Among the most striking changes from the text-book generalisations of my school days is the emphasis given nowadays to those who were not committed to either side in the Civil War, those who tried and in some cases succeeded in keeping clear of the conflict altogether. Indeed so great has been the stress on neutrals and neutralism and on the general reluctance to take sides and to begin fighting at all in 1642, that we are in danger of having to explain how a mere handful of obstinate or fanatical extremists on each side contrived to drag the country down into the abyss of Civil War. I have said enough in my previous addresses in this series to make my own position clear on that. Among Royalists, including the King himself, there were enough who believed that rebellion must be put down, whether they were more concerned to defend the constitutional prerogatives of the Crown, the government and liturgy of the Church, or the whole existing fabric of society. Correspondingly there were enough Parliamentarians who believed that religion, liberty and property were in deadly peril, through the design for Popery and arbitrary government. If these beliefs had been confined to a few dozen or even score of men on each side, it is not credible that a war would have begun in 1642, where fighting broke out be it noted in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Somerset before the preparations and manoeuverings of the two main armies led up to the campaign and battle of Edgehill.

EARLY medieval archaeology can be said to have its origins with the investigation of burial: with Otto III's opening of Charlemagne's tomb in 1000; with medieval and early modern reports of the discoveries of the graves of kings or warriors; and, most notably, with the discovery at Tournai in 1653 of the grave of an early Frankish king, Childeric. And, until very recently, the study of burials dominated the subject. This is only natural. Graves are easily recognisable when discovered accidentally; often they were intended to be, and have remained, a very visible part of the landscape. Surviving royal burials are, of course, very rare. But there are over one hundred thousand excavated graves of lesser personages from the period between c. 450 and c. 1000: an astonishing mass of data which forms a significant proportion of the total available evidence for the early Middle Ages and which needs to be assessed and taken into count by any early medievalist interested in the totality of the period. And it can be argued that cemeteries offer rather more opportunity than the written sources to understand the world of those below the status of kings and bishops, and to do so without the ecclesiastical bias that the written sources have. We nevertheless have to remember that graves are not the unconscious waste products of society, like most of the data studied by an archaeologist: rubbish pits, building remains and so on. Bodies were deliberately and carefully placed in the ground, along with whatever accompanied them. Those responsible for the burial made a whole series of choices about the manner in which they carried out this action. A burial, like a written text, is a product of conscious mental activity, and subject to many of the problems of interpretation and analysis with which historians are familiar.

ON 4 MARCH 1848 Hungarians were excitedly debating the devastating criticisms of their country's rulers pronounced before assembled members of the diet the previous day by the popular tribune, Lajos Kossuth, the culmination of a campaign of agitation which stretched back a decade and more. Kossuth called for a constitutional transformation, with a responsible ministry, full legal equality, and the abolition of all privilege. The following month his programme was conceded wholesale by the authorities, under pressure from the sans-culottes of Budapest, and prostrate before their own Viennese revolution—for Kossuth's speech had played a major part in unseating Metternich there. Six months later power passed to a fully secessionist Hungarian regime, in which Kossuth enjoyed near-dictatorial sway. The ensuing civil war, during which the dynasty was declared deposed, took a further year to contain; its outcome appeared to be a complete breakdown of mutual confidence between king and country.

THE SUBJECT of this paper is not the sombre story of the mass graves at Katyn, filled with the corpses of murdered Polish officers; nor will it deal directly with the question of who killed those officers. I approach these events in the course of research on the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy in Britain during the Second World War, and on the closely related matters of censorship and propaganda as practised by the British government in that period. The diplomatic crisis produced by the affair of the Katyn graves was one in which publicity was freely used as an instrument of policy—indeed sometimes policy and publicity were indistinguishable. Those who controlled British censorship and propaganda, and attempted to guide public opinion, were faced with acute and wideranging problems. It is the object of this paper to analyse those problems, to see how the government tried to cope with them, and to trace the reactions of the press and public opinion, as a case study in the extent and limitations of government influence in such matters.

SINCE the days of John Foxe, ecclesiastical historians of the 1520s have concentrated on the Odysseys and Passions of the earliest English Protestants. Their Catholic opponents, with the notable exceptions of John Fisher and Thomas More, have been largely ignored. The object of this essay is to redress the balance by examining the English commitment to orthodoxy in the 1520s, a commitment made primarily by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, but seconded enthusiastically by the academic community. It aims not to rewrite the entire ecclesiastical history of the decade, but merely to draw attention to an important though neglected element in the story. Nevertheless, it hopes to be a contribution to the reassessment of the English Reformation that has been carried out in much recent research. The essay is primarily an investigation of polemics, rather than of politics or of popular religion. Beginning with Henry VIII's decision early in 1521 to take up the pen personally against Luther, it draws out the connection of this with the promulgation in England of Exsurge Domine, the Papal condemnation of Luther, and suggests a solution to the vexed question of the ‘real’ authorship of Henry's Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. It investigates the continuation of this polemical assault on Luther by English scholars; and examines its international dimension, gathering evidence of the patronage and cooperation extended to Luther's continental opponents by the English authorities. In conclusion it proposes that the strongly orthodox commitment of the English authorities in the 1520s ebbed away only as the pressing needs of the ‘King's Great Matter’ occasioned competing, and ultimately conflicting, intellectual priorities.

WHEN in 1629–30 Rubens gave James I his conventional apotheosis on the Banqueting House ceiling, he also, more originally, depicted his reign's major achievements. Two stood out: the general benefits of James's rule, peace and plenty; and, given pride of place, the Union of England and Scotland.

SUPERFICIALLY regarded, the foundation of the Royal Historical Society a hundred and twenty years ago belongs to that spate of foundations of academic societies and specialised disciplinary journals, on the continent and in the United States as well as in Britain, which occurred in the concluding decades of the last century and around the beginning of this. Indeed if mere date of foundation were all that counted the Society is considerably more venerable than, for example, the Royal Economic Society, which, even under its earlier title as the British Economic Association, will not celebrate its centenary until 1900, and the British Academy which will not do so for two years beyond that. The Royal Anthropological Institute is three years younger than ourselves, though admittedly it represented an amalgamation of two earlier societies, the Anthropological Society of London which enjoyed a somewhat notorious existence through the eighteen sixties and the still older Ethnological Society. Our Transactions had been published, albeit intermittently, for fifteen years before the first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886. They had not, it has to be admitted, been fifteen glorious years. Although by the mid-'eighties matters were beginning to improve and the names of some notable historians, Acton, Creighton, Seeley, appear on the membership rolls, the productions of the Society and much of its membership were far from distinguished and it still had some way to go to establish itself as a respected institution.

In The processes by which a political cause is defeated, there are significant, sometimes unexpected achievements. This proposition is as true of protectionism before and after the repeal of the corn laws as it is for example of Jacobitism or Gladstonian Home Rule. But while the supporters and fellow-travellers of free trade have had abundant attention, the protectionists have suffered from historical neglect redeemed in recent years only by the distinguished contributions of Robert Stewart and Travis Crosby. A certain absence both of historical sympathy and of interest in the arguments of the enemies of free trade has produced a widely-held view of the protectionists as mere revanchistes and political untouchables, ‘wild men of the right’ who had to be ‘dragged kicking and screaming from their last ditches’ while others made proper preparations for ‘a generation of bourgeois prosperity’. Norman Gash, the doyen of ‘the age of Peel’, while keenly aware of the mixed motives—intellectual, political and economic—which influenced men's conduct in 1845–6 and beyond, writes of the protectionists as ‘the dead weight’ of the conservative party: their cause was too monolithic, too representative of ‘a latent hostility to the other great interests of the country’, to form the basis of a national party; and their leader Lord George Bentinck was principally and destructively inspired by revenge.

We know almost as much about the operations of big Italian companies in England as about those in Italy itself during the early fourteenth century. Tuscan trade here engaged some of Europe's most celebrated businesses, attracted by the kingdom's fine wool and the credit-worthiness of her crown and nobility. Historians have some-times drawn an analogy with international lending from richer to poorer countries in the modern world, both to create a point of contact with their readers and to meet the need for deep-lying explanations. The analogy usually carries the implication that Italy had a more advanced economy than England, and there are authors who say so explicitly. Some use terms designed to describe international economic growth during the last two hundred years, and represent medieval Italy as a pole of development, or a core economy. Others, borrowing the language of power, describe Italy as a dominant economy. Professor Cipolla uses a number of these ideas at once in his observation that ‘in the early years of the fourteenth century Florence represented a dominant and developed economy, while England and the kingdom of Naples were two decidedly underdeveloped countries: the periphery, to use Wallerstein's expression’.