able, but very far from judicial.

[This article has been inspired by Dr Stella Kramer's recent book, The English Craft Gilds (Columbia University Press, 1927), and is, in fact, an inquiry into it. In this, her second work on the subject, she has dealt with the last phase, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth. Her material is drawn principally from the published records of towns and gilds, of which she has made so thorough an investigation that any one who has the temerity to follow in her steps will have an unprofitable task. To one who, some years ago, covered a fraction of the same ground with the same object in view and arrived at some tentative conclusions, the temptation to use Miss Kramer's exhaustive study to test and amplify those conclusions is irresistible.]

The Action Française dates from 1898—the year when the agitation for the revision of the trial of Dreyfus was at its height—and was an offshoot of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, one of the many anti-Dreyfusard organisations. The leaders of the Patrie Française having announced that in their agitation against Dreyfus they would do nothing illegal, the more extreme members, led by Henri Vaugeois, seceded and founded the Action Française, declaring that where the salvation of the country was at stake they would stick at nothing.

Among the blithe adventurers of the eighteenth century, few sur-passed Macartney in the diversity and value of their public service, and none left a fairer name. Whether he was cajoling the Russian premier, or contending with republican patriots in the Irish Parliament, or defying a tenfold force of French in Grenada, or heartening Madras against Hyder Ali, or driving the Dutch from the coast of Coromandel, or facing the pistol of a soldier to whom as Governor of Bengal he had given the lie, or teaching the court of Pekin the merits of his country, or conspiring with Louis XVIII in Italy, or protecting our conquest at the Cape by threatening to blow up the mutinous Tremendous, he was always the same rare man, unflinching, versatile and incorruptible. When, as a gouty veteran of sixty-two, he turned his house at Chiswick into “the resort of every distinguished character,” the Latin verses in which he reviewed his wanderings contained no more mention of Russia than Europaeque plagas fere visimus omnes. Yet he lived to see the work that he had done there contribute, and that perhaps in no small degree, to the fate of Napoleon and of Europe. In 1806, when he died, the dependent empire had not yet made its most conspicuous effort to dispense with British commercial aid. Tilsit had yet to point the way to Borodino. But the fate of Paul I had already hinted at the attitude of the Russian gentry towards a Tsar who challenged the system which Macartney's treaty had confirmed. One great cause of the retreat from Moscow may be discovered in the Anglo-Russian commercial bargain of 1766.

The decline in prosperity of the British West Indies after 1815 was so rapid as to obscure their importance during the Napoleonic War; but of their commercial pre-eminence among British colonies at that time there are many proofs. Thus, on 12 September 1804, while watching Toulon, Nelson, who knew them well, wrote in a lately published letter, “…I think the French will some day send their fleets to sea, and that the West Indies … is (sic) more likely for them to hurt us in than this country. We have but few troops to defend our islands and recent conquests; 10 or 12,000 French troops would injure us more there than in any other part of the world.” Herein he agreed with Dundas, who in August 1796 stated to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, that far more harm would result to our commerce and credit from a French invasion of Jamaica than of Great Britain or Ireland. As is well known, Nelson in April 1805 acted on his conviction recorded above, and, despite the perilously scanty news as to the course of the Franco-Spanish fleet, he chased it to the West Indies because of his conviction of the immense importance of those colonies. Lord Barham, now First Lord, approved his action; for he himself had come to the conclusion from the French moves against those colonies, “that depredation and the destruction of our trade is their grand object,” and that the invasion of England was now a secondary object. This view was for the present somewhat exaggerated; for Napoleon, who overworked his admirals even more than his generals, expected Villeneuve and Gravina first to devastate our Leeward Islands (with Tobago thrown in) and then to fly back, along with Ganteaume's fleet, to cover the invasion of England.

Russia in 1815 appeared with England as the saviour of Europe from Napoleon's despotism; the Tsar Alexander I, both by his moderation towards the French nation and by the generosity of his promises to the Poles, earned the respect of all good Europeans. In England especially the Whig party, true to the traditions of 1790 and of opposition to Pitt's warlike threats, was always ready to admire the Tsar and to co-operate with Russia. Twenty years later dislike and fear of Russia was in the minds of most Englishmen, and the responsible utterances of party leaders ranged from extreme reserve to unconcealed hostility. It is curious that some of the most hostile voices were now among the Whigs, while the tone of Conservative leaders was more cautious, and the only friends of Russia were to be found in Lord Durham and Richard Cobden, both men of Radical leanings.