There has long been some measure of agreement that European people in the middle ages adhered to a form of Christianity which was ‘folklorised’, ‘enchanted’, or ‘magical’. Interwoven with the traditional creeds and the orthodox liturgy were numerous beliefs and practices which were intended to ensure spiritual and bodily welfare, and guard against misfortune. To the endless frustration of theologians, ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ stubbornly refused to remain clearly separate, despite the intellectual effort expended in forcing them into different compartments. ‘Superstitious’ rites or beliefs repeatedly intersected with the official Catholic cult. It was believed that if a talisman were placed under an altar-cloth during mass, it would acquire spiritual potency. Orthodox prayers were constantly adapted to serve the needs of popular magic. Clergy, let alone layfolk, found the line between acceptable and superstitious practice difficult to draw. For a graphic illustration of this problem, one need only look at the following recipe for curing a hailstorm caused by sorcery:

But against hailstones and storms, besides those things said earlier about raising the sign of the cross, this remedy may be used: three little hailstones are thrown into the fire with the invocation of the most Holy Trinity; the Lord's Prayer with the Angelic Salutation is added twice or three times, and the Gospel of St John, ‘In the beginning was the word’, while the sign of the cross is made against the storm from all quarters, before and behind, and from every part of the earth. And then, when at the end one repeats three times, ‘the Word was made flesh’, and says three times after that, ‘by these Gospels uttered, may that tempest flee’, then suddenly, so long as the storm was caused to happen by sorcery, it will cease.

This paper examines racist discourse in radical print culture from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the passing of the Abolition of Slavery Act in Britain. Acknowledging the heterogeneity of working-class ideology during the period, it demonstrates that some radical writers actively sought to dehumanise enslaved and free black people as a means of promoting the interests of the white working class in England. It argues that by promoting a particular understanding of English racial superiority, radical intellectuals such as John Cartwright, William Cobbett, and Richard Carlile were able to criticise the diversion of humanitarian resources and attention away from exploited industrial workers and towards enslaved black people in the British West Indies or unconverted free Africans. Moreover, by presenting a supposedly inferior racial antitype, they sought to minimise the social boundaries that were used to disenfranchise English working men and reinforce their own, seemingly precarious, claims to parliamentary reform and meaningful political representation.

A popular movement like the Rebellion of the Earls can always be treated from two distinct standpoints, the national and the local. Hitherto, the Rebellion has always been treated from the national standpoint, with the result that, so far as I am aware, there is no book dealing with the Rebellion alone. All accounts of it must be sought in general histories such as those named below. I would specially mention the chapter in the ‘Cambridge Modern History’ in which Mr. Law has anticipated all the conclusions which I have been able to draw from my own examination of the sources. The local point of view, on the other hand, has been almost wholly ignored, and affords more opportunity for investigation; to it, therefore, I have confined myself. I cannot pretend that the essay is exhaustive, as circumstances have prevented me from investigating the local sources, such as Corporation and Town Records, Parish Registers and the like. Nevertheless, this contribution may not be wholly without value, since it is based on a careful study of the material preserved at the Public Record Office and in the British Museum.

MY purpose today is to do a kind of David Bellamy on the least promising patch of that unmapped, unloved bog-of-a-phenomenon we call ‘The British Constitution’. You know the sort of thing—‘this might just look like a boring old bundle of procedures and conventions to you, but there's life and insight in here!’

If ennui is already setting in, don't be upset. You are part of the grand tradition of our political nation. For my text today is from Mr Gladstone—his celebrated remark to the effect that:

If there are two things on earth that John Bull hates, they are an abstract proposition and the Pope.

AFTER a long period of neglect, during which historians had looked towards the petite bourgeoisie primarily to heap upon it the responsibility for fascism, the last fifteen years has seen a growing research interest in the social and political history of die world of small retail, artisanal and manufacturing enterprise. The result of diis attention has been paradoxical, on the one hand establishing the petite bourgeoisie as a focus for sustained research, while on the other confirming how difficult it is to see the owners of small retail and manufacturing enterprise as a coherent social group or social class. The combination of the owner's labour and capital widiin family-centred enterprises might indicate a distinct position for the petite bourgeoisie within the social structure, but various forces militated against a social or demographic identity for die proprietors of small enterprise: the high rate of business turnover, die limited proportion of petits bourgeois who remain in diat position through their careers, and die low rate of continuity between generations. Although political struggle was important in die formation of any class, one could go further widi respect to die petite bourgeoisie and suggest that it was only at times of political crisis and action, only through die discourse and actions of its organisations, diat a petit-bourgeois identity might emerge. It is not surprising, dierefore, diat research has focused above all on diose years between die 1880s and the First World War, when die emergence of interest groups and increasing political mobilisation seemed to offer evidence of a real petit-bourgeois identity.

The notion that the great leviathans of wealth, who had for so long been accustomed to taking first place in a nation of snobs which contrived simultaneously to accept, admire, envy, and criticise their opulence, might actually become impoverished first began to gain some currency in the 1890s. True, this had been anticipated by a few specially pessimistic and debt–ridden landowners in the immediate anxieties aroused by the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Monson, who had inherited from a cousin estates liberally furnished with dowagers and other inescapable expenses, and who was in despair at the tendency of income to fall while outgoings remained fixed, exploded to his son in 1851: ‘What an infernal bore is landed property. No certain income can be reckoned upon. I hope your future wife will have Consols or some such ballast, I think it is worth half as much again as land’. A similar but more sober banker's view had been put by Evelyn Denison, a classic gentlemanly capitalist, in 1847 when he announced his intention to sell much of his land ‘not because I am of the class of encumbered landlords, for I have luckily extricated myself from that, but because I do not think it worth while to keep a security paying 2 per cent, when I can get an equally good one paying ’.

The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, established in 1536, liberally educated the sons of Nahua (Aztec) leaders in New Spain. Its Franciscan pedagogues, including Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590), Andrés de Olmos (1491–1571) and Juan Bautista (c. 1555–1606/13), worked with indigenous students and alumni to collect, edit and circulate Nahuatl huehuetlahtolli, or ‘speech of the ancients’. This paper examines the largest collection of these orations printed in pre-modern Mexico, the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] edited by Juan Bautista and indigenous intellectuals from the college. It argues that the Tlatelolcans adapted Nahuatl ‘old words’ for the New World of colonial society. They ornamented the speeches with rhetorical techniques derived from Santa Cruz's Erasmian curriculum. They interpolated biblical sentences, particularly from Proverbs and Sirach, to enhance the evangelising potential of the discourses. Finally, they drew on Erasmus's theory of speech, as expressed in his pedagogical and spiritual writings, to explicate Nahuatl los difrasismos concerning eloquence and good counsel. Contextualising the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] in Santa Cruz's Erasmian schoolroom reveals the contours of its argument for vernacular evangelisation, the liberal education of indigenous youth and for the elegance of the Nahuatl tongue.

My text is taken from Macaulay, who wrote of the Cavalier Parliament of 1661–78:

‘The great English revolution of the seventeenth century, that is to say the transfer of the supreme control of the executive administration from the crown to the House of Commons, was, through the whole long existence of this Parliament, proceeding noiselessly, but rapidly and steadily. Charles, kept poor by his follies and vices, wanted money. The Commons alone could legally grant him money. They could not be prevented from putting their own price on their grants … that they should be allowed to interfere with every one of the king's prerogatives, to wring from him his consent to laws which he disliked, to break up cabinets, to dictate the course of foreign policy and even to direct the administration of war’

The emergence of Scottish separatism as a viable political force in the 1960s is often seen as a reflection of Britain's wider political fortunes in a post-imperial world. It is indeed the case that the Scottish National Party emerged from electoral obscurity to become a credible political alternative in the 1960s, culminating in Winifred Ewing's by-election victory in Hamilton in November 1967. That this occurred in the wake of Britain's retreat from empire fuelled speculation that separatist momentum in Scotland represented an inward manifestation of the same pressures that had torn the empire asunder. This paper draws on sources from local politics to make two key arguments: first, that post-imperial influences were neither as pervasive nor even particularly prominent in the local politics of devolution as may be assumed. Equally, however, global processes of decolonisation contributed to the separatist agenda in ways more subtle than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, there are several striking similarities between the gathering political momentum of the SNP and the sweep of ‘new nationalisms’ through the remnants of the British world in the 1960s, particularly in the former British Dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Thus, the relative absence of decolonising discourse in the local electoral source material does not necessarily rule out these global undercurrents, although the exact nature of their influence needs to be more carefully evaluated.

After her third consecutive election victory in 1987, Margaret Thatcher chose as her holiday reading Norman Gash's biography of Lord Liverpool. It was a fitting tribute from one remarkably durable prime minister to another. No one now thinks of Liverpool as a mediocrity, let alone an arch one, and the fact that many of his colleagues were more flamboyant than he was merely adds to his stature. His achievements as a statesman are emphasised by Gash, who depicts him as ‘one of the great through unacknowledged architects of the liberal, free trade Victorian state’, the first exponent of a public doctrine which, in both its economic and its moral components, would be taken up triumphantly by his successors—Peel, Gladstone, and (it might be argued) Thatcher. His achievements as a politician, meanwhile, can be measured by the fact that he sustained a fifteen year premiership, broken only by his stroke in February 1827, during a period of extreme social and economic difficulty. This seems all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the eighteenth century had seemed to demonstrate that in order to run a stable administration, a first lord of the treasury needed to be in the House of Commons.

There can now be no doubt of the intellectual substance and cohesion of early Wyclifitism as expressed in the writings of educated clerks in immediate contact with the man himself. Most would accept, too, that this coherence was successfully transferred from Latin to English. However, although these Wyclifite scholars recognised the need for a corpus of literature to cater for a non-academic audience and provide the basis in ideas for a sustained movement, they had difficulty in supplying it. This might seem to offer easy comfort to those who are already doubtful whether people called Lollards could or did grasp Wyclifitism; whether they just amputated the bits they liked, debased or perverted them, or really did not take anything on board at all. Even some less cynical would agree that the Church itself played a large part in shaping Lollardy's ideas and characteristics: such is so often the way in the birth of protest movements. Indeed, to some hardliners ‘Lollardy’ seems little more than a scare-story invented by the Church in order to damn a large but motley crew of critics and dissenters. Or, if not the Church, then those historians in whom hope triumphs over experience.

The Norman conquerors of England had at first little cause to seek connexions with the empire of the Salian kings and they had nothing to fear from it. Before William sailed on his expedition, he enlisted, it is true, not only the goodwill of the papacy, but also that of the young Henry IV. Henry, who at the age of fifteen had by German custom reached his majority, seems to have made it known that men from Germany could go to host with William, should the latter wish it. Some of the Flemish knights who took part in the venture may have come from those fiefs of the count of Flanders which were held of the empire rather than of the kingdom of France. Bruno, in his Book on the Saxon War, would have his readers believe that the Salian king, when preparing his revenge against the Saxon rebels in 1074, sent for help also to William, who is supposed to have replied that he dared not leave England. But in the same year, only a few months earlier, it had been rumoured that the Conqueror was advancing against the Lotharingian frontiers of the Reich and about to seize Aachen at the invitation of Archbishop Anno of Cologne.

In Emlyn Williams's play, The Corn is Green (1938), an Englishwoman arriving in Wales is asked an important question: ‘Are you Church or Chapel?’ Since the seventeenth century, when non-Anglican places of worship made their appearance, this question has indeed been important, sometimes momentous. ‘Church’ has had one kind of resonance in religion, politics and society; ‘chapel’ has had another. Even in unreligious households, people may still opt for ‘church’ when the bread is cut (the rounded end) or ‘chapel’ (the oblong part). The distinction is far older than the seventeenth century, however, by at least five hundred years. There were thousands of chapels in medieval England, besides the parish churches, when religion is often thought of as uniformly church-based. Although these chapels differed in some ways from those of Protestant nonconformity, notably in worship, they also foreshadowed them. Locations, architecture, social support and even religious diversity are often comparable between the two eras. Arguably, the creation of chapels by non-Anglicans after the Reformation marked a return to ancient national habits.

One of the most fascinating features in the study of the history of the common law as revealed in six centuries of law reports is the possibility of tracing the growth of legal thought over long periods of time; hints, suggestions, unsuccessful attempts to establish a rule or a doctrine often appear in such sources long before the innovation has received the final approbation of the courts, and so we are privileged to watch the progress of legal speculation, to overhear the debates upon new departures, and to estimate the forces which produced or obstructed some projected innovation. It is this possibility which gives such life and vividness to legal history. In many fields of thought we are mainly confined to those considered statements of results which have been deliberately left to us by philosophers, theologians, or politaical theorists, but the historian of the common law has more intimate and more human material at his disposal.

The paper argues that Robert Parsons's tractThe Conferenceabout the next succession provides the immediate polemical and political context in which James VI wrote hisTrue Law of Free Monarchies. The argument is not that that tract is a simple reply to Parsons but rather a response to the position occupied both by Parsons and Buchanan, which in fact were very similar. James's pamphlet was occasioned, however, by Parsons's book and the concerns raised therein about the succession to the English throne and forms part of a concerted campaign to defend James's rights in that regard and to assert his view of kingship against the monarchomach theories of both Protestants and Catholics.

Indulgences have long been studied as a contributory factor to the Protestant Reformation. The present essay focuses attention upon their origins in the eleventh century, and the changes that affected both the theology and the practice of indulgences in the period before 1215. The indulgences issued by English bishops tell us much of the role played in the English Church both by Parisian theology and by post-Gregorian theories of papal monarchy. They shed light upon the `birth' of purgatory, and upon twelfth-century penitential practice. The present essay also explores the relationship, previously ignored, between the indulgences advertised by pardoners, and the relics of the saints which pardoners were accused of mishandling.

It is commonly understood the old monastic order in England confronted the King's Reformation unreformed: the houses of the Benedictines, Cistercians and Cluniacs were seemingly untouched by the spirit of renewal that charged continental congregations in the conciliar era, and their conventional patterns of observant life persisted in the face of a fast-changing world beyond the precinct walls. This paper reexamines this view. There was no formal process of congregational reform in England and the effectiveness of the order's governing bodies faltered over the course of the fifteenth century. Yet the responsiveness of the monks to contemporary trends in learning and teaching and in patterns of personal and corporate devotion may be traced in many of their manuscript records. This is indicative, certainly, of the lively engagement of individual brethren but in a number of instances it can be read as part of a collective impulse for reform that animated the house as a whole, and perhaps even networks of houses. It was an impulse that owed much to a generation of (generally, graduate) monks that rose to prominence against the background of the great church councils; their influence allowed it to flourish, albeit briefly, in the triennial sessions of the Benedictine chapters. Their interest in humanism passed to the next generation of superiors, some of whom appear to have transformed their conventual curricula. Their pioneering work perhaps also stimulated a refined conception of the monastic profession which blossomed in the half-century before the suppressions, one suffused with a sharp, one might say, antiquarian sense of the heritage of early English monasticism, and the scholarly calibre and spiritual purity of its celebrated fathers. The energy that emanated from a number of these houses in the reigns of Henry VII and his son attracted like-minded seculars into collaborations that were not necessarily claustral in focus but certainly reformist in tone. Of course, such extra-mural interest and interaction did little to defend the monastic redoubt from the assault of the Cromwellian commissioners.

Our understanding of ties of loyalty and dependence formed at the level of the Carolingian political elite has been much improved by a great deal of excellent recent research. As mutually beneficial relationships freely entered into, they tend to be sharply distinguished from ties of dependence involving members from the lower echelons of society: the latter ties, on the contrary, are usually seen as the result of coercion, and they were long seen as emblematic of the increasingly oppressive control of local lords. Commendation for these less powerful members of society is thus often seen as tantamount to forfeiting free status. Because oppression, for legitimate reasons, has been so strongly emphasised in historical treatments of this type of relationship, paradoxically little attention has been given to what influence the lower-status party may have had on the proceedings, the extent of their negotiating ability or the range of duties and benefits involved in such agreements. But not all lower-status people made the same deals: the Frankish formularies, an important source of evidence regarding such arrangements, show a complicated situation, indicating that ties formed at this lower level need to be treated with as much nuance as higher-status relationships.

I was originally provoked into a consideration of this particular problem by reading Ostrogorsky's Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates. A long-needed and courageous attempt to reconstruct the history of the empire and characterized by acute and penetrating analysis, this book is nevertheless marked by a certain unevenness of treatment. Side by side with brilliant sections on the achievements of the tenth century and the complications of the fourteenth (this latter perhaps the finest part of the book) must be set the brief and inadequate account of the years 1025–1081. Ostrogorsky is not alone. Misstatements and omissions continue, and often in unexpected places. Recent much used general histories, as for instance the third volume of the medieval section of the Glotz Histoire générale, still repeat the old emphasis on 1081 as the dividingline between a time of painful disaster and the new era of Comnenian glory.

I Must start by saying that everything in this paper must be subject to correction from two quarters. Mr. Norman Gash has written but not yet published a book entitled Politics in the age of Peel, which will be a study of the representative system in the twenty years after the Reform Bill, and which will explain to us very much that we need to understand. Secondly, all generalizations about elections are open to correction, indeed are normally in urgent need of correction, by those historians who are prepared to make a more or less intensive study of local conditions in some district. Failure to realize the significance of local conditions vitiates the value of some of the conclusions in that otherwise useful book, Mr. Seymour's Electoral Reform in England and Wales, but it has vitiated other books of more general reference than Mr. Seymour's. In fact we have all been content to describe far too much of the history of the nineteenth century in the terms of the play of a few principal actors posturing before a back-cloth painted with conventional figures, the landlord, the manufacturer, the artisan and worst of all a mass of undifferentiated ciphers without faces which we are pleased to call the middle class. The local historian, and only the local historian, can tear this cloth aside. What he will reveal will not always be a decorous picture; the artist best suited to portray it is obviously Hogarth more often than seems appropriate for the background to such highly respectable figures as Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright and William Ewart Gladstone.