Hugh Balsham, bishop of Ely from 1257 to 1286, is chiefly remembered for his services to the university of Cambridge and for his foundation of Peterhouse. His election to the see of Ely, and the subsequent dispute arising out of it, has hitherto received but scanty attention, and the treatment that this incident was afforded has usually been based on the account given by Matthew Paris. But Matthew Paris's highly romantic and colourful account is not at all accurate, nor, from a canonist's point of view, does his report make intelligible reading; it is the somewhat sensational presentation of one who relied on the necessarily somewhat distorted tales of more or less well-informed reporters. Being apparently the only contemporary source, it has served so far as the sole record of this dispute. But newly discovered material enables us to reconstruct the dispute following the election and, above all, to show the real reasons which provoked it. Although by no means aspiring to the striking publicity of the Canterbury election some fifty years earlier, this incident, in several respects, is more important than its renowned predecessor. Before we attempt to reconstruct the arguments, it will be advisable to summarize briefly the report of Matthew Paris.

Seventy-five years ago the Clarendon press published the first volume of The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Developments, and its third volume came out in 1878. Those of us in Cambridge who have been responsible for the list of books recommended to the attention of the students of medieval constitutional history have of set purpose placed Stubbs’ book in the category of those recommended for ‘study’—a category in which no other secondary history book is to be found. It is our considered view that no student of the early history of our constitution can dispense with reading it, and this article, is an attempt to justify that opinion, whilst indicating, as far as may be, the directions in which the results of seventy years ‘research and reinterpretation have supplemented Stubbs’ knowledge and modified our attitude to his judgements. I would say at once, with all the force at my disposal, that there is no nineteenth-century historian towards whom it is less possible to be condescending without condemning oneself as unfit to study history. As one who loves Maitland this side idolatry, I can only accept Professor Galbraith's opinion that Maitland's learning fell far short of that of Stubbs—as Maitland himself would have been the first to declare. ‘In the augmentation of knowledge’, he said, ‘Dr Stubbs stood supreme. No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising.’

Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region was published by the Cambridge University Press, and a proposal by the Committee of the Journal that I should write down my afterthoughts on that book and such ‘considerations as I might wish to put to students at the present day’ was a compliment an author could not but appreciate, and an opportunity he could not refuse.

In the great and widespread revival of medieval studies by which the nineteenth century was distinguished, no province was so long neglected as that of academic institutions and scholastic thought. The pioneers of the historical revival were, almost without exception, men deeply influenced by the romantic movement, and many of them were antiquaries rather than historians; their successors, especially in England and Germany, were principally concerned to trace in the Middle Ages the origins of national institutions and racial characteristics; to neither party did the speculations of what seemed an outworn religious organization make any appeal. Even those scholars who, in France and elsewhere, were themselves Catholics and ecclesiastics, were also men who had been brought up in an age of transition and adaptation, when traditional religion was on the defensive, and were often more sympathetic towards the various systems of philosophy—idealist or ontological—that flowered and fell in Germany and north Italy in the period after the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the century before that great cataclysm, the scholastic thought of the thirteenth century, rejuvenated by the Italian and Spanish theologians of the counter-Reformation, had been all but submerged by successive waves of Jansenism, rationalism and the new philosophy of Kant, and had only survived in a few schools as a dry and formal discipline. To all alike, therefore, whether Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans or free-thinkers, the vast mass of manuscript material which survived from the scholastic period to cumber the libraries appeared destitute of literary or human interest, and daunted the boldest with its bulk and its technical terminology.

On 19 May 1692, the English and Dutch fleets decisively defeated the French fleet off Barfleur, and followed up their advantage the next day by destroying fifteen of its ships in the bay of La Hougue. Despite the comparatively small material losses, the battle marked, and was recognized as marking, the turning point in the war at sea. It removed in dramatic form the fear of invasion which had been present, and at times had seemed real, since the French had defeated the allies off Beachy Head in 1690, and offered in its place, and for the first time, the prospect of an offensive unhindered by a superior enemy fleet. The fruits of victory, however, soon turned sour, for its very completeness had set a problem which seemed insoluble. The logical sequence of Barfleur, as was recognized at the time, was a large-scale landing on the northern coast of France; but when this was tried in the summer of 1692 the attempt ended in a public fiasco, with the admirals arguing against the generals and the ministers arguing with both. The 14,000 troops who had been put aboard the transports had to be dispersed, and the only result of the campaign was to secure the dismissal of Admiral Edward Russell as commander-in-chief of the fleet and of his rival Nottingham as the Secretary of State in charge of naval affairs. At the end of the year the future success of large-scale combined operations seemed improbable; but with the French fleet unlikely to seek an encounter in 1693 there was no alternative employment for the English fleet.

Students of history are liable to assume that the entity ‘England’ has existed at all points in her past in roughly the same way as she exists in their present–not the same England of course, but the same sort of phenomenon, corresponding to a strictly similar social and political reality, apprehended in the same sort of way by contemporaries. When they read statements about any period, they tend to feel confident that the word ‘England’ is one that can be taken for granted, as representing something self-evident or something which can easily be explained in terms of geography and political history.

If the year 1792 has come to be remembered for political crises which made it one of the turning-points in English history, it has been famous also for the auspiciousness of its commencement, the optimism and the promise that characterized its earliest months. In January and February Pitt repeatedly drew the attention of parliament to the increasing prosperity of the country and the flourishing state of the public revenue; and opposition did not pretend to deny this, but merely said that the prosperity ‘was no feather in the minister's cap’, since it was due to circumstances independent of government. Even that aggressive admirer of the French Revolution, Earl Stanhope, wrote to a Frenchman: ‘We are already free… and England is now the richest, the most prosperous and—climate apart—the happiest country in Europe.’ Even that determined reformer, the Rev. Christopher Wyvill, joined the crowd of witnesses to the country's good fortune, though he speculated that if a great European war should break out, ‘the English people would probably then renew, but in a louder tone’, the cry for parliamentary reform. Pitt attributed the prosperity to the rise of machinery, the credit facilities, the ‘exploring and enterprising spirit of our merchants’, and the mode in which money was continually being fed back into industry. He claimed that something was due, however, to the internal tranquillity of the nation and ‘the natural effects of a free but well regulated government’. The correspondence of the year 1792 often gives evidence of the sense of rising prosperity; and to this would be attributed on the one hand the general attachment to the constitution, and on the other hand the indifference of the nation to matters of foreign policy.

The problem that I am going to discuss this afternoon is one which must surely have exercised the minds of all those who have given a moment's thought to the financing of the Hundred Years' War. What conclusions have been reached it would be hard to say. For apart from two or three illuminating though hardly conclusive pages by Mr A. B. Steel, to whom my indebtedness should soon be obvious, nothing seems to have been printed on this subject in recent times. Yet unless we have some idea why men lent large sums of ready money to the English kings of the later Middle Ages, we must approach the political history of the period at a considerable disadvantage. To an increasing extent as the fourteenth century advanced and preponderantly throughout the course of its successor these lenders were natives and drawn from all sections of the propertied classes. The king's treatment of his creditors was therefore bound to affect his relations with his most powerful subjects. It would be surprising if his success or failure in meeting his obligations did not markedly influence their attitude towards his rule.

In none of the critical years 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1940 did the French Second Chamber as a body play an independent part in effecting or hindering a change of regime. But in 1814 there is one of the most striking occurrences in the history of the French legislature. The Conservative Senate takes a lead in bringing about a change of government, while the Lower House, so much more to the fore in later crises, obediently confirms the acts of the Upper. The story, often told as an episode in the fall of the Empire or the beginning of the Restoration, may bear a brief re-examination as an episode also in the history of the French Second Chamber.

At a meeting of the Birmingham Political Union in May 1833, the principal guest, Daniel O'Connell, congratulated his audience on having carried the Reform Bill through to success, for, he said, ‘it was not Grey and Althorp who carried it, but the brave and determined men of Birmingham’. In the heat of the struggle, even some of the whig ministers were willing to admit in the famous words of Russell that ‘it is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of the nation’. One of them told Thomas Attwood in May 1832 that ‘we owe our situation entirely to you’. Lord Durham maintained that ‘the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution’. Earl Grey himself, after the safe passing of the bill, thanked Attwood for all that he had done ‘to maintain popular support for the measure outside the House of Commons’.

In the year of 1657, a Shropshire clergyman, George Lawson by name, followed a prevailing fashion among English moralists and political writers of the day in publishing a formal refutation of Hobbes' then notorious Leviathan. Three years later, he further provided a positive and complete enunciation of his principles of civil and ecclesiastical polity in a work which he entitled Politica Sacra et Civilis. While it is perfectly evident that neither of these works attracted anything like that degree of contemporary attention which was aroused by the Leviathan of Hobbes or the Oceana of Harrington, it is no less evident, on the other hand, that they did not fall stillborn from the press. Not only are they to be found listed, with a fair measure of frequency, in extant catalogues of private libraries of the period, but in the critical year 1689—eleven years after the death of Lawson—Politica Sacra et Civilis was well recognized by certain ardent supporters of the revolution then in progress in England to be sufficiently timely to warrant its republication, and was palpably considered by at least one Whig pamphleteer to be well worth the trouble of plagiarizing. The popularity of the work was, however, of the most transient nature. The truth would seem to be that those principles of civil government which were maintained by Lawson were some three decades in advance of the age for which he wrote them; and that when, at length, the circumstances attending the English Revolution rendered them particularly appropriate, a greater political thinker, John Locke, was at hand to give them full expression in a form which, for clarity and fidelity to the spirit of the audience to which they were addressed, has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed. In all probability it is chiefly owing to this fact that the name of Lawson has been almost completely forgotten even by students of the history of English political philosophy, while Locke, for more than two centuries, has been regarded as one of the greatest political philosophers of all time.

It is a traditional view among historians that nothing so be-devilled Anglo-American relations in their early days as the British wartime practice of impressing seamen. True, the British never asserted any right to impress persons who were not British subjects, but on the other hand such persons often claimed to be American citizens, and it was frequently very difficult to determine whether they really were so or not. Moreover, alleged British subjects were pursued by the Royal Navy on to neutral ships, not only in British ports and waters but also on the high seas, as well as on to British merchant ships and privateers, even when these were lying in neutral harbours. Finally, American naturalization papers were not respected by the British before 1870; until then the rule was, ‘once a British subject always a British subject’. The result was that, according to American official estimates, at least 2410 genuine Americans were impressed by the British between 1792 and 1802, and a further 6057 between 1802 and the beginning of 1812. The latter figure is probably an underestimate, and the grand total of impressed men for whom some colour of American citizenship existed may perhaps reach 10,000. Very many contemporary Americans believed it to be five or six times as much—with no shadow of doubt about the citizenship—but most American historians would now admit that such beliefs were ill-founded.

Some years ago the late Ronald Balfour wrote a paper on the Study of History at Cambridge. His main preoccupation was the nature of history as a study. To-day interest is focused on more practical matters of detail, and we wish to know why the Cambridge Historical Tripos developed as it did, what was the purpose behind the various reforms, how far the character of the Tripos was affected by the example of foreign Universities, by experience at Oxford or by the requirements of the Civil Service examinations, and, finally, who most influenced the Tripos, the professors or the more junior College lecturers and supervisors.

In 1807 William Smyth, tutor of Peterhouse, was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge through the good offices of Lord Henry Petty, later third Marquis of Lansdowne and then still liberal M.P. for the University. Two years later, not long after Smyth had delivered his first course of lectures, there appeared the caricature of him reproduced as a frontispiece to this paper and bearing the same title. It represents him in profile lecturing to a drowsy and yawning audience of undergraduates and elderly bewigged Fellows.

I have been invited to write something about three friends of mine who, each in his own way, helped to maintain and advance medieval studies in Cambridge during the last generation. Two of them, Charles William Previté-Orton and Zachary Nugent Brooke were bulwarks of the history school as teachers and lecturers, the one for twenty-six, the other for thirty-four years. Both were scholars of St John's College and, although Brooke was six years younger than his friend, were contemporaries as undergraduates; both were editors of the Cambridge Medieval History; each in succession was Professor of Medieval History. It was not easy to think of one without passing on in thought to the other, as a man might take the short walk from St John's to Caius. The third scholar, who survived both the others, was George Gordon Coulton. Born in October 1858, a fortnight before Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1 November announced to the people of India that the territories, possessions and executive powers of the East India Company had been transferred to the Crown, he lived to know that the end of British rule in India would come within a year or two. He was the last survivor of a noble company of medievalists, to whose society, it must be confessed, he owed but a casual, though in general a respectful, allegiance. He was four and a half years younger than John Horace Round, three years younger than Thomas Frederick Tout, eighteen months younger than Reginald Lane Poole, four months younger than Hastings Rashdall, the scholar and friend whom he especially revered.