Addressing a Society consecrated to the advance of historical studies is bound to be an awesome experience: it is a particularly sobering one for me because the central argument of this paper would have been familiar to British historians writing in the early nineteenth century. In his Constitutional History of England, published in 1827, Hallam asserted, seemingly without fear of contradiction, that

‘it must be evident to every person who is at all conversant with the publications of George II's reign, with the poems, the novels, the essays, and almost all the literature of the time, that what are called the popular or liberal doctrines of government were decidedly prevalent. The supporters themselves of the Walpole and Pelham administrations … made complaints, both in parliament and in pamphlets, of the democratical spirit, the insubordination to authority, the tendency to republican sentiments, which they alleged to have gained ground among the people.’1

Gregory became pope in the summer of 590, to succeed his predecessor who had been carried away by the plague. Nearly fifty years had passed since the first outbreak of the plague in the time of Justinian. Let the plague serve as our signpost to a period of upheaval across Europe. If the 530s were the ‘age of hope’ a disastrous reversal began in the 540s. The succeeding half-century was a time of collapsing hopes and darkening horizons: the prospect of imperial reconquest and peace receding after 540, never to be more than ephemerally and precariously realized; the dreams of spiritual and political unification revealed as illusory; war, plague and the obscure workings of ‘demographic forces’ combined to turn the Italy of Boethius into that of Gregory the Great in the course of some sixty years. The contours of the societies of late Antiquity were becoming displaced to produce a new social landscape. Some of this transformation has left visible traces in our evidence and has been extensively studied; much of it has been concealed from us, either through lack of evidence or through failure to ask the right questions. It is only in recent years, to take one example, that the subtle shifts in Byzantine religiosity and political ideology discernible in the later sixth century have begun to cohere into something like a unified picture of a ‘new integration’ of culture and society in the towns of the Eastern Empire. How far the world of Western Europe was exposed to analogous changes may be a question impossible to answer; in any case, it needs approaching piecemeal and with the necessary discrimination of time and place.

The central issue in most wars is how to win. The central issue in the Crimean War was whether there should be a war. Throughout most of the war, the question of peace or war remained an open one, dependent on military prospects, diplomatic vicissitudes, and the shuttlecock of parliamentary faction. That British public opinion was hotly for war was interpreted by players of the parliamentary game only as meaning that it might become pacific with equal volatility. The supposed political invincibility of Palmerston in 1855–6 had some reality outside Parliament, but little inside Parliament where it mattered. If events in Parliament varied in line with the war, it was also true that parliamentary prospects could affect the war.

Most discussions of political divisions in the counties controlled by parliament during the civil war have taken place within a very clear framework. Following the work of Professor Everitt on the ‘county community’, the main conflict is judged to have been between gentry who sought to defend the integrity of the local community and those who were prepared to sacrifice local autonomy to the needs of the national struggle. Within this polarity, moderate or neutralist gentry were the champions of localism while the more ‘extreme’ parliamentarians were nationally minded. Thus Mr. Pennington described how ‘Localism, compromiseand social conservatism opposed centralism, militancy and Revolutionary Puritanism’, while in The Revolt of the Provinces, Dr. Morrill coupled ‘conservatism and localism’. In one of the most recent formulations, Professor Underdown wrote of ‘the now familiar conflict between nationally minded militants and locally minded moderates [which] can be found in all the parliamentarian counties’. Only Professor Holmes has challenged this consensus.

The belief that the common people of England had little real sympathy for either side in the civil war—that they were mere cannon-fodder, targets for plunder, at best deferential pawns—has a long and respectable ancestry. Many of the combatants believed it, noting the automatic changes of local attitudes when news came of distant vic-tories or defeats. In postwar politics too they knew it was ‘safest to be in favour with the strongest side’. When they fought, it was because they had no alternative. How often, Anthony Ascham lamented, ‘ambitious or angry men forme subtilties and pretences, and afterwards the poore people (who understand them not) are taken out of their houses … to fight and maintaine them at the peril of one anothers lives’. Survival on the margin of subsistence was the universal motive. ‘The people,’ Sir Arthur Haselrig declared, ‘care not what Government they live under, so as they may plough and go to market.’ Looking back after 1660, men as various as Hobbes and Baxter took the same line. ‘There were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes, but would have taken any side for pay or plunder,’ Hobbes tells us. Baxter has been as often quoted: ‘The poor plowman understood but little of these Matters; but a little would stir up their Discontent when Money was demanded.’

I am somewhat daunted by the honour of opening this conference; for what I have to offer is not the product of intensive scholarship but a broad and possibly contentious argument about the whole sub-continent of West Africa (roughly bounded by the Senegal river, Lake Chad and Mount Cameroon). My underlying hypotheses will be that many so-called minority problems in contemporary Africa derive from changes introduced by the creation of colonial states, rather than from some exotic African malady called ‘tribalism’ and that African experience over the last millennium may sometimes be more relevant to contemporary problems than the received wisdom of western political science. I have some fear that, to adapt a phrase of Sir Keith Hancock, these may prove no themes for scholars.

The fact that Spain is, to date, the only western European country which has ever been an Islamic colony still seems to banish her to the fringe of her neighbours' historical consciousness. Much of the responsibility for this state of affairs rests with the Spaniards themselves. In most cases and in most periods, the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, used the Pyrenees as an intellectual, as well as a physical, barrier, and considered the Peninsula's problems as distinct from those of the rest of the European continent. A strong reason for adopting this approach is the remarkable co-existence of Islamic, Christian and Jewish civilization between 711 and 1492, which placed Spain and Portugal within both medieval Christendom and the Islamic world of North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. The successes of co-operation between the three religions which were achieved during this period are worthy of greater recognition than they generally receive, but the intention here is to investigate the causes of the failures which brought co-existence to an end, concentrating on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in a large, late-medieval Castilian town.

Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, compiled his account of the transition of English Catholicism from monopoly to minority status in 1599–1600, and called it ‘A story of domestical difficulties which the Catholic cause and promoters thereof hath had in defending the same, not only against the violence and persecution of the heretics but also by sundry other impediments among themselves, of faction, emulation, sedition and division, since the change of religion in England’. This version of Tudor ecclesiastical history supplements Nicholas Sander's attention to evil Protestants and politicians by an examination of the Catholic response to the Reformation. The Parsons story has two groups of villains, the bishops and the parish clergy, who betrayed their faith to hold on to their livings; it has two groups of heroes, who rescued the faith by their self-sacrifice, the Jesuits and the seminary priests they inspired, and the Elizabethan Catholic gentry; and it goes something like this. The early Tudor monopolistic Church was weakened by spiritual decadence and mere conformism, and its leadership divided by ambition and faction, so it could not resist the challenge of heresy.

Unlike their American cousins, the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Britain have, until recently, received comparatively little scholarly attention from historians. This is not to say that their presence in Victorian Britain has gone unnoticed; far from it. Throughout the nineteenth century the doings and, much more often, the mis-doings of the immigrant Irish were logged in massive detail by an army of social investigators, philanthropists, clergymen, royal commissions and parliamentary committees. But, with very few exceptions, the scholarly analysis of the data has only begun in earnest during the last two decades, and especially during the past few years. In a growing body of local and regional studies, and in studies of particular aspects of the Irish presence, the literature on the Irish immigrants is becoming not only more plentiful but also conceptually more sophisticated.

Was the Habsburg Empire doomed to collapse, and if so, at what point did its collapse become inevitable? This is a question which has been debated consciously and unconsciously by historians ever since 1918. Today, it is true, Austrian historians are warning against it— Professor Wandruszka even a decade ago advised us to do our ‘duty’ and accept ‘the tragic element in history’1—yet the issue is still discussed. Alexander Gerschenkron, for example, in his last work on Austrian history2 chose a counter-factual theme, and in the introduction to his book condemned historians—presumably those like Professor Wandruszka—who were ‘anxious to prevent people from asking pertinent and interesting questions and [had] neither the wit nor the imagination for asking those questions themselves’. Whether Professor Gerschenkron himself employed too much imagination is only one of the issues to be examined in this paper.

I want first to consider some of the statistical evidence that there was an increase in activity in the land market during the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. It has long been known that there was a substantial increase in fines levied during this period, i.e. in the fictitious suits which were, in substance, conveyances of land. Mr. Meeking observed in his introduction to the Surrey Feet of Fines for the period 1509–1558 that ‘the average number of Fines levies each Term rose so steeply that the number of Surrey Fines levied in the years 4 & 5 Ph & M (1557–8) is more than five times as great as those levied during an average year of the period 1509–1530’. Professor Stone's calculations based upon the fines for three counties suggest that the number more than doubled between 1560 and 1620. A rough count for the country as a whole shows as one would expect a more moderate but still considerable increase; the annual number in the 1580s was under 3,000; in the 1590s it was over 3,000; and by the early seventeenth century it has risen to over 4,000. Besides the evidence of the fines, some information can be derived, though for a shorter period, from the returns of the income received by the Receiver-General of the Alienation Fines; this consisted of the fees payable on the writs which initiated the fictitious suit and also on licences and pardons connected with the alienation of property held in capite. This income bore a relation to the value of the property; though the value for this purpose was not the true value, the income gives some clue to the fluctuations in the aggregate value of transactions, and not merely in their number.