In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there was a recognizable, if indefinite, distinction between the king's prisons and the prisons of his subjects. It is only with the king's prisons that this paper is concerned. Nor with all of these; for those royal prisons (mostly castles) which temporarily harboured state prisoners and prisoners of war it almost wholly ignores. The theme, in short, is common gaols for common suspects.

IT has been, and still is, the considered opinion of many scholars that the freemen and sokemen who figure so prominently in the Domesday Survey of the northern and eastern counties of England were the descendants of the rank-and-file of the Danish armies of the ninth century. The theory is not based on any precise knowledge of Scandinavian peasant-society in the ninth century, but on the geographical distribution of the free peasantry in England. It was first propounded by E. W. Robertson in 1862:

In the Danelage, … omitting Yorkshirefrom the calculation, between a third and a fourth of the entire population were classified either as liberi homines or as socmen. … Free Socage, the very tenure of which is sometimes supposed to have been peculiarly a relic of Anglo-Saxon liberty, appears to have been absolutely unknown except among the Danes.

On 1 February 1876 the London Missionary Society decided to establish a mission on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was a bold and almost a foolhardy decision, for the route between the lake and the east coast of Africa was more than 800 miles in length, without either roads or ordered government, and over this enormous distance the mission would have to maintain some contact with the outer world if it was to survive. Not without hesitation and misgiving did the Directors commit themselves to so hazardous an undertaking. But interest in the lake region had been aroused by the journeys of Livingstone and Cameron, and a certain wealthy citizen of Leeds, named Robert Arthington, had offered the Society a contribution of £5,000 on the express condition that a mission to the peoples bordering Lake Tanganyika should be undertaken. The offer seemed too generous and imaginative to be refused. The vast lake, with its thousand miles of coastline, was a great natural highway by which to reach and evangelize the villagers who dwelt around its shores. It was not the only lake with such possibilities, and only a few months previously, as it happened, the Free Church of Scotland had sent out a mission to Lake Nyasa, and had supplied it with the sections of a steamer.

Recent discussions about Mediterranean trade in the early Middle Ages have tended to be based on two main assumptions. First, trade has been regarded as trade between ports in the eastern and western parts of the Mediterranean. Secondly, as a result of this view, the attention of historians has concentrated on the advance of the Arab fleets in the seventh and eighth centuries, which disrupted regular commerce and temporarily diminished the importance of the trading cities of Italy and Provence.

One of the results of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 was a heightening of interest in the cure of souls, and the years that followed the Council saw a generous effort on the part of prelates to provide, in accordance with the Lateran directives, a better–educated clergy who could bring the laity to a reasonable understanding of the essentials of Christian belief and practice. In England, during the reign of Henry III, nearly every diocese contributed to the movement for reform, chiefly by statutes modelled upon or deriving from decrees of Innocent III's great council. The Council of Oxford in 1222, the Council and Constitutions of the Legate Otto at London in 1237 and of the Legate Ottobono at London in 1268, catered in varying degrees for the Church in England as a whole.

After a period of comparative neglect, the ecclesiastical history of the Restoration has recently again attracted the attention of historians. Dr.Bosher's Making of the Restoration Settlement has luminously exposed the politics by which the Church of England recaptured the establishment, and Mr. A. G. Matthews, by tracing the biographies of the Anglicans displaced during the Interregnum and the Non-Anglicans ejected after the king's return, has shown how changes in doctrine and discipline affected the ministry during these years. Here an attempt will be made to discuss another aspect of the re-establishment: its administrative reconstruction. Dr.Bosher has shown how the exigencies of politics led to the piecemeal restoration of Anglicanism, instead of the immediate ecclesiastical revolution which, from a legal point of view, could have been attempted. That the traditional episcopal administration was thereby eventually reconstructed is of course well known, but it seems worth asking what light the administrative records of certain dioceses can throw not only on the details of how this took place, but also on the structure and character of the revived system.

This paper is concerned with an obscure and long defunct branch of the administration, which was instituted in 1833 and reached its climax by the middle 'fifties. The branch, which had not even a distinctive name, consisted at most of between twenty and thirty executive members, almost all half-pay naval officers, who were at first directly controlled by the colonial office, and, after 1840, subject immediately to the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission. Though the corps of emigration officers, or agents, as they were indifferently called, was established in the 1830's, it by no means belonged to a new race of administrators. It did not originate in political agitation, or Benthamic or parliamentary inquiry. Its purpose and function were scarcely defined; certainly it was innocent of doctrinaire intention. No celebrated public servant, except, indirectly, James Stephen, was concerned with its workings; no considerable attention was ever drawn upon its officers. Indeed, by and large, the British public was unaffected by, and probably ignorant of, its existence.

The cabinet in Great Britain is an emanation of the privy council. The councils in the royal colonies upon the American mainland, like those in the West Indies, were, in the language of the royal instructions to colonial Governors, ‘our’ councils, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a prospect of a like development overseas. Yet it did not occur. The offspring of the colonial council in America is the senate of the United States. That body, like the colonial councils, has both legislative and executive functions. At the start it numbered a mere twenty-six members; and it was expected that the president, following the practice of colonial governors, would seek its advice in the discharge of his office. His cabinet had a quite different pedigree. It was envisaged in 1787 as something ‘[our Government] has always wanted, but never yet had.’ But it was, and still is, a meeting, not of ministers having seats in one or other of the houses of the legislature and collectively responsible to it, but of heads of departments individually responsible to the president. And it was historically, not a cabinet after the English model in a state of arrested development, but paradoxically a device of the legislature adapted to a presidential system. Why, it may be of interest to enquire, did this happen?