In the history of Renaissance thought and learning jurisprudence seems to be a missing term. Not that the scholarship of civil, canon and customary law is itself lacking, or lagging, but it has not been sufficiently integrated with that of other fields, and even in the modern history of the Renaissance ‘encyclopedia’ it does not hold high priority. In some modern views of the studium, in fact, law seems to stand not only below the trivium and quadrivium but even, since it lacks utility as well as liberality, below the mechanical arts. Petrarch and other humanists would no doubt be pleased at this turnabout; and others may find justice (in a historian's if not a lawyer's sense) at the fall of the profession of law from academic grace. For present purposes, however, we must try to lay aside the prejudice which many of us may feel toward lawyers, modern counterparts of the pedants derided by Petrarch and the ‘mean and mercenary’ pettifoggers denounced by Cicero. It is not the purpose here to plead the cause of Renaissance jurists; but it may be possible, by attending to some of their less celebrated (or lamented) achievements, to do some justice to their place in the history of learning.

The English Revolution began in the summer of 1647. It was a struggle to delimit power and authority which neither the constitutional reforms of 1641 nor the civil war that followed had been able to resolve. Shortly after the fighting ceased in 1646 the House of Lords propounded that ‘things that are to be perpetual might be settled in the old way, by the three estates’. Unexpectedly, however, it was conservative ‘presbyterian’ members of the House of Commons who conducted an experiment in government without the king. In the winter of 1646 Denzil Holies succeeded in obtaining sufficient personal support and institutional power to coordinate and implement a political programme. But the inability of the men at Westminster collectively to secure an accord with the king had encouraged some to question parliament's intentions and others its integrity. Moreover, Charles's defeat, flight to the Scots, and subsequent imprisonment revived the long deferred examination of sovereignty. This now centred on parliament, whose good intentions were, nevertheless, an insufficient justification for its rule. Beginning in the winter of 1646 and building to a climax in the summer of 1647, an assault mounted from both left and right struck at the conduct of Holles and his ‘faction’ and then at the foundation of parliament's role as a conservator of order and authority.

A study of the Victorian poacher raises several points of interest for historians of nineteenth-century society. First, he was such an ordinary figure, an accepted and normal part of rural life. In recent works of oral history, old people recall just how important poaching had been for their predecessors, and for the family and village economy. An examination of the statistics of rural crime in the nineteenth century reveals that, together with theft, trespass, vagrancy and Poor Law offences, poaching offences absorbed a major share of the magistrates' time. For example, in 1843, one in four convictions in Suffolk were against the Game Laws, whilst in Norfolk over 2,000 poachers were fined or imprisoned in the years 1863–71. Landowners such as Lord Ashburnham of Battle in Sussex, and Lord Musters and Sutherland in the Midlands, fought a daily, and sometimes losing battle, against these people. In the second quarter of the century poaching was widely regarded as one of the fastest growing crimes in Britain, and, unlike arson, highway robbery, cattle, horse and sheep stealing, it continued to be a prominent and permanent part of the rural scene. Even in the 1880s and 1890s contemporaries were periodically shocked by the bitterness and violence which accompanied this particular criminal activity. A study of poaching, therefore, tells us a good deal about the secret world of the village and the labourer.

The internal dissessions and upheavals in the Unionist party following the catastrophic defeat incurred at the general election of 1906 have been the subject of frequent examination by historians. Despite, or perhaps because of, the importance of the issues involved there has been general agreement that questions of policy were at the centre of this struggle. Balfour's official biographer has commented that any rumours of ‘disputed leadership’ were ‘ludicrous in the light of the correspondence that was passing in private’, while Chamberlain's biographer has asserted that he was staking ‘everything on policy’. Recently Dr Judd has suggested that Chamberlain ‘envisaged…a reunited Unionist party…very probably under his leadership not Balfour's’, but he took this analysis no further and Mr Fraser's judgement is typical that what took place was ‘a polite but ruthless struggle for the control of the Unionist party's machinery and policy’. The Birmingham leader is characteristically seen to have played through the whole episode with the straightest of bats, bound above all by personal loyalty to Balfour. Contemporaries, however, saw a different Chamberlain – one whose ruthless ambition bordered on fanaticism. Balfour noted that Chamberlain ‘cannot realize that because he is only thinking of one thing, it does not follow that every one else has the same limited intensity of vision’. Some were prepared to interpret Chamberlain's machinations in terms of a dual personality: ‘You know there are two Joes and that one honestly sees no harm in prosecuting such a manoeuvre’, but others were ready to place more sinister constructions upon them:

Between 1917 and 1919 the United States made its first, spectacular intrusion into European power politics. For President Wilson, entry into the First World War was a chance not only to eliminate an immediate threat to American interests but also to transform international relations. The time had come to weld the industrialized countries into a community of interest, based on a shared loyalty to representative government and the market economy, expressed by membership of a League of Nations, and in which economic and territorial causes of tension would have been removed. But hardly had the German obstacle to this programme been overcome before, at the peace conference of 1919, Wilson ran up against almost equally determined obstruction from his former allies. This article examines one source of that antagonism, in the latent conflict before the armistice between American war aims and those of France. It argues that French policy was moulded by a tension between the Paris leaders' own desires for the settlement with Germany and their need to preserve a system of alliances deemed essential for French security in the future as well as for the war itself. By 1917 French governments were already confronted with dilemmas which were to harass them for the succeeding twenty years.

Churchill's ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, was a major effort to promote both a strengthened Anglo-American combination and a firmer western front against the Soviet Union. In the months between his electoral defeat and his talk at Fulton he had viewed Soviet consolidation in Europe with continuing concern, probably coupled with despair at his own inability to do very much about it. This presidential invitation, however, to deliver an address at an American college could provide a means to push to the fore the policies that he believed in. Certainly, the effect of his talk can be overestimated, but, despite its failure to create the very close alignment Churchill hoped for with the United States, it undoubtedly contributed to hardening western positions towards the Soviets.