The origin and original nature of medieval English palatinates has been a hardy theme of medieval English constitutional history at least since the seventeenth century. Earlier work on the topic by this author was essentially negative, dealing with what palatinates were not rather than with what they were; it is now time to offer the thoughts which follow. This article presents no conclusions based on evidence unexamined by other scholars, but looks at familiar material in new ways.

As the royal government in England expanded from the twelfth century onward and touched more aspects of the economy and society, landlords tried to control the administration and to protect their interests by retaining royal officers as their private clients. Simultaneously, lords built their own administrations to manage their estates and households. As clients, administrators could move easily between the royal government and baronial administrations and serve two or more masters, thereby compromising their loyalty and impartiality. The problem of “double allegiance,” as it has been called, therefore worried moralists and became an important characteristic of English government and politics in the fourteenth century.

Resentment of monopoly and purveyance, weariness with the burdens of a long war, and the fears and hopes attendant upon the accession of a new and foreign dynasty were all focussed by the meeting of James I's first parliament in 1604. If there was nothing entirely new in these elements, there was novelty and danger in the concurrence of so many grievances at a time when the sense of external crisis which had unified the country for the preceding quarter century was at last relaxed. The new political climate, parochial, isolationist, and hostile to government intrusion whether of church or state, was soon associated with the term “Country.” In one sense, this climate was merely a moderate intensification of perennial English localism, and as such devoid of ideological implication. But allied with the persistent failures of the early Stuart administration, particularly in dealing with parliament, it became a medium in which genuine political opposition began to develop.

It is now more than six years since Professors D.C. Moore and R.W. Davis battled it out, toe to toe like a pair of heavyweights, over the “other face of reform” in Buckinghamshire. The controversy began, it will be recalled, when Davis in his book on Bucks electoral politics addressed himself to Moore's conclusions about a country-based reform movement. Moore suggested that it was composed of ultra-Tories and rural Whigs, who eventually influenced the framing of the First Reform Act. Davis labelled Moore's “other face of reform” an “hallucination,” at least so far as Bucks was concerned. Whereupon the latter launched a vigorous counterattack in the pages of this journal. Both scholars defended their conclusions about events in Bucks, as well as the sources upon which they were based. When the final bell rang each stood bloodied but unbowed, still convinced of the validity of his viewpoint. Since then no challengers have come forward to join the battle. The arena has remained empty, the spotlights dimmed, as if mourning a memorable brawl.

Between the abolition of slavery, 1834, and World War I, more than a half-million laborers were introduced to the British West Indies under terms of indenture. Indenture implies unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. It is an alien concept in modern Western society, and the transoceanic transport of thousands of African and Indian workers during the nineteenth century appears a further testimonial to European racism, to the arrogance of great power, and to the political influence of the West India planters and their merchant associates. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have characterized the whole process of nineteenth-century indenture as a “new system of slavery.”

“What was wrong with the historical reaction at the end of Victoria's reign, was not the positive stress it laid on the need for scientific method in weighing evidence, but its negative repudiation of the literary art, which was declared to have nothing whatever to do with the historian's task.” Writing in 1945, G.M. Trevelyan was overly pessimistic in assuming that this “negative repudiation” had completely destroyed “literary” history in an age of professionalization; John Osborne uses Trevelyan's own success to convince us of the continued vigor of the belletristic tradition in the twentieth century. Both Trevelyan's anxieties and the fact that they proved unfounded are significant, however, for they help us to focus on important issues in the emergence of professional historiography in England.