In September of the year 29 B.C. the citizens of Rome saw pass before them one of the most splendid triumphs ever celebrated in their city. In it Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, the heir and successor of Julius Caesar, now sole master of the Mediterranean world, displayed the spoils he had won from his campaigns in Illyria and Dalmatia, at the battle of Actium, and by the conquest of Egypt. The spectacle must have been gratifying to Roman pride and a fair omen for future security: in the young victor were centred the hopes of the Roman people for external conquest and internal peace. Octavian had now reached the summit of his desires, his word and will appeared all-powerful; yet he was already aware that he was bound to a policy imposed upon him by his own success, and as time went on he became conscious that the very completeness of his victory, though it satisfied immediate demands, presented embarrassing problems for the future. In order to defeat Antony and to secure the necessary support for himself he had utilised a sentiment which had recently grown strong in Rome, and he was now to some extent fettered by the feeling he had aroused. This feeling was a profound fear of the Orient and mistrust of all things Oriental, and Octavian had posed as the champion of Roman manners and institutions, and had thus succeeded in concentrating on himself the enthusiasm of all Italy. He was now committed to this policy; in future years there must be no suspicion of Orientalism whether in government or institutions or religion. And even though Octavian might satisfy his countrymen on this score, he himself found it difficult to throw off the anxiety and embarrassment that the possession of Egypt caused him.

In his study of Les Droits des Marchés et des Foires, M. Huvelin discusses the question whether markets owed their origin to grants made by the king, direct or through authority delegated to a lord, or to grants made by a lord and confirmed by the king. His decision that they were entirely of royal origin would have met with the approval of Edward I, whose attorneys during the Quo Waranto inquest constantly asserted that, “to no one in the realm is it permitted to have a market without the licence and goodwill of the lord king or his predecessors.” In the delegated regality of the Palatinate of Durham it had been definitely stated in 1228 that, “no one has toll save the Bishop, because no one has market or fair in the Haliwarifolc save he alone.” Yet it is legitimate to wonder how this particular apple got into the royal dumpling. The majority of the regalia are obviously such by nature; but there are some about which we feel that, while we hear much of baronial usurpations from the king, we might well hear something of royal encroachments upon domanial rights. If a market is regarded simply as a regularly recurrent assembly for the sale of local products, it is surely a matter that concerns the local community or its lord rather than the king. A phrase in the so-called “Laws of William the Conqueror”—“There shall not be any market or fair save in cities of our realm and in boroughs enclosed by a wall and in castles and very safe places, where the customs of our realm and our common right and the royalties of our crown … may not be defrauded”—sounds more like an attempt to bring an existing, independent market system under the control of the Crown than the assertion of an acknowledged regality; and it may be noted that a previous attempt, made by Athelstan in 925, to confine markets to towns had had to be abandoned.

The literary tradition about the makers of early written codes in Greece presents so many contradictions and inconsistencies that it is natural to take refuge in complete scepticism. But if the tradition is analysed, it appears that there are two strata, the first reasonably consistent, matter-of-fact and credible, the second progressively vitiated by influences which can be isolated and explained. The division between the two strata lies about the year 300 B.C. and the primary tradition is not necessarily less credible because of the existence of the secondary tradition, which proves not that the primary tradition was false, but that truth itself could not prevail against the pseudo-history which set in after Aristotle. The primary tradition about the personalities of the early makers of codes cannot be lightly rejected; the content of their codes, as far as it is given in the primary tradition, is not inconsistent with the general character of early Greek lawgiving as it can be reconstructed from other evidence.

The story of John de Warenne's rusty sword and the blustering speech with which he proffered it before the justices in eyre in the quo waranto proceedings in 1279 long held it s place both in serious and popular accounts of Edward I's reign. It put, indeed, in dramatic, perhaps even in theatrical, form the essence of the struggle between the king's theory of sovereignty which was sound law and the barons' claims to hold their franchises by prescription which in a good many cases was sound history as indeed the king was at length constrained to admit in the statutes of 1290. Maitland apparently did not question the tale, and the extract from the chronicle in which it occurs held its place in eight successive editions of Stubbs' Charters. But the most eminent of our living historical critics entertained doubts, and when in 1910 Dr Round published his work on Peerage and Pedigree, which was relished by the general public almost as much as it was valued by the learned world, it was found that the rusty sword, with many other tales of the Conquest, was dismissed from the canon of history. When, three years later, Professor Davis produced a ninth edition of Stubbs' Charters—a work no less valued by the world of scholarship than Dr Round's, though it may be doubted whether it was much read for entertainment in other quarters—the well-known extract had silently disappeared.

The history of Thomas Becket has been a fruitful subject of controversy for centuries. The murder and its results have also been continually expounded, so that it would seem presumptuous to claim to say anything new on such a well-worn theme. But attention has been focussed almost entirely on the question of criminous clerks, and rightly, if the quarrel of Henry II and Becket is the theme; for this was the issue that affected the archbishop most closely—the prestige of the archiepiscopal court was at stake. The Constitutions of Clarendon, however, affected the prestige of a greater than Becket, and the issues involved were correspondingly more important, and a decision on them carried with it the settlement of the minor question. I am only concerned with Becket because his murder brought about a decision of the main issue between Henry and the Pope. When Henry was reconciled with the Pope at Avranches in 1172 he made two concessions: (1) he renounced those customs that had been introduced in his own time to the harm of the Church; and (2) he allowed appeals to Rome. Now it is doubtless true to say that, as Henry insisted that the Constitutions were all “old” customs, the first concession meant little or nothing. But it is also usual to say that as, by a saving clause, he was allowed to get security from appellants that they were meditating no harm to king or country, the effect on his authority of the second clause was also slight. So the general opinion seems to be that, while Henry gave way over the question of the criminous clergy, on other questions of principle he was successful in maintaining his position.

The importance of the English wool trade in the middle ages is so well recognised that it is difficult to remember that its history is still largely unwritten. This is particularly true of the century before the advent of the Tudor dynasty to the throne. The careful researches of Professor Tout have thrown some light upon the origins of the Staple system in Edward II's reign and those of the late Professor Unwin and his seminar upon the wool trade in the reign of Edward III, but in this, as in most other branches of economic history, the period of the Lancastrian and Yorkist dynasties is an almost unworked field. Ample materials for an investigation of the subject exist, but many of the most important are still hidden in English and foreign archives and much laborious spade work remains to be done before the whole story can be told. That story really involves two distinct problems, which for convenience's sake can be separated—first the institutional history of the Staple and its financial and other relations with the government, and secondly the history of the wool trade, that is to say the technical and financial organisation of the trade, the persons engaged in it, their relations with wool growers at home and wool buyers abroad, and the dimensions of the trade year by year, as reflected in the customs accounts. This article is an attempt to sketch the second of these subjects only, and that for a very limited period. The reign of Edward IV has been chosen because it was a period of considerable commercial activity and because there happens to exist a particularly important collection of material relating to the wool trade at this time.

I propose in the present article to mention the additions which have been made during recent years to our knowledge of the medieval, Turkish and modern periods of Greek history, especially by the Greeks themselves. In the fifth edition of Paparregopoulos' standard History of the Greek Nation, edited and continued by Professor P. Karolides, we have an account of the whole history of the Greeks from prehistoric times down to the annexation of Thessaly and Arta in 1881. The editor, who sat in the Turkish parliament and is particularly strong in all that regards the Moslem world, has, by large additions to the text and by footnotes, brought the classic masterpiece of his author up to date, while for the first time this work is illustrated and indexed. In the general field of medieval Greek history the Annual of the Society of Byzantine Studies, which first appeared in 1924, has published a number of articles by Greek specialists, while the Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbücher of Professor Nikos A. Bees, started at Berlin in 1920, has been published since 1926 in Athens, where a similar periodical, Helleniká, edited by Professors Amantos and Kougeas, is announced. The local medieval and modern history of Epeiros is being collected in the Epeirote Chronicles, of which two volumes and a biographical supplement have appeared; that of Thrace in the similar periodical, Thrakiká, of which one complete volume has been issued. Dr Franz Dölger has produced two instalments of the Corpus der griechischen Urkunden des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, planned by Krumbacher, and giving German summaries of documents from 565 to 1204, and Beiträge zur Geschichte der byzantinischen Finanzverwaltung besonders des 10. und 11. Fahrhunderts. Messrs A. E. R. Boak and James E. Dunlap have contributed Two Studies in Later Roman and Byzantine Administration on “The Master of the Offices” and “The Office of the Grand Chamberlain” respectively to The University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series (vol. XIV, New York, 1924).

Of the many sixteenth-century conferences which sought to bridge the gulf between Catholicism and those who had broken away from the Church, the Colloquy of Poissy was perhaps the most spectacularly staged. It was, however, remarkable more as a spectacle than as a serious theological discussion, and its true importance lies rather in the movement which brought it into being, and the particular aspirations, both political and religious, which were bound up in it, than in the actual tenor of the debates. Its real significance lay in this, that it represented a local attempt made by those Catholics who were opposed to the continuation of the suspended Council of Trent, to deal on their own initiative with the religious situation and to put into action their own eirenic ideas of church reform. They counselled concessions in ceremonial and discipline and the largest possible doctrinal lenience, in the hope, if not actually of effecting reunion with the Protestants, at least of removing some of the most powerful incentives to schism. The realization that the Council of Trent, if resumed, would neither favour this policy nor commend itself to Protestant support impelled them to resist the papal wishes and to call for a new council of Catholics and Protestants at which reunion should be the principal objective. These views spread wherever the growth of large bodies of heretics, organized and defying persecution, had caused serious embarrassment to the state by weakening the country's unity, imperilling the general administration, and presenting altogether a political problem that demanded urgent solution. But although to a large extent inspired by the exigencies of government the programme of the moderates was not based entirely on considerations of political expediency. The party did not lack theologians: Zasius, Gienger, Staphylus, in the Emperor's entourage, and liberal Catholics like George Cassander, were all men on whom some shreds of the mantle of Contarini and his followers may not unjustly be said to have fallen.

While there seems no end to the polemics of nationalism, a critical analysis is far to seek; for which reason an account of the beginnings of the theory of nationality in the eighteenth century may be of value to the political theorist as well as of interest to the historian. We may say of its beginnings, because although nationality as a fact is in England and some other countries of Western Europe a heritage of the Middle Ages, as a theory it is much more recent in origin. In Shaw's Saint Joan, Pierre Cauchon, discussing with Warwick the popular uprising in France under the Maid, says, “If I were to give it a name I should call it—nationalism.” Mr Shaw's Bishop is nearly four centuries in advance of his age. It was not till the nineteenth century that men in general began “to call it nationalism,” and under the guidance of such as Wordsworth and Mazzini to understand in some degree what they implied when they did so. The Revolutionary upheaval and the Napoleonic dominion were necessary to rouse the nations to self-consciousness. But these events, though they may partially account for the fact, do not altogether elucidate the theory of nationality. For its veritable beginnings we must look earlier. It is a significant fact in considering the causation of the nationalistic movement that the first and possibly still the wisest of the theorists of nationality had developed his ideas long before the Revolution.

No system of self-government at all resembling the practice of the mother country was possible in the British colonies so long as the heads of the colonial departments and the members of Governors' councils held their offices nominally during His Majesty's pleasure, but actually for life. Hence it has been generally recognised that Lord John Russell's despatch of October 16, 1839, to Governor-General Poulett Thomson, which put an end to this state of affairs, marks a stage of immense importance in the transition to Responsible Government. The Colonial Office papers in the Public Record Office show that the pronouncement of the new principle, made at a turning-point of Canadian history, originated in a decision on a minor incident in a remote and lately colonised part of the empire.

[In the Streatfeild Collections Relating to Kent there is a transcript with the following heading: “Minutes, in great part transcripts, from ye Diaries of Sr Edward Dering, and of Sr John Knatchbull; from the originals at Hatch. T. S. 1835.” In the Index to Add. MSS. the diaries are attributed to Sir Edward Dering (ob. 1689) and Sir John Knatchbull (ob. 1696), and Dr Harold Temperley refers to them in the bibliography of the Cambridge Modern History.

The subject of treaties of guarantee has been discussed with great ability and exceptional knowledge by Sir Ernest Satow in a recent number of the Cambridge Historical Journal. It is, however, one of such historical interest and also of such immediate practical importance, that it may perhaps be permissible to offer some additional observations upon it, and I hope that the value of what I have to say will not be diminished by the fact that I shall be chiefly occupied with what may at first appear to be largely a question of language. After all, treaties are the legal instruments by which the relations between states are defined, and we know how much difficulty may arise, even in private affairs, from the incorrect wording of legal documents and from carelessness in the use of technical expressions.

Mid-nineteenth century Imperial trade policy has been discussed mainly from the standpoint of the constitutional historian. It is probably for this reason that the economic events with which the policy is connected have received very little critical analysis, and are usually expounded on lines laid down by contemporary partisans. The orthodox view that the Canadian corn-exporting trade was encouraged by the English grant of increased preference in 1843, and in the midst of consequent expansion was injured by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and later revived in some measure by the compensating repeal of the Navigation Laws in 1849, was the view normally held by Canadian writers in 1850. Having its origin in past politics, it characteristically exalts the influence of legislation. It is hoped to show in this article that when disturbing factors besides English tariff policy are taken into account—speculation, harvest fluctuation, and the policies of foreign states, to name no others—the interpretation which has proved so seductive is in the main a legend. A legend, it is true, whose acceptance in the late “forties” is not difficult to understand.