Robert Banks Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool and prime minister since 1812, joined his colleague and eventual successor George Canning at a civic banquet held to honor them in Bristol on January 12, 1825. Canning told his wife that the mayor and council really wanted Liverpool and “would take no denial.” Sheriffs met the party and escorted them in procession to the Mansion House. Notables from surrounding counties joined Bristol merchants and tradesmen to honor the visitors. The Whig-leaning Bristol Mercury, which excoriated what it called the Tory system of William Pitt the Younger and gave Canning only cautious praise, acknowledged Liverpool's talents, while calling his father “one of our most able financiers.” The event congratulated ministers for reviving trade and bringing the country through a difficult transition to peace after the long struggle with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

Amidst the plaudits, Liverpool thanked Bristol's Merchant Venturers for conferring upon him the freedom of their society. Britain owed commerce its prosperity, which gave the landed interest its present revival. No interest, Liverpool declared, stood alone, “all were links in a great social chain, all connected and all dependent on each other for that mutual welfare he was pleased to witness and believed to be increasing.” Deliberately pitched to flatter his listeners, Liverpool's words expressed his sincere commitment both to trade and a conception of social relations that guided his public life. With trade the mainspring of British prosperity, he viewed society as an interlocking network of interests governed by a patrician elite acting for the public interest. Its leadership upheld the ordered liberty that secured property and lawful authority while allowing private initiative the widest possible scope. When toasted after dinner, Liverpool replied that his merits lay in good intentions and best efforts for the country. Neither would have succeeded without “the talents of my excellent and able colleagues.” Their united efforts, backed by commercial and other great interests, had brought peace and a prosperity that he fervently hoped would continue to increase. A rhetorical flourish captured Liverpool's habit of downplaying his own part and sharing credit with colleagues.

THE chapters in this section have, respectively, outlined commemorative practice within All Saints’ and explored the archive that survives for the Halleways’ chantry. Some of the themes arising should now be considered, to make some observations concerning practice both within All Saints’ and also Bristol itself.

‘And what good they did in their days’: Implications of commemoration in All Saints’

By 1470, the endowment income that the churchwardens of All Saints’ relied upon had long been steady at some ￡8 per annum. This derived from property, much the most lucrative of which was the Green Lattice devised by Alice Halye in the late thirteenth century and, to a lesser degree, from rents of assize, of which William Newbery's, standing at 12s. per annum, was the most generous. But the prognosis for parish finances would not have been encouraging. Rents of assize had become increasingly unreliable and, even if they had all been operational, at some 25s. per annum their yield was hardly princely. Moreover, while the parish had long maintained the Green Lattice, it had become dilapidated by the early 1440s, explaining why Richard Haddon underwrote extensive repairs in order to restore it. Such a commission, however, was redolent of a spirit of enterprise which, in the decades preceding the mid-century, began to transform the parish.

POLICY-MAKING BY THE ELITE

The first signs of this spirit found expression in the campaign to rebuild the south, or Cross, aisle, coming to fruition in the 1430s; this was financed in part by funds raised from parishioners, but was apparently primed by gifts from the wealthy, the Halleways prominent among them. Following shortly after, in the 1440s, Richard Haddon rebuilt the north, or Lady, aisle. The families leading these initiatives were themselves closely connected, for not only did Richard Haddon have links with Thomas and Joan Halleway and their associates, with both Thomas and Richard having served with John Gyllard as executors in the disposition of Christine Haddon's estate, but Richard Haddon and Richard Hatter also served as bailiffs of Bristol in 1443.

A desire to establish a timeline for fashion details in sixteenth-century England led this author into a close study of portraits from that period. Accurate dating of portraits can be a difficult task. The portraits rarely include a specific year as an inscription. Some portraits have an inscription of the sitter's name and perhaps an age as well, and personal records can sometimes provide the dates of occasions when the sitter would have been likely to have a portrait painted. Some portraits carry the name of the artist, so the time frame can be narrowed down to the period when this artist was active. Sometimes, however, a portrait depicts an unidentified sitter painted by an unidentified artist, or different dates are suggested for the same painting by different sources. In order to compensate for this, the author set out to build a reasonably reliable timeline by comparing only headdress and hairstyle, as these two fashion elements are more easily changed overnight than a whole dress. This comparison led straight into the minute study of the French hood and its many variants over time and location and resulted in a set of theories regarding the construction of the French hood, the timeline of the French hood, and the evolution and purpose of the feature known as the bongrace.

Other attempts to reconstruct a French hood have been published in recent years by Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies in The Tudor Tailor and Sarah Lorraine in “Reconstructing the French Hood,” but the results do not to this author look much like the iconic headdress associated with the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Grey (for nine days), Mary I, and Elizabeth I.

The research material used for this study includes not only paintings and drawings of the English headdresses but also depictions of the hoods worn in France. A major difference between finished paintings and preparatory drawings is color. In a painting, the artist would portray the colors of the goldsmith's work, set in two curved lines on either side of a crescent shape (usually either white or red), and he would define the visible parts of the oreillette (the coif covering the ears; see detailed discussion below), but the rest of the French hood is black and frequently set on a very dark background.

SLIGHTLY AFTER FIVE o'clock on May 11, 1812, John Bellingham shot Spencer Perceval in the lobby of the House of Commons. As Perceval staggered forward with a single cry and fell dead, Bellingham seemed to have thrown politics back into confusion. The Times believed “the firm is entirely broken up by the death of the chief partner.” Appearances mislead. Perceval's cabinet united behind Liverpool, who saw the prospects as “doubtful, but not desperate.” After grasping for alternatives, the prince regent appointed Liverpool prime minister. Cabinet making and domestic politics soon afterwards led into the complexities of peacemaking abroad.

Perceval's assassination shocked a political elite focused on economic trouble and an acrimonious debate over the Orders in Council. Bellingham, a failed merchant driven to insanity by a grievance over his imprisonment in Russia, shot Perceval as a target of opportunity. Henry Brougham had finished examining a witness before the Commons when the shot was heard. Business continued as those present outside took Perceval's body to the speaker's apartments. Bellingham admitted his guilt. Isaac Gascoyne, a Liverpool MP, identified him and the speaker ordered the murderer taken into custody. As news reached the Lords with a cry “Mr. Perceval is shot,” peers crowded into the chamber. Eldon, who had passed Bellingham earlier on a stairwell, called them to order as witnesses confirmed the report. Tears overcame both Eldon and Castlereagh the next day when they conveyed the prince regent's wish that provision be made for Perceval's family. Not since the Duke of Buckingham's murder in 1627 had an English minister been assassinated. Plebeian crowds celebrated in Nottingham and Leicester while others at Wolverhampton exclaimed that “now the great Man in the Parliament House is dead, we shall have a big Loaf “ seemed an alarming portent. Amidst elite unease over such talk of revolution, Canning noted the difficulty loyalists had in seeing the murder as an entirely apolitical act. Bellingham's trial and execution still passed quickly without event.

After Louis was back in France he continued to send generous assistance to the Holy Land in terms of men and money. His brother Alphonse began planning a new crusade almost as soon as he returned from Syria, but the popes continued to devote their energy and resources to their bitter struggle against the Hohenstaufens. Frederick had died in 1250, leaving the Regno (the kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy) to King Conrad IV, absent in Germany, and appointing his bastard son Manfred regent of both the Regno and North Italy. Excommunicated by Innocent IV, Conrad died on 21 May 1254. In two years Manfred established his rule over the entire Regno, and in August 1258 he succeeded in having himself crowned King of Sicily in Palermo. By the end of 1261 he was a significant threat to the Papal State. In 1262 and 1263 Pope Urban IV authorised negotiations to transfer the Sicilian crown to Charles of Anjou as a papal fief, a project designated from the start as a crusade, and in May 1264 the papal legate Simon of Brie was sent to France to conclude these negotiations and organise the preaching there. He was granted the power to commute the crusading vows of all those in the kingdom of France and the other lands of his legation on condition they instead participate in Charles of Anjou's Sicilian campaign. Charles was crowned on 6 January 1266 at St Peter's in Rome and immediately set out to conquer his fief from Manfred, whom he defeated and killed at the battle of Benevento in 1266. In 1267–1268 young Conradin, the only surviving legitimate grandson of Frederick II, attempted to regain control of the Regno, but was crushed at the battle of Tagliacozzo on 23 August 1268 and then executed.

This overlapped with the period sometimes referred to as the ‘Great Interregnum’. After William of Holland's death in 1256 until the election of Rudolf of Habsburg in 1273 there was no established Holy Roman Emperor. The electors were unable to agree on a German prince, and the two initial candidates for the imperial crown were Richard of Cornwall, brother of King Henry III of England, and King Alfonso X of Castile.

Exhortation, separation and departure

In 1239 the treaty made between Frederick II and al-Kāmil in 1229 came to an end. Thibaut de Champagne, who in 1230 had first publicly declared his intention to go on crusade in anticipation of the end of the truce, became king of Navarre in 1234, and the crusade was preached at the end of that year. Preparations were complicated, and five years later, in the summer of 1239, Pope Gregory IX sent out agents to preach the crusade again, in both France and England. The emperor Frederick had been hoping to lead it but was prevented by events in Italy, and Thibaut was left in charge. By early summer he was ready to set sail, and he arrived at Acre on 1 September, where an army of around 1,000 knights assembled during the next few days. This period saw the production of a number of preaching songs, and also of songs of separation, in whose development Thibaut himself was particularly innovative.

Thibaut preceded his departure by presiding over the burning of more than 180 heretics at Mont-Aime in Champagne. According to Michael Lower, this powerfully bolstered both his finances and his public image as a penitential crusader. He himself contributed to the preaching of the crusade (RS 6):

His composition draws on many of the motifs and arguments typical of crusade songs of exhortation: the hope of salvation and fear of hell, compassion for Our Lord's suffering, the need to avenge it and liberate the holy places that rightfully belong to God, the concern for personal reputation, the cowardice and lechery of those who stay behind.

In the aftermath of the 1987 Mineworkers Strike, some forty thousand workers were dismissed and sent home. A large cohort of these was from the Transkei bantustan, in what is now the Eastern Cape. Many were from Pondoland on what is known as the Wild Coast, with its steeply rolling hills, indigenous forests and ragged coastline. Despite its natural beauty, this was then and still is one of the poorest places in South Africa, deeply dependent on incomes from migrant labour, and one of the areas hardest hit by job losses in the 1987 strike. Little did we know at the time that this was just the start of a decade-long period in which the mines would haemorrhage more than three hundred thousand jobs.

For the men sent home on the buses, the transition from a trade union battleground to a very different terrain of struggle in labour-sending areas across southern Africa was a significant rupture. The considerable power that arose from collective action on the mines did not translate into any equivalent form of power for ex-miners suddenly dispersed onto the outskirts of the economy, nor did the strategies used on the mines have any traction in facing down the competitive market pressures soon to confront them in the co-ops and other forms of enterprise.

So, while there was a political continuity of purpose, this could not be translated into a continuity of practice. Yet the early patterns of action saw the ex-miners attempting to create just such continuities in both their organisational structures and strategies. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Transkei.

Two of the main protagonists – and antagonists – amongst the exmineworkers in the Transkei were Elliot Nomazele Bhala and Sipho Nqwelo. Bhala, who had been the Chair of NUM’s notoriously violent Randfontein Estates Mine in Westonaria, took the reins of leadership amongst ex-miners in the Eastern Cape.

Randfontein Estates Mine was notorious for an incident in 1986, during which mineworkers had paid a sangoma (traditional healer) for muti (traditional medicine) to make them invincible. In particular, the sangoma promised it would make police bullets turn to water.

The previous discussion pointed to al-Hakkamat's ability to exercise agency and influence in all the settings in which they are involved. Their emigration from the village to settle in Nyala town suggests that they have become associated with different social and political settings, where they have encountered fortuitous or planned events that have functioned as turning points in the journey of their development. This new context has necessitated readjustment and the development of their personal identity to meet the challenges encountered. Some of the critical incidents and the way they have impacted on al-Hakkamat are explored here.

IDENTITY AND CHANGE

Identity, community, territory and culture are not natural, static and/or taken-for-granted orders, but are discursively and historically constructed through certain modes of power relations and resistance of the subjects to change or form their identity (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997, p. 18). Resistance in this respect is a form of power that ‘categorises the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity … a form of power which makes individuals subjects’. Identities are thus dynamic processes that are changing throughout the course of personal development when people remodel characters and reposition their identities to suit changing and challenging circumstances.

In the town of Nyala, al-Hakkamat encountered multifaceted forces that challenged their rurally acquired skills. These mainly comprised government influence and urbanisation processes. In adapting to these challenges, we must bear in mind that institutions and interest groups usually seek to forge solidarity and political alliances with (utility) groups across new sections and territorial boundaries in order to fulfil their own objectives. Sometimes these processes involve methods that restrict the range of choices available to individuals, who will be required to command respect and obedience to the rules and/or to act in what may look as against the norms. The NCP/NIF government of Sudan has designed processes and measures to mould the identities of the followers and to ensure a firm control over them so that they serve the regime's doctrine and interests. Al-Hakkamat are a living testimony of a utility group upon which the NCP exercised co-opting procedures that enabled the full manipulation of their identity and agency and directed them to serve the vested interests of the ruling elite.

INVESTIGATIONS of religious belief and behaviour in England in the century and more before the Reformation, and especially studies either of particular towns or rural locations, have tended to rely upon contemporary wills. Not only do large numbers of these documents survive but they also shed welcome light on personal circumstances and, more importantly, on individuals’ convictions and preferences. Wills provide an acceptable means for introducing some of the more important ‘players’ within All Saints’ and also establishing a basic understanding of aspects of their conduct. Nevertheless, much testamentary material has clearly been lost. Some forty wills survive for All Saints’ parishioners for the period 1400–1550, with notably sparse coverage for those dying in the first part of the period. While wills generally tend to reflect the wealthier ranks of parish society, even among so small a sample variety is evident. Some testators occupied themselves mainly with family interests, concentrating on inheritance strategies to the neglect of any detailed spiritual provision. Others, although evidently wealthy, left brief and uninformative wills, while a few, of apparently moderate estate, made much more detailed prescription. Moreover, while the great majority of testators depended heavily upon their parish, one or two did not. Of the latter, some had only recently ‘married into it’, like Joan Wilteshire, who exhibited a stronger allegiance to her former parish, St Mary le Port; and some evinced a closer allegiance to the fraternity of the Kalendars within All Saints’ or, simply, to another parish.

Although we tend to use the term ‘will’ as a catch-all, these documents should strictly be classified as last wills and testaments, dealing respectively – but, ordinarily, in no necessary order – with the devise of real property and/or the bequest of money and movables, often for pious purposes. Occasionally, however, the suspicion creeps in that a particular will, without any statement to the effect, in fact deals with only part of the testator's estate.

Just when I thought the manuscript for this book was done and dusted, a final reviewer came back with the comment that I am never introduced to the reader; that, in particular, an explanation is needed for how a white middle-class woman ended up running the development programme of South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers during the apartheid years. It’s not a question I had thought to answer – the focus of the book is on development strategy – it is not a memoir. Yet, once asked, it is hard to argue that race, class and gender are irrelevant.

Where, however, to start? Age eight years seems as good a place as any: in a history class at school. We were studying the Great Trek: the moment when the Boers leave the Cape, a pivotal moment for Afrikaner identity and South African history. They table a list of grievances against the British: many no doubt legitimate. The last on the list, however, registers their protest at the anti-slavery campaign led by Dr John Philip. The same picture of him as hangs in our dining room looked out of the history textbook at me with a quizzical expression that asked: so what side of history are you on?

I grew up in a family that knew the answer to that question. By the time I got to high school, my parents had started a small independent publishing company to tilt at windmills – and to contest apartheid ideology, too. David Philip Publishers operated from our home. So after school, I would often find renowned authors on the stoep, unknown poets under the lemon tree, or artists unwrapping the tissue paper from their illustrations in the lounge. They all seemed to stay for drinks. There was no question that ideas mattered – and that yours did too.

Each year my parents would go to the Frankfurt Book Fair, often leaving my sister and me in the care of Tessa Fairburn who was, at the time, an English teacher at Livingstone High School. This was a ‘coloured’ school – at a time when schools were strictly segregated by race.

Dream-visions are perhaps the most self-reflexive of medieval literary genres. They purport to open a window into the minds, indeed, to bare the very souls of their narrators, if not those of the authors themselves. Moreover, in exploring the conditions of their genesis and the materials out of which they are made, dream-visions are an intensely metafictional genre. As Helen Phillips and Nick Havely observe in the introduction to their edition of Chaucer's dream-visions, ‘Late-medieval poets seem less interested in fictional dreams as mirrors of real-life dreaming than as mirrors of the imagination, consciousness and literary composition.’ But what about the sleep that precedes dreams? Are representations of sleep merely a literary precondition that mimics the physiological one, a purely conventional stage through which narrators must pass in these texts? If so, why are some literary dreams prefaced by lengthy representations of sleep (and sometimes, as in Book of the Duchess, its ‘defaute’ [5]) while others mention it only in passing or not at all? In this essay I will explore some of the ways in which sleep serves as a particularly useful vehicle for poets whose metafictions sought to probe the boundary between physical and mental phenomena.

In ‘Sleep, Dreams, and Poetry in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess’, Lisa Kiser observes that ‘no one has yet satisfactorily explained why this Chaucerian persona is introduced in a belabored and self-conscious passage on his sleeplessness, a passage that appears to most readers to act as a lengthy digression instead of a true prologue to the poem's issues and theme’. Kiser argues that the theme of sleeplessness unifies the poem around a metaliterary concern. ‘If, as many critics have suggested, dreams are metaphors for the activities and results of the poetic imagination in medieval courtly works, then Chaucer's sleeplessness in the first lines of this poem represents not only his failure to dream, but also his inability to write’, Kiser suggests. ‘For a poet, whose business is to create well and to create often, sleeplessness results in a poetically barren state of mind, a period of disturbingly unproductive idleness.’

It took several decades for gunpowder weapons to come into use everywhere in Christian Europe and the Muslim world, but once they were acquired there was never any chance of going back. Despite the considerable limitations of early guns, no ruler (king, sultan, prince or prince bishop, doge or city corporation) failed to take up this new technology. For most of the fourteenth century, major constraints were imposed by limitations in metalworking skills and unsolved problems in the combining of the ingredients and the process of making the powder itself. By the end of the century, both issues were largely resolved, allowing the creation of new generations of weapons during the following century that changed the face of warfare. Even before this point the manufacture of gunpowder and of guns had become a major industry, but the role of master gunner had yet to achieve the importance that would be attached to it as the weapons themselves began the journey towards becoming decisive from the middle of the fifteenth century.

For most of the fourteenth century more traditional technology continued to be dominant and the engineering skills called upon by commanders during the previous century continued to be as valued as those of people making and operating the new weapons. In western Europe, the decision of the English king Edward III (1327–77) to reassert his claim to rule France led to the intermittent but seemingly interminable conflict now known as the Hundred Years War, generating regular bloody warfare (albeit usually with impact limited in time and place) from Iberia to Scotland. In the Baltic, the theocracy established by the Teutonic Knights, ejected like their fellow crusading orders from the Holy Land in 1291, ignited conflict with the pagan inhabitants of Prussia and Lithuania and, eventually, with neighbouring Christian states. In Asia Minor the dynasty founded by Osman in the early fourteenth century ultimately came to dominate the Muslim world as the Ottoman empire, on the way completing the destruction of Byzantium, briefly interrupted by the invasions of Timur, latest (and last) of the great Mongol conquerors, who marched undefeated across central Asia, India and Asia Minor at the end of the fourteenth century.

In the prequel to this volume, Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity, the authors introduced provincial colonials like myself to exciting new scholarship reconsidering the place and consequences of Sweden's and Denmark's colonial projects in northern Scandinavia, Greenland and Iceland, North America, the Caribbean and Africa. This volume revisits and expands our view of these colonial encounters in Finland, among the Sami in northern Scandinavia, and in North America. We also learn about early modern Sweden's other exploratory and mercantile ventures outside the kingdom – in South America, China and North Africa. Perhaps most important for Anglophone archaeologists and historians of the modern world, this volume illuminates the complicated diversity and arena of contested encounters that was 17th-century Sweden.

Editors Magdalena Naum and Fredrik Ekengren argue that during this period Sweden did not remain on the margins of Europe. Rather the nation and its peoples became collaborators in the creation of modern Europe. Sweden encompassed Finland, Livonia, the German provinces and Danish regions acquired in war settlements, as well as the Sami homeland in the north, Sápmi. In the opening chapter, Per Cornell and Christina Rosén contend that we must begin by distinguishing between “other” (that defined as different in particular settings) and “Other” (alterity, the unknown) in 17th-century Sweden. Home to various European immigrants, ethnic minorities, peasants and noblemen, merchants and administrators, soldiers, sailors, farmers, and craftspeople, urban and rural communities, distinctive regions, Lutherans and Orthodox and others, 17th-century Sweden is difficult to describe. The roles and powers of the state, nobility, and Church varied considerably across the century.

Cornell and Rosén examine the more than 12,000 cadastral maps drafted between 1630 and 1655, inscribing details of farms and settlements that form one measure and document of change, of othering and of the Other in Sweden. The maps themselves “othered” the landscape, severing the connection between it and the people living on it, making it unfamiliar and unknown. They also represented new, other landscape practices (such as enclosure) and Other settlement forms that scholars have too easily conflated into hamlet, village, and town. Starting in the Swedish homeland, Cornell and Rosén rightly maintain, and challenging what we thought we knew and the categories our predecessors developed to classify and analyses places, people and objects, is critically important to “encountering” early modern Sweden and Swedish colonialism anew.

The earliest silk in Denmark appears about AD 800. From the first, it evidently had great importance as a status symbol, marking the elite in both the secular aristocracy and the Church. This article brings together Danish silks up to 1200 for the first time, demonstrating their social importance. The study focuses in large part on the unique royal burial find of the Eagle Silk from Odense and other silks from graves and reliquaries, among them that of Bishop Absalon (d. 1201). The royal shrine belongs to the most important medieval monument of Denmark, and international research regards the finds from Odense to be highlights even in a European context, mostly attributing them to Byzantium. Therefore the Odense silks, along with new analyses of the silks from Sigersted Church, are central to this study. The study includes previously unpublished scientific evidence about the colours. The article also suggests probable ways in which silk reached Denmark in the period 800–1200.

Most of the silks in Denmark dating from 800 to 1200 were made in the Mediterranean region and woven as samite. (A full list of the surviving silks appears in table 2.1.) Samite weaving had been developed by the Persians of the Sassanid period (226–661). This technique exploited the qualities of the silk in the best possible way. Unlike the Chinese, who wove with a technique where the long vertical threads (the warp) predominated, the Sassanid Persians developed a technique where the weft threads predominated, covering most of the weave without interruption. If the weft thread was unspun—that is, made of reeled silk—the lustre of the silk was particularly evident. The cloth was just as smooth on the back, where the pattern appeared in the opposite colours. Silk produced in the Mediterranean in the sixth and seventh centuries was often woven in small patterns, sometimes with small birds, animals, and Christian figures. The samite weaving technique was later taken up by Byzantine silk weavers. The exclusive imperial silk, which had its origins in Byzantine and Sassanid culture, was woven in special workshops, the so-called gynaecea. Byzantine silk production was still active from 800 to 1200. Byzantine silks are known from many European churches, where they were often associated with relics. The motifs were often Oriental and inspired by Sassanid silks.

The ‘Via de Hispania’ and the ‘via Jerusalem’

The triumphant First Crusade spawned many narratives, Latin and vernacular. But romance lyric responses to the crusading movement emerge only in the 1130s, in the context not of the Holy Land but Iberia. The first troubadour, Duke William IX of Aquitaine, fought in both places. Despite the enormous contingent of southerners following Raymond of Saint-Gilles to Jerusalem, William did not take part in the main expedition to the Holy Land. In 1101 he led his own. It was a disaster. His army was ambushed and wiped out in Anatolia, though he himself managed to escape and make his way to Jerusalem, where he fulfilled his vows. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis relates that on his return with some of his companions he often recited the miseries of his captivity in the presence of kings and magnates and groups of Christians, using rhythmical verses with elegant modulations. The hypothesis that his song Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz might be one of them, and refer to his departure on crusade, has not met with acceptance; rather, the duke was anticipating his departure from the world through death.

William also fought against the Muslims in Spain, at the battle of Cutanda in June 1120. Jane Martindale observes that the Chronique de St-Maixent gives the impression that the Via de Hispania and the via Jerusalem were regarded in Poitou as being of similar or even or equal importance, so that Christian victories in Spain match those ‘in Jerusalem’, and the disaster of the Ager Sanguinis (Field of Blood) in 1119 is counterbalanced not only by King Baldwin's great victory of the following year but also by the Christian success at Cutanda. In the St-Maixent annals this appears as a great victory: ‘Count William, duke of the Aquitanians, and the king of Aragon fought with Abraham (Ibrahim) and four other Spanish kings on the field of Cutanda; and they conquered and killed 15,000 Moabites and made innumerable prisoners. They captured 2000 camels and other beasts without number, and they subjugated many castles.’

HAWKESBURY'S TENURE AS foreign secretary, despite its frustrations, staked his claim to prominence. As colleagues resigned, they gave him their seals of office for safekeeping as the only secretary of state to continue in Pitt's new government. The small detail points to the role he quietly acquired over the coming years. Moving to the Lords, as his father predicted, took Hawkesbury from the contest in the Commons among Pitt's followers for the lead. It eventually cast him as the mediator among the eventual claimants to Elijah's mantle. Hawkesbury also stepped into his father's role as George III's confidant, a position strengthened by handling quarrels between the Prince of Wales and the king. His most challenging negotiations, however, involved Pitt and Addington, whom he eventually brought together in a short-lived reconciliation. Exchanging the Foreign Office for the home department at Pitt's insistence sparked unwelcome controversy of its own from an early stage.

Pitt no longer dominated politics as the infant Hercules resting upon Chatham's shield or the giant factotum who towered over the Commons and amused himself with the globe. His speed filling leading offices in May 1804 belied the fact that he now operated within a more limited scope. By refusing to admit Fox to the cabinet, George III dashed plans for a comprehensive administration with leading men from all parliamentary factions. Pitt argued that Napoleon's conduct had superseded differences over the French Revolution. A broad government free of opposition would facilitate a new military coalition against France. It also would remove anxiety that agitation of the Catholic question would revive by precluding support from any faction. After rejecting the original plan, the king later agreed on the value of an extended administration. He even waived objections to certain figures holding particular offices, but persisted in rejecting Fox, whom he saw as the most dangerous of politicians, without, however, denying him a post abroad. Refusing to accept office without Fox, Grenville condemned any principle of exclusion. His stance, which prevented an inclusive government, irritated Pitt and reinforced factionalism. Pitt indignantly declared he would teach that proud man how with the king's confidence he could do without him.