Last year, in pursuance of my plan of inquiring how far the modern statesman could obtain assistance from certain of the more famous writers of antiquity, I submitted to you some observations upon Polybius, an author who, thanks to various accidental circumstances and to his unattractive style, has hardly had justice done to him, in these our days, and you will probably not think it unnatural if I speak to-day of Cicero, who was in some sort a pupil of the Achaean warrior, statesman and historian.

The present paper is not an attempt to write a narrative of the battle of Marston Moor, but an attempt to solve certain questions connected with its history, and to state the evidence concerning them. I propose, therefore, to discuss in detail the four following subjects: The numbers and the composition of the Royalist and Parliamentary armies; the order in which the forces composing the two armies were drawn up on the battlefield; the tactics of Cromwell and the cavalry under his command during the battle; the nature and value of the authorities for the history of the battle. This investigation has led me to reject a view which is adopted in all modern accounts of the battle, and had been hitherto accepted by myself. The received view is that the infantry of the Parliamentary right wing was entirely routed, while a portion of the centre stood firm. The conclusion which a reconsideration of the evidence obliges me to adopt in this paper is exactly the opposite. The Parliamentary centre was entirely routed, but a portion of the infantry of the right wing held their ground until the cavalry and infantry of the left wing came to their relief, and turned a defeat into a victory.

It would be senseless presumption in me to speak in this place of the interest of any branch of history studied for its own sake; nor have I interpreted the invitation which I have received through your Secretary as implying any wish that I should do so. I have rather understood the term ‘national’ as expressing a wish that I should speak of the lessons of national importance which are to be sought for in the history of our navy, ‘the wall and fence of the kingdom.’

In the present paper I propose only to refer to a single problem of the modern study of history, naval or otherwise—the exigencies of research.

Naval history is at length recognised as a subject of special study ; it has its historians, its scholars, students, and the general readers of its special publications, and it has a large and powerful society which represents their literary interests.

The two most interesting periods in the career of Charles XII. of Sweden are for many people, curiously enough, the two periods during which he did nothing—the two years spent at Altranstadt and the years spent at Bender. During the former period he engrossed the attention of all Europe; during the latter he was forgotten by the world. The stay at Altranstadt contained picturesque incidents—picturesque incidents, indeed, occurred almost every day of Charles's life. The visit of his protégé Stanislaus, the visit of his conquered enemy Augustus, would both afford material for the historical word-painter; but the incident which was fixed upon by contemporary Europe as a topic of wonder and speculation was the visit of Marlborough in the spring of 1707. From the common man's point of view, as something merely picturesque and extraordinary, nothing so wonderful had occurred in the memory of living men. It was the meeting of the two greatest men of their time, an event almost without precedent in history.

A Sheriff's farm was the sum of money which he was required to pay annually at the Exchequer for his bailiwick. In virtue of this payment he was allowed to receive for his own use certain revenues paid to him in his official capacity. He was not entitled to all revenues so paid to him, but only to specific revenues; these he was said to farm. But he was not obliged to pay the whole of his farm directly to the king. In every year he would receive orders to apply portions of it in the discharge of all kinds of casual expenditure, civil, military, and domestic. He would also receive orders to apply other portions in the payment of annual salaries and fixed alms. Finally, he was allowed to make certain deductions from it for royal grants, by which the revenues farmed were diminished.

The origin of the present paper may be traced to a request made to me by Dr. Cunningham, when I was passing through Florence in November 1896, to examine a list of the English and Scotch monasteries which furnished raw wool to the mediæval Florentine wool merchants, given in the fourteenth century manuscript of Balducci Pegolotti's ‘Pratica della Mercatura,’ preserved in the Riccardian Library. This list, as printed by Peruzzi in his ‘Storia del Commercio,’ was suspected by Dr. Cunningham to contain sundry clerical and other inaccuracies, a suspicion which proved to be amply justified in fact. It was then suggested to me that it might be worth while to try and collect information bearing upon the wool trades of the Florentine Republic as a whole, inasmuch as there must assuredly be no little material in the way of contemporary documents stored away in Florentine archives and libraries.

Among the Royal MSS. at the British Museum is a pretty little volume of some seventy-two pages, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, which seems practically to have escaped notice. It was written in the year 1565, by one James Bell, and gives an account of a somewhat remarkable journey across the north of Europe, which had just been accomplished by a Swedish princess, ostensibly in order to gratify her strong desire to visit the Court of the great English queen. It is uncertain whether the writer (of whom we have little further knowledge) was with the princess on her journey or not, but it was certainly by her desire that he wrote and presented this account of the voyage to Elizabeth.