Two hundred and fifty years ago a record-keeper sat amid the boxes, the cupboards and the shelves which housed his charges, compiling ‘an account of all or most of the records in the Duchy office and how to find them’. The result was invaluable for searchers in the Duchy of Lancaster records, but lacking order and arrangement, as its author was the first to admit, it is not a systematic description of these records and it says very little about their history. There is therefore some justification for attempting a comprehensive view of these records. The rich diversity of interest which the Duchy bears is fully reflected in the range of its records. It has indeed been said that ‘what the records of the United Kingdom are at large, these records of the Duchy are in miniature’. That is a bold assertion, difficult to sustain. For one thing, the Duchy never knew the complicated processes of the royal exchequer, and it must be obvious that the Duchy could not repeat in parvo the whole pattern of the nation's life. Yet the analogy gives a hint of the records' scope, and it becomes closer if we take the Duchy records to include those of the Palatinate of Lancaster. It is true that in the Public Record Office, which contains most of the records under discussion, the two series are treated separately, and the Guide, repeating a distinction drawn in 1868 in the Deputy Keeper's Report, says that the Duchy records ‘are entirely distinct from the records of the County palatine, which, although public, are purely local, whilst the Duchy Records, though private, concern the government and jurisdiction of the entire dominion of the Duchy and embrace the County Palatine as a subordinate regality’. This statement, which the grammarian finds imperfect as an example of the chiastic construction, is equally unsatisfactory to the archivist or historian if we understand it to refer to the palatinate, and not to the administration of the modern county council. We ought no more to segregate the palatinate simply because it was an organ of public administration than we should, say, a private hundred, and the description itself recognises the county palatine as a component part of the Duchy. How the judicial records of the court of Duchy chamber were any less public than those of the chancery court in Lancashire, is not explained. The distinction, in fine, is fallacious.

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.

The early history of Russia is still in many respects an unexplored field, and the place which the first Russian political organisation occupied in Europe from the tenth to the twelfth century is not yet appreciated as it deserves to be, even by Russian scholars themselves. The research carried out in this field in Russia at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century was cut short for almost three decades by political events. It is only recently that the history of Kievan Russia has aroused a keener interest among the historians of Soviet Russia, as witness the many studies published in Vestnik Drevnei Istorii and especially the work of B. D. Grekov.

I fear that my address to-day will inevitably disappoint expectations, for I have no state secrets to offer you, and in the time at my disposal I obviously cannot hope to cover so vast a field. A more modest, and therefore more correct, title would be ‘Some Aspects of Foreign Policy’, planned merely in outline, but capable of evoking and sustaining fuller discussion in parallel fields.

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.

Henry VIII was a great king, and great things were done in his day. The story of his reign has been told by more than one famous historian, and in that story Scotland, as a rule, plays only a small part. Generally she appears as the ally of France used to embarrass England from time to time, as a sort of Highland dirk threatening the back of stout King Hal as he faced south—a dirk little used in fact, and in use very ineffective; witness Flodden and Solway Moss! If we may judge by the standard histories, Scotland had little to do with the action and the movement of a stirring period.

A traveler to England in 1946 is speedily made aware of the immense admiration of the British people for the late president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is probable that no other American statesman has evoked quite so warm a regard in the British Isles. Roosevelt early understood the issues of the war which Britain was forced to take up in 1939, and quickly responded when the collapse of France put that country in imminent peril. His intimacy with that great Englishman, Winston Churchill, dramatized the close association of the two English-speaking countries in the struggle that came to a close only a year ago. It would have been strange if he had not been appreciated by the British people. There was, however, another great American president who led his country into war, and stood by the side of Britain in critical days. His name was Woodrow Wilson, and he seems in general to have won far less affection and regard in Britain. Yet he, too, was a great man. It is the object of this paper to make him, as the author hopes, a little better understood, and to demonstrate why he deserves a place amongst the most eminent of the presidents of the United States.

It is well known that organisation of bishoprics and parishes came late to the greater part of Scotland, beginning probably with the gradual spread of Norman influence in the late eleventh century and becoming marked in the time of David I. Before that time the Celtic church was predominant in the region between Forth and Spey, which was the main seat of the monarchy, and there were strong Celtic influences in the Highlands, Clydesdale and Galloway. The church was mainly monastic and missionary with religious communities serving wide areas; though in addition Skene has hinted at the existence of tribal churches in the north-east lowlands. Lothian, a part of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, was peculiar, for it resisted Celtic influences and looked, ecclesiastically, towards Durham; but any parochial organisation it may have had was rudimentary. In general it can be said with truth that ecclesiastical Scotland was completely transformed by the coming of the Normans. Owing to lack of sources twelfth-century Scottish history is obscure; but something at least may be discovered from the charters, which have been in print for over a hundred years and still remain unexplored. And it was in the hope that a reconstruction of church organisation during the transition period might help to illuminate the social history of Scotland that this paper was undertaken. I have concentrated on one subject: the structure of parishes and the relation of local lay and ecclesiastical authorities, because it is a crucial one: and one region, southern Scotland, because there Norman influence was strongest. If in the absence of special studies on the subject my conclusions must remain tentative, they may at least indicate the problems and provoke wider discussion from which the truth will emerge.

The limiting dates of this paper are those of the first surviving minute book of the Corporation. Though Bedford is a borough by prescription and its earliest charter, granted by Henry II, confirms the privileges enjoyed under Henry I, there is evidence in the muniments of the Corporation generally, as well as in the character of the first minute book itself, that its beginning marked a significant stage in the evolution of the governing body. It certainly marked also the opening of a period of constitution-making which may fairly be described as eventful, even in comparison with other English boroughs of the seventeenth century, for between 1649 and 1660 the rules for the election of the Common Council were comprehensively revised four times. Antagonisms which belong to national politics are clearly involved in these short-lived reforms, but there are also others, local in origin, which cannot well be understood without some knowledge of the relations between the governing body and the freemen in the reigns of the first two Stuarts.

In my first Address from this chair I chose as my subject ‘The Foundations of British Policy’, in the belief that its study is more than ever incumbent upon ourselves and upon the succeeding generation, and that neglect and incomprehension are among the major causes of the most devastating war in all our history. And if it is an urgent duty, in the interests of future peace, to study and discuss the workings of our own policy, it follows that we must also clear our minds as to the underlying motives of other Powers, both friendly and hostile. The price that we have all had to pay for neglect of German history is even to-day not yet fully understood. But to the plain man Russian policy, with its many shifts of extreme violence, is even more mysterious. Thus the events which brought us together in 1941, in an alliance of twenty years for which there is no precedent, ought to be, nay are, the personal concern of every one of us. These events, the result of Hitler's supreme blunder in invading Russia, represent a rebound from unreasoning isolation and appeasement to a policy first of guarantees, then of increasingly effective intervention, and finally of unswerving ‘jusqu'au-bout-isme’. Are we to assume that that unconventional alliance was merely dictated by passing necessity and is in gradual dissolution, or alternately that it rests upon a solidarity of interests which far outbids ideological aims?