The achievement of Timoleon in the field of reconstructive statesmanship received far less attention from ancient writers than the exploits of his crusade which liberated Greek Sicily from tyranny and from Carthage. Timaeus, who was largely responsible for the literary tradition, had no experience of practical politics and was therefore considered by Polybius to be unqualified to deal with political issues. The Timoleon of Plutarch is a brilliant work, in which some aspects of his career receive detailed treatment, but except in two digressions it is wholly dependent on the tradition established by Timaeus. Moreover, to a biographer who was primarily a moralist constitutional and social reform could scarcely be an attractive theme, and it is not surprising that he sketches the reconstructive accomplishments of his hero in terms of vague eulogy without fully appreciating their significance. Diodorus, on the other hand, was profoundly interested in the political and economic development of Syracuse. The parts of Book xvi devoted to the career of Timoleon reproduce his customary faults: the narrative is ill-arranged and highly compressed, degenerating here and there into a string of disconnected notes, and in its later chapters it depends upon the tradition of Timaeus. Yet it constitutes the chief source of information on the reforms of Timoleon. The contribution of a third-rate historian is in this sphere more valuable than that of a first-rate biographer.

Few historical doctrines agreed better with the prejudices of what one may call the romantic-liberal school of historians of the last century than the classical theory of Germanic kingship. In early Teutonic society, according to this theory, there were normally no kings, but in each nation there was a royal race from which kings could be chosen by the ‘folk’ if need arose. ‘Kings’, wrote Tacitus, ‘are chosen by reason of their nobility, dukes because of their good qualities’, and it was assumed that such an arrangement, which so judiciously combined a romantic respect for aristocratic traditions with a democratic element of popular selection, still held good in the epoch of the Barbarian Invasions. More sober historians of a later epoch echoed the enthusiasm of earlier scholars. The king, wrote Kern, ‘possessed a certain hereditary reversionary right, or at least a privileged “throne-worthiness” in virtue of his royal descent. But it was the people who summoned him to the throne with the full force of law, in as much as they chose from among the members of the ruling dynasty either the next in title or the fittest. … What distinguished the king from a freely elected official was his hereditary right to the throne; but this was an hereditary right not of any individual ruler, but of a ruling family…All members of the ruling family are royal’. Bury put it even more clearly. ‘A German state might have a king or it might not, but in either case it was virtually a democracy.… Some of them had kings; any of them might at any moment elect a king; but the presence or absence of a king might almost be described as a matter of convenience, it had no decisive constitutional importance…. But the people who had no king required an executive officer of this kind likewise. Well, they had an officer who was called a graf…. The graf was elected by the assembly, and the assembly might elect anyone they liked. The king was likewise elected by the assembly, but in his case their choice was limited to a particular family, a royal family. In other words, the kingship was hereditary, and the grafship was not. But this hereditary character of the kingship was of a limited kind. When a king died, the office did not devolve on any particular kinsman of his; the sovran people might elect any member of the family they chose; they might refuse to elect any successor at all.

The idea of expansion towards the East runs through the whole history of Germany like a scarlet thread, and often lends its successive phases a similarity of design and a certain consistency. The history of this expansion is one of the most fascinating epics in European history and it is the Germans themselves who started calling it Drang nach Osten, ranking the results of this drive among the greatest achievements of Germany's national past. Truth to tell, there is an audacity about this Drang, a fierce and ominous dynamism that cannot be denied, for it created a new Germany from the Elbe to the Oder and beyond, deep into the Vistula region. No other Western European nation can boast such a feat, though in the East the Russians accomplished something similar, only on a vaster scale, when they spread out the old Russia from Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow towards the Volga, the Urals and the Siberian steppes as far as Vladivostok. It is, indeed, a dramatic and tragic turning-point in modern European history when these two nations, which developed their grandiose eastward expansion in their own independent spheres, come to a head-on crash in the present bloody and merciless struggle.

As I see it, the course of English economic history in the later Middle Ages is as follows. By the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries medieval civilization had reached a climax of material prosperity and spiritual confidence which it was never to surpass. A cessation of economic advance in the first half of the fourteenth century was followed by a positive decline in the second half, continuing and deepening in the century following, to reach its lowest point between 1450 and 1470. Recovery first started in the last twenty or twenty-five years of the fifteenth century, leading directly to the great economic renaissance which came to flowering in Tudor England. Then began that ‘cumulative crescendo’ which was to lead, at an ever-increasing pace, through the Industrial Revolution, to the command over Nature and the vast material resources of our own day.

One of the most interesting features of modern historical work on the Anglo-Saxon settlements in recent years has been the tendency to admit a possible connexion between the Jutes and the Franks; or even to stress the possible associations, either of race or culture, between the Germanic conquerors of Kent and the mixed Germanic races of the middle Rhine and northern Gaul. That the language of the Cantware, or whatever they called themselves, was not very different from that of the subjects of the kings of Paris is suggested by the sending of Frankish interpreters along with the Italians of Augustine's mission. Linguists admit this, and they have been delighted to find remnants of the Frankish gau embedded in Kentish placenames. Archaeologists tell us that the early Kentish kings minted no coins of their own, but used Frankish ones, or else used their own rings and bracelets for money; when they did begin to have mints of their own, they copied Merovingian coins in weight, though not in design. Frankish coins, for that matter, were used farther afield than Kent: the coins found at Sutton Hoo were all Merovingian. It is in this pleasantly pro-Frankish context that the subject of the court officers of king Æthelberht of Kent is here offered for consideration. Someone may say: Æthelberht I know, and queen Bertha I know, and Augustine I know, and, in fact, all that Bede tells us about Æthelberht I know: but who are these officers of the court of Æthelberht that you are speaking of? We know, they say, that Æthelberht's law speaks of eorlcund men who had a wergeld of 300 shillings, and ceorls, who had a wergeld of 100 shillings: but we cannot remember that the individual officers of Æthelberht's court are mentioned by anybody; or at least, by any source that is reliable.

Students of history are well aware of the ambiguity of the term medieval. Although it may be true that for some thousand years, between c. 500 and c. 1500 A.D., the social, economic, political and religious life of Western Europe had characteristics easily distinguishable on a broad view from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization that preceded, and from what we call the modern world of nation-states that followed, yet within that millennium the developments are so great, and the changes and declines so numerous, that the careful historian distrusts anything approaching to a general judgment which might confuse century with century, and region with region. Yet in spite of this, many, whose knowledge of the social or artistic life of past ages is very wide, forget such distinctions, and speak readily of the medieval papacy, the medieval village, the medieval craftsman or medieval philosophy, as if each of these expressions denoted a single clear-cut system or institution.

No description of the theory of the constitution which the Whigs Professed in the five years of their existence as a political party in Charles II's reign, can be adequately made except in relation to the position in which they found themselves during this period. For though their view of what the constitution ought to be was to a considerable extent built up on ideas inherited from past ages and especially from the previous half-century, as it was formulated between 1678 and 1683 it was designed to justify a particular set of actions, and to advocate a type of government appropriate to the needs of a group of people at a particular moment.

The purpose of this essay is not so much to answer questions as to raise them; not to present conclusions, but to prospect a territory which remains to a remarkable extent unmapped, and to suggest lines of future exploration which few of us, in present circumstances, have either the leisure or the opportunity to pursue.

On 2 December 1854 a treaty was signed between Britain, France and Austria. By this treaty, Britain and France hoped to draw Austria into the Crimean War—Austria, on the contrary, hoped that Russia would be frightened into concessions, and that peace would thus be made without Austrian intervention in the war. There was a powerful pro-Russian party at Vienna; the young Emperor Franz Josef was for a long time unable to make up his mind; and it was only after toilsome negotiations that the tripartite treaty was signed. A decisive factor in Franz Josef's ultimate decision was the Austrian fear of revolutionary intrigue in Italy, backed up by the French. Napoleon III had been the ‘man of order’ since the coup d'état; but this was Only three years ago, and the Austrians feared that Napoleon might not have shed all his Carbonarist leanings. It might therefore be good policy for Austria to risk the growing antagonism of Russia, and enter into treaty engagements with France and Britain, if, in return, France would promise good behaviour in Italy.