In 882 the Emperor Charles III was forced to break off his siege of the Norsemen's camp at Asselt and make peace with them. One of their leaders, Gottfried, got a Carolingian wife and the benefices in Frisia formerly held by Rorich; the other, Siegfried, got a large sum in gold and silver. Commenting on these events, the Mainz cleric who composed this section of the Annals of Fulda wrote:

and what was still more of a crime, he did not blush to pay tribute, against the custom of his ancestors, the kings of the Franks, and following the advice of evil men, to a man from whom he ought to have exacted tribute and hostages.

The expansion of print and the rise of specialist disciplines from the early nineteenth century are usually associated with a decline in informed conversation about the sciences and other forms of learning among the aristocracy, gentry and professional classes. Yet an extensive body of evidence suggests that the sciences remained a vital part of conversational culture in England at least through the 1860s. Ultimately, however, discussing specialist knowledge at parties became condemned as ‘talking shop’. This was not so much the result of changes within science, as is usually assumed, but was instead a byproduct of the increasing differentiation of roles throughout society. By the early twentieth century, scientific practitioners had created new places for broad-ranging talk about their subjects, most characteristically in the tea rooms attached to university laboratories.

BEATNIKS, hippies, punks; marines, convicts, monks—it does not need much reflection to see that styles of head and facial hair in our own society convey meanings about status, attitude and role. The same is equally true of other societies, including those of the past, and the purpose of this paper is to explore some of those meanings as found in medieval Europe.

The central problem facing the student of public order in England in the late middle ages is to reconcile two conflicting lines of research. On one hand the institutional historians, through their studies of the central courts at Westminister, the provincial circuits of assize and gaol delivery and the justices of the peace and coroners in the counties, have proved beyond doubt the sophistication of the late-medieval legal system. On the other hand the historians of crime have shown equally clearly that the courts were often incapable of keeping the peace or of doing justice. Indeed the late-medieval period has long been notorious as one of widespread uncontained disorder. Reviewing the secondary literature on the subject Professor Bellamy concluded: ‘Not one investigator has been able to indicate even a few years of effective policing in the period 1290–1485.’

The chronology of labour services in the Middle Ages has been agitating agrarian historians for nearly a hundred years. In view of this it is surprising to find how many of the dates are still a matter of assumption. On the whole, economic historians know much more about the final demise of labour dues than about their previous history. They may disagree as to the exact dates of the fourteenth-century commutation, or as to the extent to which England had been manorialised and was therefore likely to be affected by the dissolution of the manor.

The late thirteenth and fourteenth-century civilians made a distinctive contribution to the theory of the state, because they were seeking to apply a specific juristic language to account for the existence of contemporary territorial states. Fully worked out state concepts are to be found in the works of Bartolus and Baldus, although elements necessary for the construction of a concept of the state exist in earlier Commentators. The theories of Bartolus and Baldus are prime illustrations that the concept of the state is historically fluid: they do not possess our concept of the state; indeed their theories are highly complex, combining aspects which are distinctively late medieval with others which can justifiably be termed elements of a modern idea of the state.

The history of coal-mining in the seventeenth century covers what may be termed the first chapter in the great story of English coal. In less than a century a seemingly insignificant and experimental industry developed into one of considerable importance. Coal had been used locally before this period; but an industry, as such, did not arise till a decline in the country's supply of wood stimulated new activities. It is possible that the introduction of coal might have been indefinitely postponed, had not years of ruthless felling of timber and neglect of forest lands, coincident with an increasing demand for wood for other than domestic purposes, caused a shortage of fuel. To the Elizabethan the decay of woods had an even wider significance. The demands of the Navy, the extension of the Empire and the discovery of new countries all laid a claim on timber. Its preservation became a matter of national concern. That the individual consumer should have possessed this degree of circumspection, and acted accordingly, was hardly to be expected; but the national needs were brought home to him through an increase in the price of wood. The use of coal became a matter of necessity rather than of choice.

Politeness is a `key word' for historians of eighteenth-century Britain. It implied a distinguishing vision of wider social concerns and less constricted cultural tastes than was attributed to earlier ages. What part it played in identifiable shifts of behaviour is harder to judge. Among people who served the growing commercial and professional needs of the day, its influence seems well attested. More problematic was its impact on plebeian life. Yet even here, there is evidence to suggest some degree of `polishing' in line with contemporary expectations, to the extent that politeness itself ceased to describe social aspirations and became synonymous with basic standards of civil behaviour.

To speak of ‘atheism’ in the context of early modern England immediately invites confusion, and it is for this reason that I shall place the word in inverted commas throughout this paper. On the one hand, I intend to deal with what a twentieth-century reader might expect ‘atheism’ to imply, namely overt hostility to religion. On the other, I want to consider at some length the profuse writings on ‘atheism’ that survive from the period: in these, as we shall see, the word if often used to describe a much broader range of phenomena, in a manner typical of a genre which often appears frustratingly heightened and rhetorical. Some might argue that this juxtaposition displays—and will encourage—muddled thought. But, on the contrary, I think that it is precisely from such a combination that we stand to learn most. Not only are we likely to discover how contemporaries experienced and responded to the threat of irreligion in the society of their day. In addition, by re-examining the relationship between the real and the exaggerated in their perceptions of such heterodoxy, we may be able to draw broader conclusions about early modern thought.

Of all forms of historical writing, that which deals with particular places is perhaps the most pregnant with the possibilities of boredom, for the general reader can seldom hope to share the parochial enthusiasms by which the study of local history is so often inspired. But local history, and particularly urban history, can be approached from two different points of view. It can seek to portray the changing pattern of life within the few square miles which it takes for its field of study. Or it can endeavour to interpret that changing pattern as a symptom of greater changes in the nation as a whole. For, as the sociologists are never weary of reminding us, a town is essentially a social product. It is. brought into being by forces external to it. It continues to exist because, and only so long as, it serves a social purpose. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the population of London and its immediate suburbs grew much more rapidly than the population of the country as a whole. Confronted by that fact, one of the obvious tasks of the historian is to make clear the purposes which that metropolitan expansion served; to indicate the wider developments of which it was a symptom; and to explain why, to contemporaries, it appeared as a symptom of disease rather than of health in the body politic. For that the growth of London was widely considered to be a morbid growth is incontestable. Topographers and chroniclers might write with admiration and affection of the city whose contours they described and whose history they told.

‘Since he isn't able to sell his books,’ Erasmus said of a fellow scholar in 1518, ‘he goes about offering them as gifts to important people; he makes more that way than if he had sold them.’ Erasmus's shrewd observation to his friend Tunstall has considerable currency among historians today, anxious as we are about the book market. But writing his Colloquies a few years later, the great humanist also envisaged other purposes for giving books. At the end of a banquet, during which the gifts of God and human charity have been discussed, the host presents books to his guests, suiting each one to their learning, piety or vocation. His friends thank him not only for the gifts, but for the advice and compliments that went with them. ‘It is I who thank you,’ the host insists, ‘for being so good about my simple style of living and for refreshing my mind with your conversation.’

‘Well are ye called the Free People.' – Bagheera

BARTOLUS of Sassoferrato (1314–1357) is as famous to legal historians and specialists in the history of political ideas as he is unkown outside those areas of research. His obscurity is owed not to his mind but to his genre: the commentary on Justinian'sCorpus Iuris Civilis, and the occasional monograph of more systematic yet still legalistic lineaments. Of the thousands of lawyers who studied, taught and applied Roman law from its rediscovery in the late eleventh century to the end of the middle ages, there are perhaps three or four who command universal respect, some of whom we shall encounter in what follows. Only Bartolus radiates the nimbus of genius. In the realm of political ideas, he has – perversely, perhaps – best been served by Anglophone historiography, beginning with the classic study published in 1913 by C.N.S. Woolf, continuing by way of Walter Ullmann's numerous articles and most recently subjected to a full-scale analysis by Joseph Canning in his study of the ideas of Bartolus' most famous pupil, Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1400).

Ordinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. According to one political leader, the vote for Brexit was ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who've taken on the establishment and won’. In making this claim, Nigel Farage sought to link a dramatic political moment with a powerful, yet conveniently nebulous, construction of the ordinary person. In this paper, I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I will explore the range of values, styles and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I argue that the immediate post-war period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category. Crucially, ordinariness itself became a form of expertise, a finding that complicates our understanding of the ‘meritocratic moment’.

One of the results of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was a heightening of interest in the cure of souls, and the years that followed the Council saw a generous effort on the part of prelates to provide, in accordance with the Lateran directives, a better–educated clergy who could bring the laity to a reasonable understanding of the essentials of Christian belief and practice. In England, during the reign of Henry III, nearly every diocese contributed to the movement for reform, chiefly by statutes modelled upon or deriving from decrees of Innocent III's great council. The Council of Oxford in 1222, the Council and Constitutions of the Legate Otto at London in 1237 and of the Legate Ottobono at London in 1268, catered in varying degrees for the Church in England as a whole.

Because research calls for work, and work for specialisation, the study of history tends always to subdivide. The deepest of its subdivisions is that between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’: between things like war, politics, business and law on one side, and on the other, thoughts and emotions. ‘History’ tout simple has come thus to refer mainly to the external, things usually handled in the past by men, while from the side of this Adam have sprung separate disciplines with names like die history of ideas, or mentalités,—not to mention the literatures in various languages. A glance even at the buildings of a university will confirm this.

It is a remarkable fact, and one that needs to be pondered, that almost all our current regional terms in this country are of very recent origin. Expressions like Tyneside and Merseyside, the West Midlands and the North-East, have no very lengthy lineage; such phrases as the Home Counties cannot be traced back beyond the early decades of the railway era; the present usage even of a genuine historic name like Wessex is no more than an antiquarian revival; while the current reanimation of Mercia seems to be chiefly attributable to a contemporary police force. Perhaps the only regional name of this kind with a continuous history to the present day is East Anglia. In other words, behind most of our modern expressions, ideas and preconceptions lie implicit that were not necessarily of much significance to the people of earlier centuries. A phrase like the Home Counties, for example, implies a kind of regional unity between the shires surrounding London which until recent centuries—and in many respects until recent generations—is entirely fallacious. There was no connexion between the origins of settlement, for example, in Hertfordshire and in Sussex, and next to none between settlement in Essex and in Kent. Even in the Civil War period there was singularly little contact and no cohesion, as parliament quickly found to its cost, between the counties surrounding the capital.

Manorial accounts by their existence reflect, somewhat after the event, an administrative revolution that almost swept away the firmarii characteristic of an earlier stage in the management of large estates. During the greater part of the thirteenth century and of the next, lords (or their advisers) generally seem convinced that to manage their manors through fully accountable local officials was preferable to the familiar alternative of committing the property to men whose responsibility would be limited to producing a stipulated annual return. In the thirteenth century, also, many of these lords—monastic lords perhaps especially—displayed a remarkable readiness, sometimes a positive enthusiasm, to undertake the trouble and risks of demesne husbandry, instead of letting their demesnes entire or piecemeal to tenants. This addiction to demesne husbandry, though it may have weakened before the close of the century, persisted in the next; it survived the first consequences of the Black Death and was not widely given up until the lastthirty years of the fourteenth century.

British colonial expansion, it has been argued, was governed during the nineteenth century by the workings of the official mind. French colonial expansion was not. The official mind of French imperialism was slow to develop and at best half-formed. The first steps in the creation of the modern French Empire under the July Monarchy and Napoleon III followed no grand design or strategic obsession. Empire-building in Africa, Indo-China and the South Pacific proceeded instead by a series of fits and starts of whose significance successive governments were usually unaware. When the Third Republic embarked on colonial expansion in the 1880s, its policies proved almost as incoherent as those of precedessors. Intervention in Tunisia was swiftly followed by refusal to intervene in Egypt; a forward policy in Indo-China was first accepted, then violently rejected; in West Africa Army officers carved out a private empire on their own initiative. After 1880, however, French expansion at last acquired a clear sense of direction. French imperialism, in its final phase from 1890 to 1920, consciously pursued and substantially achieved a series of imperial grand designs; the unification of France's African Empire in the 1890s; the completion of Frenćh North Africa by the Moroccan protectorate in the early twentieth century; the acquisition of a Middle Eastern Empire and German West Africa during the First World War. These grand designs, however, were the product not of the official but of the unofficial mind of French imperialism. That unofficial mind forms the subject of this paper.

THE Gordon Riots made a profound impression on contemporaries. They took place at a time of acute political crisis, at the most dangerous moment of the American war, when the country, after numerous defeats and counteralliances, found itself virtually isolated. At their height, on the night of 7 June 1780, London appeared to onlookers to be a sea of flames. ‘I remember’, wrote Horace Walpole on the 8th, ‘the Excise and the Gin Act and the rebels at Derby and Wilkes’ interlude and the French at Plymouth, or I should have a very bad memory; but I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames!' Sébastien Mercier, in his Tableau de Paris, wrote nine years before the attack on the Bastille that such ‘terrors and alarms’ as were spread by Lord George Gordon in London would be inconceivable in a city as well-policed as Paris.

THIS paper provides a preliminary and exploratory account of some of the ways in which eighteenth-century parliaments helped to shape English social policy. At the heart of this study lie a body of measures, several hundred strong, which came before Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century. These were general rather than local measures, applying to the country as a whole. They dealt with such matters as the relief and regulation of the poor, repression of vice (variously conceived), handling of insolvent (and therefore perhaps imprisoned) debtors, and prevention and punishment of crime.