From the earliest moments of the French Revolution, the Midi displayed its own special characteristics within the revolutionary phenomenon. This was the chosen land of political extremes. The outbreak of the Revolution rapidly engendered an aggressive strain of radicalism which, by 1792, had made Marseille in particular the epitome of patriotism, enshrined in the association of its name with the battle-song of the Revolution and in the rôle of its militant fédérés in the overthrow of the monarchy. At the same time, militant counter-revolution appeared with mass support in the Midi well before it achieved notoriety in the Vendée. There were peasant-based insurrections in the Massif Central each year from 1790 to 1795, whilst the Bagarre de Nîmes in 1790 was the first major manifestation of royalist plotting that was to trouble many major low-land towns for the rest of the Revolution. In the earlier years of the decade, the Midi frequently descended into anarchy involving, in its most spectacular instances, civil war in the Comtat Venaissin in 1791 and armed expeditions in the name of patriotism between rival towns in 1791 and 1792. By late 1792, radical groups in Lyon, Marseille and Aix were articulating well developed proto-terrorist programmes. Indeed, at Marseille they had got to the point of largely ignoring the central government by changing the location of administrations and establishing extraordinary institutions. In 1793, it was in the Midi that Federalism developed to the extreme, requiring a campaign and sieges by regular troops for its defeat. Toulon went as far as to call in the English.

‘The “county”’, said Maitland, ‘is not a mere stretch of land, a governmental district; it is an organized body of men; it is a comnumitas’. For the most part it has not been medievalists who have taken up that theme but historians of the early modern period. Much recent writing on the politics of sixteenth and seventeenth century England has turned on the county and its institutions, for it was there that the ambitions and loyalties of the gentry often found expression and the factions and rivalries of the 1640s first developed. The grand dénouement of the Civil War has stimulated historians to look beneath national and parliamentary affairs to the attitudes of the shires, which so frequently obstructed and distorted the policies devised at Whitehall and Westminster.

During the closing stages of the second world war in Europe, the British and the Americans, together with the governments they supported, were often faced with the problem of dealing with armed resistance movements which they themselves had actively fostered to help in the fight against the Germans. Despite significant national and even local variations, the root cause of the problem was the same everywhere: the resistance was a political as well as a military phenomenon. Many of its members did not regard their task as complete with the departure of the last German soldier. They saw defeat and occupation as the inevitable result of pre-war political, social and economic structures which they were determined to transform. While the allies and the governments they supported were themselves often in favour of change, they were rarely prepared to go either as far or as fast as some elements of the resistance desired. Confrontation was therefore almost inevitable.

One evening early in the war, the First Lord of the Admiralty and Mrs Churchill invited the Prime Minister and Mrs Chamberlain to dine. By a happy chance the conversation turned to Chamberlain's early life in the Bahamas. He told the story of the struggle to recruit the family's fortunes by growing sisal on a remote and windswept island in the Bahamas, ‘living nearly naked, struggling with labour difficulties and every other kind of obstacle, and with the town of Nassau as the only gleam of civilization’. Chamberlain described how, for all his exertions, the scheme had failed. In the Chamberlain family, it appeared, it was felt that though they loved him dearly they were sorry to have lost £50,000. ‘I was fascinated’, Churchill recorded after the war, ‘by the way Mr. Chamberlain warmed as he talked, and by the tale itself, which was one of gallant endeavour. I thought to myself, “What a pity Hitler did not know when he met this sober English politician with his umbrella at Berchtesgaden, Godesberg, and Munich that he was actually talking to a hard-bitten pioneer from the outer marches of the British Empire!” ‘

No historian of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is likely to ignore the hostile environment in which the western settlers found themselves and the effects of military needs on their politics, government and society. The Latins’ war establishment has long been the subject of study, with historians naturally concentrating upon the actual manifestations of conflict: invasions and defence, feudal institutions and the use of mercenaries, castle-building and tactics in the field. Other less tangible factors, quite as important in contributing to the stresses to which society in Palestine was subjected, are rarely considered. The Latins believed themselves to be engaged in a sacred task in maintaining Christian presence on the holiest soil in Christendom; others believed this too, and military reverses in the East aroused in the West bitter criticism of them. They found themselves, moreover, in a situation in which, for reasons outside their control, permanant peace with their Muslim neighbours was impossible. It is this ideological background to the history of the defence of the kingdom that is discussed in this paper.

From a selfish point of view the historian has reason to be grateful for war, for it has been a prodigious generator of record and stimulator of commentary and chronicle. This, I suppose, is merely another way of stating the adage ‘Happy is the country which has no history’. In modern times it seems to have become normal for the belligerent powers to produce massive official histories of the wars in which they were engaged. These will serve to demonstrate that the cause was just, that the population, troops and civilians alike, displayed exemplary courage and fortitude, that their leaders had an unerring grasp of strategy and could inspire love and devotion, and above all that the country concerned somehow acquired, under the strains and shock of war, a unity, even a personality, which transcended the pre-occupations, the ambitions, squabbles, triumphs, boredom and tribulations of the host of individual men and women who happened at the time to compose it. There seems, in contrast, to be much less enthusiasm for the idea of an official history of a country in peacetime, save (no doubt significantly) in the case of totalitarian, collectivist countries whose régimes are perpetually conscious of the need for self-advertisement and self-justification.

Many voices prophesied a destructive war for England on the eve of the Civil War. The miseries of the conflicts in Germany had been closely followed in the earliest newspapers published in England. With the outbreak of the Irish rebellion in 1641, and the consequent bloodshed, the wars were only a step away. In 1642 newsbooks and sermons vied with each other to paint the blackest picture possible of the evils in store for England, once it seemed that, at last, the nation was to be swallowed up in the general European conflagration.

For our ancestors the end of the twenty-year conflict with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France came with the signing of what was called the ‘General Peace’ in April 1814. All over the country the occasion was celebrated with thanksgiving services, public feasts, open-air sports, fireworks and processions with tableaux depicting Wellington, Blucher, the Tsar Alexander and the vanquished Bonaparte. At Gainsborough in Lincolnshire the future Chartist Thomas Cooper, then nine years old, and some other boys dressed themselves up in ribbons and hats, labelled with the names of these contemporary military heroes (Cooper was Wellington), and went round the neighbouring squires and farmers soliciting money. They sang some of Bishop Ken's hymns and at theend, in imitation of what they had heard on procession day, shouted ‘Peace and Plenty! God Save the King!’ followed by three cheers, for which one benevolent old squire gave them a whole half-crown.

Any historical contrast between the manner in which the two major wars fought in the first half of the twentieth century came to an end has to start from the same sets of reference points. Neither the war of 1914–18 nor that of 1939–45 was a single war. Each comprised and interrelated set of wars. Their endingsfound the victors unready and surprised, their preparations for the processes of peace-making unrehearsed and unconcerted. The processes of peace-making themselves were therefore long drawn out in time and overtaken by subsequent events.

In 1887 Charles Booth addressed the Royal Statistical Society on the condition and occupations of the inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets, after which Leone Levi, a well-known statistician of the hard school, posed a testing question:

‘Who was a poor man? … The author [Andrew Mearns, writer of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London] had not mentioned the causes of poverty … His own impression was that poverty proper in the district which had been described was more frequently produced by vice, extravagance and waste, or by unfitness for work, the result in many cases of immoral habits, than by real want of employment or low wages.’

Roger Whitley, a Flintshire royalist, outlining in 1658 the terms which Charles should offer the Presbyterians to induce them to join in a royalist rising, included a reference to the purchasers of confiscated property: ‘as for Purchases of Church, Crowne or other lands, they shall either peacibly enjoy theire possessions, or be reimbursed the charge …’. In the discussions and speculations in the two years preceding the Restoration, it was commonly assumed that the interests of the purchasers would exercise a major influence on the course of events. Some observers thought these interests presented an insuperable obstacle to a restoration; others supposed, like Roger Whidey, that in order to bring about a restoration it would be necessary to propitiate the purchasers by promising them either confirmation of their purchases or compensation. In the spring of 1660, when a restoration of the King on terms seemed the most likely outcome, James Sharp, the representative of the Scottish Presbyterians in London, thought that the indemnity and the purchases were ‘the most sticking part’ of the articles to be laid before the Convention; and the French ambassador believed that the confirmation of confiscated lands would be ‘one of the principal questions of the accommodation’. The purpose of this paper is to consider how the interests of the purchasers were dealt with in 1660.