M. Varin's learned monograph at present stands alone as an attempt to ascertain the origin of the double monastery, or monastery for men and women. He deals with the subject incidentally as part of a thesis on the points at issue between the Breton and Roman Church, and he handles his whole theme controversially. In spite of this fact, his argument on the subject of double monasteries has met with general acceptance, for example, from Montalembert, Ozanam, Haddan, Professor Mayor, and M. Maurice Prou. M. Varin seeks to prove that St. Rhadegund' foundation at Poitiers was the first example of this form of organisation among the Western nations of the Continent, and that its origin is directly traceable to Irish influences. It is the object of this essay to suggest a different conclusion, to collect the evidence on the subject from the scattered sources where alone it is at present accessible, and incidentally to criticise the arguments adduced by M. Varin.

Few historians of the Long Parliament would regard the form of Church government as the first concern of the parliamentary leaders in their negotiations with the king. Contemporary historians considered that the early struggle was not about religion. The royalist Clarendon, the parliamentarian Thomas May, even Richard Baxter, a deeply religious Puritan, were unanimous. To the aristocracy and gentry, it was essentially a conflict over political power and public safety. Religious fervour would inspire the New Model Army, rouse the London citizens, and stimulate the printing presses. But how many members of Parliament or of the gentry in 1640 supported fundamental religious change? Sir Edward Dering told the Commons on 20 November 1641 that he had heard no one there declare themselves for either Presbyterianism or Independency. When Baxter described the composition of the Rump Parliament, he did not see it as the culmination or fulfilment of a religious movement, the expression of Independency.

Over the last thirty years the work of historical demographers, spearheaded by Sir Tony Wrigley, Roger Schofield and others at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, has demonstrated the centrality of marriage to explanations of early modern English demographic change: ‘a history of English population in this period in which nuptiality did not figure prominently would resemble the proverbial production of Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.’ Although their ‘neo-Malthusian’ or ‘neo-classical’ model of population levels kept in ‘dilatory homeostasis’ by negative feedback relationships between living standards, age at first marriage and the proportion of the population never marrying has not been immune from criticism, it is now generally accepted that changes in fertility rather than in mortality account for population stagnation in mid-seventeenth-century England, and for its renewed and rapid growth from the 1730s. Moreover, having flirted with, and subsequently discarded, changes in marital fertility as a proximate cause of fluctuations in the birth rate, Wrigley and Schofield are now convinced that nuptiality was decisive. For Wrigley, ‘the crucial importance of the tension between production and reproduction which affected all pre-industrial societies’ explains why marriage had a ‘significance…far wider than the purely demographic.’ ‘Marriage,’ he argues, ‘was the hinge on which the [early modern English] demographic system turned.’

Taking William Marshall at his word, a comparison of his Defence of Peace of 1535 with the Latin editio princeps of the Defensor Pacis, printed in Basle in 1522, reveals that there is much need for ‘correction’ or rather, it reveals that Marshall had himself corrected and amended the original to suit his own purposes. What those purposes were, the nature of the amendments and their consequences for our understanding of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy will be the subject of this essay.

This paper continues the argument made in ‘Educating the Nation: I. Schools’, that democratic demand for ever widening access to education was the principal driver for expansion in the second half of the twentieth century. Demand for higher education was not as universalistic or egalitarian as demand for secondary schooling; nevertheless, it was pressing, especially from the late 1950s, and ultimately irresistible, enshrined in the ‘Robbins principle’ that higher education should be available to all qualified by ability and attainment. The paper tracks the fortunes of the Robbins principle from an initial period of rapid growth, through a mysterious period of sagging demand in the 1970s and 1980s, to the resumption of very rapid growth from the late 1980s. It remains the guiding light of higher-education policy today, though in very altered circumstances where the price is paid ultimately more by beneficiaries than from the public purse.

A YEAR ago I took the opportunity presented by this obligatory address to survey the working out of a classical formula for historical writing during the three hundred years which separate Einhard's Life of Charlemagne from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. History written in accordance with these rules had many merits, and its emphasis is often right, or at least illuminating, but it never had a more than uncertain hold on the matter-of-fact world. Geoffrey of Monmouth was a historian who followed the old rules, but he did his job so well that he could have no successor except in the realm of romance. This is no place for us, and it is time for us to come down to earth again.

THE Dutch Revolt lasted longer than any other uprising in modern European history—from the iconoclastic fury in August 1566 to the Peace of Munster in January 1648; and it involved more continuous fighting than any other war of modern times—from April 1572 to April 1607 (with only six months' cease-fire in 1577) and from April 1621 to June 1647. Its economic, social, and political costs were enormous. The longevity of the revolt becomes even more remarkable when one remembers that the two combatants were far from equal. The areas in revolt against Spain were small in size, in natural resources, and in population—especially in the first few years. In 1574 only about twenty towns, with a combined population of 75,000, remained faithful to William of Orange; Amsterdam, the largest town in Holland, stayed loyal to the king until 1578. Against the ‘rebels’ Philip II could draw on the resources of Spain, Spanish America, Spanish Italy and, of course, the Spanish Netherlands. Although by the seventeenth century the odds had narrowed somewhat—by then there were seven ‘rebel’ provinces with a combined population of over one million—Spain could still call on vastly superior resources of men and money. There were a number of occasions in the course of the war when Spain seemed to stand on the threshold of success. In 1575, for example, the con-quest of the islands of Duiveland and Schouwen in South Holland divided the rebel heartland in two and appeared to presage the collapse of the revolt. A decade later, in 1585, Antwerp was re-captured against all predictions, leaving Holland and Zealand dispirited and prepared to discuss surrender. As late as 1625, with the reconquest of Breda in Brabant and Bahia in Brazil, Spain's final victory seemed near. But total success never came. Spain never regained the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands and by 1648 Philip IV counted himself lucky to have retained the ten southern ones.

The century between Reformation and Civil War saw a slow but steady expansion of the cultivated area of England—by bringing new lands under the plough in outlying regions like Devon and Cornwall, Cumberland and Westmorland; by extension of cultivation to forests, wastes and common lands; and by drainage. The same century also saw an expansion of the area of London's trade, and of London influence. Corn and dairy products were being shipped to the capital from Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland. London merchants began to purchase wool direct from North Wales, Wiltshire and the West Riding. Welsh cottons and cattle depended on the London market: early in the Civil War the gentry of North Wales petitioned the King for safe conduct across the fighting lines for their herds. Merchants in Shrewsbury and Hereford kept up trading connexions with the capital throughout the Civil War: Worcester merchants tried to do the same.

This paper explores the memories and histories of the slave trade and slavery produced by three figures, all of whom were connected with the compensation awarded to slave owners by the British government in 1833. It argues that memories associated with slavery, of the Middle Passage and the plantations, were deeply troubling, easier to forget than remember. Enthusiasm for abolition, and the ending of ‘the stain’ upon the nation, provided a way of screening disturbing associations, partially forgetting a long history of British involvement in the slavery business. Yet remembering and forgetting are always interlinked as different genres of text reveal.

One does not have to be a card-carrying postmodernist to understand that historical periods do not possess inherent characteristics. ‘Eras of Reform’, ‘Ages of Revolution’, ‘Triumphs of Reform’, and ‘Centuries of Reformation’ exist only in, and as, texts. They represent, in the simplest of forms, readings of the past. The nomenclatures we employ to demarcate and characterise particular historical moments embody fundamental ideological assumptions, encapsulating an idée fixe, and exposing the crux of the creative—or, if you prefer, the scholarly—process. Traditionalists might already be crying foul, insisting that our titles, or period characterisations, reflect rather than impute salience. History, as Geoffrey Elton might have instructed us, reports rather than constructs the past. The writing of history, Elton suggested in 1967, ‘amounts to a dialogue between the historian and his materials. He supplies the intelligence and the organising ability, but he can interpret and organise only within the limits set by his materials. And those are the limits created by a true and independent past.’ Revealingly, though, our book titles generally describe or construct processes, rather than recall events; and processes are abstractions whose full meaning, as Vico told us long ago, is apparent only in retrospect. Of course the Reformation happened, but not in the same way as the Battle of Trafalgar happened. Thus describing the sixteenth century as ‘The Age of Reformation’ orders the experience of the European West in a very particular way. It was also, and some might say equally, an age of exploration, of empire, of inflation, of hunger, and of the explosion of print culture.

My concern in this paper is essentially the complementary commercial links of the two countries against the background of political friendship.

Eighty years ago Miss Shillington put forward a very positive picture of the strength of Anglo-Portuguese trade, and apart from some work by Professor Carus-Wilson and Dr Livermore, not much has been done on this trade since, although almost all other aspects of Portuguese activity in northern and Mediterranean markets and in exploration have been considered, and the relationship of northern trade in Portugal's seemingly dramatic expansion into colonial adventure has not infrequently been raised. Writers may passingly refer to Anglo-Portuguese trade as vigorous, regular, modest, increasing or decreasing: but on what scale? Is vigorous trade two, five, or ten ships a year in the context of Anglo-Portuguese trade? I first became interested in Portuguese trade years ago as I wrote on Castilian trade, when it seemed to me that, despite good political relations Anglo-Portuguese trade was modest, while the Basque and Castilian trade flourished in much less welcoming political circumstances. The approach of 1992 with its promised closer commercial links in the European community (now including Portugal) seems a good time to review England's medieval links with what is commonly called her oldest continuous ally and trading partner. What I intend to do in this paper is at once limited (to examine England's trade with Portugal and the Portuguese role in it) and very broad (to sweep a whole century to provide a context for this activity).

From the earliest moments of the French Revolution, the Midi displayed its own special characteristics within the revolutionary phenomenon. This was the chosen land of political extremes. The outbreak of the Revolution rapidly engendered an aggressive strain of radicalism which, by 1792, had made Marseille in particular the epitome of patriotism, enshrined in the association of its name with the battle-song of the Revolution and in the rôle of its militant fédérés in the overthrow of the monarchy. At the same time, militant counter-revolution appeared with mass support in the Midi well before it achieved notoriety in the Vendée. There were peasant-based insurrections in the Massif Central each year from 1790 to 1795, whilst the Bagarre de Nîmes in 1790 was the first major manifestation of royalist plotting that was to trouble many major low-land towns for the rest of the Revolution. In the earlier years of the decade, the Midi frequently descended into anarchy involving, in its most spectacular instances, civil war in the Comtat Venaissin in 1791 and armed expeditions in the name of patriotism between rival towns in 1791 and 1792. By late 1792, radical groups in Lyon, Marseille and Aix were articulating well developed proto-terrorist programmes. Indeed, at Marseille they had got to the point of largely ignoring the central government by changing the location of administrations and establishing extraordinary institutions. In 1793, it was in the Midi that Federalism developed to the extreme, requiring a campaign and sieges by regular troops for its defeat. Toulon went as far as to call in the English.

In the paper which I read last year upon the History of Landholding in England, I described the principles which underlie the distribution of land among the aboriginal inhabitants, the primal occupiers of the soil. It is not necessary that I should now dwell at much length upon that portion of the subject. I would, however, refer to two authorities which have weight in relation to the allotment of lands.

Probably the most famous passages in Halévy's work are those attributing England's immunity from revolution after 1789 to the influence of Methodism. The ‘Halévy thesis’ encouraged, though it did not begin, a debate which still fizzes, jumps and occasionally explodes. Little attention has been given to Halévy's first essay in Methodist history, ‘The Birth of Methodism in England’, which appeared in La Révue de Paris in 1906, even though one of its central themes prefigured his famous thesis. After decades of neglect, this has been disinterred, translated and excellently introduced by Bernard Semmel. Compared with Halévy's major writings it is thin and slightly documented, for much of the primary research on which it was based was crowded into a few weeks in the Bodleian Library, after which he seems to have been discouraged by the misleading news that his subject had been pre-empted. The essay remained a rather slender piece, sweepingly written, which found its outlet in a cultural periodical rather than a learned journal. But it is something of a tour de force.

IN the late 1140s William d'Aubigny, Earl of Chichester, wrote to all his men both French and English, to say that he had sinned and that he was very sorry. He had made many exactions on the churches and the lands of those in the bishopric of Chichester and under my authority (sub potestate mea). A few years earlier Gilbert Earl of Pembroke had written to Theobald Archbishop of Canter-bury to tell him that there is a place in Wales called Dungleddy, and that it lay in those regions which by divine mercy have recently been added to our authority (potestas again). And from the last few years of the reign there is a well-known agreement between the earls of Chester and Leicester, designed to keep the peace in Leicester-shire. In it each party made specific promises, intended to reduce the damage should they have to fight against each other for their different lords. At the end of each set of promises there was a statement in this form: the earl of Leicester ought to guard the land and the goods of the earl of Chester which are in the power (in potestate) of the earl of Leicester without ill-will; the earl of Chester gave an undertaking in the same words. There are four earls here, and three different regions. They speak the same language, and that language reflects the same pattern of thought. They think in terms of territorial lordship: the bishopric of Chichester, the county of Leicester, the regions of Wales.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century language has come to occupy a prominent place, often a provocative and intolerant one, in the ideology and rhetoric of nations. ‘Every people (Volk)’, so Herder asserted, ‘has its own language as it has its own culture (Bildung).’ Bishop Stubbs spoke with equal certainty, if only to vindicate the Germanic character of the English people and to clear it of the charge of being infected with Roman or Celtic traits. Language, he pronounced roundly, is ‘the nearest approach to a perfect test of national extraction’. It is a sentiment whose certainty and content would command almost no historical support today. We are much more likely to agree with Eric Hobsbawm's opinion that ‘language was merely one, and not necessarily the primary, way of distinguishing between cultural communities’.

In the parish churches and cathedrals of England and Wales stand many thousands of early modern funeral monuments. Typically, these are elaborate structures of carved stone, often painted and decorated in bright colours and trimmed with gilding. Their complex programmes of inscribed text, allegorical figures, heraldic emblazons and sculpted effigies are set within architectural frameworks. With a few exceptions, such as the famous memorials to Queen Elizabeth, William Shakespeare or John Donne, these monuments are relatively little studied and little known. However, they were extremely costly to their patrons and prominently displayed in churches in purpose-built family chapels or against the wall of the sanctuary. Contemporary comment reveals that they were accorded high status by both specialist commentators, such as antiquaries and heralds, and by the patrons who invested in them so heavily. All-in-all, they represent what was the most important kind of church art made in the post-Reformation England, a period when there was a great deal of general uncertainty about the status of visual experience and particular worries about the legitimacy of religious imagery.

Was the Habsburg Empire doomed to collapse, and if so, at what point did its collapse become inevitable? This is a question which has been debated consciously and unconsciously by historians ever since 1918. Today, it is true, Austrian historians are warning against it— Professor Wandruszka even a decade ago advised us to do our ‘duty’ and accept ‘the tragic element in history’1—yet the issue is still discussed. Alexander Gerschenkron, for example, in his last work on Austrian history2 chose a counter-factual theme, and in the introduction to his book condemned historians—presumably those like Professor Wandruszka—who were ‘anxious to prevent people from asking pertinent and interesting questions and [had] neither the wit nor the imagination for asking those questions themselves’. Whether Professor Gerschenkron himself employed too much imagination is only one of the issues to be examined in this paper.

This paper requires some justification. In what is otherwise an under-researched period, the campaign for reformation of manners in the 1690s has been a very well-ploughed furrow indeed. Since the publication in 1957 of Dudley Bahlman's The Moral Revolution of 1688, there have been half a dozen major essays on reformation of manners, as well as some outstanding unpublished research. The work has not only been copious, but also of a very high standard. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of reformation of manners that has only been dealt with tangentially in the existing literature: the relationship between godly reformation and the cause of Protestant union. Historians have noted that the societies for reformation of manners were composed of both churchmen and dissenters, and that this stimulated high church attacks upon the societies in Anne's reign. But there has been little analysis of the ways in which the ideal of Protestant union coloured some aspects of reformation of manners. The second half of this paper seeks to fill that gap. But first it will be necessary to explore the providentialist context of reformation of manners ideology. We shall begin by taking a brief excursion to the island of Jamaica.

Just before lunch on Tuesday 13 October 1942 the British War Cabinet assembled for a hasty meeting in the Prime Minister's room in the House of Commons. Sandwiched on the agenda between discussion of the impending visit of the South African premier and the arrangements for celebrating Armistice Day was a unique item, one on which no less than six different Cabinet ministers had submitted papers. The subject was the treatment of the black soldiers who were in Britain as members of the US Army's expeditionary force. The American policy was to segregate them as much as possible from white troops. The Cabinet had now to make up its mind about a War Office proposal that British troops should be encouraged to adopt a similar attitude to the black GIs. The issue, bluntly stated, was whether the British Government should approve a discreet colour bar.