In 1890 America was at peace, the golden age appeared to be at hand; unfettered by the miseries of European strife, in prosperous rather than splendid isolation, the American people confidently looked forward to an even more exciting future. But a new age of danger was rapidly approaching; the nineteenth-century conditions of American safety—geographical isolation, the British fleet, as it turned out, the ‘hostage’ of Canada in American hands, and the balance of power in Europe—were passing away. The era which had seen the new world fattening on the follies of the old was coming to an end; soon the follies of the old world impinged on the peace and prosperity of the new. Within three decades the contest for world power fought out in Europe, and the rise of the youngest of the great nations, Japan, was to endanger the safety of the United States. Yet few Americans recognized the full import of these changes and the need for fresh policies.

The view that Philip II was the secular arm of the Counter-Reformation still survives. It is based on the assumption that his own words and claims must be taken at their face value, and on the fallacy that because the religious motive was sometimes present in Spanish policy, therefore it was always present and was the most important motive. The popes he had to deal with took a different view. They considered that Philip II, like his predecessors, used his prestige as a Catholic sovereign to pursue objectives that were essentially political. A characteristic summary of the papal view of Philip II's foreign policy was given in 1589 with reference to his ambitions in France: ‘The King of Spain, as a temporal sovereign, is anxious above all to safeguard and to increase his dominions … The preservation of the Catholic religion which is the principal aim of the Pope is only a pretext for His Majesty, whose principal aim is the security and aggrandisement of his dominions’. It is true that Sixtus V had a deep and personal aversion to Spain and a low estimate of its king, but these opinions were not peculiar to one pope. There were conflicts between Philip II and almost every pope with whom he dealt, which makes it impossible to explain those conflicts in terms of personalities and points to some deeper and more permanent cause.

Les marchands de Cahors ou Cahorsins ont joué un rôle de quelque importance dans la vie économique et financière de l'Angleterre au XIIIe siècle. En 1948, M. Denholm-Young terminait le solide article qu'il leur consacrait en suggerant que l'emploi, de plus en plus courant à partir du milieu du XIIIe siècle, du terme ‘cahorsin’ au sens d'usurier découlait de l'ampleur de l'activité commerciale des marchands de Cahors dans l'Europe du Nord-Ouest durant la période antérieure; le déclin de leur commerce à la fin du XIIe siècle n'aurait plus permis de comprendre le sens primitif et simple du mot ‘cahorsin’, tandis que la prospérité persistante des hommes d'affaires italiens, dont ils avaient été d'abord les concurrents souvent heureux, aurait maintenu l'intelligence du premier sens du terme parallèle ‘lombard’, dont étaient affublés les usuriers au XIVe siècle. En 1950, M. Wolff reprenait la même hypothèse dans une communication au Congrès des Sociétés savantes du Sud-Ouest de la France, réuni précisément à Cahors, auquel j'avais moi-même présenté des faits qui la renforçaient. Je voudrais ajouter aujourd'hui à cette évocation du rôle des marchands de Cahors dans la vie économique de la Chrétienté au XIIIe siècle quelques traits nouveaux que m'ont révélés mes recherches sur l'histoire du duché d'Aquitaine et essayer de faire ressortir et d'expliquer le singulier éclat et la brièveté de leur trajectoire économique.

After years of intense specialization in historical studies —in the history of ideas, of science, of historiography; in economic history, diplomatic history, administrative history, social history, legal history, world history, which last is fast becoming another specialism—there is perhaps no subject of historical enquiry that would not benefit from an attempt to amalgamate the results of all these disciplines. This is certainly true of international relations. The valuable labours of diplomatic historians have done no more than erect a scaffolding of established facts. In the work of understanding and explaining those facts we have not made much progress since von Ranke and Albert Sorel. Von Ranke's famous essay in interpretation, ‘The Great Powers’, was written more than 125 years ago, before the rise of specialist studies. For this reason, as well as on account of the preoccupation of his generation with national mission and divine intention in a universal scheme, it necessarily fell back on a mystical conception of the society of states, on a spiritual conception of the role of the individual state—on what must now be regarded as general history of the worst kind.

Early in the summer of 1285 Edward I announced that he was sending John de Kirkby and a special commission of judges to the Tower to examine the state of public order in London. On 10 June, nineteen days before their coming, he issued letters patent: the area around St Paul's, he asserted, had become the haunt of thieves and vagabonds, and he empowered the Cathedral to enclose and incorporate it in the churchyard. The ‘area around St Paul's’ was nothing less than the site of the folk-moot and the muster. The moot was the primal city assembly, the muster the characteristic expression of communal patriotism. By this time, it is true, neither was much more than an institutional fossil, but both were integral and basic components of civic tradition. The sites were the city's freehold and there had been no preliminary inquest of any kind. As late as the Iter of 1321, when Hamo de Chigwell tried to reverse the decision, the affront still rankled.

In March 1915, when the Dardanelles campaign was at its crisis, F. S. Oliver, the author of The Endless Adventure, who had long known many of the leading political figures and the background to politics of his day, wrote to his brother in Canada: ‘The only two men who really seem to understand that we are at war are Winston and Lloyd George. Both have faults which disgust one peculiarly at the present time, but there is a reality about them and they are in earnest, which the others aren't.’ This affinity was recognized by the two men themselves. Churchill's admiration and affection for Lloyd George are well known. ‘There could be no doubt…’, he has written, referring of all years to 1940, ‘that he was our foremost citizen’; and his final verdict on Lloyd George's death was ‘The greatest Welshmanhellip; since the age of the Tudors’. Lloyd George returned the affection to the full, and the admiration to a great, though not to the full, extent. ‘Men with such gifts’, he once remarked of Churchill, ‘are rare—very rare. In an emergency they ought to be utilized to the full, and if you keep a vigilant eye on their activities, they are a greater asset than a legion of the conventional sort.

Cistercian writing produced in the half-century after the death of Ailred of Rievaulx seems in comparison with that of the earlier generation unattractive and undistinguished. This impression is, however, largely caused by the lack of any one figure comparable with the abbot of Rievaulx who might arrest our attention and then stimulate an appreciation of the whole scene. In addition, the brightness coming from that great light, to adopt a figure from Walter Daniel, has almost effaced the memory of those lesser lights who came after him. Yet it must be confessed at the outset that by literary standards little of their work is distinguished. None of it, however, is devoid of interest for the historian. It comes from a period whose course is difficult to trace, and besides helping us to understand better the order's intellectual and spiritual life, it shows us some of the connexions between this and Cistercian prosperity.

The publication of the Chronicles and Memorials of GreatBritain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, known familiarly as the Rolls Series, was the outcome of a movement set on foot early in the nineteenth century by Henry Petrie. Petrte (1768-1842), who began life as a dancing master, made himself a learned and zealous antiquary, and acquired a knowledge, unrivalled in his day, of the materials for early English history. He was patronized by the second earl Spencer (1755-1834), then engaged upon the enrichment of Althorp library, and in 1818 a meeting of noblemen and gentlemen was convened at Spencer House to induce the government to support a scheme for printing the early sources of British history. The project was approved by the then prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and took shape in an humble address of the House of Commons to King George IV (25 July 1822), begging for the publication of manuscript sources of history; as a result of this Petrie, who had been appointed Keeper of Records in the Tower of London in 1819, assembled extracts from various sources for the period before the Norman Conquest, which were published posthumously in 1848 as Monumenta Historical Britannica. This was a selective collection, modelled on the Recueil of the Maurist Dom Bouquet, which Guizot had continued in France. Petrie's Monumenta was inordinately costly, while it failed to give real satisfaction to historians.