Every student of the Anglo-Saxons accepts the existence of feud as a feature of society before the Norman Conquest. Yet there has been no serious study of feud in over a century of intense scrutiny and debate on almost every other aspect of English culture in the period. Scholars have marginalized the subject; though a set topic of the books, feud seldom seems to affect the main currents of Anglo-Saxon history. Anglo-Saxon England, possessing the statelike characteristics now identified by scholars, emerges in modern accounts as a society very different from the ones where scholars have usually located, described, and analyzed feuds. Much current scholarship has lately depicted England during the century and a half separating Alfred “the Great” from the Norman Conquest as a highly centralized society, one more closely subject to royal leadership than other contemporary medieval societies. Such centralization was rarely attained in the later medieval period, with the exception of the often-lauded “Angevin Kingship” itself.

In attempting to juxtapose the evidence for feud with the case for “the Late Old English State,” I have come to view the process of feud as a pillar central to Anglo-Saxon political culture. However, two interesting questions—where to strike the balance between feud and royal central action, and between private initiative and public authority in the maintenance of order?—remain unanswered, given inconclusive sources that are patently incapable of sustaining any quantitative judgments. Inevitably but unapologetically, my case is framed by the premise that in arguments a silentio, assumptions for the existence of a particular practice or pattern, are just as much assumptions as those for its absence and nonexistence.

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father was the center of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture.

It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.

In this letter to her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu expresses what was in the early eighteenth century a commonplace view of wedlock. Marriage, she writes, is such an object of mockery that even women have lost interest in it and married women like herself must “excuse” themselves for their unfashionable behavior. Obviously, Lady Mary's tone is light, but she expresses ideas that were being argued quite seriously in a variety of circles. Many of her contemporaries believed that marriage was deteriorating into a business contract. Rather than being respected as an institution ordained by God and necessary to social stability, the argument went, marriage was an object of mockery, used only as a cynical means of increasing wealth. Brides were being bought and sold with no regard for their future happiness or compatibility with their husbands. Most famously, perhaps, this notion was exploited in William Hogarth's series, Marriage à la Mode (1745), its very title embodying the idea that mercenary marriage was a new fashion.

Paul Rich has written that “nationalism in English society has not been a subject that has especially interested historians until comparatively recently.” This judgment could equally be applied to what Gerald Newman has described as that “mere primitive feeling of loyalty,” the less complex and far more ancient phenomenon of patriotism, which, for the purposes of the present article, will simply be taken to mean “love of country.” In the last few decades, the attention given to patriotism by British historians has grown rapidly. However, historians of party politics, particularly those interested in the late nineteenth century, have proved something of an exception to this rule. Although few would dispute Lord Blake's view that “‘patriotism’ … has usually been a valuable weapon in the Conservative armoury,” even work done on the tory party has avoided serious discussion of the subject. Most writers, particularly those of textbook studies, have found it difficult to move beyond rather general allusions to the Conservatives' transformation into the party of patriotism in the 1870s, with “Disraeli's speeches of 1872–3” and his “performance at Berlin in 1878” establishing once and for all “the image of the Conservative party as the champion of national honour.” This argument, of course, owes much to Hugh Cunningham's important History Workshop article of 1981, which put forward the view that patriotism—originally an antistate and libertarian “creed of opposition”—had by the late nineteenth century passed from the hands of the radicals into the possession of the political Right.