In 1152 King Stephen and his army began an unexpected siege of Newbury castle. The castellan, John fitz Gilbert, warned by his constable, was able to beguile the King and put the castle in a suitable state of defence. To achieve the necessary breathing space for this he surrendered a younger son, William, as a hostage. When his trickery was discovered the boy's life was at risk; it was proposed that he should be hanged or projected over the castle walls. Stephen sent messengers to John fitz Gilbert, threatening his execution. To them John gave the daunting reply that he was not particularly worried since he had the hammer and the anvil for forging even better sons. In fact the boy charmed King Stephen and survived to become Earl of Pembroke and regent of England. Whether the tale is anything more than a tall story it is impossible to say. At least it presents a problem. Family relationships mattered—or did they? In what ways and to what extent did they matter?

Some tenth-century English kings, especially Æthelstan and Edgar, were commonly presented as rulers of Britain. The basic reason for this is that they had a loose but real hegemony over the other rulers on the island. This hegemony did not collapse in subsequent centuries, but English kings were less often described as rulers of Britain. The intensification of royal rule within the English kingdom in the second half of the tenth century made kings’ power inside the kingdom increasingly unlike their power elsewhere in Britain: it consequently became harder to think of Britain as a single political unit.

During 1301 the propaganda war between the king of England and the Guardians of the kingdom of Scotland reached a climax in a welter of claims and counter-claims submitted to the Pope. Differing historical mythologies were part of the arguments deployed by both parties. The English case was based on a gloss placed on one of the wondrous legends recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Britain, according to the legend, had been divided by its illustrious eponymous ruler, Brutus, between his three sons, Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Scotland, originally known as Albany, was Albanact's portion; but—and here we come to the gloss placed on the legend—he was to be subordinate to his elder brother and first-born son of Brutus, Locrine, to whom alone the royal dignity was reserved. Such was the ultimate historical basis for Edward I's claim to superior lordship over Scotland. The Scots could not be expected to accept such a tall story lying down. They did not. They countered with their own even taller tale. They insisted that Brutus's three sons were of equal standing, ‘so that none of them was subject to another’; they even queried whether Albany had ever been equated with the whole of what we know as Scotland, suggesting instead that it was the part of the original Britain which stretched from the Humber to the Forth, but no further north. They then went on the offensive, asserting that a lady called Scota, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, had conquered the northern part of Britain (if indeed it was such), expelled the Britons and renamed it Scotland in honour of herself.

THERE is a considerable body of opinion which holds that marriage in early modern England, and especially marriage among the lower orders, was uncaring, affectionless, and entered into for economic rather than emotional reasons. This view was, for example, axiomatic to those writing from a feminist perspective in the 1970s. Thus Sheila Rowbotham felt that in the pre-industrial world The peasant judged his woman by her capacity to labour and to breed more hands for toil…among the peasantry women were essential in the family economy. The peasant's wife bore children which meant more hands to toil and she laboured herself. She was like cattle, a means of production.

My subject is the new police of the nineteenth century. It was said of policemen in Mid-Wales in the later part of that century that, after five years of looking at sheep, their minds turned to emigration, drink and suicide. Writing this paper has been a comparable travail. My initial enthusiasm for the topic has been somewhat crushed by the weight of evidence and the models of police historians. The evidence is vast and problematical. Thisis not the world of the historian of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Great parliamentary and government papers, an ever-widening range of local and national statistics, countless newspaper files, court records and police books await the historian of the nineteenth century. Much material is still being catalogued, and a great deal of police evidence has yet to be collected.

It is well known that, in contrast to the nineteenth century, the Middle Ages, and especially the later Middle Ages, suffered from great coinage instability. Now that we, in our turn, are confronted with identical difficulties, some historians would explain the currency manipulations of the Middle Ages by motives of the same kind as those that have inspired some devaluations in the twentieth century. They ask themselves if perhaps the princes of that time were not trying, as some modern governments have tried, to influence economic life and in particular to stimulate international commerce by devaluation of the currency.

Before coming to the substance of this paper, I feel that I must define its purpose somewhat more closely than I have done in the title which I have given to it. A study of the state and landed interests, of course, could embrace most of the domestic and much of the external histories of France and England in the thirteenth century, I shall be concerned with much less than that—with a problem which nevertheless seems to me to be of the first importance in any study of the social and economic policies (if that phrase be not too anachronistic) of medieval governments. I mean the break-up and alienation of feudal tenements in the thirteenth century, some of the causes and consequences thereof, and some of the attempts made to deal with the difficulties thereby occasioned. This still remains a large subject, and at best this paper is an attempt at synthesis, even of vulgarisation, which rests, in the main, upon the work of others. In particular, I have drawn heavily upon Professor Plucknett's study of the legislation of Edward I, and I was encouraged to venture upon some comparisons with France because he has also shown, I feel, that such comparisons may not be without value.

COMPARATIVELY little has been written recently on the origins of the manor. The exposition given by Maitland and Vinogradoff and closely followed by Sir Frank Stenton has been modified for certain areas; it has seldom been questioned as a whole. The basis of early society, according to this view, was the free ceorl, owning absolutely one hide of land or its equivalent, and owing only royal dues, such folk-worthy and law-worthy men being associated together in free, lordless and nucleated villages. The gap between these men and medieval villeins, between these free villages and the manor, was bridged in a variety of ways. Grants of royal rights to ecclesiastics and laymen exposed the ceorls to the pressure of great lords who took advantage of economic insecurity, wars, famines, plagues, commendation and similar factors to depress them so that, in the end, in place of their free ownership of a hide, they came to hold normally between a quarter and a whole virgate or less, on most onerous and servile terms. Some place was, indeed, allowed to the creation of tenancies by lords themselves, but this was largely incidental. ‘The central course of Old English social development’, wrote Sir Frank Stenton, ‘may be described as the process by which a peasantry, at first composed essentially of free men, acknowledging no lord below the king, gradually lost economic and personal independence.’

A quiet revolution has occurred of late in the history of poor people and poor relief in early modern Europe. Shapeless, decentralized and infinite, like the story of most everyday things, it has depended for progress on the laborious accumulation of local examples, garnered from patchy, weedy and erratically surviving evidence; and for vitality on cerebration which outstrips research, on hypo-theses which demand to be tested in a hundred detailed trials. Time was when sociologists and students of social legislation encouraged historians to believe that with the Reformation there developed fundamental differences in the ways in which the old and the new faiths treated their poor–variances which sprang essentially from the abandonment in the wake of Luther of the ancient belief that ‘good works’ (almsgiving included) offered to those who performed them a direct means of securing salvation. To compress is often to parody. But it can perhaps be said that the coming of Protestantism, in all its forms, was believed to have emancipated poor-relief from the control of a too-indulgent Church, which encouraged the almsgiver to think only of the benefit to his own immortal soul. In so doing the Church had allegedly destroyed all incentive to contrive a rational philanthropy—to build systems which would benefit the receiver of alms, which would serve the common weal, which would in general be directed at procuring good order and reducing physical want and suffering. Hence the Church was credited with a very low capacity for organization and even accused of breeding the very poor whom it relieved, by depriving them of all incentive to find employment and attain self-support.

This paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.

WHY was the Mau Mau movement in colonial Kenya believed to be so evil? It was the horror story of Britain's empire in the 1950s. Less of a military or strategic threat, it was thought to be more atrocious than either the Communists in Malaya or the Cypriot EOKA. It has lived in British memory as a symbol of African savagery, and modern Kenyans are divided by its images, militant nationalism or tribalist thuggery. This essay explores some of these constructions of Mau Mau.

A student of the sixteenth century is always tempted to represent his period as being one of unprecedented change and new departures. In the case of my present subject the temptation is particularly strong, because printing was a new invention, and the technical problems and opportunities which it presented to governments were also new. Nevertheless it would be most misleading to begin a discussion of Tudor censorship with Sir Thomas More's restrictive proclamation of 1530, or even with the introduction of printing to England in 1476. The concept of society, and of the duties and responsibilities of government, which censorship was to reflect was deeply rooted in the past, and was not fundamentally challenged until the puritan revolution of the seventeenth century.

In this polemical paper, I argue that, although conservation has generally presented itself as ananti-modern phenomenon, it is actually very modern indeed; the rise of the conservation movement has been a key element in the modern transformation of the built environment. The paper assesses how this situation has come about, drawing on the turn-of-century ideas of Alois Riegl, and argues that this modern concept of the monument has had a positive, creative side and a negative, even destructive side. In a concluding section, I explore the problems that conservation faces today as a result of that ‘committed’ stance.

The paper examines the reasons that India, Pakistan and Ceylon chose to become Dominions within the Commonwealth instead of becoming republics on independence as many expected. Each of these South Asian states had different motives that compelled them to take on a form of government more associated in areas where the British had settled in significant numbers. The ‘Tropical Dominions’ differed from the settler cases and tested this vague British concept. The British and South Asians had to compromise their wishes in order to satisfy their wants. India is characterised here as the ‘Expedient Dominion’, Pakistan the ‘Siege Dominion’ and Ceylon the ‘Imitation Dominion’. This paper focuses on the years immediately prior to independence to understand the various objectives of the South Asian elites that negotiated with the British for their sovereignty and how they varied from each other and from the Dominion ideal.

The importance of the rôle of the industrial inventor in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution is recognized by everybody: Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, John Kay, James Watt, James Neilsen, George Stephenson, William Murdoch, Josiah Wedgwood, even schoolboys can reel off their names with glee, and their careers have mostly been investigated in satisfactory detail by economic historians. But the rôle of the merchant entrepreneur—their natural partner and alter ego—has been far less exhaustively studied. Those who are well known are few, and those whose careers have been examined in detail even fewer. As a class they do not even occur in the indices of the two standard text-books on the Industrial Revolution—those by Mantoux and Ashton; Matthew Boulton is one of the few individuals amongst them who have avoided total obscurity, and he is now receiving adequate treatment.

‘History is more backward in Ireland than in any other country’, wrote J. R. Green's Anglo-Irish widow fiercely in 1912. Here alone there is a public opinion which resents its being freely written, and there is an opinion, public or official, I scarcely know which to call it, which prevents its being freely taught. And between the two, history has a hard fight for life. Take the question of writing. History may conceivably be treated as a science. Or it may be interpreted as a majestic natural drama or poem. Either way has much to be said for it. Both ways have been nobly attempted in other countries. But neither of these courses has been thought of in Ireland. Here history has a peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale—the good man (English) who prospered, and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end.

The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.

The lords of the March of Wales enjoyed a remarkable position within the dominions ruled by the kings of England in the thirteenth century. They were subjects of the king and held their lands, in Wales as in England, of him as feudal tenants; but within their Marcher lordships they claimed and exercised a measure of authority unsurpassed elsewhere within the king's dominions. The nature of that authority was not the subject of a contemporary treatise or of a quo warranto inquiry; but that it was of the most comprehensive seems evident enough. Within his lordship the Marcher lord was governor and universal landlord; only the lands and the affairs of the church lay beyond his reach. Jurisdictionally his competence was equally wide. Contemporary lawyers characterized it curtly by referring to the March as an area in which the king's writ did not run. That was to express the point negatively and inadequately. The clerks of the royal chancery put it more clearly and positively later when they declared that a Marcher lord was to enjoy ‘all royal rights, prerogatives and customs belonging to royal lordships, and all royal courts and other jurisdictions, … an authentic seal for commissions, writs and warrants, and power of appointing justices to hold sessions in eyre and other sessions and courts’.

Althought anticipated by earlier writers, the clearest formulation of the idea of a metropolis as the focus of economic activity is to be found in Professor N. S. B. Gras' The Evolution of the English Corn Market. There he writes:

The metropolitan market may be described as a large district having one center in which is focussed a considerable trade. Trade between outlying parts of course may take place, but it is that between the metropolitan town and the rest of the area that dominates all. This is chiefly the exchange of the raw pro-ducts of the country for the manufactured or imported goods of the town. The prices of all goods sent to the metropolitan center are ‘made’ there, or, in other words, prices diminish as the distance from the center is increased.

By the fourteenth century the descendants of those who had gone from Britain to Ireland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had come to call themselves ‘the English of Ireland’ or ‘the English born in Ireland’. Or, to be more accurate, they did so when faced by Englishmen from England: within Ireland they described themselves simply as ‘the English’. From the 1340s onwards a series of disputes with agents of the king formed a context in which they collectively stressed their Englishness. By the fifteenth century this identity was from time to time problematical, both for those who claimed it and for the metropolis. Historians who work on the late medieval and early modern periods have found it equally so, and have argued about the atuitudes and nationality of the settler élite. While fourteenth-century evidence has been called upon in these debates, there has been little serious consideration of the first two centuries of the lordship of Ireland. In what senses were those who went to Ireland during the founding period ‘English’? Why does the emphasis upon being English appear to have intensified among their successors as time went by? What does the self-proclaimed Englishness of the fourteenth century signify? How far do the complexities and tensions associated with it foreshadow the better-known difficulties of later periods? These are the matters I wish to explore.