The author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People was the greatest historian writing in the West between the later Roman Empire and the twelfth century, when we come to William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, and William of Tyre. Bede's qualities as a historian are well known and widely appreciated, and they need no further exposition here. Instead, we propose to be perverse and to attempt to read Bede's text as though he had been a sociologist or an economic anthropologist: What can we learn from him about the “material conditions” of life in post-Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England, especially about life in the sixth and seventh centuries. This is surely a strange purpose for which to use the Ecclesiastical History. We do so both to show that Bede is so rich and so multifaceted that he is immensely valuable for many purposes besides those of greatest obvious interest to him, and because the sources for social and economic life in those years are so poor that everything available is legitimate grist for the mills of our analysis.

Actually there are two reasons why Bede might have furnished us with the kind of information we are seeking. One is that among classical and early medieval historians there was a considerable tradition of describing the barbarian world, of paying particular attention to the institutions, mores, and customs of the Germanic people or whoever might be the subject of the tale.

Few incidents in the reign of Henry III excited more interest and amazement than the fall of Hubert de Burgh. Between 1215 and 1232, Hubert held the office of chief justiciar. After 1219 he progressively dominated the government of England. “He lacked nothing of royal power,” commented the Waverley annalist, “save the dignity of a royal diadem.” Then suddenly in 1232 “the great judge” was swept from court and stripped of all his lands and offices. He became a hunted fugitive. He was dragged from a chapel in which he had taken sanctuary, and incarcerated in chains in Devizes castle. Historians have been attracted by the drama of these events, but they have never provided a coherent explanation of Hubert's dismissal. The accounts of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris are confused. Those of Sir Maurice Powicke, though illuminating, are discursive and inaccurate.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the fall of England's last great justiciar. It is hoped to show that Powicke exaggerated the extent to which the justiciar's demise was consciously planned by the king, and that he underestimated the force of Hubert's struggle to stay in office. Powicke also failed to stress the connection between the justiciar's fall and events in the early years of the minority. Although Henry III came fully of age in 1227, the politics of the period 1217-34 must be viewed as a whole. Conflicts that burgeoned between 1217 and 1224, and were in some respects the legacy of the reign of John, cast a malign shadow over the next decade.

The main force shaping English institutional development during the late middle ages was the intermittent but seemingly endless war with France—a war that was occasionally expanded to include the struggle with France's enthusiastic Scottish ally. Hardly an aspect of English society remained unaffected by these conflicts: the crown was obliged to organize and manage the war effort; the nobility and many freemen had to fight; and most of the population, with few exceptions of class or status, bore the cost. Even if the average Englishman had been able momentarily to forget the continuing state of emergency prevailing in his country, such things as commissions of array, requests for subsidies, seizures of goods and services, alerts and alarms against invasion, and barrages of propaganda and counter-propaganda would have reminded him of the burdens of war. Especially after the formal beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1338, enormous pressures were placed on the institutions of English public administration by the demands of a war waged simultaneously on several fronts.

Associated with the expansion of the wartime activities and needs of royal government was the emergence both in England and France of an official mentality attuned to the importance of public opinion for facilitating the exploitation of community resources for military purposes. The inherent nature of feudal monarchy, which was heavily dependent on the cooperation and voluntary service of the governed, had always obliged medieval kings to recognize and respect the vox populi; but official awareness of the value of favorable publicity for conducting the domestic and foreign affairs of the crown increased notably from the late thirteenth century as a result of the French and Scottish wars.

So wrote Mary Tudor to the Marquis of Winchester in 1554. The subject of the Queen's approval was Sir Edmund Peckham, one of her most trusted councilors. The result of that approval was an outright gift of land worth nearly one hundred pounds a year.

Land, the basis of the social structure of the age, was one of the crucial instruments of patronage. The crown estate not only had its financial function as a regular source of income and an emergency source of realizable capital, but one directly relevant to social control and to government. It was a means by which past services to the prince could be rewarded and future services perhaps anticipated. The way land was used for this purpose and whether the frequency and extent of its usage can throw any light on problems and methods of government are questions meriting close consideration. The period taken here—the late 1530s to the early 1570s—spans several very different phases of government: how far did policy towards patronage vary from phase to phase? And how far did these variations reflect the needs of each successive government?

To acquire an accurate picture of the use of the crown's estate, some localized knowledge is essential.

Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.

The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.

Whether Puritanism gave rise to a “work ethic,” and, if so, what the nature of that ethic was, has been a source of controversy since Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism more than seventy years ago. Experienced polemicists have waged international wars of words over its terms, and tyros have won their spurs in the battle. With repect to England, there is at present no agreement either about the reality of a peculiarly Puritan work ethic or about the impact, if any, that such an ethic might have had on the attitudes and behavior of the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie, if such a species indeed existed as a distinctive social class or group in the early modern period. In fact, since perfectly sane and competent historians have questioned on the one hand, whether “Puritanism” is more than a neo-idealist reification of a nonentity, and on the other, whether the early modern middle class is more than a myth, it might be the better part of wisdom to inter the remains of these vexed questions as quietly as possible. What follows is not a perverse attempt to flog a dead horse, if it is dead and a horse, but rather on the basis of a different perspective and different evidence to resurrect a part of what Timothy Breen has called “the non-existent controversy.”

The 1635 ship money writ elicited a “common feeling of dissatisfaction” throughout England. It was the general belief that the tax contravened “fundamental law,” and that in its imposition Charles “had deliberately treated the nation as a stranger to his counsels, and that if his claim to levy money by his own authority were once admitted, the door would be open to other demands of which it was impossible to foresee the limits.” Contrast this account by S.R. Gardiner with a more recent analysis of the response to ship money provided by J.S. Morrill, a scholar who has acknowledged a substantial intellectual debt to Alan Everitt, the progenitor and leading exponent of the concept of the “county community” in seventeenth-century England. “The King's right to levy the rate was rarely questioned in the provinces. Ship money was hated for its costliness and its disruptive effects on the social and political calm of the communities … Above all,” the levy was detested because “it exemplified the government's insensitivity toward localist sentiment and belief.”

In these divergent accounts, a fundamental difference emerges between the traditional school of English historians and the county community school of local historians. For Gardiner, seventeenth-century Englishmen were fully aware of and vitally concerned about the actions of their national rulers, actions they evaluated against the touchstone of constitutional principle. Everitt and Morrill insist, by contrast, that even the gentry were “surprisingly ill informed” about “wider political issues”; they were “simply not concerned with affairs of state.”

In 1675 Mrs. Hannah Woolley, schoolmistress and writer of books on cookery and household management, published The Gentlewoman's Companion. Her Introduction contains this unexpected diatribe:

Mrs. Woolley's complaint was intended for a female audience only, but the themes of her indictment—male oppression, the equal intellectual capacity of the sexes, the injustice of barring women from higher learning—appear openly and often in the literature of Restoration England. Rebellious daughters and emancipated wives, female virtuosi, “she-philosophers”—all rebels against male authority—crowd the Restoration stage. So many took up the cause of women in the “Battle of the Sexes” in the last decades of the century that one scholar has found in the pamphlet literature of the time “a large and well-defined movement, an early ‘liberation war’ of the sex.”

Discussions of the unreformed English electoral system usually revolve around its three major flaws: the control of borough seats in the Commons by individual patrons, the general lack of opportunities for popular participation, and electoral corruption. The standard examples of Old Sarum (for patronage), the election of 1761 (for the lack of participation), and the Oxfordshire election of 1754 (for corruption) have been cited so often that certain bits of disparaging information, such as the 20,000-pound Tory expenditure in Oxfordshire in 1754, are permanently imbedded in the secondary literature and have resulted in dismissals of eighteenth-century popular politics as unworthy of serious consideration. Instead of using such extreme examples to illustrate the depths to which electoral politics could sink, this more systematic inquiry into the nature of electoral politics enumerates both electoral patronage and electoral participation over the entire eighteenth century, and considers electoral corruption in a necessarily more speculative fashion. From this broader perspective, it is clear that the dismissals of popular politics in England before the Reform Act are unwarranted. Electoral politics played an increasingly important role in the political system during the reign of George III, and to neglect its importance is to misinterpret the political environment of unreformed England.

The Bristol Bridge Riot of 1793 was one of the most serious riots, in terms of killed and injured, to occur in Britain during the last half of the eighteenth century. George Rudé lists it as second in violence only to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Yet, because it defies classification, it is rarely listed in the categories of riots so meticulously set out by Rudé and others. It was neither a turnpike riot transferred to an urban setting, nor was it the expression of long-held social grievances. It was a demonstration of dissatisfaction with official incompetence and deception. In many respects it was a riot caused by officials whose perception of the crowd led them to overreaction and violence.

The tendency by recent writers has been to see riotous activity in the eighteenth century as a sort of class warfare between the “people” and the “establishment,” represented by land owners, entrepreneurs, or parliament. This class warfare is presented as taking various forms under the categories of food riot, urban riot, country riot, and the like. While classification of riots may serve useful purposes and there may sometimes be more than a grain of truth in the class-war interpretation, it must be acknowledged that the resulting impression of uniformity in eighteenth-century riots is misleading. In the case of Bristol riots, in particular, it is the differences rather than the similarities that are of significance in understanding the changed perception of the crowd that caused the tragedy of 1793.

News of a great victory over Napoleon's forces in Portugal was published in London on the morning of September 2, 1808. The celebrations that began the night before with the firing of cannon in the parks and the pealing of the city's church bells spread from one end of the country to the other and did not subside for nearly two weeks: it was the first important victory for a British army since the war began in 1793. Ever since, the glorious Battle of Vimeiro has been associated with the name of Wellington who, as young General Sir Arthur Wellesley, won his spurs on that occasion by (in his own words) winning “a complete victory” with only half his army over “the whole of the French force in Portugal … under the command of the Due D'Abrantes in person.” Following publication of his vainglorious communiqué and the more sober official announcements, the country waited impatiently for details of the French surrender.

Historical accounts of the event are all in agreement as to what happened after the battle and who was to blame for what proved to be a fiasco in Portugal: after leading his troops to victory, Wellesley (through no fault of his own) had been superseded on the field by General Harry Burrard who, in turn, was replaced on the following day by General Hew Dalrymple. These peculiar revolutions in the command are traceable to political in-fighting at home and the vagaries of travel in the days of sailing ships and have nothing to do with the story except that it was Dalrymple not Wellesley who was in command when the armistice between the contending forces was negotiated. Dalrymple, according to the orthodox exegesis, a stubborn blunderer, negotiated the agreement with the French representative, General Kellermann, and literally gave away the hard-won fruits of Wellesley's victory.

Emily Davies' reputation rests almost entirely on her role as founder of the first Cambridge college for women—so much so that her biographer, Lady Barbara Stephen, entitled her lengthy and scholarly work (still the standard life fifty years after its publication) Emily Davies and Girton College. In keeping with her focus on Emily Davies as an educational pioneer, Lady Stephen paid little heed to the blind alleys that Davies first entered and then retreated from during the 1860s—the abortive editorships of the Englishwoman's Journal and Victoria Review, not to mention her brief and vexing stint as secretary of the first women's suffrage organization established in Britain.

Emily Davies' involvement with the nascent women's suffrage movement was not long lived, and was terminated with such ruffled feelings that she remained aloof from the suffrage cause for most of the rest of her career. Yet it was largely between 1865 and 1867, the years during which she played a central role in founding and then leading the first women's suffrage society, that the institutional and ideological strengths and weaknesses that were to characterize the suffrage movement for the next thirty years were shaped.

Emily Davies' father, John Davies, was an Evangelical minister. In 1815, at the age of twenty, he had left his native Wales to attend Queens' College, Cambridge, which had become one of the focal points of the then burgeoning Evangelical movement. He subsequently became both clergyman and schoolmaster, living mostly in Chichester until 1840, and then at Gateshead (near Newcastle) for the next twenty-two years.

Alec R. Vidler recently remarked that “It is because he was at least two men that Balfour is the most interesting Prime Minister of this century.” He was both a man of political action and a philosopher. In the opinion of Sir Austen Chamberlain, Balfour had “the finest brain that has been applied to politics in our time.” Blanche Dugdale adds that “No one can understand Arthur Balfour who forgets that interest in speculative thinking was part of the fabric of his everyday existence, wherever he was, whatever he was doing.” But no matter that Balfour's involvement in philosophy, theology, science, and psychical research often superseded his active involvement in the affairs of state. The image of a dilettante persists in most biographical studies. One of the reasons for this historiographical problem was stated well in an early biographical sketch:

Whether “vulgar” or “elect,” the public was slow to appreciate the mind of Arthur Balfour. It was not until the publication of his second book, The Foundations of Belief (1895), that Balfour received critical attention as a thinker.

“If I desire to pass over a part in silence,” wrote Claudian in his account of Stilicho, the consul, “whatever I omit will seem most worthy to have been recorded. Shall I pursue his old exploits and early youth? His recent merits recall themselves to mind. Shall I dwell on his justice? The glory of the warrior rises resplendent before me. Shall I relate his strength in arms? He performed yet greater things unarmed.” Such was a fifth-century poet's assessment of some of the historian's most persistent problems: how should the historian select his evidence and, once selected, when can this evidence be said to constitute a historical proof? That this problem has not been solved to everyone's satisfaction is evidenced by the recent exchange between two historians of the seventeenth century, J.H. Hexter and Christopher Hill.

Few historians are more qualified to enter the vast historical minefield known as the history of seventeenth-century England than J.H. Hexter. Though he has done some narrative studies, most of his work has been devoted to attacks on conventional ideas. In these works, Hexter has revealed himself as a gifted critic and polemicist, performing the same sort of demolition of established ideas about the English Revolutionary era that Alfred Cobban has provided for the French period. At various times Hexter has denounced theories of new monarchy, the Tudor middle class, the rise of the gentry, the fall of the gentry, historical relativism, and history as social science.

The creation of the National Government of 1931 has been a theme of unending comment and controversy. Politicians and writers of the left, with their party suddenly decapitated and bereft of office, not surprisingly were bitter. Their tendency was to castigate anyone who had played an obvious role in the crisis. Therefore, Ramsay MacDonald, who presided over the change, has been branded a traitor by his former colleagues and by later generations of Labour supporters. Even for historians he has remained at the center of the controversy.

From a slightly wider perspective, it has been possible to suspect a “bankers' ramp,” and the king has been singled out for special abuse on the charge of misleading the prime minister. Although some of these elements have been dismissed as myths in Reginald Bassett's 1958 treatise, the controversy hardly has been brought closer to a solution. In his review of that polemical study, Richard Crossman contended that “no one has yet succeeded in writing about this crisis without violent partisanship” and that it remained “the kind of live political issue about which no one except a political eunuch can write dispassionately.” That the debate continues is evident from the recent biography of MacDonald by David Marquand, who, in an attempt to vindicate his subject, once more reverts to the king as the agent most responsible for the creation of a coalition. Amazingly, no writer has yet interpreted the formation of the National Government as a Conservative Party bid for power, despite the control manifested by that party in the ensuing general election and the eventual successions of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain to the premiership.