One of the most invidious duties of the President of the Royal Historical Society is the obligation to deliver an annual address to his constituents. This obligation is perhaps the harder, since he is absolutely free to talk about anything that he likes, provided only that it has some relation, near or distant, to things historical. This year the obligation comes upon me with particular severity, because I am working night and day in seeing through the press two more volumes of a book whose composition has lain heavily on my soul for the last twenty years, and I must conclude this task speedily, since in ten days I am sailing for the United States of America and shall, therefore, have to crave leave of this Society to neglect my duties to it until I come back in the Fall. Under these conditions, I shall have, for several months, to say good-bye to those administrative records with which I have lived for the best part of a generation. Parting from old friends is always a sad thing. One is prone to dwell upon such an occasion on their more endearing and attractive qualities, even when in daily association we are sometimes too apt to regard them as tedious, dull, and unprofitable. Accordingly I do not think I can do better to-day than pay a tribute to the records to which I owe nearly all my material, and suggest to you that they are not nearly so tedious and dull on intimate acquaintance, as they seem to be to those who have only a casual knowledge of them.

It is a curious coincidence that to-day should have been fixed for me to read a paper on my memories of the Public Record Office, for I entered as a junior clerk on 9 March, 1893, so that when I left the office this afternoon I had completed exactly thirty-five years' service.

At that time Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte had been Deputy-Keeper for just over seven years; one volume of the Calendar of Patent Rolls (1327–30)had been published, and the late Mr. W. H. Stevenson had just finished the first volume of the Calendar of Close Rolls (1307–13). The Patent Rolls have now been completely calendared from the reign of Henry III to the end of the reign of Edward VI, and the Close Rolls to the end of the reign of Henry V, although the whole of the latter calendar has not yet been published.

At a time when Anglo-Russian relations show a great difficulty in being re-established after the Russian revolution of 1917, it may be of special interest to look back to a very far past in English history, when England, after having fought for freedom under the leadership of Parliament against the Stuart despotism, had created by a bloody act a republic, which was taken by Protector Cromwell into his strong hands and existed for years, until death removed his grip. Then another Charles Stuart was restored to the throne which his father had left for the scaffold.

Ashrewd Italian visitor, writing of England more than four hundred years ago, remarked:—“There are scarcely any towns of importance in the kingdom excepting these two: Bristol, a seaport to the West, and Boraco, otherwise York, which is on the borders of Scotland; besides London to the South.” Now York was not a port, though it traded far afield through Hull; London was a port, but it was so much else that its story is confusingly complex; moreover it was not by the Thames but by the Severn that Englishmen first found a pathway to the New World at the end of the Middle Ages. Hence Bristol, then the second port in England, is of peculiar interest to the student of the still unwritten history of English commerce in the fifteenth century—a history unchronicled, but not unrecorded, and quite as significant as the wars abroad and the strifes at home which have too often earned for the century a character of futility.

Clare is situated in the south-west corner of Suffolk, in the valley of the Stour River. At the present day it is only a village, for its market is no longer held; yet its history shows that in earlier times it was of considerable importance, especially during the medieval period, when it was a favourite residence of the Clare lords. The town then had a busy market and a flourishing cloth-making industry; and at one time it seemed possible that Clare might attain full development as a borough, possessing as it did some burghal characteristics. In the following pages it is proposed to study in detail the history of Clare as a seignorial borough during the Middle Ages, and its subsequent development.

Twenty-five years ago Cardinal Gasquet in a paper read before the Royal Historical Society pointed out the desirability of a new edition of Polydore Vergil's Historia Anglica based on an as yet unpublished manuscript in the Vatican Library. In this paper he referred to the important differences between the Vatican manuscript and the published versions of the Historia, and suggested certain significant possibilities in regard to some of the facts of Polydore Vergil's life. In the course of researches preliminary to the preparation of a critical edition of the Historia, the will of Polydore was discovered in the municipal archives of his birthplace, Urbino. The publication of this document provides a suitable opportunity for further comment upon the life and importance of “le premier historien humaniste en Angleterre.”

The antiquities of the word parliament have not been neglected either by lexicographers or by constitutional historians. The latter usually mention Jordan Fantosme and various thirteenth-century chroniclers; while the articles parlamentum in the Glossarium of Ducange and parlement in Godefroi's Dictionary are instructive although meagre in their references to record sources. But after he had studied all the references of historians and dictionary-makers, the enquirer might well be puzzled to know why certain sessions of the English king's court should in particular be called parliaments by the royal clerks. We may, however, get some way towards a plausible explanation by filling in a few of the gaps in the chain of references. For a full explanation we need to look at the working of parliamentary institutions; but that is a further step.