As historians have long recognized, the “perfidious Machiavel” of the stage was by no means the only image of Machiavelli in the minds of English intellectuals before 1640. Besides frequent denunciations of the Florentine as a devious, amoral politician and an atheist (most of them sincerel a few pro forma), one encounters in English works of theology, moral and political philosophy, and history two other approaches to Machiavelli the political scientist. Some writers, with or without acknowledging their source, mined II Principe and the Discorsi for detailed information. Slowly, tentatively, and sometimes surreptitiously, others worked toward a partial appropriation of Machiavelli's political analysis. The scholarly consensus, however, is that before Machiavelli's new paradigm could be fully accepted in England, a major shift in the political situation had to occur. Only with the coming of the Civil War would writers like James Harrington unreservedly endorse Machiavelli's rejection of the medieval world view in favor of classical political wisdom, which they held to be directly applicable to modern English circumstances.

The corrody is harshly judged by many medieval historians; it is condemned because it introduced into the cloister a distracting and often boistrous presence from the secular world. With sharp hindsight, they argue that the corrodies were poor financial policy and often saddled a convent with an unwelcome boarder who lived off its resources long after his original investment had been consumed. But the corrody was most often used, at least in the fourteenth century by bishops and archbishops, to reward a faithful servant or to provide care and maintenance for those who were unable to sustain themselves. In this article, the corrody and its recipients are examined in an effort to redress the balance and demonstrate its praiseworthy character as an institution of medieval charity.

But first things first. What is a corrody? Following the etymological derivation of the word made by A. Hamilton Thompson, corredium, corradium, corrodium and other variations are derived from conredum and conredium, which have “the primary connotation of equipage, and among others, it was especially applied to the provision made by a feudal vassal for the entertainment of his lord when he made his round. The corrody was the provender or prebend which was the lord's due …. [The[ corrody became first and foremost a grant of money or victuals, or of other means of livelihood, made by a monastery or other religious or charitable corporation to dependents upon its bounty.” According to one authority, the first usage of the word in this sense in England was in a deed of 1197.

Since the publication of Paul Murray Kendall's sympathetic biography of Richard III in 1955, scholars have been debating with renewed intensity the fate of that monarch's two young nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. In addition to numerous books and articles on his reign, including a study by Charles Ross in 1981, Alison Hanham published a volume in 1975 on the contemporary or near-contemporary historians of Richard III. Since the appearance of these publications, two original sources, which were almost certainly unknown to them and to other Ricardian scholars, have been identified. In a 1981 article in the English Historical Review, Richard Firth Green described one of these documents as a merchant's commonplace book, written between 1483 and 1488. The second relevant source, “Account of Miracles performed by the Holy Eucharist,” is a collection of religious anecdotes written by Henry Parker, Lord Morley. It has remained in manuscript although several excerpts, including one about Richard III, were printed in the introduction of Hubert G. Wright's 1943 edition of Morley's version of De Claris mulieribus by Boccaccio.

The “Account” is now Add. MS. 12,060 at the British Library. A small quarto with a leaf missing at the end, it was a New Year's gift to Queen Mary, probably in 1554. In its next to last anecdote, Morley made a revealing remark about Richard III. Early on the day this king died at Bosworth Field, he wrote, God would not permit him to “se the blyssed sacrament of the Allter, nor heare the holy Masse, for his horrible offence comytted Against his brothers children,” a statement that surely reflected Morley's belief that this monarch was punished at Bosworth Field for the deaths of his two nephews. Any consideration of the author's negative comments must necessarily take into account two facts. First, they occur in only one of several anecdotes in the manuscript, the purpose of which was to venerate the Holy Eucharist. The inclusion of the Ricardian story was not essential to the author's primary goal of detailing the miraculous efficacy of this sacrament, for the Holy Eucharist, not Richard III, was the primary focus. Secondly, the anecdote was written in a low-key and matter-of-fact style. Morley made no reference to the many Tudor embellishments of the king's personality and appearance, including the infamous stories of his withered arm and hunched back.

Despite recent interest in both the administration and conditions of prisons in England during the Victorian Period historians have neglected the study of Scottish prisons. It is the intention of this article to redress this omission by assessing the administration of the Scottish penal system between 1840 and 1861 as it developed under the supervision of the General Board of Directors. This Board was equipped with considerable powers over local prisons by the Prisons Act of 1839, and by the time it was replaced by the Managers of Scottish prisons in 1861, it had overseen the completion of an extensive building program to implement the separate system. Working in conjunction with county prison Boards, which had raised the necessary assessments, the Board of Directors attempted to impose uniformity and efficiency in local jails while separately maintaining sole responsibility for the management of the general prison at Perth. This form of administrative structure was unique, and differed from England where local prisons were not brought under close central supervision before 1865.

South of the border the Home Office possessed no authority to enforce sanctions, but through the efforts of the prison inspectors appointed in 1835, it persuaded a number of local authorities in England to remodel or rebuild their prisons in conformity to the separate system. Some magistrates resisted the official adoption of designs and rules which often involved large expenditures they were unwilling to impose on the rate payers. Consequently, throughout the period 1835 to 1865, in contrast to the situation in Scotland, local prisons in England were marked by a lack of uniformity in construction, diet, and discipline as standards were often dictated by the views of each prison governor appointed by the magistrates. This “quest” for uniformity continued in 1865 when a Prisons Act required local jails to provide separate cells commensurate with the highest number of prisoners held there, to follow a uniform code of rules, and to enforce hard and unproductive labor. Many magistrates were still able to avoid these regulations and the victory of uniformity came only in 1877 when legislation centralized all prisons in the country and placed them firmly under the control of the Home Office. Scottish prisons had, however, since 1839 experienced some degree of centralized control that had attempted to bring uniform standards to all the jails in the country.

When analyzing the origins of the Anglo-Irish “economic war” of 1932-1938, historians have focused primarily on two precipitant causes: the destablizing effect on Anglo-Irish relations of Eamon de Valera's return to power in Ireland in 1932, and the reaction to the resulting situation by the British Government. Underlying both were unresolved constitutional and financial questions. Chief of these were the oath of allegiance to the king, which de Valera had pledged, if elected, to remove from the Free State Constitution, and the land annuities, which were annual instalments paid by Irish tenant farmers purchasing their land through loans advanced by the British Government under the Land Purchase Acts of 1870-1909. These payments de Valera had promised to withhold from the British Government.

Although the dispute between de Valera and the British Government has been studied extensively, the political context in which it was carried on has not. This is especially true on the British side. The British Government and its Dominions Secretary, J.H. Thomas, are often criticized for their handling of the affair. F.S.L. Lyons, for example, writes that Thomas “sniffed the approach of treason in every tainted breeze and saw in the return to power in 1932 of the intransigent republican of 1922 a direct threat to the whole basis of the settlement so painfully reached in the Treaty.” A.J.P. Taylor, though no less critical of Thomas, sees the whole affair more broadly as “a last kick of the old rule that English statesmen took leave of their senses when dealing with Ireland.”

Reform of the English grammar school system in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owed much to the prestigious public schools of England. Institutional instruments of cohesion, control and status, proven in the public schools, were admiringly adopted. The evolution of the grammar school involved in large measure, imitation of its upper class superiors and segregation from its working class inferiors. In an accurate reflection of public school priorities, games and games fields were the expensive symbols of emulation, distancing, ambition, and success. The reason is not hard to find. Technological competence in an industrial era was less valued than an image of gentility in a strongly hieriarchical social system. The deferential absorption by grammar schools of the athletic mores of the public schools reveals a significant cultural hegemonic process at work. A bewildering variety of autocratic headmasters of differing persuasions and backgrounds served as agents of this diffusion, assimilation, and implementation of philathletic public school values. This fact, in conjunction with support at the higher administrative level of government for extension of the public school ideal of education into state secondary schools, ensured that the model for secondary education in the first half of the twentieth century was the late nineteenth century games-orientated public school rather than the technically-orientated late-eighteenth century dissenter academy.

“The dissolution of this government,” suggested James Harrington, “caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government.” This dictum has recently received favorable attention not only from a historian who sought the causes of the English Revolution in the great social and economic changes of the sixteenth century, but also from one who described the Civil War as the product of the financial weakness of the Stuart monarchy. The agreement, in at least this one respect, of two such disparate interpreters is heartening. If Professors Stone and Russell are correct in their assessment of Harrington, then the task of the historian of the Civil War is that much simpler. In order to understand the outbreak of armed conflict in 1642 the historian must first understand the collapse of government in 1640.

Many explanations for this collapse have already been advanced. What is interesting from a historiographical perspect is the limited number of variables considered. Whether regarding them as merely precipitants or as major casual factors, historians have concentrated almost exclusively on the great programs of Charles's government: the Book of Orders, the perfect militia, Laudianism, extraparliamentary taxation. This fixation remains largely unaffected even by the recent outpouring of local studies.

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”

The recent publication by Cambridge University Press of the third volume of G.R. Elton's collected papers and reviews nearly coincided with two other events: the appearance of a florilegium entitled Tudor Rule and Revolution and presented to him on his sixtieth birthday, and the announcement of his appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge where he has been a Fellow of Clare and a mainstay of the University Department of History for three decades. During that time his work has ranged over the whole territory of the historian. Witness the scores of papers in a set of three fat volumes that is a selection and also the seventeen other published volumes of original work mainly based on archives, large narrative histories, and also books on the study and teaching of history. His major contributions also include the annual bibliography he has edited since 1977 as well as various series of monographs and archival indices which in themselves have been a major source of encouragement to the work of other scholars.

But G.R. Elton has not gathered flowers and tributes and honors because he is an industry in himself—a veritable Krupp among historians. It is rather the quality of his achievement that has been celebrated since the publication of The Tudor Revolution in Government in 1953. Once the radical theses of that book had been incorporated into the text England Under the Tudors (1955), the importance of his work has never been in doubt. Subsequent debates in Past and Present and other journals, with Oxford medievalists and London Elizabethans, showed the impact of his main ideas.

One of the most vexatious questions of twentieth century military history concerns the manifest ascendancy of British theoretical development of mechanized warfare during the inter-war period. Why this should be so in a society which was by no means the most motorized in the contemporary world and which was already displaying a distinct penchant for technological stagnation poses a perplexing riddle. Facile attributions of such hegemony to either the inherent genius of the two progenitors of mechanized warfare, J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddell Hart, or a shallow acceptance of these theories as an obvious ramification of British experience in the First World War would seem to neglect other profound intellectual and military influences. Such a renowned historian as John Keegan has even written that it is “unrewarding” to speculate on the reasons for British preeminence in military thought during the inter-war years. The search for such explanations, however, constitutes the historian's task.

Although definitive resolutions to the conundrums posed by the emergence of intellectual trends can never be achieved, this essay will contend that Britain's leadership in the development of doctrines of mechanized warfare can be partially attributed to her heritage of mobile warfare along the frontiers of empire. The neglect of this imperial dimension is one of the factors which has thus far obscured our understanding of the genesis of innovative thought among British military intellectuals during the interwar years. Furthermore, the tendency to interpret Britain's military role almost solely in reference to the looming armored clashes on the European continent during World War Two has seduced some military historians into ignoring the long-term historical antecedents of an emphasis on celerity of movement bred by the imperial tradition of dynamic attack.

Although sport and recreation are vital segments of human life and culture, they have generally been neglected by social historians. Serious scholars still know too little about these important subjects even in England, where a spectacular sports explosion occurred during the nineteenth century. Cricket is perhaps the most English of all games and has long been regarded as an important national symbol. Any careful study of it is therefore likely to throw useful light on the English mores and character. By focusing on such complex themes as status, class-distinctions, social mobility, paternalism, and snobbery, this paper will try to fit Victorian county cricket into a broader socio-cultural context. This study of amateurs and professionals will attempt to provide some insights not only into the basic economics of Victorian cricket (which deserve more attention than they have received hitherto), but also into the intricate relationships between masters and servants and the interesting English attitudes towards professionalism in sport.

Betting, corruption, and professionalism had been integral elements in English cricket during the Hanoverian age. The Victorians discarded the first two and kept the third, while for a long time trying to exclude all three from soccer. In the end, they failed and had to accept professionalism in Association football in 1885. Curiously, none of this soul-searching occurred in cricket where professionalism was always quite simply regarded as a necessary evil. First class cricket, in fact, sprang directly out of professionalism. It was the touring professionals who taught the Victorians how to play as well as sell the game. Without the work of the All England and United Elevens during 1845-70, county cricket might never have evolved as it did.

Rudyard Kipling thought New Zealand “last, loneliest, least.” No so its historiography. New Zealand can claim an inspired corps of scholars who are probing various aspects of the past. Austin Mitchell, scholar and parliamentarian, whimsically wrote, “New Zealand is one of the few countries having more books than history.” Amusing as this perception is, the fact remains that historians of the New Zealand experience have been pouring out an incredible stream of work—in theses, articles, and books; and this flow is not likely to be dammed in the future, as more adventuresome scholars investigate aspects of class, race, ethnicity, community, health, and related matters. A glance at the available bibliographies provides proof of the swelling stream of writing. The New Zealand Journal of History, which began publication in 1967, ranks as the principal, but by no means only, periodical publishing New Zealand history. The maturity of this journal as a vehicle for New Zealand-related scholarship is a testament to how national history has come into its professional phase, and added sophisticated perspectives and techniques to previous studies which in times past, as in other nation-states, sometimes bordered on the antiquarian.

The recent, 1981, publication of the Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by W.H. Oliver with B.R. Williams and comprising contributions from sixteen scholars, has been widely praised as a new look at the national experience, though reviewers note an internal preoccupation and an inadequate attention to external relations. Neither Japan nor Pearl Harbor is mentioned. The preoccupations and progressions are with New Zealand's society, its anxieties, conflicts, and apprehensions. Gone is the day of lauding the British connection; independence and nationhood mean self-examination even at the possible expense of introspection.