THE great lordships of the Welsh marches constituted a phenomenon not found elsewhere in the area subject to the kings of mediaeval England, and a comparison with the English palatinates and the great liberties of Norman Ireland reveals some very remarkable features. Many of the powers which the marchers exercised were no doubt taken over from the Welsh princes whom they displaced, but this does not in itself explain why they were able to retain such powers. In Ireland at the end of the twelfth century another Norman conquest produced another series of great liberties in which Norman lords displaced Celtic kings who had exercised the powers of independent rulers, but the lords of the liberties of Leinster, Meath or Ulster were subject to the control of the royal government at Dublin in the same way as the greater English liberties were subject to royal control, and never attained a degree of independence comparable with the position held by the marchers. The difference seems most easily explained as being due to the simple fact that the marcher position was in essentials established in the reign of Henry I, while the Norman conquest of Ireland occurred two generations later, at the time when Henry II was extending the control of the crown in so many directions.

LIKE Jacobitism and Chartism, the study of the influence of the French Revolution on British politics and public opinion has attracted a good deal of sentimental interest, but it is a curious fact that with the exception of Professor Alfred Cobban's anthology (The Debate on the French Revolution, 1789–1800 (1950)), A. H. Lincoln's Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800 (1938), and a few scattered articles comparatively little appears to have been published since 1926 on the subject. It has therefore never been examined in the light of those trends in historiography associated with the names of Unwin and Namier.

THE Communist Party of Great Britain, like the Communist Parties of most other European countries, was founded shortly after the Russian Bolshevik revolution. It was unique among the Communist Parties of the major countries in being the result of an amalgamation of small revolutionary groups rather than a product of the schism of a large existing organization. The British Labour Party did not split as a result of the Russian revolution: the Communist Party grew up out of elements which for the most part had had a separate existence on the Labour Party's left wing.

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.’

ONLY a hundred years ago the question whether or not there had been coroners in Roman Britain could still be seriously discussed, for two pieces of evidence had created a widespread belief that they had existed long before the Conquest. The Mirror of Justices, a thirteenth-century treatise, credits king Alfred with the appointment of coroners and sheriffs in every county, and a rhyming charter, purporting to have been granted by Athelstan to Beverley Minster, restricts the holding of inquests upon dead bodies within its liberty to its own bailiffs, specifically excluding any ‘other coroner’. Later legal writers, especially Coke, strengthened and prolonged the authority of The Mirror of Justices: they unquestioningly accepted the section on the coroner and embodied it in their works. Maitland, however, has brilliantly exposed the wilful mendacity of its author. The rhyming charter is an obvious forgery; the earliest extant version of it has been attributed on palaeographical and linguistic grounds to the reign of Edward II, when it was probably composed.

The many non-theological controversies which ranged about the Church of England in the first three decades of the nineteenth century fell into two classes, the one inspired by the deficiencies in the church's physical equipment for performing its allotted functions as the state's religious establishment, the other by the superiorities and advantages enjoyed only by its members. The controversies in the latter class went the deeper. In discussing ‘church reform’, the fact of establishment could be taken for granted: but in discussing the legal disabilities and social inferiorities under which both Protestant and Roman Catholic nonconformists suffered, the establishment's superiorities had to be defended against liberals who maintained that an established church could do without them, and its very existence as an establishment had to be justified against the charges of those Protestant dissenters and secularists who maintained that established churches were iniquitous, oppressive, and absurd. The discussion thus ranged freely between the poles of political practice and political philosophy, and joined the immediate problems of the hour to the most serious philosophical and theological problems with which thoughtful statesmen could be concerned.

ACCORDING to Lord Ernie, the period from 1750 to 1789 was, in spite of many dark features, the brightest period hitherto reached in the history of French husbandry, a period during which ‘we turn, as it were, from the sombre etchings of La Bruyère to the smiling pictures of Watteau’. It certainly was a time when the spirit of agrarian reform which was prevalent throughout Western Europe was blowing strongly in France, arousing great enthusiasms and aspirations. From the presses of France poured a spate of agricultural treatises, books and pamphlets deploring the existing agricultural system, proclaiming the virtues of the English system of capitalist farming, urging the emancipation of property and of sale from all restrictions in order to achieve increased production, higher profits, and the investment of more capital.

ON several occasions during the last twenty or thirty years students of the past have had their attention directed to the seventeenth century by historians of science and of scholarship. We have been told that we shall find there the authentic beginnings of the modern world, and that in that age reliance on the traditions and books of the past gives way to experiment, to analysis and to criticism. In the realm of history, there is a shift from the classical, literary traditions to the original sources and to official records, while the historical writings of the past are subjected to the new technique which for a hundred years had been applied to the literary masterpieces of the ancient world by a succession of great scholars from Valla and Erasmus to Scaliger and Casaubon. Certainly, in many ways the seventeenth century is more significant in the annals of historiography than is the century that followed. In England it is the age of Dodsworth, Dugdale, Twysden, Wharton, Wanley and Hearne. In France, it is the age of D'Achéry, Labbé, Ducange and the Maurists. In the part of the Netherlands that is now Belgium it is the age of the first Bollandists.