This afternoon you will be listening, not to conjectures or explanations with reference to events which took place in the remote past, but to a report of proceedings of the last two or three years.

The most significant feature of the baronial movement of 1258 is that it was the first deliberate and conscious political revolution in English history. The Angevin system of government, essentially a centralised despotism grafted on to the stock of a primitive national monarchy and growing within the framework of a feudal society, was transformed, at the Parliament of Oxford, into a limited monarchy based on written constitution. The entire power and authority of the crown, in every sphere of government, was put into commission and vested in a privy council of fifteen magnates, selected, not by the king, but by a sub-committee appointed by a committee of the great council; and for nearly two years England was successfully governed and reformed by this nominated privy council, which acted throughout in virtue of the mandate expressed in the Provisions of Oxford, regarding itself as representative of and responsible to the great council. In the king's own words, the Council of Fifteen treated him as a minor under their wardship, settling affairs of state without his presence, and without having asked him to attend, issuing orders without awaiting his authorisation, ignoring his views, and merely replying ‘Nous volons qe issy soit’, without any further explanation, when he remonstrated; they passed over his nominees for offices high and low, appointing others against his will; they used his great seal without consulting him, and denied him all use of it; in fact, they so far diminished his royal power and dignity that little or nothing was done at his command, and his orders were neglected as though it were the council that reigned.

At the time of the so-called German colonisation to the east of the Elbe, German merchants and artisans entered the Brandenburg Mark, whose rivers, woods, and marshes stretched from the Old Mark to the west of the Elbe to the New Mark to the east of the Oder. The immigrants brought with them the economic methods and social organisation of their homeland. Town life, self-government, and trade quickly developed everywhere, whether the new town was established on an uninhabited site, or on the site of a Slavonic village which gave its name to the new settlement, or a walled town or fortress of the Slavs was transformed into a German town.

There can be no doubt that the records of archdeacons' courts, and, indeed, of all ecclesiastical courts, have been very generally neglected by both custodians and students. This is evident from the comparatively small amount of work that has appeared based upon records of this sort: only rarely are they drawn upon for evidence. And but an infinitesimal fraction of what is known to exist has ever been published in any form. In short, the field is almost untouched.

In one of his characteristic outbursts to the British military attaché at Berlin, the Kaiser complained, ‘All my life I have worked for a good understanding with England, but you do not help me’. This is only one of the oft-repeated complaints, made sometimes to the British ambassador and more often to the military attaché, but its frequent repetition, in varying forms, represented a genuine conviction of German good-will and British lack of response. In the history of the ten years which began in 1892 this reproach has a special significance, for one at least of the important results of the developments of British policy in this period was that the era of co-operation between Britain and the members of the Triple Alliance was ended.