The opening of the Council of Constance in November 1414 was an occasion full of promise and possibilities. The promise was more than dimmed, perhaps, by the attitude of John XXIII, who had taken three years to come to the point of summoning the council to which he had stood pledged at his election, but still it was an event at which all Christendom rejoiced.

The venerable relic which is the subject of this paper is a wooden cot (or cradle, as it has been called) of unquestionable antiquity, traditionally said to have been the cradle of the hero of Agincourt, the glory of Monmouth, Henry V.

Lambarde, in his “Topographical Dictionary,” speaking of the destruction of Monmouth Castle in the thirteenth century, writes: “Thus the glorie of Monmouth had cleane perished, ne had it pleased God longe after in that place to give life to the noble King Hen. V.” (“Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places in England and Wales,” by William Lambarde, first published in 1730). It may befit me, therefore, as an inhabitant of this town, to use my endeavour to preserve from perishing the memory of an object which tradition has associated with him who has given undying fame to my place of residence, and which for a period of many years has been lost to us. Tradition, of course, is not evidence. But where direct testimony is not to be obtained, and in the absence of authoritative contradiction, it must be accepted as of a certain weight and worth. It will generally be found to be built upon a substratum of fact, and although, in process of time, the groundwork is almost invariably distorted, it is rarely destroyed. Should there be nothing, then, but tradition to link this rare example of mediaeval furniture with the House of Plantagenet and the town of Monmouth, it would not, I opine, be beneath the notice of those whose professed aim is to classify the stores of the past and to preserve everything connected with those of our forefathers whose history is an honour to our land.

I must begin this paper by disclaiming any intention of entering into the detail of parliamentary procedure, a matter with which I am not qualified to deal. It has, however, occurred to me that certain changes in the administration of law, changes which begin early in the reign of Henry III, have some relevance to the origin of parliamentary jurisdiction. These changes arise from a new and more severe attitude on the part of the Crown towards franchise, and make necessary important modifications in the exchequer's methods of dealing with it. In time, I think, the many disputes between the Crown and the magnates about privilege, debt, and so forth, gave rise to a volume of petitions and subsequent trials which called for some tribunal in the nature of parliament, and these trials found a nucleus about the exchequer and the council. That is my thesis, and it is with these legal changes and their reaction upon the constitution that I propose to deal. The greater part of this paper is, therefore, concerned with the period before direct parliamentary record, and, indeed, before there is any true court of parliament. It goes very little beyond matters of law, and, if I am forced here and there to refer to the structure and procedure of parliament in later days, I do so very much subject to correction. Even for the early period with which I am concerned, I cannot attempt to assess the importance of that part of parliament which came from the commune consilium of the realm.

The proposed amalgamation of the Royal Historical Society with the Camden Society, from which we hope to see many advantages to both, has led me to submit for consideration a scheme in which both societies might collaborate for the preparation of a competent Bibliography of English History. All students are aware how singularly deficient is our liferature in the department of historical bibliography. France and Germany have now been working in this field with great industry, and more or less success, for more than a century. They have shown us many lacuncæ and not a few errors to avoid; and we may now, at any rate, perceive what schemes are impracticable and what are useless. England, which has with such energy, and I venture to think with such signal success, laboured on a series of exhaustive Calendars of her Manuscript authorities, has been curiously slow to set about a scientific bibliography of the published materials of her own history.

Even before the beginning of the movement which it is our purpose to examine, the position of the government of Lord North had come to be critical. Perhaps never in English history has a ministry known comparable distress and at the same time been compelled to go on existing through it. The difficulties came to a head in a catastrophic manner in October and November 1779, after the government had shown its helplessness in the face of a possible invasion of these islands, and news had come of the development of a semi-revolutionary situation in Ireland. And as Parliament was to reassemble on 25 November the internal condition of the ministry deteriorated—some members resigning, the rest in a state of anarchy, Lord North himself almost a pathological case, often paralysed by his doubts and incapacitated by his moods of depression—and, precisely because of these difficulties, there was the prospect of a union of opposition factions who might well believe that one last desperate endeavour would complete the overthrow of the ministry. On the top of everything, there was the fact that the next general election was beginning to seem imminent, and at this stage in the life of a Parliament the members in an extraordinary manner would begin to be sensitive to opinion in their constituencies. When Parliament re-assembled the political conflict was made more dramatic in that the issue was more clearly set out by the opposition as a matter of the People versus the King. On repeated occasions the dangerous influence of the crown—and especially the closet activity—was made the principal object of opposition attack. Henceforward this is a central theme in parliamentary debate.

The commercial relations of England with Muscovy have been already investigated at various times by the author of this paper, by Professor Scott, by Dr. Gerson, in America, and lately by Miss Mildred Wretts-Smith; but the relations of Holland with Muscovy are, I believe, still little known.

It is sufficiently well known to the general reader of history that the cause of Wolsey's fall was his failure to obtain for Henry VIII. a divorce from Katharine of Arragon. Wolsey had certainly done his utmost in that bad cause, however unwillingly he engaged himself to it in the first instance; for it was a matter of life or death to him to give the king satisfaction. For years the old nobility of England, who were councillors by right of birth and standing, had resented his monopoly of the king's confidence. Several of them were related to Anne Boleyn, and others who were not personally interested backed the king's wishes in the divorce—unpopular as it was in the country generally—as a means of securing the downfall of the Cardinal. Even the Duke of Suffolk, no less an upstart than Wolsey himself, and whom Wolsey had saved at the outset of his career from the vengeance of the other nobles, now most ungratefully turned against him; and when the Legatine Court was prorogued by Campeggio, gave a great rap on the table and said with haughty mien, ‘It was never merry in England whilst we had Cardinals among us.’

On this occasion, last year, when I first had the honour of addressing you from this chair, I deplored the loss of two of our leading historians—the Bishops of Oxford and London—both of whom were Fellows of our Society. Since that date two other great men, to whose illness I then referred, have been removed from us—Lord Acton and Dr. S. R. Gardiner. To my last year's address, as delivered, I ventured subsequently to add some remarks on these notable writers and men of learning, and will therefore on the present occasion do no more than remind you of their deaths, and express the hope that we may, to the best of our powers, follow their example and imitate their high endeavours in the cause of historical science.

This résumé of some of the problems connected with the life of Richard de Bury is complementary to three noteworthy articles by Father Ghellinck in the Révue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique for 1922-3, in which he used the Philobiblon and an abundance of other literary and record sources to place the Bishop in his setting as the greatest bibliophile of medieval Europe. That admirable contribution to the history of literature and manuscripts still leaves room, however, for some remarks on the history of Bury's life, as civil servant, diplomat, and patron of letters; and this will involve a discussion of his Liber Epistolaris.

This historiographical review considers a corpus of literature which examines the spread of modern Western sport within and beyond the locus of public schools, princely playgrounds and club greens in colonial India. While locating the old historiographical problems and new social historical interpretations, a great deal of attention has been paid to foregrounding significant research areas that are less catered to in existing scholarships. As well, this review contends that the eagerness to examine colonial interventions in the sports field without tracing the conflict and negotiation between two different – pre-colonial and colonial – ideas of leisure and body cultural movements expounds an incomplete history of Western sport in modern India. While doing so, it urges a rectification of the methodology of current academic studies in which vernacular literary sources are treated as a ‘passive mediator’ merely reflecting the popular enthusiasm for sport. It concludes that this ‘reflectionist’ approach is a hindrance to research work on the diffusion of Western sports in colonial India, which recognises the emergence and development of a new sporting culture as the discursive formation that surrounded the ideological meanings and images of the literary construction of sport.

There are few subjects in our country's history which are so enshrouded in mystery as the so-called conspiracy which was designed to place Perkin Warbeck upon the English throne. It is with great diffidence that I present the following account, which I have collected from various sources, being well aware that the subject is one which has occupied and baffled many of our ablest historians.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of historical reenactment of Great War battles as an effort to create what is termed ‘living history’. Thousands of people all over the world have participated in such reenactments, and their number increased significantly during the period surrounding the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War. Through a comparison with representations of war in historical writing, in museums and in the performing arts, I examine the claim of reenactors that they can enter into historical experience. I criticise this claim, and show how distant it is from those who do not claim to relive history but (more modestly) to represent it. In their search for ‘living history’, reenactors make two major errors. They strip war of its political content, and they sanitise and trivialise combat.

The Alliance of the Three Emperors was Bismarck's attempt to escape from a dilemma which had led him to a typical crisis of nerves and irritability during the early months of 1879. He had soon recognized after 1871 that the interests of the new Germany could no longer be served by war. Could he secure the isolation of the unforgiving French without embarrassing commitments to his friends and potential allies? The maintenance of friendly relations with, and between, Austria and Russia seemed to him the indispensable basis of German predominance in Europe; the worsening of Austro-Russian relations during the long-drawn-out Near Eastern crisis after 1875 had, however, led both his neighbours to grumble at his limited support, although Russia had been very, much more open and indiscreet in her complaints than Austria. Accordingly he decided at the end of 1878 that the very nebulous Dreikaiserbündnis of 1872–3 no longer provided an adequate basis for German security; in October 1879 he formed a defensive alliance with Austria against Russia, and in June 1881 the new alliance of the three emperors was concluded, although the Austro-German alliance remained in force. The collapse of the three emperors' alliance in the first major crisis that it had to face, namely the Bulgarian crisis of 1885–6, suggests that the solution was hardly a happy one.

Any attempt to discuss the reign of David II of Scotland is bound to be patchy and unsatisfactory because the evidence itself is so. There is for instance no good chronicle of the period. It is true that John of Fordun left some notes on the reign, through which he had lived; but his history was so largely de-voted to remoter and even mythical periods that he never worked up these notes into the history of his own times that he could have written. Later writers all based their work on his; they embroidered on what he wrote, but could not fill in the gaps. Hence the accounts that have survived of the reign consist of a number of isolated incidents rather than a continuous and intelligible narrative. Many more details can be discovered in the records of government, such as the Register of the Great Seal, the Exchequer Rolls, and the large number of surviving texts of the documents issued by David II; but these are again isolated scraps of evidence. What is missing is the framework into which this evidence needs to be fitted.

The most significant feature of the baronial movement of 1258 is that it was the first deliberate and conscious political revolution in English history. The Angevin system of government, essentially a centralised despotism grafted on to the stock of a primitive national monarchy and growing within the framework of a feudal society, was transformed, at the Parliament of Oxford, into a limited monarchy based on written constitution. The entire power and authority of the crown, in every sphere of government, was put into commission and vested in a privy council of fifteen magnates, selected, not by the king, but by a sub-committee appointed by a committee of the great council; and for nearly two years England was successfully governed and reformed by this nominated privy council, which acted throughout in virtue of the mandate expressed in the Provisions of Oxford, regarding itself as representative of and responsible to the great council. In the king's own words, the Council of Fifteen treated him as a minor under their wardship, settling affairs of state without his presence, and without having asked him to attend, issuing orders without awaiting his authorisation, ignoring his views, and merely replying ‘Nous volons qe issy soit’, without any further explanation, when he remonstrated; they passed over his nominees for offices high and low, appointing others against his will; they used his great seal without consulting him, and denied him all use of it; in fact, they so far diminished his royal power and dignity that little or nothing was done at his command, and his orders were neglected as though it were the council that reigned.

This article addresses the experiences of Croats and Croatia in the aftermath of the First World War, showing how the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia privileged the wartime sacrifice of Serbia and the Serbian army and how Croats were often depicted as the remnants of a defeated state, Austria-Hungary, and therefore less entitled to citizenship in the South Slav kingdom. It focuses on three large veteran associations: the Association of Reserve Officers and Warriors, the Union of Volunteers, and the Association of War Invalids.