The late thirteenth and fourteenth-century civilians made a distinctive contribution to the theory of the state, because they were seeking to apply a specific juristic language to account for the existence of contemporary territorial states. Fully worked out state concepts are to be found in the works of Bartolus and Baldus, although elements necessary for the construction of a concept of the state exist in earlier Commentators. The theories of Bartolus and Baldus are prime illustrations that the concept of the state is historically fluid: they do not possess our concept of the state; indeed their theories are highly complex, combining aspects which are distinctively late medieval with others which can justifiably be termed elements of a modern idea of the state.

In a paper presented on St George's day one may be forgiven for thinking of England, and not even simply of England as a nation but of provincial England, described by Professor Everitt as ‘a union of partially-independent county states’. He and other historians have paid fruitful attention to the ‘county communities’—and the urban communities too—of Tudor and Stuart England. But much of their research has been devoted to the period before 1660, and most of what little we know about the provinces under Charles II and James II is concerned with economic change, landownership, the professions, political faction and religious persecution. Recent work on government in the localities during the Interregnum has suggested that, contrary to earlier suppositions, ‘changes are often hard to seek’ and that local authorities carried out their duties ‘in much the same way as their predecessors’. Nevertheless, the impression survives that after the Restoration provincial government, like Punch, was not what it had been, that it did not recover from the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, that local governors were left to their own devices, and that inertia set in largely because of ‘the long decline in central interference in local administration’.

The central problem facing the student of public order in England in the late middle ages is to reconcile two conflicting lines of research. On one hand the institutional historians, through their studies of the central courts at Westminister, the provincial circuits of assize and gaol delivery and the justices of the peace and coroners in the counties, have proved beyond doubt the sophistication of the late-medieval legal system. On the other hand the historians of crime have shown equally clearly that the courts were often incapable of keeping the peace or of doing justice. Indeed the late-medieval period has long been notorious as one of widespread uncontained disorder. Reviewing the secondary literature on the subject Professor Bellamy concluded: ‘Not one investigator has been able to indicate even a few years of effective policing in the period 1290–1485.’

‘Since he isn't able to sell his books,’ Erasmus said of a fellow scholar in 1518, ‘he goes about offering them as gifts to important people; he makes more that way than if he had sold them.’ Erasmus's shrewd observation to his friend Tunstall has considerable currency among historians today, anxious as we are about the book market. But writing his Colloquies a few years later, the great humanist also envisaged other purposes for giving books. At the end of a banquet, during which the gifts of God and human charity have been discussed, the host presents books to his guests, suiting each one to their learning, piety or vocation. His friends thank him not only for the gifts, but for the advice and compliments that went with them. ‘It is I who thank you,’ the host insists, ‘for being so good about my simple style of living and for refreshing my mind with your conversation.’

‘The criminal law’, said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen with his usual trenchancy, ‘stands to the passion of revenge in much the same relation as marriage to the sexual appetite’. The basic reason for the existence of the criminal law is not to punish ‘offences against society’ (whatever they might be) but to allow the private passion for revenge to be released in a controlled way.

The notion that London conforms to an urban crisis model in the seventeenth century has recently been challenged in a bold reassessment of how the City adapted to change and coped with its problems at a grass-roots level. Too much stress, it is argued, has been placed upon disorder in the capital, wrongly depicted as constantly prone to rioting and criminality, to the neglect of its ordered and stable features which enabled London to weather a period of unprecedented political upheaval without a popular uprising. Yet has disorder in seventeenth-century London received too much emphasis, and just how effective were the endeavours of municipal and other authorities to maintain peace on the streets? This paper will attempt to gauge the seriousness of the problem posed by periodic rioting in the capital, and the efficacy of measures of riot prevention and control, in the period from James I's accession to Charles I's departure from London, allegedly driven out by uncontrollable tumult and sedition, in January 1642. No answer to these questions would be complete, however, if the investigation were simply confined to the area under the lord mayor's jurisdiction, for disturbances which began in the suburbs could soon cross over the City's limits or the citizens themselves could participate in disorders outside those limits.

Eighteenth-Century England witnessed an extraordinary transformation in the capacity to disseminate information. Improvements in communications, particularly the turnpike roads and the postal service, together with the multiplication of printing presses and newspapers, underpinned what has been described as an ‘information explosion’. The changes which these developments wrought in the political and commercial life of the nation are increasingly familiar to historians. Their impact on eighteenth-century crime and policing is less so.

My subject is the new police of the nineteenth century. It was said of policemen in Mid-Wales in the later part of that century that, after five years of looking at sheep, their minds turned to emigration, drink and suicide. Writing this paper has been a comparable travail. My initial enthusiasm for the topic has been somewhat crushed by the weight of evidence and the models of police historians. The evidence is vast and problematical. Thisis not the world of the historian of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Great parliamentary and government papers, an ever-widening range of local and national statistics, countless newspaper files, court records and police books await the historian of the nineteenth century. Much material is still being catalogued, and a great deal of police evidence has yet to be collected.

‘History is more backward in Ireland than in any other country’, wrote J. R. Green's Anglo-Irish widow fiercely in 1912. Here alone there is a public opinion which resents its being freely written, and there is an opinion, public or official, I scarcely know which to call it, which prevents its being freely taught. And between the two, history has a hard fight for life. Take the question of writing. History may conceivably be treated as a science. Or it may be interpreted as a majestic natural drama or poem. Either way has much to be said for it. Both ways have been nobly attempted in other countries. But neither of these courses has been thought of in Ireland. Here history has a peculiar doom. It is enslaved in the chains of the Moral Tale—the good man (English) who prospered, and the bad man (Irish) who came to a shocking end.

Notions are potent but nebulous, often direct and determining in their effect but themselves indeterminate in origin and structure. My title is designed to circumvent two lines of thought which have largely circumscribed the study of inheritance in the eleventh and twelfth centuries hitherto. First, I shall say something here and there about succession, but it will be only a subsidiary part of the argument. Heritable title was not diminished by unsettled rules of succession. On the contrary, in the eleventh century as in the thirteenth, it was emphasised and nourished by the claims and counter-claims of competitors. In such disputes the opposing arguments were couched in a common language; it is the language, therefore, that will be my first concern. Second, for this same reason I shall also pay scant attention to the jurisdictional aspects of inheritance. To be sure, in post-Conquest England inheritance amounted not to a title but to a claim upon a lord; heritable title was realised when the lord admitted it; no concession by a tenant was as secure as it could be made until his lord had confirmed it.