Historians, particularly medieval historians, are vulnerable to the charge that they concentrate their attention upon success—on the successful dynasties, institutions and ideas—and that they thereby misrepresent the past. Thus the political historian sees the ninth century as the crucial period in the evolution of a unitary English kingdom. The four powerful and independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms existing in 800—Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex—had been reduced by the end of the century to one, Wessex. But this was achieved not through the assertion of West Saxon supremacy—the overlordship that Egbert won in 829 lastedbut a year—but by the destruction of the other kingdoms by Viking conquest and their partial replacement by new Viking states. Though it is clear to us with hindsight that Alfred's claim to be the ruler of all the English not under Danish rule was the germ of the unification of England under his descendants, no one can have known, when Alfred died in 899, that new Viking armies were not being raised in the Scandinavian homelands to crush the remaining English kingdom. At that time, for most Englishmen, the deepest impression must have been of the defeat and destruction of the English polity and culture.

Amongst problems in eighteenth-century history that of the relationship between seigneur and the rural community continues to intrigue the social historian. The simple fact that in 1789 rural France took upon itself the destruction of the seigneurial régime by widespread attacks on châteaux resulting in the burning of terriers and other seigneurial registers, attacks which constituted perhaps the most single-minded aspect of revolutionary activity in 1789, has presented subsequent generations of historians with a number of problems which have never been satisfactorily resolved but which, given their obvious import, have been periodically aired in light of recent research. Such is my purpose here. In the historiography of the peasant movement two works have shaped the historian's approach more than any other. The most consequential, and without doubt one of the most brilliant works ever written, was Georges Lefebvre's La Grande Peur (1932) which sought to analyse the mechanics of the peasant movement and to delineate a number of epicentres, such as Burgundy, in order to show the ripple of a panic movement along river valleys and significant arteries and to make apparent which parts of France, like the Seine valley and the Beauce, were quite untouched by rural revolt. In so doing Lefebvre raised the inevitable question which has beset historians ever since, that is, why here and not there? Lefebvre was himself drawing upon the researches of Philippe Sagnac, Quomodo jura dominii aucta fuerint regnante Ludovico sexto decimo (Le Puy, 1898). Although he did not invent the idea, Sagnac gave, in this work, some documentary underpinning to the concept of ‘la réaction féodale,’ a systematic attempt on the part, of the seigneur to increase his levies in the last decades of the old régime.

The lords of the March of Wales enjoyed a remarkable position within the dominions ruled by the kings of England in the thirteenth century. They were subjects of the king and held their lands, in Wales as in England, of him as feudal tenants; but within their Marcher lordships they claimed and exercised a measure of authority unsurpassed elsewhere within the king's dominions. The nature of that authority was not the subject of a contemporary treatise or of a quo warranto inquiry; but that it was of the most comprehensive seems evident enough. Within his lordship the Marcher lord was governor and universal landlord; only the lands and the affairs of the church lay beyond his reach. Jurisdictionally his competence was equally wide. Contemporary lawyers characterized it curtly by referring to the March as an area in which the king's writ did not run. That was to express the point negatively and inadequately. The clerks of the royal chancery put it more clearly and positively later when they declared that a Marcher lord was to enjoy ‘all royal rights, prerogatives and customs belonging to royal lordships, and all royal courts and other jurisdictions, … an authentic seal for commissions, writs and warrants, and power of appointing justices to hold sessions in eyre and other sessions and courts’.

The opening years of the fifteenth century witnessed an outburst of lawlessness at sea of such intensity that legitimate commerce between the kingdoms of France and England, and their allies, all but ceased. Official contemporary sources seem to leave no doubt as to the causes of this outburst. The truce conservators of the two kingdoms were in full agreement in placing the blame for the outrages against merchant shipping on the activities of ‘piratae’, ‘depraedatores’ and ‘banniti’, outlaws working without the sanction and beyond the control of their governments. Modern authorities have accepted this ‘official’ explanation without question.

It is a remarkable fact, and one that needs to be pondered, that almost all our current regional terms in this country are of very recent origin. Expressions like Tyneside and Merseyside, the West Midlands and the North-East, have no very lengthy lineage; such phrases as the Home Counties cannot be traced back beyond the early decades of the railway era; the present usage even of a genuine historic name like Wessex is no more than an antiquarian revival; while the current reanimation of Mercia seems to be chiefly attributable to a contemporary police force. Perhaps the only regional name of this kind with a continuous history to the present day is East Anglia. In other words, behind most of our modern expressions, ideas and preconceptions lie implicit that were not necessarily of much significance to the people of earlier centuries. A phrase like the Home Counties, for example, implies a kind of regional unity between the shires surrounding London which until recent centuries—and in many respects until recent generations—is entirely fallacious. There was no connexion between the origins of settlement, for example, in Hertfordshire and in Sussex, and next to none between settlement in Essex and in Kent. Even in the Civil War period there was singularly little contact and no cohesion, as parliament quickly found to its cost, between the counties surrounding the capital.

Italy is reputedly the most regional of European nations, yet it is a regionalism of an unusual kind. In most countries, the regions are territories, often with well-marked natural boundaries, containing a variable number of major towns and cities. Behind them there is usually a long history of social and political identity, often leading back to a feudal kingdom or principality; quite often the region is thought of as the home of a particular tribe or people, and regional culture has deep roots in folklore and popular tradition. Typical regions of this kind are Aragon and Catalonia, Anjou and Brittany, Saxony and Bavaria; in Italy only the islands and the South, and the frontier area of Friuli conform to this pattern. Elsewhere, the modern regions or provinces have little historic reality behind them; the social unit was much smaller, and the strongest focus of loyalty was the union of the city and its territory on which both the classical civitas and the medieval commune were founded. Strongly ‘human’ rather than natural in character, the Italian city-regions were upheld by the in-tense particularism of the dominant classes rather than the populace. The more or less autonomous city-state was the natural political expression of this feeling, which nevertheless survived the establishment of the renaissance territorial state with little modification. The multi-centred regional culture for which Italy is famous depended on the sense of separate identity found in the dominant classes of the city region, whether it was politically independent or not; it was a matter of learned men and wealthy patrons rather than popular traditions.

Some four hundred years ago this month Stephen Limbert, master of Norwich School, stood before the gates of the Great Hospital and addressed his well-turned Latin phrases to an audience almost as eminent as that gathered here today. Elizabeth I and her mobile summer court were on progress, and Norwich, the second city of the kingdom and capital of a region that was both the agricultural and manufacturing heartland of England, was determined to impress its monarch with both its loyalty to the Tudor dynasty and its contribution to the common weal—so it hired an impecunious London hack, sometime soldier and court hanger-on, Thomas Churchyard, to write the script. In part, at least, this no doubt accounts for the frequently reiterated commonplaces of Elizabethan propaganda embodied in such of those pageants and speeches as survived the intermittent downpours that sent both Her Majesty and her municipal hosts scurrying for cover on more than one occasion during her visit. Neither did Master Limbert's disquisition differ in its enthusiasm for Elizabethan rule from those of his metropolitan confrère. ‘It is reported’, he told Her Majesty, ‘that Aegypte is watered with the yerely overflowing of the Nilus, and Lydia with the golden streame of Pactolus, whyche thing is thought to be the cause of the greate fertilytye of these countries: but uppon us, and farther, over all Englande, even into the uttermoste borders, many and maine rivers of godlynesse, justice and humilitie, and other inumerable good things … do most plentifully gush out … from that continuall and most aboundaunt welspring of your goodnesse … With what prayses shall wee extoll, with what magnificent wordes shall we expresse, that notable mercie of your Highnesse, most renowned Queene’, sentiments that earned the former Norwich schoolmaster the Queen's invitation to kiss her ungloved hands, and sentiments that direct our attention to the symbols and image-creating aspects of the political culture of renaissance England.

As in relation to many other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to apply modern conceptions of nationhood to the situation in the Low Countries. If the difficulty seems more awkward in this area than elsewhere, it is perhaps merely because the sixteenth-century Netherlands, as we all know, developed into two distinct nations, the northern Netherlands and Belgium. It is clearly impossible to give a convincing answer to the question whether, in politically more propitious circumstances, the northern and the southern Netherlands might have grown into a single nation state with one common culture. All we know is that in the north a new state was created which, in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly possessed a culture idiosyncratic enough to be described as properly Dutch. We may well call this a national culture. On the other hand, if we bear in mind, asmany seventeenth-century commentators did, that the Dutch Republic was no more than a part of what had been the real Netherlands, both north and south, it would not be totally incongruous to define Dutch culture, that is the northern culture, as regional rather than national. However, if we do so, we must conclude that the national culture uniting the southern and the northern Netherlands, and somehow enclosing the regional cultures of Flanders and Brabant, of Holland and Zeeland, never came into existence.

A few years ago I commented in an article on the European catastrophe of 1870, viewed in the long perspective of relations between the French and the Germans down to that date. My present lecture embodies a comment on the international consequences of 1870 during the twenty years which followed it. I hope in time to come to pursue the theme of Franco-German relations further down the slope of time, as far as the end of the Second World War.

There are two types of question that can be asked about estate-ownership. The first relates to actual families. What was the rate of turnover of landed families, i.e. what percentage appeared and disappeared in, say, each half century? What sort of families were rising and for what reasons? How many were old-established and how many were new? Which families were declining and how many were extinguished; and what were the causes of decline and extinction? Among such questions it is reasonable to ask whether the size of a family's estate made a difference to its survival, whether for example the great families of 1600 fared better or worse than the gentry in the following centuries.