By the late twelfth century, the principle that hereditary succession guaranteed title had triumphed in English feudal land law, and this threatened lords' rights to choose their tenants freely. Henry II's assizes were providing mesne tenants with security of tenure. They separated title to a tenement from lordly acceptance of the tenant when the the tenant was a direct descendant of the previous landholder. An undoubted male heir could take possession at once, not waiting for his lord to put him into possession, denying the lord his right to take the land into his hand and hold it until relief was paid.

The new actions available to mesne tenants did not apply to direct tenants of the Crown, however. The Angevin monarchs resisted following rules that their courts were enforcing against other feudal lords in their treatment of their own tenants-in-chief. The king held to the old view that an heir does not succeed to his ancestor's property automatically, but only has a customary claim to be accepted as tenant. As Glanvill noted, the king claimed primer seizin, his right to take possession of a barony and to place the heir in possession only once the heir had done homage to him and made arrangements to pay relief.

While discussing the status of knights in the eleventh century, F. M. Stenton observed briefly in a footnote:

Down through the twelfth century, politics were as much, if not more, the affairs of personalities and families as the affairs of state. One corollary of this premise is that certain women, as creators of family ties and managers of households, can be shown to have exercised more effective real power than traditional legal and institutional approaches to the medieval period have brought to light. As an instrument of long-term policy, marriage politics were fraught with uncertainties, but when dominant and powerful personages were able to capitalize on opportunities, the resultant alliances could prove effective in the realization of precise political aims. A re-examination of the available evidence for the career of Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror and countess of Blois, Chartres, and Meaux, from the perspective of family politics reveals that the Anglo-Norman – Thibaudian alliance, confirmed in her marriage to the eldest son of count Thibaud of Blois-Chartres, was actualized by Adela as an effective determinant of political action in the nearly twenty years she acted as the acknowledged head of the Thibaudian family.

1988 and 1989 have been vintage years all over the world for centenary celebrations. People have celebrated the centenary of the Eiffel Tower, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the bicentenary of Australia, the bicentenary of the American Bill of Rights, the quatercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the sexcentenary of the battle of Kosovo (this one may have escaped your notice, but it brought over a million people to a gathering in the city of Pristina in Yugoslavia in June 1989), and, of course, the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1688–89, with which I am concerned tonight. You will have no trouble believing that I have been “concerned with” and “celebrating” the Glorious Revolution for two years now, but I want to confess to you in the intimacy of this festive occasion that it has really been at least ten years, and that sometimes it feels more like three hundred!

How did centennial observances start? Why do people go to trouble, take time, and spend money to call to mind an event that happened one, two, or three hundred years ago? What is it about centennial moments that turns serious-minded, scholarly-inclined historians like ourselves into “party people”? What do celebrations tell us about the uses of the past in successive “presents”? The fact is that celebrations, each varying in character, have attended the Glorious Revolution from its beginnings on through each centennial anniversary thereafter — in 1788–89, 1888–89, and 1988–89. The observances at these centennial moments not only celebrated the Revolution itself, but also served, even as they reflected, current political, cultural, and/or economic ideas and goals. In a long perspective, the celebrations are an important part of the political and cultural history of the Revolution of 1688–89 itself. They illustrate how high and low politics may intersect, show how political ideas circulate through society and undergo transformation, and offer an index of changing ideological and cultural assumptions and aspirations over three hundred years.

The several statutes passed between 1534 and 1544 devoted to the rebuilding of decayed urban housing, collectively known as the Rebuilding Statutes, have been drawn upon in at least two scholarly debates about English government and economic life in the sixteenth century. First, in his discussion of Thomas Cromwell and the Henrician government's efforts to respond to economic and social problems, Professor (now Sir) Geoffrey Elton identified these statutes as important examples of central government initiative. Elton traced the inception of these acts to complaints about the state of housing brought by individuals at court and by the M.P.s of several individual towns. He saw the legislation itself as an example of the central government empowering individual towns to attend to the economic reality of decayed houses in their midst, and found it “an interesting precedent for local and private acts procedures (sic) of later days.” For Elton, then, the Rebuilding Statutes offered evidence of central government initiative in setting economic policy, a view intended to support his more general thesis about the primacy of the 1530s as a “revolutionary” point in the development English governing institutions. The same observation may be taken in support of Elton's later concept that Parliament, along with other central institutions, formed a “point of contact” with such particular and local interests as the towns listed in these statutes.

Historians differ widely in appreciating the fiscal grievances of the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Following the Dodds, some dismiss them as a marginal concern, while others regard them as a major cause of revolt. No matter where they stand, historians have handled these grievances without careful analysis. This seems to stem from a debate that has dogged both rebellions. The complexity of the rebels' complaint is obscured by a simplistic desire to show that the revolts were primarily of religious provenance, notwithstanding the variety of causes evident in the rebels' demands. Furthermore, the two main advocates of secular motivation, A. G. Dickens and R. R. Reid, perversely mention the fiscal grievances only in passing. Yet they were there, firmly declared in the rebels' bills, petitions, and songs. A pervasive force affecting the whole range of society, they sustained the rebel view that the government had to be checked not only to prevent the subversion of the Church but also the decay of the commonwealth. They were also present in the revolts of 1537 as northerners rose again, this time to protest against a breach of promise committed by the government's attempt to collect the lay subsidy and clerical tenth before the York Parliament had met to determine whether or not they should be collected.

The English Historical Review for 1974 published an intriguing proposal by Braxton Ross concerning the early history of Bodleian MS Canon. Pat. Lat. 131, a twelfth-century copy of Lactantius' Divine Institutes. Ross noticed several marginalia that read “Audi Thoma” or “Henriciani Nota,” and he suggested that these might have been penned by an unknown French cleric who wished to criticize Henry II's chancellor, Thomas Becket. From fourteenth-century writings contained on the manuscript's fly-leaves, scholars have long recognized the Bodleian Lactantius as once having been the property of Landolfo Colonna, a canon at Chartres in the years 1298–1328. On paleographical grounds, Ross assigns the manuscript's provenance to central France in the twelfth century. Noting that the Istitutiones Divinae was a rare text at the time — apparently unknown in England from Alcuin's day until the fourteenth century — and that this “utilitarian” yet “handsome” manuscript was made using two exemplars, Ross concludes that the Bodleian Lactantius originated in “a centre of intellectual vigour and wide-ranging connections.” Three hands corrected the text, all at the site of production. One of these hands has left many remarks that (Ross felt) display the annotator's wide classical and patristic reading and, as the “Audi Thoma” notes seem to suggest, an interest in Thomas Becket and the “Henricians.”

The staging of aristocratic funerals was among the variety of ideological controls and display employed by Henry VIII to reduce the great magnate families of the north and place the country under central authority. An examination of the funeral of Henry Percy (1502/03?–1537) may be especially instructive because of the important and unusual relationship between the Crown and Percy. In fact, the sixth earl's funeral is worth examining in detail because it clearly reflected not only this personal and family relationship but also one step in the transfer of power from the north to the court.

It was not at all unusual that the College of Arms should have been a main instrument by which Henry VIII manipulated the ceremony. As marshalls of aristocratic Tudor funerals and prominent participants in them, the heralds of the College customarily used the occasions to convey an abundance of political information whose display was intended to serve the interests of the Crown. This included information about the rank of the deceased, his or her relation to the Crown, and the enduring authority of the elite, all of which could be represented in symbols so conventional that their array and magnificence would communicate clear meaning. Henry VIII's subordination of the College and his support for it — increased prestige and employment for the heralds, for example, and their expansion from registrars to regulators of armorial bearings or insignia — may therefore be seen as attempts to help manage the aristocracy in a time of rapid social change.

Slightly more than two years after the decapitation of Charles I, the Commonwealth of England inflicted the same punishment on the same block against his follower, Sir Henry Hyde. The failure to reach a settlement in the aftermath of the British civil war led to the king's beheading. Explaining Hyde's execution, however, requires a geographically broader context, for Sir Henry undertook his treasonable activities against the overseas interests of the English Commonwealth and Sir Thomas Bendysh, who had served as English ambassador in Istanbul since 1647, when he assumed the role of protector of English merchants. Although Bendysh later quarreled with his charges, the unexpected appearance of Henry Hyde in Istanbul in 1650 rallied the merchants behind him, for Hyde represented to them a return to the recent past, with its governmental interference and royal regulation of commercial activity. His presence also forced merchants to choose sides, thereby transposing upon Levantine commerce the divisions that had emerged during the civil war. Just as most Company members supported Parliament, so did their factors in the Levant back Bendysh, a known quantity, a clever negotiator, and a pragmatist. In his brief tenure, Bendysh had proven his ability to strike bargains with the Ottomans and stimulate commerce. He also personified the interests of the Council of State and the Levant Company directors, thereby linking the disparate but inter-dependent network of Levantine commerce.

Historians and literary scholars have long agreed that the rate of change in English society in the seventeenth century was so great that only the label “revolution” can do justice to its magnitude. For the past hundred years, most historians who have written about the political upheavals of the middle decades of the century, for example, have taken it for granted that these events constituted a “revolution.” Indeed, the custom of referring to the political turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660 as the “English Revolution” is so established that many scholars would deny that they are relying upon an assumption at all, but would insist that they are simply stating an obvious fact. After 1660, most scholars agree, England's political and constitutional practices and presuppositions were fundamentally different from what they had been before 1640. The permanence of the change, combined with the extraordinary character of political events during the Interregnum, makes the label “revolution” the obvious and appropriate one.

In his celebrated presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society between 1974 and 1976 Sir Geoffrey Elton explored three “points of contact” between central authority and local communities: Parliament, the royal council, and the royal court. Parliament, he argued, was “the premier point of contact,” which “fulfilled its functions as a stabilizing mechanism because it was usable and used to satisfy legitimate and potentially powerful aspirations.” Elsewhere Elton, and other parliamentary historians such as Michael Graves, Norman Jones, and Jennifer Loach, have stressed parliament's role as a clearing house for the legislative desires of the governing class. The author of this article has recently drawn attention to the pressures which private legislation placed on the parliamentary agenda and the attempts by the government to control it. All of this supports Elton's contention that parliament, from the perspective of central government, was indeed a vital means of ensuring stability and channelling grievances.

However, few studies have viewed parliament from the perspective of the local communities and governing elites who sought parliamentary solutions to their problems or even parliamentary resolutions to their disputes with others. The major exception to this has been London. Helen Miller's seminal study of London and parliament in the reign of Henry VIII and Edwin Green's on the Vintners lobby, have been recently complemented by Ian Archer's on the London lobbies in Elizabeth's reign, Claude Blair's on the Armourers lobby, and my own study of the struggle between the Curriers and Cordwainers. These not only reveal the broader context of such disputes, but emphasize that parliament was only one of many arenas available to participants. This important point has also been stressed by Robert Tittler in his study of parliament as a “point of contact” for English towns.

In contrast to their predecessors, who emphasized constitutional conflict and opposition in the parliaments of early Stuart England, revisionists emphasized harmony and cooperation. There was a problem with this new, anti-Whig orthodoxy from the outset, however, and that was the problem of trust. Defying the revisionist model of harmonious relations between Crown and Parliament, the M.P.s of early Stuart England perversely refused to trust James I and Charles I. Revisionists adopted two strategies to deal with this problem of trust. Conrad Russell exemplified the one strategy: he acknowledged the existence of distrust but treated it as a deep mystery requiring ingenious explanations. Surveying the reign of James I, Russell discovered “profound distrust, but it is hard to show how this distrust was implanted.” Perplexed by this enigma, Russell observed, “One of the most crucial, and one of the most difficult, questions of the early Stuart period is why this distrust developed.” For Russell, then, it was not natural for M.P.s to distrust the king. It was, instead, an unnatural attitude that had to be “implanted” or “developed.” In time, of course, Russell solved the mystery of distrust by providing a series of explanations: distrust resulted from the pressures of war, friction between the localities and the center, the functional breakdown of an inadequately financed government, court factionalism, and the growth of Arminianism. In Russell's view, the underlying problems that gave rise to distrust had more to do with circumstances and structures than with people, least of all James I and Charles I. A second strategy for dealing with the problem of trust is best exemplified by Kevin Sharpe: he solves the problem neatly by denying its existence. Steadfastly adhering to the revisionist model of harmony and cooperation, Sharpe claims that M.P.s did in fact behave the way that model predicts they should have. “In the early Stuart period,” writes Sharpe, “compromises between king and parliaments…were common because fundamental beliefs were shared and there was an atmosphere of trust.” Sharpe admits that there was an “erosion of trust” in the latter part of Charles's reign. “But,” he insists, “there is little evidence that it unfolds in the parliaments of early Stuart England.”

To its late-Victorian participants, London “Society” was one of those abstractions, like “the young,” that deteriorated with each passing generation. For decades chroniclers of Britain's clannish ruling circles had lamented the diminishing refinement, morals, and breeding of those highest sections of elite society that migrated to the capital each spring for the parliamentary and social “season.” Thus, when the press, with many contributors from the aristocracy itself, launched a new campaign against London Society in the last years of Victoria's reign, the charges had a familiar ring. Society was expanding alarmingly, abandoning its standards, worshipping notoriety and opulence, and abdicating serious responsibilities in the pursuit of frivolous amusement. If the criticisms contained few surprises, the intensity of the alarm was unprecedented. Beginning in 1874, with The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope's novel of a greedy and credulous beau monde, and continuing through a series of journal articles bearing titles such as “The New Society,” “The Deterioration of English Society,” “The Sins of Society,” and “The Enlargement of London Society,” critics subjected the aristocratic elites and the informal institutions of the London season to fierce scrutiny and nearly universal diagnosis of advanced illness.

The dramatic collapse of the Liberal party during the second decade of the twentieth century has long fascinated academic historians, but only in the past twenty years has it become one of their major preoccupations. Every history of modern Britain now has a discussion of the causes and course of the Liberal collapse, and the specialized literature on the subject is voluminous, much of it highly technical and sophisticated.

It is easy to see why the Liberal decline appeals to historians. It has personal drama: the contest between Herbert Asquith, “the last of the Romans,” and David Lloyd George, “the Welsh Wizard.” There is the larger drama associated with the collapse of a great party and the rise of another. There are the large silent “revolutions” historians have found behind the political changes: the rise to maturity of the working classes, the evolution of British capitalism, and a vast cultural shift ushered in with the First World War.

In August 1874, the Marquess of Ripon, until recently a Liberal Cabinet Minister, decided to convert from the Church of England to that of Rome. The Times, which like the rest of the English political world assumed that this ended Ripon's public career, denounced the moral “obliquity” of the man who “has renounced his mental and moral freedom, and has submitted himself to the guidance of the Roman Catholic Priesthood.” In October, the former Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone, asserted in an article on ritualism that the High Church position could not lead to Rome because, among other things, “no one can become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another.” Remonstrances from Catholics (among them Ripon) on the issue of civil loyalty led Gladstone to develop his position fully in a pamphlet in November, The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, which in turn provoked one of the major Church-State controversies of the century. Historians have generally assumed that Ripon's conversion was causally connected with Gladstone's outburst.” It was, but with a difference.

The most important contribution made by Archbishop James Ussher to the ecclesiastical developments of the Interregnum and Restoration periods was his short tract The Reduction of Episcopacy Unto the Form of Synodical Government. Printed only after his death in 1656, its combination of ministerial synods with episcopal rule was seen as a basis for presbyterian-episcopal reconciliation over the next three decades. The tract was printed in five editions during the later 1650s, and came out in two more editions in 1679, when the Popish Plot and the calling of a new Parliament revived hopes that dissenters could be comprehended within the Church of England. It was printed once more in 1689, in Edinburgh, when “comprehension” was again being hotly debated in both England and Scotland. By that time Ussher's name had come to symbolize such “limited” or “primitive” episcopacy, and indeed it has continued to do so among twentieth-century historians.

The fame of the Reduction rests upon its content and authorship. Although the tract was only one of many such compromises offered during the Interregnum, it was the most radical to come from the royalist and Anglican side during that period. Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Ussher was admired and respected by radical puritans and major Laudian spokesmen such as Henry Hammond and Bishop John Bramhall. The power of Ussher's name in this context was shown in 1685, when the nonconformist divine and politician Richard Baxter was on trial for allegedly making a printed attack against the king and the bishops. When Baxter's attorney, Sir Henry Pollexfen, sought to introduce as evidence one of Baxter's own printed compromises between episcopal and presbyterian government, Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys replied, “I will see none of his books; it is for primitive Episcopacy, I will warrant you — a bishop in every parish.” In replying “Nay, my lord, it is the same with Archbishop Usher's,” Pollexfen indicated both the radical nature of the Reduction and the legitimacy that Ussher's name lent to other compromises of this kind.