The English bishops of the fifteenth century seldom arouse the historian's enthusiasm. They seem, like their registers, too concerned with ecclesiastical routine, too governmental and orthodox for any that might still expect to find elements of heroism in the later medieval Church. John Stafford is a fair example. He has suffered from the dislike of Thomas Gascoigne and in later times from the coolness of Bishop Stubbs. Gascoigne, who suspected his origins, charged him with begetting offspring by a nun;1 Stubbs, more anxious to be fair, concluded that ‘if he had done little good, he had done no harm.’2 Sir James Ramsay, who admitted his administrative ability, wrote of him as ‘a Beaufort partisan’,3 while Mr Kingsford was cautious and noncommittal.4 Now Stafford was one of Chichele's best lawyers and a close associate: he was also the successor strongly recommended to the pope by the archbishop, and in 1443 the succession to Canterbury was no passing matter.

Manorial accounts by their existence reflect, somewhat after the event, an administrative revolution that almost swept away the firmarii characteristic of an earlier stage in the management of large estates. During the greater part of the thirteenth century and of the next, lords (or their advisers) generally seem convinced that to manage their manors through fully accountable local officials was preferable to the familiar alternative of committing the property to men whose responsibility would be limited to producing a stipulated annual return. In the thirteenth century, also, many of these lords—monastic lords perhaps especially—displayed a remarkable readiness, sometimes a positive enthusiasm, to undertake the trouble and risks of demesne husbandry, instead of letting their demesnes entire or piecemeal to tenants. This addiction to demesne husbandry, though it may have weakened before the close of the century, persisted in the next; it survived the first consequences of the Black Death and was not widely given up until the last thirty years of the fourteenth century.

To talk about a London gild is to talk under the shadow of Unwin's learning. To stand in that shadow is inevitably to be overshadowed. My hope to-day is to avoid such comparison and, instead, by drawing on the records of a gild not used at first hand by him, to add something to the picture he drew.

The second decade of the eighteenth century in Europe was an era of administrative experiment and reform. In certain respects, these were as impressive as the measures ofso-called ‘enlightened’ absolutists after the Seven Years War. The earlier, like the later, period discloses the attempt of governments to undo the consequences of prolonged warfare; in this case, also, in some areas, to soften the fearful effects of disease which decimated populations and their livestock in 1710–14, during the last major visitation of bubonic plague in the history of central Europe. Peter the Great tried to give a more settled form to the changes hastily improvised to take the strain of his war with Sweden. Frederick William I set to work on those schemes which led to the resettlement of derelict areas in East Prussia, and to the organization of the General Directory. In France, leaving aside the abortive constitutional reaction afterLouis XIV's death, the gigantic problem of the debt was tackled by orthodox financiers and administrators as well as by John Law. In this setting, it seems worth asking whether the Austrian Habsburgs, faced by similar problems, sought similar remedies. Such an inquiry may help to give a clearer picture of the main outlines of European development immediately after 1713, in the period which is still occasionally regarded as a featureless interim between the fiercer climaxes of the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War on the one hand, and the age of Frederick, Catherine and Maria Theresa on the other.

On 13 July 1405 Henry de Boynton, knight, was brought before the Court of Chivalry of England, sitting in Berwick at a place called ‘Waleisgreene’, and was there condemned to death for high treason. His crime had been that of levying war against the king in his own realm, in the company of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland. The evidences of his guilt were a series of warlike acts against the king's lieges, committed ‘si notoirement et si publicement que par nulle tergiversacion nautre excusacion queconque purra estre concele ne denie’. He had ridden in arms, robbed, plundered and taken ransom in the lands of his liege lord, and he had surrendered the keys of Berwick into the hands of the king's enemies, the Scots. He had refused his sovereign entry into the town when the royal host lay before it, so that the king had been forced to fire his cannon at the walls of his own city. These acts amounted to notorious treason, and as such they were judged by John of Bedford, constable of England, presiding in the court, ‘par1 comandement mon tresredoute seigneur et pere le roy avantdit ton liege seigneur’. Boynton was therefore condemned to death, to be hanged, beheaded and quartered, and all his goods and chattels to be forfeit to the king.

It is a singular paradox that one of the world's leading maritime powers should have virtually ignored the history of its merchant service. Yet such has been the case in England— inevitably, perhaps, in view of the spectacular course of naval and imperial achievement—and this notwithstanding the labours of a host of publicists to demonstrate the importance of the country's shipping as ‘a principal means to advance [its] honour, strength, safety and profit].

The French victories over Prussia and Russia in 1806–07 enabled Napoleon to impose upon the continent a peace diametrically opposed to the interests of Britain. An essential condition of it, as was made clear in the Berlin Decree and the Franco-Russian treaty of Tilsit, was that Britain should be banished from Europe. Within a few months of the Tilsit agreement in July 1807 all the northern powers, except Sweden which kept out of the French alliance until 1810, were formally at war with Britain and were pledged to break their commercial connexions with her. It appeared that Napoleon, with the aid of Russia, Prussia and Denmark–Norway, had finally shut the Baltic to British trade and had thus made the commercial exclusion of Britain from the continent a reality. As things turned out, trade between Britain and the north of Europe, though harassed by enemy commerce raiders and impeded by French agents, was not destroyed. The Scandinavian and Baltic ports, the last in Europe to come under French influence, were never firmly closed even when Napoleon''s continental system was most effectively enforced in 1811

In 1840 and 1841 the Record Commissioners issued two publications whose exactly corresponding titles indicated that they were designed to be parallel compilations. The one, published in 1840 and edited by Benjamin Thorpe, was entitled Ancient Laws and Institutes of England. The other, published in 1841 and edited by Aneurin Owen, was entitled Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales. At that time, Owen's work was probably a more considerable achievement of scholarship than Thorpe's, but in due course, with the further development of historical and other relevant studies, many improvements became possible in both collections, and new editions of each therefore became more and more obviously necessary.