I must first of all thank the Royal Historical Society for conferring on me the distinguished honour of its Presidency. I am proud to be thus closely associated with its work. Yet I am very conscious that my past discharge of the duties of membership gives me but a modest claim on its suffrages. It is true that I have been a member of the Society since 1891. I vividly remember how at that time I fell, a coy, but not an unwilling, victim to the blandishments of Mr. Oscar Browning, who used to the full the opportunities of a mountain holiday in the Engadine to preach the sound doctrine that no self-respecting historian could discharge the whole duty of his station unless he enlisted under the Society's banner. Between 1894 and 1901 I acted as a member of the Council, until, doubtless for the sufficient reason of non- attendance, I was relegated to the position of an ordinary member. In 1915 the Society was good enough to raise me to the dignity of an Honorary Vice-President, an office the more welcome to a member then dwelling in what are sometimes quaintly called the “provinces,” since it involved neither the obligation nor the privilege of attending meetings. All that I can claim to have done in return for these favours was the contribution in 1894 to the Transactions of a paper on the “Earldoms under Edward I,” and an edition in 1906 of the “State Trials of Edward I” to the Camden Series.

At the death of Edward I Ireland was, in theory, equipped with institutions on the English model. The various parts of the machinery of Irish government had been assembled and put together in the century following the Conquest. Imitation of English institutions was necessarily close, as the Anglo-Norman colonists were not content with anything less than their full share in the constitutional rights enjoyed by themselves or their kinsmen in England. From the first, the head of the English government in Ireland was the Justiciar; his duties were vice-regal and he obviously borrowed his title from the Anglo-Norman officer who acted as royal deputy in England. He was ex officio president of the King's Council in Ireland, a body which normally consisted of the chief officers of the Crown, but which was sometimes afforced by the attendance of the magnates and free tenants of the colony. The curia regis in Ireland was represented by the Court of the Justiciar; pleas which in England would have been called coram rege were heard by him and entered on the Justiciary Rolls. The oldest of the committees of the curia regis in Ireland was the Exchequer, which was probably constituted very soon after the Conquest. There was apparently one Itinerant Justice in the reign of John and with him two others were associated in 1221.

[At a meeting of the Royal Historical Society on 22 April, 1926, I gave a summary of a paper entitled “A Derelict Diplomatist in the Eighteenth Century,” in which I narrated the misadventures of a certain Friedrich Lorentz, or Frederick Laurence (as he was called in English State Papers), a born subject of the Elector of Hanover, who was employed by our Foreign Office in a rather indeterminate capacity, first at Berlin and later at Dresden. Lord Hyndford, ignorant, like so many of our diplomatists, of the German language, had employed him as a private secretary to deal with German documents. In the autumn of 1744, when Frederick II re-entered the war against Maria Theresa, Hyndford was transferred from Berlin to St. Petersburg, and was allowed by Carteret to leave the representation of Great Britain, with the necessary cyphers, in the hands of Laurence. In view of public and parliamentary opinion it was rather reckless to entrust such responsibility to a Hanoverian, and it was to disguise this that Hyndford laid stress upon the English form and sound that could be given to the name. Laurence himself was exultant at his unexpected elevation, and did his best to earn by zeal and industry the approval of his employers.

There is still some ambiguity about the authorship of the book Defensor Pacts. When it was first printed in the sixteenth century it appeared under the name of Marsilio of Padua alone, and subsequent editors repeated the ascription of the editio princeps. For long, therefore, it passed as Marsilio's work. But evidence has since been brought to light suggesting that a certain John of Jandun had some sort of interest in the book too. That evidence has been very variously interpreted. On the one hand, Jandun has been treated as merely a copyist, the translator of the French version, or Marsilio's confidential adviser; but on the other, as a collaborator who furnished the quotations from Aristotle, or perhaps constructed some of the philosophical arguments. But what exactly his share was has yet to be determined.

In the history of South America as a whole, the first thirty years of the nineteenth century were marked by wars of independence and the diplomatic search for political recognition. Among these struggling republics and revolted Empires, a little enclave remained under European rule. Facing the Atlantic, between the Orinoco and the Amazon, guarded by mountain ranges, lay the coastlands of Guiana, a series of river basins occupied by a medley of European peoples.

Early in the Civil War some North Welsh gentlemen addressed to the King a petition, the draft of which is preserved in the National Library at Aberystwyth:

“ To the King's most excellent ma'tie. The humble petition of yo'r Ma'ties Loyall subjects subscribed for and on the behalfe of themselues and the rest of the inhabitants of yo'r Ma'ties six counties of North Wales, Sheweth, That the sale of yo'r petitioners' cattle and Welch cottons being the principall and most considerable commodities of these countries, cottons usuallie vented in Shrewsbury and our cattle driven and sould in most parts of England, hath bin and is the onelie support of yo'r petitioners' being and livelihood, among whom there (be) many thousand families in the mountainous part of this countrey who sowing little or noe corne at all, trust merely to the sale of their cattle, wooll and Welch cottons for provision of bread.”

The title of this paper does not mean that I wish to propose to you any revolutionary opinions as to the character of the earliest English history. I shall not ask you to reconsider the evidence which has convinced generations of scholars of the Germanic character of Early English society and institutions. I shall not discuss the question whether Celtic tradition may have preserved fragments of true but neglected information relating to the age of the Saxon settlement. All that I propose is to ask whether a more exact analysis or a completer presentation of familiar materials is likely to confirm or to overthrow the reconstruction of Early English history which we have inherited from earlier scholars.

When discussing the Exchequer Year in the Transactions for 1925 (4th Ser., Vol. VIII) I should have noticed certain of the contemporary endorsements on the early feet of fines. The practice of depositing in the Treasury of the Receipt of the Exchequer the foot of each tripartite chirograph commenced on 16 July, 1195, and some methodical arrangement had to be devised for preserving the feet of fines for convenient reference. The accumulation of each term and of each eyre was therefore filed separately; and the blank underside of the bottom document of each file was endorsed with an appropriate inscription, such as the following:— Cyrographa recepta anno VII, a festo sancti Michaelis usque ad Pascham: