More than four centuries have passed since the famous preambles to the various Tudor acts for the re-edifying of English towns generalized with such unnerving confidence about the lamentable state of provincial urban communities in the early sixteenth century; but no historian today who has the temerity to walk through those still perilous streets can be under any illusion as to the continued hazards of such an expedition. Yet that this journey, despite its dangers and frustrations, deserves to be undertaken more frequently and more urgently than ever before seems very clear. Even the most optimistic historian must occasionally suffer some qualms at a situation in which the single most important issue in pre-industrial English urban history—the exact contribution of the late medieval and early modern town to the society and economy of the nation as a whole—seems to be becoming more rather than less mysterious with every detailed monograph and every new methodological problem. For here of course, much more in 1976 than in 1894, we are in the presence of one of those ‘burning questions in which impetuous economists have outrun the historians, and have not found it pre-mature to set in order by the help of accepted theories the obscure chaos of social history in the Middle Ages’.

This paper is concerned with the way in which news was handled by the four main London dailies, The Times, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph and the Standard which, by the late 1870s, enjoyed the largest circulations. They differed from each other considerably in character and history, and in the kind of historical record which they have left behind. Much more is known about The Times than about any of the others. In the 1860s it was a 16-page paper, costing 3d, with a circulation declining slowly from 65,000 to 60,000. The fact that it could maintain this circulation, when it was three times as expensive as its main rivals, is by itself evidence of the value that contemporaries placed upon it. It had far greater assets than any of its rivals, and the Walter family were willing to invest heavily in the paper as and when funds were needed. Its greater resources were shown, partly in its technical equipment, and partly in the range and quality of writing in the paper itself. The Times had more correspondents reporting more frequently and fully from more European capitals than its rivals, and much of its prestige had been derived from that fact. It also employed in London a staff of educated writers such as George Brodrick and Robert Lowe. Unlike its rivals it could afford to pay salaries which enabled it to impose on its writers the condition that they wrote for it exclusively. (The lives of a number of notable late nineteenth-century journalists show that they tried to make up income by writing too much simultaneously, for too many different publications.)

Despite the rich and exciting work of recent years, the social history of England between the Restoration and the Industrial Revolution still bears something of a hangdog look, scarcely war-ranting, as yet, the cosmic conclusions and ferocious controversies to which students of early Stuart and early nineteenth-century society have grown accustomed. Yet, thanks to the work of one remarkable Englishman, who was born in 1648 and died in 1712, there is one aspect of this pre-industrial period—its social structure—on which we are all happy to pontificate. Gregory King's table of ranks and degrees, on which in the last resort so much of this confidence rests, has now acquired a unique cachet. The continual reproduction in post-war textbooks of this famous document, which we think of as King's ‘social table’ but which he described as his ‘Scheme of the Income and Expense of the Several Famillies of England’, is just the most obvious symptom of its dominant historiographical influence.

Among the major political events in a century of momentous political change in Ireland the Kildare rebellion of 1534–1535 has been accorded a special significance by contemporaries and historians alike. The downfall of the most renowned Anglo-Irish noble family and the personal tragedies of the doughty old earl and his dashing young heir, gave the story an aura of romance that caught the fancy of the Elizabethans—it inspired an Elizabethan drama— and partly accounts for its prominence in popular histories. More scholarly commentators have emphasized its significance as a water-shed in the history of English government in Ireland. The subsequent course of events reveal it as a point of transition from the medieval to the early modern phase of Irish political history, the juncture at which the hold of Anglo-Irish feudal magnates on crown government was broken and at which the period of uninterrupted super-vision from England began.

As the recent lament over falling standards by the Secretary-General of the United Nations reminds us, universal literacy is today considered a necessary feature of civilized society. This may be one reason why the problem of medieval literacy, of a society where the ability to read and write was apparently confined to a clerical élite has so intrigued modern historians. In this paper, I wish to reconsider the extent of lay literacy in England before the Conquest. But first we must be clear what we mean by literacy. The ability to read does not necessarily imply the ability to write. To take only the most famous medieval example, Charlemagne could speak Latin, and enjoy the City of God, but he never learnt to write. What Parkes calls ‘pragmatic literacy’ may extend from the capacity to recognize, if not sign, one's own name, to the ability to write a formal document in Latin. What might be called ‘cultured literacy’ could range from reading free prose in the vernacular to composing Latin in the classical tradition. The more advanced types of pragmatic literacy might well overlap with the more basic cultured levels. But it is obvious that we cannot deduce a widespread ability to read any-thing from the fact that the names of owners or makers were some-times engraved upon Anglo-Saxon coins, weapons or memorials; or a generally high standard of lay culture from the fact that there were documents in the vernacular. If we are to describe early English society as literate in a sense that would satisfy the ancient, or later medieval, historian, we must show that the proportion of laymen able to read at least a vernacular writ or poem was socially, if not statistically, significant.

If study of the university can have any place in the general history of society, it must be understood as a part of a much larger historical phenomenon, of whose vastness and complexity the university's records themselves make us aware. In the sixteenth century we are conscious of powerful currents of social change and energy upon which the universities floated with little or no power of control: a rapidly growing population, geographically and economically on the move; a burgeoning school system; urban wealth growing and changing location, but always under the massive dominance of London; an active land-market; rise in prices; and the work of governments, both national and local, concerned with education and its consequences. This is the setting of Tudor society, and only special optical devices will enable us to pick out the university and set it in the foreground. In the process some distortion is inevitable. An indication of the problems that occur in university history may be found in the view of a recent student of Tudor Cambridge who, while acknowledging that one contribution of the universities to the complex change within English society was ‘the creation of a more refined and integrated cultural and intellectual milieu’ centred upon London and the court, finds the truly significant contribution in a more informed, vigorous and tenacious local solidarity in the ‘country’. Another historian of Elizabethan England tells us that in the universities, ‘the interesting thing, as so often in English life, is the extent and intimacy of the social mixture’.

It has been a characteristic of studies of social policy-making in England to lay considerable stress on the importance of quantification, of precise measurement, in the evolution of any given policy. It has been suggested that the power of the evidence, once properly assembled and measured, could on occasion be sufficient to dissolve previous certainties and act as a catalyst of new thought. It is perhaps not entirely fanciful to see links between this aspect of the historiography of social policy and the preoccupation of English social thought with empiricism, a preoccupation which led sometimes to the presentation of empiricism as an alternative to social theory. All of this enhances the importance of attempts to assess the role of measurement in any given field of policy and to confront directly the questions of its autonomy and the power of its advocates.

In the 1850s, school policy enjoyed very high priority in the fight against the revolution. The elementary school was to be brought back to simple subject matter, firmly grounded truths and to an education stressing authority; above all the teachers were to be given as simple a training as possible.

A general study of the effects of the Viking Wars on Anglo-Saxon society is much to be desired. These wars lasted from the last years of the Mercian hegemony to the last months of the life of William the Conqueror. It has been abundantly shown that the English did not catch institutions from the Vikings like a sort of social measles, but common-sense alone suggests that a three hundred years war with little more than one generation's respite must have had consequences. Such a study is far too large for a single paper. What I have sought to do, therefore, is take a single campaign, that culminating in the famous battle of Maldon, which occurred at a moment of intense crisis and to try to set this campaign in a context of the relevant political and military problems of the day, and most of what I have to say relates to the much-dismissed, little studied, but well-evidenced, reign of Æthelred II.

There is said to be a crisis in historical studies whose collapse some predict. I think myself that the word crisis gets over-used, and I am convinced that history as a subject of study and instruction will survive. We may find fewer students of it in schools and universities, but we shall stop well short of the retreat (itself, it seems to me, now halted) that has befallen the classical languages. People will continue to read history, even serious history, and people will continue to write history, even good history. Still, there are enemies, some lurking in thickets, some boldly skirmishing across the plain, and while their peashooters cannot kill they can and do hurt. Those sufficiently out of date still to think that what gets the customers is rele-vance continue to proclaim that history is irrelevant to a forwardlooking—indeed, a progressive—society; and since their numbers include a good many who decide what happens in colleges of education, in schools, and (worst of all) in the Department of Education and Science, their obscurantism is not to be ignored. I do not here, in this company, need to defend or justify the study of history, but I feel urged to warn historians that they would be well advised to consider and state their case: at the very least we cannot any longer take it for granted that society will as a matter of course accept us at our own valuation and therefore support us. Today, therefore, on this last occasion that I address this body as President, I should like to consider the grounds on which I would argue that no healthy society can afford to abandon the professional study of the past at its highest, most intensive, and to all appearances least practical level. I cannot now also attend to the history that is told to the generality: one thing at a time.