The questions which, I imagine, are most frequently asked about the medieval University run something like this: What was the value of all this intellectual activity? Was there any sequence or permanence in it? What kind of degree did scholars take? Was it a mere form, or did it involve a serious mental discipline? We can best get some ideas about the answers to such questions—I do not say that we can ever get very satisfying answers—by looking at Paris in the middle of the fourteenth century.

M. Depoin begins his brief account of Waleran by remarking that his “existence mouvementée pourrait faire l'objet d'une thèse attrayante, ou serait mise en relief la vie d'un grand feudataire anglo-francais au XIIe siecle.” As his suggestion has been neglected on both sides of the Channel, I have ventured to attempt the task.

In 1446 the dominant faction in Bologna, bereft of a head by the murder of Annibale Bentivoglio, invited Sante, an illegitimate scion of the house, to throw up his post in the Florentine wool-trade and assume the leadership of the city. For the next sixty years Sante and his successor Giovanni II exercised an ascendancy in Bologna which entitles them to a place among the more famous despots of the Italian Renaissance. The Bentivoglio Signoria is in essentials a typical outcome of the nation and age. Constitutionally, the position of its holders was even more ambiguous than that of the majority of their contemporaries. Like the Medici, they were in law, not despots but private citizens. The system by which their ascendancy was maintained mingled terrorism with beneficence. The coming of Sante followed upon a faction fight which brought death and exile upon the rival family of Canetoli, and in the course of years fresh rivals arose to suffer a like fate.

The existing alliance between England and Portugal is usually said to date from the Treaty of Windsor of 9 May, 1386, celebrated between our Richard II and John I, or even from that of 16 June, 1373, between our Edward III and Ferdinand and to be the most enduring pact between two countries, but as it was in abeyance from 1580 to 1640, if not earlier, during the reign of Elizabeth and suffered a brief interruption in the time of Cromwell, the former statement seems to need qualification. Long before these conventions, however, perennial trading and intermittent political relations existed and they followed on a common brotherhood in arms arising out of an incident in the Crusades.

The history of agricultural technique in the Middle Ages is a subject of obvious importance and interest, but in England, at least, it has never been systematically studied. It is true that the main outline of agricultural practice has been made familiar, as a result of the study of manorial documents, but there has been little attempt to investigate technical questions in detail, or to distinguish between the practice of different parts of the country. One branch of agrarian economy, sheep and cattle farming, has been almost entirely neglected, in spite of the fact that wool and hides were the staple export of England. Nor is it only the technique of farming which awaits investigation; the whole subject of estate management in the Middle Ages is almost untouched. Historians have in the main been content to study manorial organisation and those problems of tenure and of labour which can be observed in a manorial framework; it is the legal rather than the economic side of agrarian history which has chiefly interested them.

If an attempt were made to define the tendency of political thought in England during the fifteenth century, it would be destined to failure unless it gave expression to opposing views of the character of the time. Here, as elsewhere, the historian's most difficult task is to form not merely generalisations that will sum up part of the facts, but generalisations that will take account of all the facts, however irreconcilable they may seem. The task of establishing general statements about the fifteenth century is especially troublesome, for the character of no century in English history is more open to conflicting interpretation. The reason for this conflict is not the so-called transitional aspect of the period, for every century is transitional, and every historical generalisation must express a transition of some sort. The source of the conflict goes much deeper than that, and is to be found rather in the sheer contradictoriness of our evidence.

The study of Law Merchant in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which I venture to read to the Society to-day arose out of some work upon the business of eighteenth-century merchants. I approach the complex problem of the Law Merchant therefore not from the point of view of the law courts but as the merchant himself approached it, by way of the problems of commercial intercourse.

It is well known that between 1801 and 1809 the Tory Party broke up into several groups led by Addington, Grenville, Wellesley, Perceval, and Canning, which were divided partly by personal, partly by political differences; and that the two-party system was temporarily superseded by the group system. Much new information concerning the smallest but the most distinguished of these various connexions is to be found in the Huskisson, Liverpool, Granville, Harrowby, Harewood, and other papers in public or private hands, which have recently been made accessible to the historian.