The importance of the rôle of the industrial inventor in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution is recognized by everybody: Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, John Kay, James Watt, James Neilsen, George Stephenson, William Murdoch, Josiah Wedgwood, even schoolboys can reel off their names with glee, and their careers have mostly been investigated in satisfactory detail by economic historians. But the rôle of the merchant entrepreneur—their natural partner and alter ego—has been far less exhaustively studied. Those who are well known are few, and those whose careers have been examined in detail even fewer. As a class they do not even occur in the indices of the two standard text-books on the Industrial Revolution—those by Mantoux and Ashton; Matthew Boulton is one of the few individuals amongst them who have avoided total obscurity, and he is now receiving adequate treatment.

The one important, indeed invaluable, source for the history of the council in the early-fifteenth century is the Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 10 Richard II–33 Henry VIII, edited by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas and published by the Record Commission in seven volumes in the years 1834 to 1837, but in so far as the title of this work implies a formal and continuous record of proceedings it is misleading, for, unlike parliament, the council left no regular account of its activities. The Rolls of Parliament, even though their account of the proceedings is one-sided, official and incomplete, do at least record such bare facts as the dates of meeting, the names of the Speakers, and usually the dates of adjournment; but there are no similar rolls for the council. The phrase ‘privy council’ in Nicolas's title is also something of an anachronism, at least for the early part of the period covered. At this time the future privy council was generally known simply as the council or the king's council, although it was sometimes called the continual council to distinguish it from the larger body known to contemporaries as the great council. This distinctionis usually made in official records, but chroniclers often referred indifferently to either body as the council, and the differences are not now always apparent to us.

The St Albans chroniclers, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, present a unique version of the documents of 1215. This, as it appears in Wendover's chronicle, consists, first, of a text of Magna Carta drawn from the 1215 version for its introduction and first clause, and thereafter from the re-issues of 1217 and 1225; secondly, of a text of the Charter of the Forest based on the versions of 1217 and 1225, and in the St Albans version falsely attributed to King John; finally, of a version of the forma securitatis of 1215 which includes sections found nowhere else, either in record or in chronicle. It is, in short, a complete muddle, and it was not improved by Matthew Paris, for he copied it into his Chronica Majora and then later proceeded to patch it with sections drawn from the 1215 text.

If it is true that any worth-while historiographical analysis aims at a better understanding of past events or institutions, the present subject is in no need of justification. For it is admitted on all sides that the medieval empire constituted within the central medieval period a historic entity which to a very large extent shaped and influenced the destiny of many parts of Central, Eastern and Southern, and to a lesser extent also of Western, Europe. No particular effort is required to visualize what great attraction the vast extent of the medieval empire, whose core was thoroughly German, can easily exercise upon minds which are susceptible to the view that the present should continue the past. Amongst German historians there has been for exactly a century an almost morbid obsession with the medieval empire, not, however, in its purely historical setting, but in its bearing upon modern Germany. Why was it that German historians have debated the question so hotly whether or not medieval imperial policy was justified? After all, to all intents and purposes the medieval empire has been dead for more than 600 years: why should it then provoke so much excitement, so much heartsearching, so much emotional historiography? Nothing even faintly resembling this phenomenon do we find in English or French historiography.

Although the Domesday survey has long been used effectively to illuminate many aspects of English history in the eleventh century, attempts to use it for reconstructing the contemporary rural landscape and structure of landholding have been less frequent and less successful. This has partly been caused by the fact that most commentators since the days of Maitland and Vinogradoff have concentrated on the making of Domesday rather than on its actual contents. However, even the series of Domesday Geographies by Professor Darby and his collaborators is marred by the failure to determine the meaning of the formula terra unius carucae or its equivalents. This expression has been translated in the present paper as ‘teamland’, rather than the ‘ploughland’ favoured by most modern writers on Domesday, because use of the latter synonym would prejudice the later argument by presupposing the argued identification of the Domesday ‘land for one plough’ with the field-hide or carucate found in later manorial records.

When Francis Egerton, third duke of Bridgewater, died in 1803, he left his canal and coal mines to a body of three trustees. Financial interest was thereby severed from control, for whilst the income from the properties went to the late duke's nephew, George, Lord Gower, later to be marquess of Stafford and first duke of Sutherland, the management was committed to a superintendent, who was appointed by the will and vested thereby with an almost arbitrary and exclusive authority.

Erasmus' Folly, orating in 1511, accused modern theologians of treating the scriptures ‘as if they were of wax’. Similar charges were to be commonplace in the sixteenth century. John Fisher, preaching in 1521, maintained that heretics have always ‘turned the wrong side of the scriptures outward, following their own brain and fantasy’. Thomas More, also, criticized the Reformers because they ‘abuse’ the scriptures, comparing Tyndale in 1532 to ‘a butterfly fallen on a lime twig, which the more it striveth and fluttereth, ever the faster it hangeth’. On this conservative side, the Erasmian image was personalized by the Dutch Albert Pighius, who referred in 1538 to ‘someone’ as saying ‘both truly and merrily’: ‘The scripture is like a nose of wax, that easily suffereth itself to be drawn backward and forward, and to be moulded and fashioned this way and that way, and howsoever ye list’. Now, that idea of a ‘nose of wax’ had been used against the papists by Tyndale in 1532: they ‘make it a nose of wax, and wrest it this way and that way, till it agree’.

The emergence of majority rule in English parliamentary elections has a twofold interest. On the one hand it concerns the history of parliamentary government in England, and in that respect it is primarily an English affair. On the other hand, however, it is relevant also to a much broader theme. Maitland once said that one of the great books that remain to be written is The History of the Majority. There are a large number of historical phenomena which could illuminate that manysided subject. One such phenomenon is the election of representatives for the Englishand subsequently for the Britishparliament. Those elections have been going on with astonishing regularity for close upon seven hundred years. So they provide for the history of the majority one thread of development which, though only single, is at any rate both long and strikingly continuous.