When I had the honour of addressing this Society a year ago, I spoke to it of our past history and hinted that I might at some future time have something to say about our present work and our future prospects. I do not wish to-day to grapple with the whole of such large subjects, but there are special reasons why I should as soon as possible call your attention to some particular aspects of them. My motives are largely practical. A movement has been maturing for some time which has for its object the promotion of international co-operation in historical work. During the last year it has reached the definite stage of creating a permanent international organisation of historical scholars for the promotion of co-operative undertakings on a large scale. It is an important movement and one which historians should have greatly to heart. It has attracted very little attention in this country and there is a danger lest we should not take our full share in the work in which we are now invited to play a part. I wish to give to it all the publicity that I am able, and to make an appeal to serious historians to do what they can to help it forward.

It is now nearly twenty years since Mr. G. J. Turner gave to the Royal Historical Society the second of those two papers that did much to change current ideas about the minority of Henry III. Due recognition was here at last given to the protective care of the Church for the kingdom of its infant ward, and the difficulties experienced by the Council in dealing with John's war-inured sheriffs and castellans were for the first time sympathetically examined in the light of record evidence. But the papers were notable in that they were the first serious English attempt to bring criticism to bear upon the St. Albans chronicler, Roger of Wendover, and his greater editor and successor, Matthew Paris. I say English, because in 1897 there had appeared the interesting and too little known dissertation of Dr. Hans Plehn upon the second of these writers, analysing with care and acumen the political sympathies of Paris, and anticipating some of the remarks made by the late Master of Balliol in his Ford Lectures. Mr. Turner's examination fixed chiefly upon the not always justifiable partiality of the St. Albans writers for Hubert de Burgh, and the foundations were now laid for Miss Norgate to continue, not long afterwards, this critical line in regard to the hero of the St. Albans' scriptorium.

The parlement of Paris has a double interest for students of English history. In the first place, it has the interest of an institution parallel to our own parliament, with a similar origin but with a history widely divergent: of the comparative study of the two institutions I hope to say something on another occasion. In the second place the mediæval records of the parlement mirror the relations between Englishmen and Frenchmen during more than two centuries, and particularly the doings of English kings, soldiers, clergy, students and traders in France, of French renegades in the English service and of French patriots fighting the English enemy or languishing in English captivity. The existence of this wealth of material is, it would seem, practically unknown in England. The Record Commission transcripts contain nothing taken from the records of the parlement: this omission may have been due to the difficulty of access, for until 1847, when these records were removed to the Hôtel de Soubise, it was almost impossible for students to consult them. But they seem to have been unknown even to Mr. Joseph Stevenson when he was collecting materials for his Letters and Papers illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the reign of Henry VI.

The Revolution of 1688 marks the beginning of an era of great importance in our foreign policy. This fact, together with the close personal supervision of foreign affairs by William III., makes the study of the diplomatic service in that reign peculiarly interesting. The following sketch does not pretend to be complete, but it is the fruit of much miscellaneous research.

In a paper read to the Society nearly two years ago, an attempt was made to bridge the gulf between exchequer procedure under Henry II and under his grandson. By 1232 the first stage of development from the organisation revealed in the Dialogus was already complete: the exchequer had met the crisis with which it was faced on Henry II's death by the invention of new procedure, and had passed through the experimental stage under John and during Henry III's minority. The curtain was drawn up for the second act, when in July 1232 Peter des Roches became all powerful in the king's counsels. The time for a general review of the financial position, for reorganisation and for codification had already arrived. The first paper dealt with “Experiments in Exchequer Procedure (1200–1232)”: the second proposes to consider the “Reforms at the Exchequer (1232–1242)” which were the direct result of that experiment.

There can be few institutions which have so successfully eluded the serious historian as the Duchy of Cornwall, for only one aspect of its history and administration, that of its jurisdiction of the tin mines, has been adequately treated; its curious legal relation to the Crown, and to common law, its political importance in reference to Council and Parliament, and its economic significance as one of the largest landowners in England, all await detailed investigation. For such an enquiry there is abundant material available, both in the series of “Duchy of Cornwall Records” and “Miscellaneous Books” in the Augmentation Office of the Exchequer, at the Public Record Office, and in the fine collection of Ministers' Accounts, Assession Rolls, Court Rolls and other documents, preserved at the Duchy of Cornwall Office; a collection to which I am much indebted to Sir Walter Peacock, for giving me access and to Mr, Rollo Clowes, its custodian, for invaluable assistance in working at it.

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 accordance with the decree “In singulis regnis’2 of the fourth Council of the Lateran, 1215, the hitherto unconnected monasteries of the Black Monks of St. Benedict in England, as in other countries, were required to unite themselves by holding every three years, a general or provincial chapter of the heads of all their independent houses, and the work of the chapters was to be enforced by triennial visitations made by the monks themselves, as distinct from those made by the bishops. Until the constitutions of Benedict XII in 1336 the monks in the provinces of Canterbury and York met in separate chapters: after that date there was a single chapter for the whole of England.