Facts are something we take for granted, at least most of the time. As ordinary individuals we assume that there are knowable facts, for instance, that the dog chewed the drapes, that England exists, that it rained yesterday, or that babies cry. If, as scholars, that is as historians, social scientists, and natural scientists, we are more aware of the problematical nature of “facts” we nevertheless tend to establish and use facts rather unselfconsciously in our work. On this occasion I want to look at the evolution of the concept of “fact,” and in particular the way “fact” entered English natural philosophy. I will attempt to show that the concept of “fact” or “matter of fact,” so prominent in the English empirical tradition, is an adaptation or borrowing from another discipline—jurisprudence, and that many of the assumptions and much of the technology of fact-finding in law were carried over into the experimental science of the seventeenth century.

My paper has three parts. The first discusses the nature of legal facts and fact-finding in the early modern period, focusing on the distinction between “matters of fact” and “matters of law,” the emphasis on first hand testimony by credible witnesses, the preference for direct testimony over inference, and legal efforts to create and maintain impartial proceedings. The second portion attempts to show how legal methods and assumptions were adopted by early modern historiographers and other fact-oriented reporters. The third section attempts to show how the legally constructed concept of “fact” or “matter of fact” was transferred to natural history and natural philosophy and generalized in Locke's empirical philosophy.

One of the most famous results of the Norman Conquest was the creation of honors, the sometimes vast collections of land given by William the Conqueror to leading followers. These followers then gave land to the Church and subinfeudated land to their own followers, who often granted away land themselves; indeed, the chain of generosity sometimes continued through several levels. Because subinfeudation and alienation of land were so intimately bound up in the creation of English “feudalism” and the development of English land law, scholars have long recognized the importance of this process. Despite great scholarly interest in the process, however, little work has been done to track and quantify the amount of subinfeudation and alienation on secular honors over a long period of time. Scholars have used Domesday Book to produce pertinent figures, but because so much subinfeudation and alienation occurred on the great honors after 1086 such figures tell us little about how much of their land tenants-in-chief granted away and how much they kept over the long haul. Moreover, they tell us little about subinfeudation and alienation of land by rear vassals.

Facts are something we take for granted, at least most of the time. As ordinary individuals we assume that there are knowable facts, for instance, that the dog chewed the drapes, that England exists, that it rained yesterday, or that babies cry. If, as scholars, that is as historians, social scientists, and natural scientists, we are more aware of the problematical nature of “facts” we nevertheless tend to establish and use facts rather unselfconsciously in our work. On this occasion I want to look at the evolution of the concept of “fact,” and in particular the way “fact” entered English natural philosophy. I will attempt to show that the concept of “fact” or “matter of fact,” so prominent in the English empirical tradition, is an adaptation or borrowing from another discipline—jurisprudence, and that many of the assumptions and much of the technology of fact-finding in law were carried over into the experimental science of the seventeenth century.

My paper has three parts. The first discusses the nature of legal facts and fact-finding in the early modern period, focusing on the distinction between “matters of fact” and “matters of law,” the emphasis on first hand testimony by credible witnesses, the preference for direct testimony over inference, and legal efforts to create and maintain impartial proceedings. The second portion attempts to show how legal methods and assumptions were adopted by early modern historiographers and other fact-oriented reporters. The third section attempts to show how the legally constructed concept of “fact” or “matter of fact” was transferred to natural history and natural philosophy and generalized in Locke's empirical philosophy.

They that go down to the sea in ships hold an ambiguous position in society. Though drawn from society, and molded by its beliefs and values, seamen spend much of their lives isolated from it. The sea is the sailor's home and workplace, the ship itself a society in miniature with its own customs, rules, and language. People ashore know little of the seaman's life and work, and what they do know is usually drawn from observing the seaman on land, where, out of his element, he often appears as a foreigner in his own country.

For this reason, the image of the seaman that appears in literature is frequently an inaccurate reflection of reality. Yet, it is the literary image of the seaman of the late seventeenth century that has held the imaginations of historians until quite recently. The traditional view of the sea officers of the age has been of two antagonistic groups based on social class, with little or no common ground in terms of education, tradition, values, or experience of the sea. One of these groups, the tarpaulins—the source of the popular nickname for the sailor, Jack Tar—consisted of those who had risen to command from the lower deck; bluff and coarse in manner, lacking in education, tact, and good breeding, but excellent seamen, who were brave, sober, and diligent. The other group, the gentleman captains—ignorant of seamanship and navigation, frivolous, drunken, and corrupt—are said to have pushed most of the tarpaulins out of their commands after the Restoration. This displacement of tarpaulins by gentleman captains is usually viewed as a disaster for the navy, leading to incompetence, undiscipline, and sloth, and an adequate explanation in itself for every naval embarrassment of the late seventeenth century. This view has come under increasing criticism as overly simplistic, if not wholly inaccurate, and one may hope that the recent work of J. D. Davies has exploded it forever.

Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge, Duke of York. Just the mention of the name for most historians conjures the image of an historical figure with all the moral fortitude and intelligence of Rowan Atkinson's Black Adder. The fourth surviving son of Edward III, born too late to join in the glorious campaigns of his father, young Edmund became a pawn in the futile games of Plantagenet martial diplomacy. After his father's death, all of Edmund's incursions into the political arena resulted in total failure. Abroad, Earl Edmund's “monumental stupidity” in Portugal tore asunder John of Gaunt's grand strategy to acquire the throne of Castile. At home, Edmund of Langley's “lazy and indifferent” support of Richard II during the appeal of treason against the Duke of Ireland and a number of the young king's other favorites ensured the success of Thomas of Woodstock and the appellants. Though Edmund served as custodian of the realm during Richard's Irish campaign of 1394 and presided over Parliament the following year, such high office overmatched the Duke of York's abilities. Duke Edmund's “fatuous” vacillation in the face of Henry of Lancaster throughout the summer of 1399 cost Richard his throne. As the noted historian and natural philosopher David Hume observed, “The Duke of York was left as guardian of the realm; a place to which his birth entitled him, but which both his slender abilities, and his natural connections with the Duke of Lancaster, rendered him utterly incapable of filling in such a dangerous emergency.” Edmund of Langley's choice to “remain as neuter” in response to Henry of Bolingbroke, along with his treacherous submission to Duke Henry, allowed him and his family to survive the usurpation unscathed. But the new king could find no use for a man who possessed such titanic infidelity, and Henry quickly cast the loathsome York from council and government. Though York lived on until 1402 he remained on the periphery of the Lancastrian establishment. Even Duke Edmund's death attracted little notice, being, as-it-were, only a footnote to his colorless, uninspiring existence.

One of the few remaining points of agreement among Stuart scholars is that the Crown's political difficulties, especially the conduct of foreign affairs and wars, stemmed in large part from inadequate revenues. The Crown's “ordinary income”—so named by scholars but not by law or tradition—was eroded in the early seventeenth century by inflation, royal extravagance, and increased demands upon government. The bulk of the ordinary income came from the Crown lands whose traditional structures and management were unable to compensate for inflation. B. P. Wolffe has shown that medieval monarchs had never viewed Crown lands as a source of revenue in the same manner as parliamentary taxes or the customs. Rather, Crown lands were used primarily for the uneconomical purpose of providing royal bounty to political elites. Wallace MacCaffrey has argued that the royal clients in the bounty system shifted during the Tudor era from the feudal barons to an emerging state bureaucracy. Moreover, by the seventeenth century the list of clients grew again to include members of Parliament, especially the Commons which increasingly held the fate of royal finances in their hands. Finally, Linda Levy Peck has emphasized another profoundly entrenched English attitude, modeled after classical Roman authorities: the Crown must husband its resources against waste or corruption lest it become impoverished and the body politic decay. A monarch without ample treasure could command neither private (i.e., clients) nor public (i.e., national policy) authority.

For the past twelve years one Whig historian after another has attempted to turn back the tide of Jacobite studies, meeting with as much success as King Canute. The purpose of this article is to challenge Clyve Jones's conclusions in this journal (“Jacobitism and the Historian: The Case of William, 1st Earl Cowper,” supra, 23, 4 (Winter 1992): 681-96) that Lord Cowper never became a Jacobite, that Lord Orrery was not a key player in the Atterbury Plot, and that the Duke of Wharton was not a committed Jacobite until the end of the plot. Jones uses a discussion of the evidence of Lord Cowper's involvement with Jacobitism as a means of dismissing the whole subject, using the same arguments as previous Whig critics. “James III” and his advisers were wildly optimistic about the prospects of a Stuart restoration and, therefore, their testimony may largely be disregarded. James, on the contrary, was pessimistic by temperament and may be criticized for over caution rather than rashness. The Stuart papers, Jones argues, are not complete. What historical collection is? Despite the gigantic size of the collection, some papers that were brought to England from Rome have disappeared, notably the letter written from the Tower by Lord Oxford in 1716, expressing the utmost indignation at the harsh treatment meted out to him by George I and the Whig ministers and offering his services to James in the management of Jacobite affairs in England. This letter was found by Sir James Mackintosh when the collection was first deposited at Carlton House, but it has disappeared since. An additional difficulty is that after the discovery of the Atterbury Plot by Walpole and Townshend in 1722, Atterbury, Lord Stafford, and Lord Orrery, leading conspirators, destroyed most of their papers before being arrested. Similarly, Lady Cowper destroyed a large part of her diary and a substantial part of her husband's papers at the time of the Atterbury Plot. The papers destroyed were probably more significant than what remains and this helps to explain why Walpole could find so little evidence about the plot that would stick in a court of law. A good deal of material, nevertheless, has survived, and is it too much to ask that it should be used in the same way as any other historical evidence?

On Wednesday, 23 February 1647/8, General Sir Thomas Fairfax received a petition from his Lifeguard protesting the terms under which they were ordered to be disbanded. Finding the General unsympathetic, some of the soldiers went to the cornet's lodgings at the Bell in Gray's Inn Lane and carried away the troop colors, hiding them at the Lamb on Snow Hill. The Council of War regarded this act “as a great Disrespect and Dishonor to the General” and interrogated members of the Lifeguard. On Friday, the Council condemned one Master William Clarke to be shot to death for mutiny and disobeying the commands of superior officers. On Saturday, the Lifeguard presented another petition, begging pardon for Clarke and submitting to the General's authority in the most abject terms. Clarke himself also petitioned for pardon, asserting as his motives “the not punctually performing of the Agreement made at Windsor, and to vindicate the General's Honor therein. After some consideration, Fairfax called Clarke in, pardoned him, and set him free.

In early April 1826, William Huskisson, President of the Board of Trade, wrote to the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, a gloomy picture of the state of essential foodstuffs in the domestic market: “there is a very serious deficiency in every article of produce even in Great Britain. Unfortunately, that deficiency is most alarming in those crops which are the food of the lowest classes—potatoes and oats. It is further unfortunate that the falling off is likely to be greatest in the parts where the lowest classes most abound…my opinion, founded on these and other considerations, is that some immediate measures ought to be taken.” In the industrial north west this dearth of essential foodstuffs coincided with one of the sharpest downturns in the trade cycle seen thus far in the nineteenth century. What Huskisson sought was some lessening in the application of the Corn Laws “immediately,” and that the question be given priority in Cabinet discussions. But his warning was ignored, the government failed to act, and the result was one of the most serious industrial disturbances of the early nineteenth century.

This article recounts the details of the disturbances themselves, but it also attempts to locate the context of the disputes in a wider historical framework than a traditional one offered by historians, namely, the imposition of new machinery. Although scholars have noted the deteriorating conditions facing industrial workers at this time their narratives have focused on the destruction of machinery. John Stevenson, for example, concedes that the disturbances were not the “blind violence they have been painted,” however, it is implicit in his approach that he views the machines as the weavers' sole target, for he ends by saying that the riots were “ineffective” as the manufacturers quickly brought in new looms. It is important to show that this episode was not mere mindless violence; it was linked to a wider set of circumstances that affected the lives of working people. Although the power looms were the physical representation of the plight of the weavers, and thus rife for attack, their targets were not only the employers and governors of their locality.

Just what were John Henry Newman, Hurrell Froude, and John Keble up to in those hectic months of the summer and autumn of 1833 when the Oxford Movement began? It might seem unnecessary to ask such a question. The standard account portrays the three friends, agreed on common principles, working with substantial continuity (with the addition of E. B. Pusey and the loss of Froude) from 1833 at least to 1841. But the conventional literature has lost sight of the confusion and indecision of the initial moment of 1833.

The basis of the standard account, and the reason why it should be distrusted, is that it is based on Newman's own account in the Apologia pro vita sua, the work of a man obsessed by his own major continuities and discontinuities, at once truthful and misleading.

After years of tinkering with the notion of police reform, Parliament in 1829 passed the Metropolis Police Improvement Act, which established the famous Metropolitan Police Force, England's first body of uniformed, fulltime “professional” police. Bodies of the “new police” were allowed to spread outside of London by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. These provincial forces answered to local authorities, a pattern disrupted in 1839 when Parliament passed three bills establishing centrally-controlled police forces for Birmingham, Bolton, and Manchester. These Acts were emergency measures, with a three-year duration, designed to hurriedly provide forces of new police in towns that seemed threatened by Chartist unrest. In the case of Birmingham a combination of aggressive Chartist activity—which produced two major riots in the summer of 1839—and fierce political in-fighting between the town's elite factions convinced Parliament that the new force, to be commanded by ex-army officer Francis Burgess, should answer to the Home Office in London rather than to Birmingham's radical/liberal (and therefore perhaps untrustworthy) Town Council.

All of the forces of new police that appeared from 1829 to 1839 faced common problems, ranging from recruitment and retention difficulties to disciplinary troubles, but perhaps the most serious challenge confronting these new forces was the hostility of many of the citizens the forces were intended to protect. Opponents of the new police forces voiced their concerns that the forces amounted to a second standing army, that the new police could be used for domestic spying, and that they were too expensive to justify any benefits they might possibly provide. While all of the new forces experienced this type of opposition, the environment in Birmingham was particularly hostile for the force created by Act of Parliament in 1839.

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle, who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.

Between 1927 and 1932, the policy-making elite of the British Government was presented with a difficult problem. Postwar attempts to explain the origins of the First World War had resulted in the belief that arms production and competition had largely been responsible for instigating the conflict. Such a view became accepted by the general public in Britain. Specifically, the pre-1914 naval competition between Germany and Great Britain was thought to be one of the key events that had contributed directly to the outbreak of the war. Such fears concerning naval armaments were touted by peace activists as having been instrumental in assuring the success of the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22. Yet, this simple explanation does not adequately illustrate the intricate and complex connections that were made between naval armaments and other issues related to Britain's international affairs. Rather than the simple possession of naval arms, British leaders feared that other pressing issues would lead to a re-occurrence of hostilities. Questions concerning world oil supplies, reparations, war debts, tariffs, the value of the pound and the gold standard, and, particularly, belligerent rights and freedom of the seas, were all viewed as having the potential to generate another international conflict. Thus, the existence of armaments themselves was not Britain's primary security problem from the perspective of the policy-making elite. Rather, their common cause was how to protect Britain's position as the center of a world economic system. Safeguarding Britain's own stable position as a focus that provided leadership for the rest of the world was seen as the logical step to ensuring global stability. In order to create an atmosphere of goodwill and security that was necessary to prevent volatile issues from exploding, the British governing elite treated naval arms talks and naval armaments as a form of currency in the realm of international relations.

Political participation in eighteenth-century Scotland was the preserve of the few. A country of more than one and a half million people had less than 3,000 parliamentary electors in 1788. Scottish politics was orchestrated from Westminster by one or two powerful patrons and their northern clients—a fact summarized in book titles like The People Above and The Management of Scottish Society. The way Edinburgh danced to a London tune is well illustrated in the aftermath of the famous Porteous riots of 1736. After a government official was lynched the Westminster government leaned heavily on the city and its council. And the nation as a whole was kept under tight rein after the Jacobite rising of 1745-46.

This does not mean that ordinary people could not participate in political life, broadly defined. Burgesses could influence their day-to-day lives through membership of their incorporations (guilds) and through serving as constables and in other town or “burgh” (borough) offices. Ecclesiastical posts in the presbyterian church administration—elders and deacons of kirk sessions—had also to be filled. Gordon Desbrisay estimates that approximately one in twelve eligible men would be required annually to serve on the town council and kirk session of Aberdeen in the second half of the seventeenth century. With a 60% turnover of personnel each year, distribution of office holding must have been extensive among the middling section of burgh society from which officials were drawn. For burgesses and non-burgesses alike, other avenues of expression were open. In periods when political consensus broke down or when sectional interests sought to prevail townspeople could resort to riot.

A British politician starts a successful ministerial career by taking the Privy Council oath of secrecy and ends it by signing a publisher's contract for a volume of memoirs. The works of self-justification after 1914 started the flow, which rose a little higher because Labour ex-ministers needed the money much more than earlier politicians had done, and now has swept everybody away. The mass of diaries and memoirs produced by cabinet ministers—Barnett, Benn, Brown, Callaghan, Castle, Crossman, Griffiths, Healey, Jay, Jenkins, Marsh, Owen, Stewart, Wigg, Wilson—from the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s was larger than ever before but the Conservatives from Thatcher's eleven-year premiership have already caught up. The ministerial memoirs now available have come out unusually quickly, appearing in print on average within three years of retirement, but there are plenty more to come. Howe's memoirs appeared too late for this review; other Thatcher ex-ministers like Joseph and Younger are probably composing their memoirs at this moment, and survivors from her time who are still in the cabinet, like Clarke, Heseltine, Howard, Hurd, and Major, or who are politically active outside the cabinet like Brittan and Chris Patten, will want to publish when they are free to do so. Perhaps a dozen more books will emerge from the Thatcher cabinet.

Twice this century, the wartime mobilization of civilian academic science has been rightly recognized as one of the most remarkable achievements of Britain, the Commonwealth, and the United States. If the first world war demonstrated the Empire's “strength in unity,” the second placed far greater demands on Allied and imperial resources in research, development, and supply. Where the first war witnessed a limited application of scientific advice, on request, and in response to limited problems, the second saw scientists and engineers develop an enormous range of technologies, frequently ahead of military requirements. In the course of the scientific war, new principles of liaison emerged, replacing peacetime practices of professional and institutional coordination. Imperial relations fostered by peacetime bureaux devoted to natural products and industrial research were overtaken by new, larger, and more powerful ministries devoted to supply and production. In certain respects, the demands of science began to drive imperial policy, weaving a fabric of relationships that survived to influence Commonwealth and international science diplomacy well after the war had ended.

At an official level, these were among the most apparent outcomes of imperial science at war. The principal technical results of Allied collaboration—in radar, jet engines, the atomic bomb, for example—are well known. However, beneath myriad homerics of technical and organizational triumphs resides an equally important legacy of imperial rhetoric, symbol, and metaphor, in which the discourses of imperial science and commonwealth became re-examined and revalorized. The respective roles of the “metropolis” and the “periphery”—the geometries of Empire—were redefined by decisions that governed the supply of raw materials, the sharing of sensitive information, and the development of weapons.