During 1301 the propaganda war between the king of England and the Guardians of the kingdom of Scotland reached a climax in a welter of claims and counter-claims submitted to the Pope. Differing historical mythologies were part of the arguments deployed by both parties. The English case was based on a gloss placed on one of the wondrous legends recorded in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Britain, according to the legend, had been divided by its illustrious eponymous ruler, Brutus, between his three sons, Locrine, Albanact and Camber. Scotland, originally known as Albany, was Albanact's portion; but—and here we come to the gloss placed on the legend—he was to be subordinate to his elder brother and first-born son of Brutus, Locrine, to whom alone the royal dignity was reserved. Such was the ultimate historical basis for Edward I's claim to superior lordship over Scotland. The Scots could not be expected to accept such a tall story lying down. They did not. They countered with their own even taller tale. They insisted that Brutus's three sons were of equal standing, ‘so that none of them was subject to another’; they even queried whether Albany had ever been equated with the whole of what we know as Scotland, suggesting instead that it was the part of the original Britain which stretched from the Humber to the Forth, but no further north. They then went on the offensive, asserting that a lady called Scota, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt, had conquered the northern part of Britain (if indeed it was such), expelled the Britons and renamed it Scotland in honour of herself.

‘Failing help from God and Saint Martin, the canons found it necessary to renew their complaint before the lord Hugh, their abbot and count’.

‘For almost six years’, the canons of Saint-Martin de Tours had been trying to regain possession of land in the neighbouring diocese of Poitiers. They complained that through ‘the cupidity of Frankish men’ they had been deprived of two estates; and, because ‘they could never get justice for their claim’, they were asking their lay-abbot, Hugh, for his advice. Hugh counselled them ‘to go again and put their claim to the lord Count Ebles, his special friend’ and to Ebles' own faithful men (iterum ad domnum Ebolum comitem, suum specialem amicum, et praescriptos suos fideles). Where God and his saint had not come to the canons' aid, cooperation between the two most powerful laymen of these regions broke this judicial deadlock: after intervention by Counts Hugh and Ebles, the viscounts of Thouars recognised that they had unjustly deprived Saint Martin of his property, and the two estates could be returned to the community of Saint-Martin once diey had renounced their possession of the villae of Curçay and Antogné.

Something of the atmosphere of trench warfare, with its immobility and its desperation, has overcome the historiography of early Tudor politics. The most spectacular impasse concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn. Three scholars have recently set out and defended against one another divergent explanations of her fall. Professor Ives and Professor Warnicke can agree that Dr Bernard is wrong: Anne cannot possibly have been destroyed by a masterful and jealous king who may reasonably have believed her guilty of multiple adultery as charged. Dr Bernard and Professor Ives can agree that Professor Warnicke is wrong: Anne's fall cannot be attributed to her miscarriage of a deformed foetus, awakening the king's fears of witchcraft and its sixteenth-century stablemates, sodomy and incest. Professor Warnicke and Dr Bernard can agree that Professor Ives is wrong: Anne cannot have been ousted by a factional plot at court, coordinated by Thomas Cromwell and cynically using fabricated charges of adultery to hustle the king into destroying the queen and her partisans at a single blow.

Perhaps no phrase is so evocative of inter-war British foreign policy as is ‘collective security.’ Yet surprisingly, despite this obvious centrality—what political figure did not at one time or another express his views regarding collective security?—there remains a missing dimension regarding our understanding of the part collective security played in British foreign policy during the critical decades of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties.

At the Peace of Paris in 1763 Britain reaped the rewards of a successful war overseas. Great gains were made in North America, die West Indies and West Africa. Two years later Robert Clive signed the treaty of Allahabad by which the Mughal emperor transferred the diwani and widi it effective possession of die huge province of Bengal to the East India Company. No one could doubt the scale of what had been acquired in so short a time in terms of land, people or resources. How these vast gains could be turned to account, by whom and with what consequences, aroused eager anticipation, a well as serious misgivings, as die British state and many private individuals tried to exploit the opportunities opened up by British military prowess. In so doing they revealed much about the strengdis and weaknesses of British overseas expansion in the eighteenth century.

I Shall be considering England during the long eleventh century—from the 990s, the Battle of Maldon and Byrhtferth of Ramsey's ‘life of Oswald’, to the 1130s, die world of Geoffrey Gaimar. I shall do so in the light of a situation where, on the one hand, historians of Anglo-Saxon England commonly refer to gentlemen and gentry in their period but do so casually, as though their presence there is something to be taken for granted, and, on the other, where scholars who regard themselves as historians of the gentry seem reluctant to admit that the phenomenon they study can have existed much before 1200, if then. In the first part of this paper I shall argue that there was a gentry in eleventh-century England, that below the great lords there were many layers of society whose members shared the interests and pursuits of the great, i.e. we should accept the terminology of historians of Anglo-Saxon England from Sir Frank Stenton onwards. I shall also argue that in all probability many vigorous members of die Anglo-Saxon gentry were knights, using the word ‘knight’ to mean the kind of person whom, in the late twelfth century, Richard FitzNigel described as an active knight (strenuus miles), i.e. someone whose characteristic and indispensable possessions were his body armour and the requisite horses

One of the abiding characteristics of the English gentry has been its system of social gradation. And yet the origins of this system have received relatively little attention from historians. Of course, we are well used to describing a local society of knights and esquires in the fourteenth century and of accommodating the addition of gentlemen, albeit with some hesitancy, in the fifteenth. Historians have highlighted the sumptuary legislation of 1363, which points to the gentility of the esquire, and the Statute of Additions of 1413 which gives legal recognition to the mere gentleman. We may understand that neither piece of legislation is to be taken entirely at face value. Nevertheless they are recognised to be significant markers in the evolution of a graded gentry.

The growth of the study of medieval society is a process which falls well within living memory. Precisely how old it might be considered to be is a matter of definition. Taking social history to be the empirical reconstruction of past social and political systems, structures and their properties, then social history was a phenomenon of the inter-war period in Britain. If one looks for a significant date to mark its full emergence (so far as we are considering later medieval society) then there is no date more significant than 1929, when Frank Merry Stenton delivered the Ford Lectures, which set in train the publication of The First Century of English Feudalism; a seminal event in the writing of social and medieval history in this country.

War was more important to medieval knights than to many of their historians. They have been more concerned to debate shifts in the social status and numbers of knights, than to examine their military role. Varied scenarios of knights rising in social status, gaining a more powerful political voice as they became wealthier, and of declining knights, increasingly aggrieved at their failure to maintain their position in society, have vied one with another. Military obligation has, of course, proved to be a battlefield on paper for many historians, but debate on this has not always been informed by awareness of the muddy realities of war. It would be reasonable to suppose that major transformations in the social position of English knights were a response to, or at least a reflection of, changes in their military functions. Yet the only link that is commonly made is the assumption that changes in the social position of English knights were in some measure the result of the rising costs of the military equipment they needed to possess.

Institutions and economies underwent profound changes between 1500 and 1800 in most parts of Europe. Differences among societies decreased in some ways, but markedly increased in others. Do these changes and these variations tell us anything about the relationship between social organisation and economic well-being? This is a very wide question, and even the qualified ‘yes’ with which I will answer it, though based on the detailed empirical research of some hundreds of local studies undertaken in the past few decades, is far from definitive. Many of these studies were inspired by an influential set of hypotheses, known as the ‘theory of proto-industrialisation’. While this theory has been enormously fruitful, its conclusions about European economic and social development are no longer tenable. This paper offers an alternative interpretation of the evidence now available about proto-industrialisation in different European societies, and explores its implications by investigating one region of Central Europe between 1580 and about 1800.