The accession of William III began a revolution in English foreign policy. Under the Dutch king's auspices England joined a Grand Alliance against the France of Louis XIV and shouldered the burdens of a principal partner in a major continental war. Not only did the war place grave financial strains upon the state; the formulation, administration, and execution of war policy also became areas of continual concern. These concerns combined to raise general questions about England's proper role in European affairs and about the proper application of English power in service of those interests. They also cast William III and the politicians into a constitutional no-man's land in which the royal monopoly over war and peace had to contest with the need to secure annual supplies. It has been the historian's task to explain how William III's “continental commitment” to land warfare, alliances, and defense of European liberties survived this political struggle.

Walcott's critique raises three general issues: whether Sir Lewis Namier thought that the foremost task of an historian is the destruction of legends; whether he tried to write the whole truth about the eighteenth century; and whether anyone can properly be designated a professional historian or professional political scientist. Some of Walcott's particular criticisms can be answered in the discussion of these three issues.

The first issue is whether Namier thought that the foremost task of an historian is the destruction of legends. At the beginning of his critique, Walcott doubts it, but does not deny it. Yet at the end of his critique, he summarizes “what Namier did do” as the removal of certain misconceptions about eighteenth-century politics; these misconceptions Namier called “legends,” according to Walcott. The misconceptions consist in analyzing eighteenth century politics in nineteenth-century terms, but they are not confined to nineteenth-century historians. They are held by twentieth-century historians as well, in fact, by all historians of the ante-Namier period, as Walcott calls it. Namier shows how much contempt he has for these historians and their legends in a sentence which cannot be considered innocuous. Namier says: “… I hardly remember having come across any contemporary materials, or any book reproducing such materials, which did not contribute something to my information.” Since “contemporary” means “eighteenth-century” here, Namier says by implication that no later ante-Namier historian has contributed to his information, unless he has reproduced eighteenth-century materials.

Now that the great bulk of papers relating to John Locke in the Lovelace Collection has begun to yield up its treasure, the life and character of John Locke, as well as the life and character of his work, can be seen more fully than ever before. John Locke has firmly entered into political history, as Peter Laslett's researches have demonstrated; and Locke himself has become firmly embedded in the amorphous discipline called the history of ideas, since the history of his own ideas can now readily be examined. The wealth of material relevant to Locke's work has by no means provided his ideas with greater logical consistency, for the lack of which Locke has always had his critics. In some ways, the philosophical coherence of his work presents even greater problems than it used to, since the papers leave even more ravelled ends than the published books did. But the papers have provided something which may prove even more useful in understanding Locke's thought than a logical key to his thought: that is, the spectacle of a man thinking, and thinking hard, over four decades. Locke himself comes to appear a particular illustration of his own preoccupation with process and with the philosophical ideas arising from the concept of process: the long processes of his thinking, along so many major lines, may also be seen more clearly now in their complementary relation to one another.

This paper, the heart excised from a longer study, deals with one line of Locke's thought, a line which has recently attracted serious scholarly attention, his views on language.

The influence of computer usage upon the landscape of British history has been subtle and often profound. This influence has been one of several historiographical and cultural trends which have changed the nature and scope of “history.” The declining importance of the so-called grand narratives of national and class histories, and the fragmentation and loss of cultural authority of scholarly history in the face of increasingly diffuse popular and political uses of “history,” cannot be separated from the impact of the new technologies. The coherence and accessibility of history is not only challenged by the postmodernist questioning of the very validity of the search for authoritative coherence and by the philosophical assertion of the self-sufficiency of the text as a basis for analysis and explanation. This coherence and accessibility is also being challenged by the increasing importance of information technology in historical research and teaching. The scholarly presentation of computer usage by historians has tended to emphasize technical and methodological aspects. Important as these are, this has tended to conceal the major philosophical issues raised by such computer usage.

There is then a double challenge to historical practice as it has been developed over the hundred years or so since Tout, Firth, and others established a modern institutional structure toward the end of the nineteenth century. The irony of the conjunction of the postmodern cultural and philosophical challenges and the computer user's technologically based challenge is not perhaps so surprising when it is considered that what the computer user is doing is creating metadata from data/sources/texts and producing metanarratives from that metadata.

This fairly representative account of the travels of an Anglo-Norman king in his dominions during the course of one year is testimony to the peripatetic character of royal and ducal administrations in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries. But, like other sources used in isolation, it barely indicates the intensity of itinerating government reached during the long reign of Henry I (1100–1135), and which was maintained at a heightened pitch in the chaotic decades to come.

Modern historians have recognized that itineration was fundamental to medieval kingship and that it was crucial to the governance of a geographically disparate realm, as kings divided their time between historically separate regions. Itineration was a practical device in the absence of fully-developed governmental institutions as well as an economic necessity, for in partially monetarized economies, it was not always possible to move goods easily from county districts to main centers of power.

Only a handful of recent, comprehensive studies of government in Norman and Angevin England have touched on the subject of itineration. David C. Douglas concentrated on the men who comprised the royal household and who attended meetings of the royal curia in his analyses of William the Conqueror's (1066–1087) personal kingship.

Raoul Glaber, the Burgundian monk and chronicler, noted in a famous passage in his Historiarum Libri Quinque how, about the year 1000,

Although Glaber was writing primarily of the Continent, the tide of religious revival that followed the coming of the millennium eventually lapped upon the shores of the most distant corners of Europe. In Scotland, the great age of church-building came a century later, and it was the twelfth century, rather than the eleventh, which was notable for the foundation of churches and monasteries on a large scale. Nevertheless, by 1200 Scotland, too, had been cloaked in a white mantle of new churches, made up of cathedrals, parish churches, and monasteries. It is the latter with which this essay will be principally concerned.

The works of Professor Barrow are of the first importance for understanding the patterns of monastic patronage that brought the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and other religious orders to Scottish soil, and for the contribution these orders made to the medieval kingdom of Scotland.

Lollardy, the native English heresy vigorously suppressed since the early fifteenth-century, did not die with its suppression in the wake of the rebellion of Sir John Oldcastle in 1414. A century later Lollard beliefs remained current, albeit in varied forms. The most consistent features in this eclectic religious system were the possession and reading of English translations of the Scriptures, a sacramentarian view of the Eucharist, and an often vehement anticlericalism. With few exceptions Lollardy was the preserve of the unlearned; based on the religious fringes of towns and the greater cities, rather than in the learned centers of the universities or the Court.

After World War II, Great Britain faced major economic problems, which the government sought to rectify by reviving export markets and achieving a favorable balance of trade. One overlooked component of reconstruction was a decision to recognize tourism as an “invisible export,” a way to draw currency, especially American dollars, into the country. However, in a period characterized by scarcity, rationing, and austerity measures, the endeavor presented enormous challenges. The situation was exacerbated by the advent of the Marshall Plan in 1948. It required British participation in a European-based tourism scheme that jeopardized the success of Britain's own initiative and, ironically, could potentially undermine the economic benefits that Marshall Plan participation was supposed to provide. In exploring the history of British tourism policy in this era, this article shows the extent to which the Marshall Plan compromised an important aspect of British reconstruction policy. It can thereby better inform our understanding of the complexities of postwar reconstruction and of Britain's guarded response to aspects of the Marshall Plan—particularly the American initiative to promote greater European economic integration in the immediate postwar era.

An extensive literature that has appeared over the past two decades on the Hanoverian electorate and political culture at the constituency level provides a more sophisticated understanding of party conflict in Britain during the long eighteenth century than earlier work focused on high politics or other subjects. H. T. Dickinson points out that most people experienced politics at the constituency level where negotiations between different political groups within communities and the voters provided a voice for competing interests that an older historiography focused on high politics failed to recognize. These local aspects of Hanoverian politics established the context for two important developments in the early nineteenth century; a greater appreciation for the impact of public opinion on politics at Westminster and the development of a two-party system. The emergence of a self-conscious provincial identity sustained by new economic and institutional forces drove both trends. Christopher Wyvill's Yorkshire Association formed in 1779, the General Chamber of Manufacturers founded in 1785, anti-war petitioning efforts by local groups during the conflict with Napoleon, and the successful campaign in 1812 against the regulatory Orders in Council demonstrated the growing impact of provincial activism. The intersection between new provincial interests focused on issues debated at Westminster and constituency politics with its own rituals and dynamics provides an opening to explore the final decades of the Hanoverian political order. Connections between local and metropolitan drew into sharper focus as party conflict at Westminster extended into national politics.

Over the course of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945, a number of letters of denunciation were sent by islanders to the German authorities, accusing fellow islanders of violations of occupation law or of anti-German activity of one sort or another. The German occupiers were ambivalent toward the denunciations. While recognizing their usefulness in maintaining order and the respect for German rule, they found both the letters and their writers distasteful. The local British authorities in Jersey and Guernsey also found the letters problematic; the consequences for the individuals targeted in the letters could be dire, and the impact on island society as a whole was significant, both during the occupation and beyond liberation in May 1945. The extent and nature of resistance and collaboration have been contentious issues in the historiography of the occupation of the Channel Islands, and these letters have been cited as evidence that islanders were unduly cooperative with the Nazis. This article examines the surviving letters of denunciation, and by placing them into the wider contexts of Nazi Europe and the historiography of denunciation in totalitarian states, argues that denunciation in the Channel Islands, far from being exceptional, was quite typical of the practice throughout the Nazi empire.