The rise and fall of the house of York is a story which sits uneasily towards both revolutionary and evolutionary interpretations of fifteenth-century England. Indeed, in general, attempts to tidy away the political process of Lancastrian and Yorkist times into the displacement of one type of régime by another always fail to convince. They do so because as a régime neither Lancaster nor York kept still long enough to be impaled on a categorical definition. The political life and death of both dynasties composes the pattern, changing yet constant, of a set of variations on the theme of an aristocratic society pre-dominantly kingship-focused and centripetal rather than locality-focused and centrifugal. In so far as the political process conformed to the social order, the households of the great were the nodal connections in which relationships of mutual dependence cohered. Those retinues, fellowships, affinities (for the vocabulary of the time was rich in terms overlapping but with nuances of descriptive emphasis) have now been studied both in their general conformation and in several particular instances; I have here attempted for the central affinity of the king over one generation not a formal group portrait but a sketch focused on the middle distance of figures in a landscape. The meagreness of household records in the strict sense is a problem we must learn to live with. But it would seem sensible to make a virtue of necessity and follow the life-line of what evidence there is to the conclusion that if an understanding of the household is only possible by attending to its wider context, so an understanding of that wider political scene requires some attention to the household.

Modern political history begins with the French Revolution. This is not merely because the Revolution began a diffusion of institutional innovations—universal suffrage, rights of association and publication, and so forth—which have been the political shibboleths of advanced societies ever since. It is also that there then appears the modern vision of politics. The term ‘vision’ is deliberately chosen, because it does not imply any necessary or objective correlation with the facts of political life. It is a name for a chosen way of seeing things, a persuasive account of the facts, not the facts themselves. Intransigent opponents have been able to agree on this vision and in finding it inspiring or clarifying. Its essence is a presentation of politics as a struggle between two enduring forces or principles. Sometimes these forces are sharply contrasted, sometimes they are only the opposite ends of a spectrum whose middle ground makes precise distinctions hard (though never impossible). Such modifications of the model do not matter; it is the enduring conflict which is crucial. Whatever names they bear—progress and reaction, liberalism and conservatism, movement and order, Left and Right—in this vision these principles are always at war, and that is what politics is about.

In the two centuries after 1700 there occurred upwards of twenty million marriages in England and Wales. It is perhaps forgivable, therefore, that this paper has about it the air of an interim report. It might be thought doubly foolish for an individual, and in this field a professedly amateur investigator, to embark upon any enquiry into past demographic behaviour when there exists that formidable, professional task force, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. At the last count it had within its lockers, for example, ‘aggregate analyses’ of over 550 English parishes. To provide information about the ages at which people married, however, the Cambridge Group appears to be relying primarily upon ‘family reconstitution’ techniques. It is not necessary to explain these techniques or to describe the remarkable light they have shed on the vital events of the past. With such tools the Cambridge Group have not only crept literally between the sheets of history; its individual members have not been abashed at publishing their preliminary findings. Yet obscurity remains and with it the thought that family reconstitution may not prove entirely adequate to the insistent demands for more information on when and why people married. For the undertaking of full family reconstitution both registration and record survival have to be good, and the method is undermined where there is a great deal of migration, albeit temporary or permanent. Unfortunately many of the most interesting demographic questions revolve around urban behaviour, and town records may be deficient on many of these counts, especially in that vital and perplexing period from about 1780 to 1840.

August The Fifth, 1914, was a cool, windy day at Mitchels-town. County Cork: but the guests at the houseparty in the Castle were not really conscious of the chilly breeze that whisked the clouds over the tops of the Galtee mountains that stood towering behind the Castle. Here during the afternoon the guests moved about the sunny, gusty terraces and talked, in little low groups, of the War. In retrospect, however, both this garden-party and those who attended it have a significance, dramatic and historical. August the fifth was the day after the War broke out; the garden-party was one of the last ever held in the Castle; and it was not a very ordinary group of people who talked of the War, and of whether its coming would avert the calamity of Home Rule.

It is perhaps surprising that no systematic study of the lord keeper's or chancellor's ecclesiastical patronage has been produced. In 1927 Jean Wilson dealt with the office of lord chancellor in the early seventeenth century but devoted a very few pages only to the exercise of his patronage. Professor Jones scarcely touched upon the matter. Yet at the very least there is a need to establish how the lord keeper administered his ecclesiastical patronage and to assess its importance. Did the various lord keepers adopt a policy? What influenced their distribution of patronage? The sources available have imposed limitations of their own: central records of presentations exist in overlapping blocks for the years 1559 to 1603; 1596 to 1616/17; and 1627 to 1640 alone. These papers are not of uniform format and the information which they can be made to yield varies in type. The papers of lord keeper Coventry, for example, are not lists of presentations but loose docquets of presentation, and these make no mention of petitioners or commenders other than the presentee. Wherever possible, however, the somewhat barren nature of the formal documentation has been supplemented by the use of diocesan and private papers.

Every city must in a sense have a city culture. Florence, however, was the only place in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers. Much of the modern historical interest in Florence has centred around these ideas which emerged in the first half of the fifteenth century, the more so because even the innovations in the visual arts introduced at the same time by Donatello and his contemporaries are in part a by-product of them. The theme which I would like to develop in this paper therefore is the relationship between the city society and its ideology. This is of course a very old and well-worn theme. One of the common presuppositions of Renaissance historiography has been the understandable assumption that the ideology fitted the city, and a good deal of historical analysis has been applied to identifying the congruences between them and illustrating the growth of the humanist school out of the circumstances of Florentine life. The ideology, however, was created in the early fifteenth century, at the end of the period which I am going to discuss, when Florence had already been a great centre of industry and commerce and an independent republic for a very long time. Fruitful as it has been, this approach therefore leaves one with the disquieting feeling that a place which has been for so long and so conspicuously a centre of throbbing urban life ought to have had its ideological revolution much earlier, particularly since economic historians have emphasized the elements of commercial contraction rather than expansion in the early Renaissance period. Some historians have found themselves driven into the paradoxical position of regarding the early Renaissance as a symptom of economic decline. I would therefore like to look at the old theme obliquely by deflecting attention from the great innovations themselves and concentrating it on the factors which favoured or hindered ideological innovation in the century and a half before they appeared.

In the seventeenth century, visitors to both cities were struck by the obvious physical similarities between Venice and Amsterdam. The social similarities were no less great. In a Europe mainly composed of monarchies, each was the greatest city of a republic. In a Europe where the ruling class still tended to identify with warriors, the patricians of Amsterdam and Venice were predominantly civilian. In a Europe whose political leaders usually despised trade, Venice and Amsterdam stood out as places where trade and politics could be combined with success, at least early in the seventeenth century. In a Europe whose ruling classes tended to spend most of their time on their country estates, the patricians of Venice and Amsterdam lived mainly in town.

One obviously cannot make generalizations covering all the towns and cities of late nineteenth-century England. London was a case by itself; Liverpool a very different port from Bristol; an industrial town like Rochdale seems very remote from Dorchester. Nor is it possible to give a single brief definition of a city, though many have tried. ‘Just as there is no single form of the pre-industrial city,’ wrote R. E. Pahl, ‘urbanization as concentration of population does not lead to any single pattern of class action and conflict.’ Attempts to provide a definition of a city culminate in David Riesman's comment that the city is what we choose to make it for the purposes of analysis. One has to accept that Bristol, Dorchester, Rochdale and Liverpool were towns without exaggerating what they had in common.

In 1790 a population numbering less than four millions was said, according to a later census calculation, to be almost 95 per cent rural in residence and, by implication, proportionately agricultural in occupation. By 1970 a population well in excess of 204 millions was almost 75 per cent urbanized and, in terms of labour force, less than 5 percent involved in agricultural pursuits.

Historians have often been inspired by the power of spiritually high ideals or socially good intentions, sometimes by both. Orosius, a disciple of Augustine, composed his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans to prove that nations which had submitted themselves to non-Christian rulers had thereby incurred a series of disasters. The legend that Brutus of Troy had founded Britain was thought useful by King James I. Both in the earlier and later stages of the development of concepts of verification with regard to historical records, the idea of a past whose example points the way to present and future conduct or which gives validity to the régime of the present has been an extraordinarily potent instrument of social policy. The social instrumentalists who emerged, among the political scientists, econo-mists, sociologists, philosophers and historians of the western world about the end of the last century were hardly less ambitious than their predecessors. Among them, the American school was particularly confident of what could be achieved by wresting the study, teaching and writing of history from the hands of its orthodox exponents and redirecting the entire subject in the interests of social advance. There is an obvious temptation to describe this school as historical utilitarians, a word that suggests itself particularly because of their long emphasis on the use and usability of the past. But the term is inappropriate. Utilitarianism is a system which envisages the greatest good of the greatest number; whereas an instrumental view could be directed to special problems or be intended to promote the interests of a particular group.

In the first three of these papers I have examined three aspects of the European historical tradition—aspects which I may briefly characterize as classical, early scientific, and prophetic. The models for all these modes were derived from the ancient world, and all three have played an important part in the development of western attitudes to history. Yet no one who looks dispassionately at the works produced by these three modes of studying history will think that they are the main sources of our modern ways of thinking about and writing history. So we must now ask whether it is possible to identify any central tradition in historical study leading to the practice and assumptions of most historians today.