‘OH, A paper on Geoffrey and religion’, sneered a friend: ‘that won't take you long!’ But it did: it took ages. For many of us, I am sure, thinking about Elton's work and influence has been an autobiographical experience, surveying our own intellectual development in relation to his. For the first time, I read right through the fat file of twenty-five years of letters from Geoffrey (and I will be quoting from some of them). I recalled the first visit of the man my little daughters called ‘The Teddy Bear’, and how he delighted them with a description of Disneyland. Elton in Disneyland is indeed a thought to conjure with! And I was reminded of all I owed to him. Although this conference has been dubbed ‘Oxford's revenge’ and Geoffrey's graduate students are not giving papers, many here stand in his debt: my own life as a historian was a constant epistolary debate with Geoffrey, and it has been a lengthy and nostalgic business trying to sort it out.

Russian historians have taken a livelier interest in Ivan the Terrible than in any other Tsar except Peter the Great. But they have always been seriously handicapped in their treatment of him by grave deficiencies in the material at their disposal. These deficiencies are of two kinds. First, the material is very incomplete and scanty. The Moscow archives and many other Russian documentary records were destroyed during the ‘Time of Troubles’ and in the great fire of Moscow of 1626, and historians have had to try to reconstruct the history of sixteenth-century Russia from what have been called ‘accidental scraps and fragments of material’. Secondly, an appreciable part of even the material which survives, such as the Chronicles, the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky, and Kurbsky's History of the Grand Prince of Moscow, is partisan and has to be used with the greatest caution. By the sixteenth century, Russian Chronicles had begun to be written and revised to put an official gloss on events; the correspondence between Ivan and Kurbsky was polemical in tone and aim; and the History of the Grand Prince of Moscow was an able political pamphlet aimed at influencing opinion in Lithuania. With only fragmentary and partisan sources to draw on, Russian historians came to differ widely in their interpretation of Ivan the Terrible and his achievements, particularly in the pioneer days of historical writing. But in a penetrating sketch of Ivan's reign published in 1923 Platonov felt able to affirm that, in the course of the controversy, Ivan and his times had begun to be substantially understood, and that this ‘success’ was ‘one of the brilliant pages in (Russian) historiography, one of the decisive victories of the scientific method’.

THE legacy of Sir Geoffrey Elton to the study of Tudor politics can only be described as paradoxical. For all his reputation as a doyen of what has been termed the Cambridge school of high political history, studies of politics comprise but a small section of his œuvre. He never wrote a substantial account of an episode in high politics in the manner of Maurice Cowling or J. C. D. Clark. If one excludes his textbooks, political subjects are treated primarily in his essays. Even these, though, are not numerous. The section ‘Tudor Politics’ in Studies I contains eleven essays and papers. Four are reviews, two are introductions to reprinted biographies, two are essays on Thomas More and two are the famous studies of Henry VII and Henry VIII (‘Rapacity and Remorse’ and ‘King or Minister?’), which are essentially analyses of personality. Only one article, the early ‘Decline and Fall’, deals with a specific political episode. For a man whose doubts about biography as an exercise are well known, there is a striking amount of biographical material here. Elton's real contribution is to be found in his later essays. Studies 3 contains the ‘Points of Contact’ trilogy, ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and ‘Arthur Hall’. ‘Hall’, ‘Piscatorial Politics’ in Studies 4 and the final section of Parliament of England form a distinct corpus of Elizabethan political studies.

The purpose of the coming Discussion may be gathered from the Card of Session and the Notices of the Meeting.

This is an age of academic Conferences and Discussions whereby we may hope to keep in touch with one another and with other historical organisations, in this country and abroad.

Queen Victoria wrote in a famous letter to her grandson William II, on June 12th 1899: “I never personally attacked or complained of Prince Bismarck, though I knew well what a bitter enemy he was to England and all the harm he did.” Why did Queen Victoria call Bismarck “a bitter enemy to England”? Obviously her remark was meant in a purely political sense. It was well known, as well to Queen Victoria as to anyone else in that period, that Prince Bismarck had a strong personal liking for England. He had known English and indeed had spoken the language well as a youth, not as well as he spoke French later on, but we have it from reliable witnesses that he was quite able to express himself fluently. There were times when he would hesitate, and instead of the ordinary word would find a most original and telling phrase. Lord Goschen, too, has borne witness to “his racy style of speech.” Until he reached old age Bismarck displayed an astonishing intimacy with Shakespeare and was very fond of Walter Scott.

The twelfth century was a period of rapid growth in English monastic administration. It saw the establishment of an obedientiary system and of a special organisation for exploiting the estates in all but the smallest of religious houses. At the same time, however, as the monasteries solved the main problems of household expenditure and estate management by entrusting administrative responsibility to the senior members of the chapter, they created a problem of equal magnitude: that of the common control of their revenues. How far, it may be asked, did the English monasteries succeed in meeting this difficulty and in combining the joint control and individual expenditure of their monetary income in one organic system? The present essay has been written as an attempt to supply an answer to this question.

One of the abiding characteristics of the English gentry has been its system of social gradation. And yet the origins of this system have received relatively little attention from historians. Of course, we are well used to describing a local society of knights and esquires in the fourteenth century and of accommodating the addition of gentlemen, albeit with some hesitancy, in the fifteenth. Historians have highlighted the sumptuary legislation of 1363, which points to the gentility of the esquire, and the Statute of Additions of 1413 which gives legal recognition to the mere gentleman. We may understand that neither piece of legislation is to be taken entirely at face value. Nevertheless they are recognised to be significant markers in the evolution of a graded gentry.

To trace the influence of writings is a task in which full attainment is impossible. Yet the attempt is worth making, especially when the writer under consideration was in some sort a pioneer, the first to write a constitutional treatise in the English language, and likewise the first, in all probability, to write a legal treatise for the benefit of English laymen. Few English lawyers can have had so varied a career as that of Sir John Fortescue. Born some time between 1390 and 1400, he lived to see the ‘unquiet time’ of Henry IV, the ‘victorious acts’ of Henry V, and the ‘troublous season’ of Henry VI, which ended in the overthrow of the Lancastrian dynasty, and the apparently firm establishment of the Yorkist line. In early manhood he became a serjeant-at-law; in 1442 he was made Chief Justice of the King's Bench; in 1443 he was sent on various special commissions; in the critical year 1450 he acted as spokesman of the Judges in relation to the trial of Suffolk, and four years later he delivered the Judges' opinion on the important case of Thorpe. During the early stages of the Wars of the Roses Fortescue was actively engaged in various extra-judicial duties; in 1461 he was present at the battle of Towton, and a few months later he fought against Edward IV at Ryton and Brancepeth. Between 1461 and 1463 he wrote the ‘De Natura Legis Naturae’ and various tracts on the succession question, and in 1463 he accompanied Queen Margaret and her son into exile in Flanders and France, where he remained till 1471. During his sojourn abroad he wrote the ‘De Laudibus Legum Angliae,’ and drew up memoranda on the political situation and a programme for the restored Lancastrian government. Fortescue took a prominent part in the conclusion of the agreement between Margaret and Warwick in 1470, and accompanied the queen and her son to England, landing at Weymouth on the very day of Warwick's overthrow and death at Barnet. Less than a month later he was taken prisoner at Tewkesbury, and Prince Edward was slain; before long Henry VI also died, and there was nothing before the loyal Lancastrian but to accept the clemency of the conqueror, Edward IV. His pardon passed the Great Seal, he was made a member of the King's Council, and before very long he obtained (1473) the reversal of his attainder and the restoration of his estates at the price—hard for a lawyer to pay—of refuting in writing the arguments he had formerly adduced against Edward's title. An interesting reference to this treatise is made by Coke.

In the time before the building of theatres the men's companies used to act in inn-yards on temporary stages; but the boys' companies seem to have had more permanent arrangements. The Paul's boys, for instance, acted in a singing room of their own till they were inhibited in 1589, and again from 1599 to 1606: the children of the Chapel also, in my opinion, acted in the Blackfriars building many years before it was rebuilt as a private theatre in 1596. But it is not with these temporary arrangements that this paper is concerned.

The exercise of metropolitical jurisdiction by the Archbishops of Canterbury is of great interest. Sometimes in the course of their visitations, they came into conflict with the Bishops, sometimes with the King, and these proceedings throw a flood of light on the history of the medieval Church.

Very little is known about the early history of English mercantile venture into the far Eastland. Although some ambitious traders from this island steered their course through the Sound in the fourteenth century, or earlier, and in the fifteenth century seem to have aspired to some degree of common action, it remains true that, previous to the foundation of the Eastland Company in 1579, there was no important body of English merchants organised to trade in the Baltic.

The older and more experienced among the witnesses before the Select Committee of 1861 on the Diplomatic Service were generally agreed that the previous half-century had seen that service assume more and more the character of a profession. Among the reasons they advanced to explain this development were the growth of the service during that period —between 1816 and 1860 the total of heads of missions rose from 20 to 37 and the paid staff more than doubled in number—the greater part which it had of late appeared to play in world affairs, and its dissociation from the vicissitudes of domestic politics.

Late medieval English historians have recently become quite interested in the gentry, and particularly in magnate-gentry relationships. The ubiquity of indentures of retainer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is evidence that the outward form of these relationships was changing; the question is, do they also indicate a change in the nature and purpose of such relationships? And if so, then why? G. L. Harriss, for example, has argued that the fifteenth-century bastard feudal affinity was

an attempt by the traditional leaders of society—crown and nobility—to contain the increasingly diversifying armigerous class within the old traditions of lordship and chivalry… (This) solution disintegrated not under any attack from the crown but as cumulative wealth and access to political authority gave the broad class of landowners independence from the nobility as mediators of patronage and power.

This theme of gentry ‘independence’ from the nobility was also taken up by Christine Carpenter, who suggested that forceful monarchical government in the shires could only be achieved once ‘the gentry who administered the shires could be separated from the nobility’—and this, she speculated, may have occurred as a result of the wars of the roses.

Recent quantitative studies of the Atlantic slave trade tend to marginalise the voices of the enslaved and transported Africans who were its victims, but some sense of their experience is provided by surviving narratives by African-born ex-slaves. This essay draws attention to a neglected example of such narratives, the biography (published in the USA, 1854) of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, from Djougou (in modern Bénin), who was enslaved and exported to Brazil in 1845. It explores some of the problems of interpretation raised by this text, especially the relationship between Baquaqua's Muslim upbringing and his conversion to Christianity in the Diaspora.

Recent historical investigations tend to push the fundamental causes of the American Revolution farther and farther back into the eighteenth century. It is, therefore, passing strange that the significance of the Canadian expeditions of the first decade of that century should have been neglected. These projects played an important rôle in bringing about a friendly co-operation between the continental colonies and the mother-country; they were no unimportant part of the military and naval phases of the war of the Spanish Succession; and they raised in a pointed way the whole question of sea power. In addition, the expeditions were used as pawns by the English in the diplomatic game, which eventually culminated in the treaty of Utrecht; they showed in a clear way the entire problem of imperial defence, as well as some of the tendencies in British and French imperialism in the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, such attempts at co-operation between colonists and mother-country revealed the superlative importance attached to colonial commerce by each of them, and helped create that most vexatious question of colonial paper money. Such a joint expedition against the French in North America was not only a contest between Whigs and Tories in England, but it finally became a struggle between the two great Tory rivals of the reign of Queen Anne.

In the seventh volume of his “History of Scotland,” pp. 365–6, Dr. John Hill Burton, Historiographer Royal, writes thus:—

“In baronial architecture and dwelling-houses there was a great advance between the Reformation and the Restoration. The French style of tall round towers or turrets with conical tops prevailed. In some instances the old square tower was surmounted with turrets and other decorations, and many dwellings were wholly built in the style of Chantilly and other great French châteaus. Of these there are a few fine specimens in Winton, Pinkie, Glammis, Fyvie, Castle Fraser, Craigievar, and Crathes. Heriot's Hospital is a curious modification of this style. It was designed by Sir Robert Aytoun, the poet, who evidently appears to have sought to bring the rambling picturesque character ef the French style into a rigid symmetry, like that which prevails in the classical styles. It may be said that the little corner turrets did not belong to his original plan. In this the towers were to be carried up into high abruptly shapen pavilion roofs, after the French fashion, as exemplified in the Tuileries. These petty turrets depart essentially from the rule that some useful end should be the object of all building—they are too small to serve as flanking works, or to be in any way of service to the main building.”

If anyone were to ask where he ought to look for the Roll of Agincourt he would probably be told that he would find it in the ‘History of the Battle,’ published by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1827, in which there are seventy-two pages of printed matter containing ‘the names of the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, Servitours and others that wer withe the Excellent Prince King Henry the Fifte at the Battell of Agincourt’; and if he wanted to know (as which of us would not?) whether one of his ancestors took part in the fight he would look through that list and if he found the name he would probably say, ‘It's all right, he was there!’ but if he didn't he might say, ‘Rubbish! You mustn't expect me to be convinced by such a mass of confusion as that!’ Such a man's difficulty is the one that I want this learned society to look into this afternoon, and in venturing to set before you the dry bones of the skeleton of what is really a very complicated question I need not say that I am here to-day with the very greatest diffidence, for I expect that there are many experts present who will say of the contents of my paper that ‘that which is true is not new and—’ you know the other half of the epigram. I speak, therefore, under a natural feeling of stage fright such as seized upon Henry Buckle when he first faced a Royal Institution audience and felt inclined at the beginning to run away there and then, though I cannot venture to hope for the success he achieved before he sat down at the end. At the risk, however, of wandering among platitudes, I will, if you please, assume conventionally that some at least in this audience may be as ignorant of the main features of my problem as I was myself when I attempted to look into it several years ago. I was then seeking for such first-hand evidence as might still exist for the details of the campaign that ended with the great battle of St. Crispin's Day and whether there was any hope of getting on to firm ground in dealing with the conflicting statements as to the numbers and composition of the force with which Henry V set sail from Southampton in August 1415 and ten weeks later fought the wonderful fight that had such far-reaching effects on the course of the history, not only of our own country and of France, but on that of the whole of Western Europe.