THE Novelle of 1908, or to use its full title, ‘A Law to amend paragraph 2 of the Law concerning the German Fleet of 14 June 1900’, was not a very large piece of legislation. The entire text read as follows:

‘With the exception of ships destroyed, battleships and cruisers shall be replaced after 20 years. Active life extends from the year of appropriation of the first instalment on the ship to be replaced to the appropriation of the first instalment of the replacement ship. For the period 1908–1917, construction of replacement ships will follow the plan in Appendix B.’

THE equipment of any well-appointed counting house in the late sixteenth century would include, as a matter of course, one or more money-books illustrating and evaluating all coins likely to come its master's way. Such money-books had originated in the late fifteenth century, when the invention of printing had made it possible to illustrate the official ordonnances, tariffs, or placards listing coins approved for circulation and giving their legal values. The earliest ones were no more than flysheets: a Flemish one of 1499 illustrating the nine ‘good florins of the Electors’, an English one of 1504 illustrating two English groats and a Flemish double patard. In the early sixteenth century these flysheets grew into small brochures, as their publishers found it convenient to take account of coins not mentioned in official proclamations but found commonly in circulation. They were, in fact, becoming illustrated versions of the privately compiled lists of coins and values which are known to us from the time of Pegolotti onwards. In due course they attained the status of substantial volumes, their format being often made tall and narrow, like that of account ledgers, so that they could stand with these on the merchant's shelves.

In the first three decades of the sixteenth century the ecclesiastical courts were harshly criticized.1 This criticism had had a long history, but it was sharply focused (at least in London) by the case of Richard Hunne.2 The unpopularity was used by Henry VIII, with great skill, to bring Convocation into subjection, and ultimately to force its acceptance of the royal supremacy. Convocation was intimidated in 1531 by a charge of praemunire for their exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction,3 and in 1532 by the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries.s But why was this Supplication submitted? Apparently it was not a diplomatic move to reinforce Henry’s papal negotiations; nor can it be seen simply as a means devised by Cromwell to deprive the clergy of their legislative rights. As Dr Kelly has shown, most of the Supplication was not about these rights. The fact that they subsequently proved crucial should not lead us into confusing intention and result. The intention of the document is to attack the ecclesiastical courts quite as much as the legislative power of the Church. Clauses 2–7 deal directly with judicial problems. What exactly lies behind this intention? Why were the courts so unpopular and felt to be so threatening?

I HAVE entitled my paper ‘What is Psycho-History’, in obvious imitation of an illustrious predecessor in analysing Clio’s nature and character. For reasons that will be clear later, I have come to think that psycho-social history may well be a better title than psycho-history for the inquiry that seems to be emerging, but since ‘tradition’, that is about ten years of effort by historians and psycho- analysts, has gone on under the latter rubric, I shall retain it here.

SOCIOLOGY is a discipline that employs abstract concepts to express general propositions about social behaviour, relationships and processes. From its beginnings, sociology was as much concerned to interpret the past as to explain the present. The early sociologists were historicists and evolutionists who explained the past by imposing a pattern of order upon it, and who readily took the less developed contemporary societies of their own time as images of the remote past of their own societies. It is to those thinkers, Comte, Spencer and Marx, if not precisely to the issues that occupied them, that sociologists still turn in tracing their intellectual descent—not to the early social surveyors, Charles Booth or Frederic Le Play.

HISTORIANS have long been interested in the subject of population, but it is only recently that they have begun to apply the formal techniques of demography to the study of population in the past. This has happened because historians have begun to ask questions about population and its relationship with the historical, social and economic environment which can only be answered if the demographic components of fertility, nuptiality and mortality can be identified and measured. Originally historians were concerned with relatively straightforward questions about population, such as the number of people alive at a given time. But knowledge of the size of a population is in itself seldom informative; it becomes meaningful when it is compared with other information, for example with the size of the population at another date, so that the direction and rate of population change can be inferred. Sometimes the bare facts of population change are all that the historian needs to know; for example some independent evidence on changes in the size of the population of England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would be a welcome addition to the current debate on the sixteenth-century price rise. But historians have seldom remained satisfied with the knowledge that population is growing or declining; very properly they have wanted to know why this was so.

THE term ‘heptarchy’, coined by John Selden in the seventeenth century to describe the political sub–divisions of England at the time of the conversion, has been handed down by successive generations of historians and still colours our thinking today. Fascinating though the word may be to the historiographer, from a strictly historical point of view it is high time it was given a decent burial, for its inadequacy has been apparent ever since Sir Henry Spelman, Selden's illustrious contemporary, edited the document known as the Tribal Hidage.

A YEAR ago I took the opportunity presented by this obligatory address to survey the working out of a classical formula for historical writing during the three hundred years which separate Einhard's Life of Charlemagne from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. History written in accordance with these rules had many merits, and its emphasis is often right, or at least illuminating, but it never had a more than uncertain hold on the matter-of-fact world. Geoffrey of Monmouth was a historian who followed the old rules, but he did his job so well that he could have no successor except in the realm of romance. This is no place for us, and it is time for us to come down to earth again.