For several years C. Warren Hollister has been picking his way through the “treacherous bog” of Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman military institutions. Out of that bog he has brought medievalists fresh knowledge of the nature of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, the relation of fyrd-service to knight's service, the importance before and after 1066 of mercenary troops, to name only a few of the questions he has touched on. As a result of his work, in fact (along with that of Eric John and Michael Powicke), the Berkshire customal in Domesday Book threatens to become as written about as the final clauses of the Statute of York. But inevitably the presentday medievalist decides to emerge from his dusty inquests and cartularies, to step boldly out from behind his philological barricade and survey the surrounding landscape, to extract more from his laconic charters than a few plausible conclusions about some minor issues. Old-fashioned self-inhumation in the details of local antiquities is no longer for him, nor Bury's sanguine belief that if each historian adds his little stone to the dry wall of History, some future age may finally be able to see its shape. Thus the historian's growing concern with his generalizations. Thus especially the recent debates about the proper definition and delimitation of “feudalism.” Thus Hollister, after ducking the general issue of “feudalism” in his Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions, recently on these pages decided to attack it head on.

Sometime in the period 1300-48, English population reached its high point in the Middle Ages. All agree that it rose rapidly in the thirteenth century and dropped catastrophically in 1348-77. Its course in the first half of the century, however, is the subject of two sharply divergent opinions. One is that population increased gradually to about 3,700,000 at the outbreak of the plague, a point at which “the agricultural people were being crowded.” The other opinion is less exact: population reached its height about 1315, when the great famine and pestilence of 1315-17 reduced the population markedly and started a decline, restrained perhaps by a mild recovery in the two decades before 1348. According to this second theory population was much denser than the 3,700,000: even in the late thirteenth century, England had a “starving and over-populated countryside,” with “the poor sokemen of Lincolnshire — [struggling] to support five people on five acres of land,” and “a society in which every appreciable failure of harvests could result in large increases in deaths in a society balanced on the margin of subsistence.”

This study will discuss first the pattern of English society as it appears in Domesday Book and the descriptions of manors called extents, which must be understood in order to estimate population properly. Next, it will consider some interesting evidence concerning social class differential mortality. Third, it will try to estimate the mortality of the 1315-17 famine and pestilence. Fourth, it will take up the trend of population change from 1300 to 1348. Fifth, it will consider the reliability of the poll tax data. Lastly, it will discuss the problem of household size and its relationship to the total population of England in the period.

Thomas Bilson, in the eyes of his contemporaries, soared like a Jewel or a Hooker above his fellow writers; unlike Jewel or Hooker his fame has not endured. He seems at first sight to be another writer with a tiny talent, overpraised in his lifetime. If this were all that there was to Bilson, then better to leave him to “such as delight in things obsolete and antique” (as an unsentimental critic said of a later, more prolix, writer).

Yet there are curiosities about the rise and fall of Thomas Bilson. He was born in 1547, became Bishop of Winchester in 1597, and died in 1616. He is a shadowy figure, whose fame rests principally on two works: The True Difference Betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1585); The Perpetual Government of Christes Church (1593). If one were to plot a graph of his public reputation, it would show a steady rise after his death, reaching a peak as late as the 1640s, and then followed by a precipitous decline. Now this is not what common sense would have led us to expect. If he had been merely an overvalued mediocrity, one would have expected a redress of the critical balance to follow close on his death. Neither the length of time taken up by the rise nor the abruptness of the fall could have been anticipated. It is true that Bilson lacked the stamina for enduring greatness, but he was not exactly shortwinded either.

Mr. Cheyette's remarks require at least a brief comment from the gild of medieval tapestry weavers with whom he disagrees so strongly. On the assumption that the historian cannot derive a definition from the evidence, he has produced an article which is at once interesting, well written, and utterly uncontaminated by contact with an original source. Thus liberated, he has woven a colorful tapestry of his own. Having written much on how feudalism ought not to be defined, he turns at length to its proper definition. Unsure of what an institution is, he defines feudalism as “a medieval way of thinking,” better yet, a “technique,” and, perhaps best of all, a “spirit.” It is not unnatural that the medieval institutional historian would object to such definitions. They have a fine sound in the context of a brief, discursive article, but in the actual writing of history they are ephemeral and, indeed, far more archetypal than the definitions that medievalists ordinarily use.

What is feudalism? Marc Bloch, whose conception of it is about as broad as one is apt to find among medieval historians, defines it as follows:

Since the days of Samuel Rawson Gardiner and Charles Harding Firth, no one has studied English Puritanism more thoroughly than William Haller of Columbia University. Yet Haller came to his study of the Puritans not by way of history and politics but by way of poetry. The occasion of his turning to read several thousands of Puritan sermons and tracts was John Milton. His early guides and inspirers were Professor William Peterfield Trent and Sir Herbert Grierson. His attention was also directed to this material by Sir Charles Firth. Puritan theology he learned, in the then approved Columbia University method, “by doing it.” So the man, the approach, and the method were all sufficiently unorthodox to produce a fresh study of the long-neglected sources of Puritanism.

Haller began his career as an original interpreter of Puritanism when he became a member of the editorial board for the then projected Columbia Edition of the Works of John Milton. He soon came into print with an article, “Before Areopagitica,” on the immediate contemporary background of Milton's plea for unlicensed printing. Next came his edition of the Areopagitica and other tracts for the Columbia Milton, followed by a three-volume opus, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638-1647. Then The Rise of Puritanism appeared. Despite the turmoil of World War II, a second collection of documents, The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653, edited by Haller and Godfrey Davies, was published. After forty-one years on the faculty of Barnard College and the graduate school of Columbia University, Haller retired in 1950 and became a fellow, later honorary fellow, of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The canonization of Thomas More in May 1935 was not greeted with universal approbation. According to one writer, the ceremony “was met by an official boycott in the English press and Parliament as well as in the Universities.” Though such a statement is not wholly justified, it must be granted that in a large segment of the British press, coverage of the canonization was minimal and hostile. The hostility was partly inspired by disapproval in some quarters at More's silence over the issue of Henry VIII's ecclesiastical supremacy. On this score there were charges that he was at best an “unsatisfactory saint” or a “negative martyr.” Typical of this attitude was the moderate statement of Ernest Barker a few months after More achieved Sainthood: “More, in the final trial of his faith, was obstinately silent about his real thoughts …. There is something negative in this attitude …. More died for the right of a free conscience — provided it were silent. But is a free conscience which keeps silent really free?”

For some scholars, however, the doubts concerning More's canonization ran deeper than mere disapproval of his silence on the supremacy issue, and centered rather on his alleged mistreatment of heretics (chiefly in the period 1526-34). Certainly the sixteenth-century Reformers regarded More as a persecutor. The Chronicler Edward Hall described him as “a great persecutor of such as detested the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.” Fox in his Book of Martyrs represented him as “blinded in the zeal of popery” to all humane considerations in the treatment of Lutherans.

On June 4, 1610, in an unusual joint session of Parliament, Henry, eldest son of James I, was created Prince of Wales. The King and lords, magnificent in medieval splendor, gathered in the ancient room of old Westminster Palace, known as the White Hall. The Lords' chamber, used at other times, would not suffice; for on this occasion, the commons, instead of standing crowded behind the bar, as they did at the opening and closing of Parliament, sat in seats especially provided, their Speaker and clerk with them. Observers noted that burgesses, fine in gold lace and velvet, were no less splendid than the lords. Special guests, noblemen's little sons, ambassadors who had jockeyed for the most honorable places, the Princess Elizabeth, and Charles, Duke of York, also gathered to honor the occasion — one of the great moments in James's reign. For all the King's shortcomings, already apparent, he brought one gift to the English people, which a far greater monarch, Elizabeth, had never bestowed: a safe succession, the Prince who would secure their realm from civil strife.

It was altogether fitting, the Earl of Salisbury had explained to the commons, that the Prince should be created in Parliament. So the most fortunate of medieval princes had been proclaimed. Others came to an evil end. Alas for these joyous predictions. Salisbury's own death in April 1612 saved him from the bitter knowledge that Henry would die a few months later in November, to be succeeded as heir by his younger brother, Charles.

Historians of politics of the English Civil War have until recently studied the behaviour of members of Parliament through their speeches on the floor of the Houses. This practice led to the view that parliamentary policy was determined by the ascendancy of one of two opposing factions, composed of the most outspoken and influential members. J. H. Hexter's analysis of the tellers in divisions during the critical period of peace negotiation with the King in 1642 and 1643 expanded this rigid dichotomy and showed that political opinion in the House of Commons was divided into three “Parties,” the less committed centre being most susceptible to the winds of political change. He also showed that policy decisions did not depend solely upon the persuasiveness and stature of the leading politicians, but were shaped according to the temporary allegiances of a body of enthusiastic, though inconsistent, followers. The work of M. Frear Keeler, and of D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington shifted the emphasis further from the leadership to the rank and file by their interest in the background and grass roots of the most insignificant member alongside his more illustrious colleagues.

The aim of this article is to examine another aspect of the dynamics of parliamentary politics. It seeks to show how the leadership of the Commons gained control over the members by skilfully delegating vital functions to carefully chosen committees, for the committee system, as it evolved during the early months of the Long Parliament and as it developed during the years of war, met the challenge of the absent Privy Council in providing Parliament with a new and responsible executive.

To those who recall Christopher Hill's brilliant cameo of Oliver Cromwell, published on the tercentenary of his death, the title of this short article may seem surprising; for Hill then uncovered a series of Cromwellian contradictions: a confusion of intentions that were both revolutionary and conservative; long hesitations coupled with swift, decisive actions; apparent hypocrisy yet patent sincerity; a man who could extend the right hand of fellowship to the lower classes but not the franchise. Cromwell is perennially elusive, a riddle about whom few authorities would dare to whisper what A. L. Rowse has admitted of Sir Walter Raleigh: “I feel … that I have got him.” Like Browning's heaven, a full understanding of the man may stand forever just beyond reach; even so the search for novel patterns and fresh approaches is bound to continue.

Despite the title, this note does not intend to subvert Hill's conclusions. Instead it begins where he ended, and seeks to carry his method of paradoxology further — to prospect for sources of ambivalence in Cromwell's theology rather than in his politics or in his social background to see whether the results might not unravel some of the apparent ambiguities of his practice.

It could be objected that the better way to understand Cromwell is “existentially rather than essentially”: one should look to his career rather than his creed and analyse his specific decisions in the context of the crises that usually accompanied them. But this approach has been tried and tried again, and still the results are inconclusive.

During the years from 1697 through 1699, King William III of England was engaged in a struggle with a radical Whig press and a Tory coalition in the House of Commons over the size of England's standing army in peacetime. Both sides regarded the contest as one of particular importance; for the King there was no issue during his entire reign which involved him more deeply in English domestic politics. The parliamentary debates on the matter were notably stormy. For what was at stake, just ten years after the Glorious Revolution, was the relative power of King and Parliament. For the first time Article VI of the Bill of Rights, that is, that Parliament must consent to an army in peacetime, was applied and tested. The army question has intrinsic importance but can also be seen as part of a broader struggle between King and Parliament for power. Among such questions as Irish land grants, “placemen,” foreign advisers, and the Land Bank, the standing army was the most complex and emotion-filled issue between the House of Commons and William. Although some of the political implications of the standing army controversy have been suggested, historians have not investigated the part played by William. The King's role is worth isolating for it casts fresh light on William's talents in dealing with domestic politics, illustrates the relationship between a King who, at the end of the seventeenth century, still retained power and a House of Commons which increasingly claimed power, and shows that, however disparate the strength of the two sides in the standing army controversy, a genuine contest took place.

The reissue after twenty years of G. H. Guttridge's study, English Whiggism and the American Revolution, is very welcome. In many of its judgments this lucid, aseptic dissection of the ideas, attitudes, and policies of the opposition groups in British politics during the period of the Revolution bids fair to stand the test of a much longer period of time than has elapsed since its first appearance in 1942. The virile political traditions (some still traceable in modern British practice) which Hanoverian England inherited from the whiggism of the seventeenth century contained not one but several potentially competing principles; and the great strength of this study lies in the author's exposition of the ways in which these divergent principles were taken up by different political groups, with the effect of determining the stand taken by each, both on the American question and on concurrent issues of domestic politics. In Locke's writings radicals found justification for the creed of personality as the basis of political rights. All groups drew from them a belief that Parliament had an essential role in maintaining “the contractual obligation of monarchy to preserve certain fundamental rights,” but more than one principle followed from this premise. In the minds of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and his friends, it was combined with pre-Lockeian concepts of fundamental law as an element in the constitution beyond the power of Parliament to alter. For the leaders and members of the Rockingham connection, Parliament's role was seen in, and secured by, its supremacy.

It has never been established how far, in the early Victorian House of Commons, voting on issues followed party lines. It might in general seem plausible to assume — what political oratory generally contrives to suggest — that there are ideological disagreements between parties and that it makes a difference which of two major opposing parties is in control of the Government. This is, indeed, the line taken by some students of politics. A number of historians and political observers have, however, inclined to the contrary opinion and have, for various reasons, tended to play down the role of issues in party disputes. Much of what has been written on political history and, in particular, on the history of Parliament has had a distinct anti-ideological flavor.

One line of argument is that issues on which disagreement exists are not always party questions. Robert Trelford McKenzie begins his study of British parties by pointing out that Parliament just before 1830 was “divided on a great issue of principle, namely Catholic emancipation,” and just after 1830, on another, parliamentary reform. He continues: “But on neither issue was there a clear division along strict party lines.” The distinguished administration of Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s was based, according to Norman Gash, on a party “deeply divided both on policy and personalities.” The other side of the House at that time is usually thought to have been even more disunited. It has even been suggested that, in the confused politics of the mid-nineteenth century, the words conservative and radical each meant so many different things that they cannot be defined in terms of programs and objectives and that these polarities may more usefully be considered in terms of tempers and approaches.

Since World War II much emphasis has been placed on the key role which education must play in East African affairs to promote the economic and cultural growth of the new African states. The problems of the intensification and the spread of education in East Africa deserve particular attention because they are different in nature from those of well-established countries and have been complicated by peculiarities in the history of the region.

Between 1900 and 1920 the groundwork for native education was laid by missionary schools. Though limited in their objectives, they achieved tangible results. In spreading the knowledge of reading and writing among a substantial number of natives, they facilitated native contact with western civilization. After 1919 British officials in East Africa, humanitarians, and leaders in missionary movements became concerned with the spread of native education and demanded a change in the existing system. At the same time there emerged new native political movements, the leaders of which took a determined stand on matters of native education. They criticized the existing facilities and demanded the right of the African to be educated. To analyze the complexity of the problems of East African native education, particularly in the period from 1920 to 1950, is the purpose of this paper. It is necessary, however, first to look at the broader picture of the situation in East Africa in the immediately preceding decades and then to examine the achievements and limitations of East African education in the period from 1900 to 1914.

The conscience of British humanitarians of the early nineteenth century was troubled by many practices which they regarded as inhumane — none more so than the practice in India of suttee or the self-immolation of widows. The prevailing humanitarian drive for the abolition of suttee drew its strength from an alliance between evangelical and utilitarian propagandists who urged upon the British public a sense of responsibility for the welfare of their brethren across the sea. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the efforts of these reformists were offset by what amounted to a determined indifference on the part of the East India Company to all aspects of Indian society. At the turn of the century the practice of suttee was well protected by the Company's policy of noninterference with native “religious usages and institutions” established in 1772. Governor-General Cornwallis refused to allow a Collector at Shahabad to dissuade a suttee victim. Yet his successors, Lord Wellesley and Lord Hastings, pondered at considerable length the possibility of abolishing suttee. With the Regulations of 1813 the Supreme Government in Bengal began a consistent policy of prescribing strict limitations upon the practice of suttee. Although interpreted by some as official government approval of suttee, these regulations were continued sine die by the superior court in Calcutta. Encouraged in part by the example set by the Supreme Government, Governors Elphinstone and Malcolm in Bombay were less inclined than the Supreme Government itself to seem to interfere with native socio-religious custom, and therefore in western India toleration of suttee was more apparent than its restriction.

Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change. Much of what is still being written about colonial administration in the nineteenth-century British Empire rests on the partisan and even malicious writings of critics of the Government in England in the 1830s and '40s who had never seen the colonial correspondence and were unfamiliar with existing conditions in the distant colonies. The impression conveyed in most textbooks is that the Colonial Office after 1815 was a well-established bureaucracy concerned with the policies of the mother country in the overseas possessions, and that those policies changed very slowly and only under pressure. Initially Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller were responsible for this Colonial Office legend, but it was soon accepted by most of the people who had business to transact there. Annoyed by the fact that the measures proposed by the Wakefield group did not meet with instant acceptance, Wakefield and Buller attacked the Permanent Under-Secretary, James Stephen, as the power behind the throne in 14 Downing Street and assumed that his ideas of right and wrong were being imposed willy-nilly on the unfortunate colonists and would-be colonists.

The picture of Stephen as all-powerful in shaping imperial policy was probably strengthened by the publication in 1885 of Henry Taylor's Autobiography. Taylor was one of Stephen's warmest admirers and had served with him longer than anyone else; when he stated that for a quarter of a century Stephen “more than any one man virtually governed the British Empire,” historians were naturally inclined to give credence to his words.

There was little reason to have expected Britain's international policies to be of major concern to most voters in casting their ballots in the 1964 General Election. Party disagreement over entering the European Economic Community was at least temporarily in abeyance after de Gaulle's veto. No great imperial question remained to divide Conservatives from the Labour or Liberal Parties. Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was firmly bipartisan (or tripartisan). Moreover, British power was now so limited, in relation to the rest of the world, as to provide little basis for Englishmen to think that their nation could make important international decisions. At the same time, there were domestic economic problems about which, it was widely thought, a British government could and should do something. In short, every likelihood existed for electoral attention to be fixed almost entirely on domestic affairs. This would hardly have been unusual. Democratic elections ordinarily seem so conducted. Even if it were clearly desirable to have sharp partisan disagreement over a substantive international question, it is doubtful whether genuine alternatives often exist except perhaps for the super-powers.

It is surprising, then, to find that a question of international policy was contested in the British General Election of 1964. The question was whether Britain should continue trying to have an independent nuclear deterrent. Labour (and the Liberals) proposed that the effort be abandoned. The governing Conservative Party was committed to its continuation. These divergent party policies did not, it is true, make the deterrent issue overwhelmingly important in the electoral decision.

Of the countless addresses which assailed English eardrums in the nineteenth century, few are more widely remembered in the general histories of Britain and the British Empire than Benjamin Disraeli's celebrated speech at the Crystal Palace on June 24, 1872. There he made a profession of faith in the Empire which is still often said to have marked his conversion from the apathy of an earlier day when he had described the colonies as “a millstone round our necks.” The speech, moreover, is commonly regarded as the great signpost at the start of the highway to the “New Imperialism,” and it is usually credited with having furnished the Tories a popular banner which they subsequently carried into the political arena with outstanding success. The speech has been both praised as “the famous declaration from which the modern conception of the British Empire takes its rise” and condemned as an opportunistic effort to “dish the Whigs,” but friend and foe alike have accorded it a significance which it does not wholly deserve.

For many decades historians have harked back to the middle years of the last century as the heyday of anti-imperialism in Britain. This was the period of “Little England,” when many of her leaders — especially the men of the Manchester School — looked with favor on the main doctrine of separatism: cut the colonies loose and let them set up shop for themselves so as to end the financial burdens borne by the mother country. The climax of this movement was supposed to have occurred about 1870, when a sudden imperialist tide swept away all separatist notions.

The purpose of this paper is to set forth, somewhat arbitrarily, a composite view of the British Labour Party's history between the Wars, to be labelled the orthodox Labour interpretation, and then to set against it a contrasting view which has been expressed by several left-wing writers within the Labour Party. This examination of conflicting opinions can scarcely be dignified with the title historiographical inquiry. In the first place, there are other more or less coherent interpretations of Labour Party history in this period besides the two sketched herein, most notably a Communist view, expressed in such works as Allen Hutt's The Post-War History of the British Working Class. Secondly, as Stephen Graubard has recently said in relation to the Fabian Society, much of the Labour Party history in this period is in fact autobiography. Finally, as will soon become distressingly apparent, the interpretations that most writers have given of Labour between the Wars have been influenced by, connected with, even in some cases identical to the same authors' views on Labour today. History used to be called “past politics”; in this case it cannot entirely escape becoming “present politics.”

According to the orthodox view, the Labour Party was emerging from its infancy in the 1920s, having established its claim to be considered a major contestant for power as recently as 1918. As Francis Williams puts it: