Everyone is familiar with the story of how William the Conqueror brought feudalism to England. Despite some recent voices to the contrary, medievalists are for the most part inclined to agree that the Norman Conquest introduced the fief into a previously non-feudal land. Moreover, since feudalism did not arise in England gradually and of its own accord but instead was imposed from above by an all-powerful conqueror, it is usually described as more symmetrical — more “perfect” — than the feudalism of the Continent. One historian, reflecting the views of many others, asserted recently that in the years after 1066 “England became the most perfectly feudal kingdom in the West.”

It is well to be wary, however, of too much perfection in an institution such as feudalism. It is always possible that in identifying an institution at a particular point in time and space as “perfect” or “nearly perfect” one is being misled by the surface appearances which usually accompany decay. As institutions become less and less relevant to their societies, they are apt, for a while at least, to assume the appearance of increasing orderliness, increasing selfconscious coherence, increasing formalism. These tendencies have been noted by a number of sociologists and have by no means escaped the attention of Professor Parkinson. To determine whether they apply to the so-called model feudalism of Norman England is both hazardous and difficult, but the effort must be made. So much has been written on the question of whether any real traces of feudalism can be detected in England before the Conquest that it may prove refreshing to scrutinize critically the “ideal” feudal state of post-Conquest times, particularly if it can be shown that Anglo-Norman feudalism was not so perfect after all.

In British historiography, economic and social history were first thrown together when both were young and backward offshoots of the study of institutions. Economic history, by exploring records in which no one else was interested and making some use of the elements of economic theory, rapidly outgrew that status. But social history lags and its future is uncertain. It has no special records to call its own, for its materials, though rich, are embedded in all classes of documentation. It has no generally recognized set of questions to call its own, for although historians have always drawn on political science for questions relating to the state and to constitutions, and are respectful of economics, they have been distrustful of sociology because this has not yet done much with long run problems of change. Is social history then to become another specialty, working out its questions as it goes along? This course would not rule out the need of defining better its relation to other specialties. Is social history to remain a mere footnote to politics and law, literature and art, science and technology, describing the ways in which these impinge on social custom? If these points are numerous and puzzling, can it fulfil the promise of the school of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, becoming the nucleus of a new kind of historical synthesis? Or has it only some peculiar affiliation with economic history?

These questions can be answered only through new work and discussion of it. They give point to commentary on some recent English work on the medieval period.

That mighty prince, Henry VIII, died on Friday, the 28th of January, 1547, at two of the morning. The final years of the reign had been moving ponderously and inexorably to this moment when the King must die. The instant, however, that Henry slipped from life into death, a fundamental change took place. Not only was an irascible old man gone but so also was the dread and anxiety that had surrounded the concluding months of the King's life. For half a decade Tudor England had lived with the terrible certainty that Henry's reign was drawing to a close and the equally terrible uncertainty of not knowing when death would claim its sovereign. Thrice within the final year, in March, October, and December, Henry had approached death and had drawn away. No prediction could be secure, no plan assured so long as the moment of death remained unrecorded.

If Henry's death cleared the air and dispersed the atmosphere of fear and insecurity enveloping those who attended upon his passing, it also introduced a new and befuddling note for those who must record and narrate his departure. The ultimate irony of the historical profession is that the historian is a victim of his own knowledge; the breadth of his vision backward through the glass of time distorts his image of the past. He knows when, where and how the old King died; he can even date the event to the hour. In contrast, those who so impatiently awaited or dreaded the sovereign's demise could only speculate and form their plans upon the slender thread of surmise.

The late Sir Lewis Namier seems to have the highest, or nearly the highest authority of historians, chiefly for his work on English politics in the 1760's. This article attempts to make a judgment of his authority by examining the truth of his findings about English politics in the 1760's. Namier's authority is in great part based upon his seeming care in his researches, since people suppose that those who are occupied with details are careful with details. The results of his researches must therefore be considered in their presentation. But these researches need not be redone, at least for the purpose of understanding Namier's findings; for his findings rest upon an argument — an argument constructed not only from the results of researches but from general statements that are not results of his researches. Indeed, it happens that Namier's general statements fall within political science, as that subject has been understood since Aristotle. The present writer is a political scientist, and proposes to concentrate on Namier's argument.

Namier's principal conclusion is that there was no danger of tyranny in Britain in the 1760's. His argument has two parts, or he has two arguments: the apparent danger of tyranny is explained and deflated, first by the heir-apparent cycle, and second by the superiority of modern party government. He reaches his conclusion by denying effect to the source of danger usually identified by historians and thoughtful contemporaries, the influence of Bolingbroke — so that he seems, to one critic, to ignore the importance of “ideas.”

The climax in the long story of Britain's blunders during the War of Independence is the campaign of 1777, the planning of which, in Whitehall and New York, was the worst that the British perpetrated in the seven years of hostilities. Their strategy in 1781 was even more disastrous in its outcome, but far more defensible in its design; the strategy of 1777 can scarcely be defended at all. It rested upon premises that many observers at the time recognized to be wildly fallacious, and it brought its due reward — the surrender that led directly to French intervention.

The campaign had no unifying concept. An army from Canada advanced by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson toward Albany, where it was supposed to be joined by a small detachment marching down the Mohawk; far to the south a substantial garrison was immobilized on Manhattan, while the main field army attacked Philadelphia by the most roundabout route it could have chosen. The British thus had three armies (ignoring, as they tended to do, their small garrison on Rhode Island), each isolated from the other two; and the Americans were free to concentrate against whichever one they chose. This was dispersion of force carried to the point of absurdity. Why was the absurdity not apparent to the Commander in Chief? to General Burgoyne? to the King's ministers in London? The question has been endlessly debated, and no final answer is possible. But an examination of the men who were principally responsible for the outcome suggests that two major factors were at work.

The last published work of Garrett Mattingly, The “Invincible” Armada and Elizabethan England in the Folger Library series of “Booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilization,” demonstrates his remarkable clarity of perception as a historian and his capacity for presenting fresh and original conclusions based on new factual research. This booklet is by no means a summary of the information in his full-length study, The Armada, published in 1959. On the contrary, it contains several new points of view developed since the publication of the earlier book, and it will stand as a model of succinct historical analysis, written with such ease and charm that a casual reader may not realize that it has far greater significance than many a ponderous tome.

Mattingly was in many ways an old-fashioned historian who showed no interest in, or regard for, current fads in historical interpretation. Controversies that mean so much to many would-be revisionists today — and mar so much contemporary historical writing — found no reflection in Mattingly's works. Yet few historians of this generation exceeded him in the quality and quantity of new knowledge that he unearthed and the significance of the interpretations that this knowledge made obvious. Mattingly was a revisionist, but the revisions that he made were based on factual information that nobody else had previously shown the ingenuity or the diligence to discover. Mattingly did not spin an hypothesis from his own brain and then go in search of something to prove it.

Every man, according to Bacon, is a debtor to his profession. Although the historian pays his debt by devotion to truth, unless he has thought about truth as well as worshipped it he may — to adapt a figure from Bishop Berkeley — become a thriving earthworm but he will surely make a sorry historian. So vermiculate a metaphor need not prompt every disciple of Clio to compose a penetrating Idea of History, but it may properly incite him to give life to his facts by evoking the universal while documenting the specific, by preferring insights to formulas, and by recalling that historiographical clichés and historical facts — modern saws and ancient instances — go ill together. If the historian of the ancient world benefits from built-in ignorance, the historian of the modern world suffers from built-in knowledge, not merely because of the mountain of fact but because this very mountain permits him to let a tissue of fact do duty for history. Absence of metaphysics is too high a price for erudition.

For some years historians have been revolting against easy generalizations and after-mindedness. Their revolt does not find expression in systems, which carry farthest the very practices exciting revolt, but in analysis of assumptions. The critical historian explores his topic in its own terms, not in terms of later dogmas; he reconstructs ideas and institutions in their own context, not as the shape of things to come; he considers his characters in their own environment, not as ancestors; he replaces anonymous society and impersonal forces with living men and women.

In his essay on “The Reputation of Edmund Burke” Thomas W. Copeland offers a timely analysis of the context and climate of contemporary Burke studies. His remarks suggest also the acceleration in pace of those studies. Current publication relevant to Burke has been noticed for the past four years in the Burke Newsletter. Reporting and reviewing new publication on or near Burke, retailing schemes and dreams and work in progress, and purveying personal news and opinion of students of Burke, the Burke Newsletter resembles in scope the Johnsonian Newsletter, edited by James L. Clifford and John H. Middendorf at Columbia University, which, of course, has for some time kept its readers up to date on the bibliography of the age of Burke and Johnson.

Copeland's essay, furthermore, is sufficient counterweight to another recent critical appraisal professedly directed to something of the same purpose – W. T. Laprade's impatient, hostile excursion through a century or more of writing on Burke. Without attempting the detail of the Newsletter, therefore, and without retreading Copeland's ground, the present survey undertakes to provide an account of significant trends and characteristic contributions in Burke studies for roughly the period since World War II. That span of years covers the time, or a little more, that the main body of Burke's papers has been generally open for study. It also includes the time when ideological and socio-political patterns have stimulated resort to the familiar past for spokesmen and scapegoats with whom to undergird and extenuate contemporary controversy.

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.

The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.

T. S. Ashton has described the Industrial Revolution in England as a time when the “chimney stacks rose to dwarf the ancient spires.” He has also described it as a time when the voluntary association replaced state initiative in governmental affairs. These two phenomena of modern society – the urban industrial complex and the growth of public opinion – are usually paired. Perhaps it is natural to think of the growth of public opinion as something made possible by the growth of cities.

Yet it is known that the Industrial Revolution profoundly affected not only the cities but the countryside as well; that the new technology prompted (among other things) an enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. This is evident in the formation of numerous societies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were devoted to purely agricultural pursuits. With the decline of rural prosperity after 1815, however, there arose societies of a different sort which had as their object not the improvement of farming through better techniques but the improvement of agriculture through political action. Both kinds of society revealed the stirrings of public opinion in the countryside.

This essay is concerned with the second type of society, which rose and spread among what are loosely termed the tenant farmers of England. These societies were numerous enough and sufficiently of one mind to take on the character of a movement. The movement was to fail, as agrarian movements are notorious for doing.

The return of James Ramsay MacDonald from the depths of defeat in 1918 to the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1922 is a dramatic episode in twentieth-century British politics. It has added piquancy because the drama was played in reverse nine years later; indeed, MacDonald's behavior between 1918 and 1922 has usually been seen as a prelude to the “betrayal” of 1931.

He owed his election as leader to the support of the Left. Consequently he has been charged with hypocrisy; in the words of Philip Snowden:

Some standard modern accounts repeat Snowden's charge, or make it independently. Even those that do not accuse MacDonald of deliberate deception nevertheless portray the Left as having acted under a misapprehension. The Clyde Members, says Francis Williams, “mistakenly judged him to be much more to the Left than he was and assumed, because of his opposition to the war, that he shared their views of the nature of the class struggle.” G. D. H. Cole agreed: had the I.L.P. understood MacDonald's moderation, “they would not have played the part they did in reinstating him and holding him firm in the leadership of the Labour Party.”

The years immediately following the War for American Independence have been rightly called the “critical period” in the history of the United States. Internal order, stability, even national existence were the issues of the struggle culminating in the Constitution. The times were critical for the new nation, too, in the regulation of her external affairs. The French attempted to make her a satellite. The Spanish would forbid her the Mississippi. By far the greatest problem in foreign affairs, however, was the reestablishment of peace-time relations with Britain, the erstwhile Mother Country.

Anglo-American relations during the decade after the Peace of 1783 have claimed much attention from American historians. Disagreement about internal developments are often bitter; but evaluations of British policy toward the former colonies are remarkably unanimous. Whether “Federalist” or “Jeffersonian,” American writers generally depict Britain as the villain. Beaten in war and vengeful, she manifested “disgust and exultation” at the difficulties which befell the new republic. Seizing upon every occasion to show her “casual contempt,” Britain adopted a policy based on “an intention of humiliating the Americans”; and her subjects plotted “how to punish their former colonies.” The British nation resolved to disregard the Treaty of 1783 with a callousness and a cynicism which made a mockery of their pledged word.

Resting upon studies in the voluminous American sources, these judgements and assumptions correctly reflect the convictions of many important Americans of the time. They accord but little, however, with a dispassionate examination of British sources.

Between 1870 and 1900 British military organization was extensively revised by act of Parliament. The reforms went further than any previous changes in the history of the British army. They were so enduring that the modem British army has its foundation in these years, particularly in the legislation associated with the name of Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's Secretary of State for War in the Whig-Liberal Ministry of 1868-74. The Cardwell reforms were a vital part of that ministry's legislation to diminish the influence of privilege and acknowledge the place of merit and efficiency in the professions, the civil service, education, and the army. Cardwell's legislation for the army, however, was not so beneficial as historians have implied. Too much of the existent knowledge of British military organization in the late nineteenth century is based on a sympathy with those reforms which glosses over their weaknesses and makes alternative schemes seem reactionary. The Cardwell reforms were neither so new nor so radical in their effects as many reformers intended. A detailed study of army organization between the Crimean and the Boer Wars leads to the conclusion that much of the old continued while many of the changes made under Cardwell failed to take hold. It is time that more emphasis was placed on this conservative aspect of British military history rather than on the liberal and novel features of army reform in the late Victorian period. Why was it, for example, that the country which was the first to experience technological and industrial change on a national scale, and which extended its colonial empire farther than any power in Europe, was also the last among European powers to transform an eighteenth-century army into an instrument of modern warfare?