The eighteenth article of the Treaty of Versailles between England and France contained a provision that commissioners should be appointed on either side to draw up new arrangements of commerce between the two nations on the basis of reciprocity and of mutual convenience, and that these arrangements should be completed within the space of two years, dating from January 1, 1784. The insertion of this article had not been effected without difficulty. The views of France and England as to foreign trade were divergent. The French were what in modern language would be called free traders. Vergennes and his advisers had learnt from the physiocrats that the wealth of a country consisted not so much in the amount of gold and silver which happened to be within its borders at any particular time, as in the natural products of the country itself. The English ministers were to a great extent under the dominion of the mercantile system, which taught that the balance for or against the wealth of one country compared with another lay in the larger amount of cash which one of the countries possessed. Thus, in arranging the conditions of peace, while the French ministers wished for a fresh treaty of commerce with England, the English ministers only desired the renewal of the treaty of commerce of 1713, made at the Peace of Utrecht. This treaty, which never came into complete effect, placed France and England reciprocally on the footing of the most favoured nation, but it was deeply affected by the Methuen treaty between England and Portugal, which gave Portugal a special position towards England superior to that of any nation, how-ever favoured.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) is generally reckoned to be the foremost intellectual amongst opponents of the Spanish empire in the Americas after the Napoleonic Wars. This paper provides a synoptic account of Bello's development as a scholar, politician and statesman from his early career as a servant of the crown in colonial Caracas, through his nineteen-year exile in London, to his prominent role in the institutional design and management of the young Chilean republic. The paper traces the historiographical treatment of Bello and the application of his cosmopolitan learning to the tasks of nineteenth-century state-building. It is suggested that his trajectory reflected a successful adaptation of liberal precepts to a conservative local social setting within a world order dominated by British promotion of free trade.

The anticlerical violence of the Spanish Civil War has received significant scholarly attention in recent years. However, there has been relatively little focus on the iconoclasm, even though the destruction of objects was easily the most common form of anticlerical violence. Nor has the effect of iconoclastic violence on those who treasured or venerated these objects been examined. This article looks at the emotional significance of the material artefacts that came under attack during the Civil War. It argues that, while some objects were treated simply as the material of which they were made, most provoked more complex interactions. In contrast to most earlier episodes of iconoclasm, these also left a visual record, which shows how the memory of the violence was shaped not only by textual accounts but also by photographs that memorialised and aestheticised it.

The title of this essay can be interpreted in two ways. One possibility might be to show how our times in their thinking, patterns of behaviour, and institutional structures still continue to be shaped by that distant era of the Middle Ages. In other words, one could show the lingering impact of the Middle Ages until the present day. This sort of approach brings many things to mind: the division of Europe into East and West, through the Roman and the Byzantine church; medieval philosophy and the influential reception of Roman law and its effects which can still be discerned today; knighthood and courtly culture; the development of the ‘modern’ state; the continuing influence of social groups and their systems of values and institutions such as vassalage, the university, and the city state; and last but not least, the division into competing states and nations that is so distinctive for Europe.

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.

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.

This article explores popular British ideas about Asia from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, using largely neglected sources: geography books. Thanks to their popularity and focus on conventional knowledge, this genre of texts – geographical reference works, gazetteers, encyclopaedias and schoolbooks – allows us to glimpse the commonplace mentalities of the period, and consequently to understand how Asia was perceived by ordinary literate Britons and not just by prominent intellectuals. Geography books typically regard Asia as a ‘place of origin’ for the cultural and societal achievements of Europe. They also assume that Asia possesses plentiful natural resources and is thus ripe for economic exploitation. At the same time, however, Asia is understood to be degenerate and corrupt, usually due to a combination of climactic decay, religious failings and government mismanagement. Asia is thus alien and entirely distinct from Europe, and, simultaneously, it is intimately connected to Europe's rise and future imperial progress. British geography books can tell us a great deal about how ordinary literate people understood Asian peoples and places in the formative age of British empire-building.

THIS lecture is named for George Walter Prothero (1848–1922), historian and editor: and one excuse for giving a lecture on W. B. Yeats to an audience of historians is that Yeats actually knew Prothero. They both sat on the Academic Commttee of the Royal Society of Literature and in 1912, after a meeting of this body, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory:

‘I was a few years back a slave on your property of Houton Tower, and as a Brown woman was fancied by a Mr Tumming unto who Mr Thomas James sold me.’ Thus begins Mary Williamson's letter, which for decades sat unexamined in an attic in Scotland until a history student became interested in her family's papers, and showed it to Diana Paton. In this article, Paton uses the letter to reflect on the history and historiography of ‘Brown’ women like Mary Williamson in Jamaica and other Atlantic slave societies. Mary Williamson's letter offers a rare perspective on the sexual encounters between white men and brown women that were pervasive in Atlantic slave societies. Yet its primary focus is on the greater importance of ties of place and family – particularly of relations between sisters – in a context in which the ‘severity’ of slavery was increasing. Mary Williamson's letter is a single and thus-far not formally archived trace in a broader archive of Atlantic slavery dominated by material left by slaveholders and government officials. Paton asks what the possibilities and limits of such a document may be for generating knowledge about the lives and experiences of those who were born into slavery.

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.

In the eastern part of the Duchy of Burgundy, in a region which now forms the southern portion of the Côte-d'Or Department, lies Cîteaux. The country around, after gently sloping from the hills on which Dijon stands, some four or five leagues to the north, here expands into a rolling plain formed by the basin of the Saône, and not far away southwards there is the junction of this river with its tributaries, the Doubs and the Denthe. The Côte-d'Or hills to the north-west protect it from some of the more violent storms, and under their shelter and through the congenial nature of the soil has grown up the great vine-growing industry of the district. Around Cîteaux in old days the country was wild, marshy, and a tangled mass of scrub, and even to-day the soil here is marshy, and there is an abundance of pools. The name itself shows the nature of the place: in its older form Cisteaux, or Cistercium, it seems to be derived either from Cisternæ, which Du Cange explains as ‘a marsh with stagnant pools’; or from Cistels, as the Bollandists give the form of the word; or Citeals, which is the form of the word preferred by Courtépée, with a variant Cisteauls. These last are explained as old French words meaning marsh rushes. Whichever be the correct derivation, the fact pointed to is the same; the word itself shows the swampy, unpromising nature of the country. But here was to spring up the mother-house of one of the greatest and most powerful of the religious orders of the Church, which some ot its adherents could claim to have been the mother of 10,000 dependent houses, 4,000 male, and 6,000 female, by the seventeenth century.

My purpose is to trace the development of the study of one particular century in our national history, to show how the knowledge we now possess of it was acquired; how gradually the darkness which overhung the time was dissipated and the truth part by part revealed, and finally by what hands this work was achieved; and by what general causes its progress was promoted or retarded.

The text of the forged Letter of Prester John which began to circulate in Europe about the year 1165 was settled and printed by Professor Fr. Zarncke more than sixty years ago, and although later scholars have added their contributions to the subject and fresh manuscripts have come to light, students as a whole must still base their studies on Professor Zarncke's learned and painstaking work.

It is with no little diffidence that, in giving my first presidential address, I follow in the steps of so many distinguished predecessors—men notable in various walks of life—historians, statesmen, administrators, diplomatists. The Royal Historical Society has had the good fortune to be presided over by such men as George Grote, Lord John Russell, Lord Aberdare, and Sir M. E. Grant Duff. My immediate predecessor in this chair, Dr. Ward, whom we so unwillingly released from his presidency to fill a larger sphere of usefulness as Master of Peterhouse and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, is known to most of us here as the author of an admirable history of the English drama, the biographer of Chaucer and Wotton, the translator of Curtius's ‘History of Greece,’ and a distinguished writer on various epochs of German history. We have all of us admired the combined courtesy, dignity, and learning with which he discharged the duties of President during his too short tenure of the office but probably only Members of the Council are fully aware of the energy and enthusiasm which he threw into the task of directing the efforts of the Society. To him is chiefly due the successful initiation of a movement for the promotion of advanced historical study in this great but ill-provided capital, which has issued in the establishment, I am glad to say, of two lectureships in the higher branches of historical learning. We parted from him, as I have said, most reluctantly, but we feel confident that the qualities which so fully justified our choice here will insure him full success in the position which he now holds—the practical headship of one of our two great and ancient Universities.

1. By Archaian White Races I mean White Races non-Semitic and non-Aryan; and by White Races I mean Races with either long or short heads (dolichocephalic, or bracbycephalic), high noses, unprojecting jaws (orthognathic, not prognathic), long hair and beards, and light-coloured skins.

Although the formation of our Society was not directly due to movements in the academic world, it did in fact take place shortly before a new epoch opened in English historiography. In 1868 the study of history as an academic discipline was non-existent in England save as part of a classical education. In that field those who seriously attempted to portray the ancient civilization were controlled by an austere literary tradition, and by the excellence and relatively small bulk of their sources. In addition to this, the work of the great Germans from Niebuhr to Mommsen penetrated to England long before Ranke and his seminar, or the early Monumentists, were known and imitated at Oxford and Cambridge. Consequently, the classical historians such as Thirlwall, Grote, Arnold and Finlay were far more sober, critical and quellenmässig than their contemporaries in English history. But they had no direct influence on historians in other fields or on academic practice, and they were all in a sense amateurs: Thirlwall was a bishop, Grote a banker, Finlay a man of private means and Arnold primarily a headmaster. In other fields of history the four principal names—and admittedly very great names—are of men who wrote either all or at least a principal part of their works as individuals at home and without academic position

AS far back as 1877 H. S. Sweetman brought to the notice of Irish scholars a letter which Robert de Ufford, justiciar Ireland, wrote to Edward I in 1277 and the king's answer. The justiciar told the king that ‘the Irish offer 7,000 marks for a grant from the king of the common laws of the English, and much desire to have an answer thereupon’. In his reply the king said that he had deliberated with his council, and that ‘it seemed meet to them that a grant of English laws should be made, because the laws which the Irish use are detestable to God and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed laws’. But it was first necessary to obtain the common consent of the people, or at least of well-affected prelates and magnates of Ireland; and the justiciar was accordingly instructed to hold a conference and ascertain the opinion of such suitable persons.

Twenty-five years ago Cardinal Gasquet in a paper read before the Royal Historical Society pointed out the desirability of a new edition of Polydore Vergil's Historia Anglica based on an as yet unpublished manuscript in the Vatican Library. In this paper he referred to the important differences between the Vatican manuscript and the published versions of the Historia, and suggested certain significant possibilities in regard to some of the facts of Polydore Vergil's life. In the course of researches preliminary to the preparation of a critical edition of the Historia, the will of Polydore was discovered in the municipal archives of his birthplace, Urbino. The publication of this document provides a suitable opportunity for further comment upon the life and importance of “le premier historien humaniste en Angleterre.”

It would be impossible, even if it were desirable, within the limits of this essay, to give a detailed account or even an adequate summary of the causes of the outbreak of the Second Civil War ; but I may be permitted to dwell briefly upon the military conditions under which the crisis was to be met.