Henry VII called a number of Great Councils, as his predecessors had for at least two centuries before. Evidence has survived for five such Councils, held in 1487, 1488, 1491, 1496 and 1502. They advised the king on important matters of foreign policy and internal security, with the result that diplomatic and military action was taken and taxes were levied. They each lasted for perhaps two or three weeks, and were attended by lords spiritual and temporal, royal officials, and – on two occasions – by the elected representatives of boroughs. In three cases they coincided with meetings of the clergy in Convocation. Henry VII also held major sessions of his ‘ordinary’ council, lasting for several days at a time, sometimes for over two weeks, and attended by between twenty and sixty people; such large assemblies had been named ‘Great Councils’ in previous reigns, although under Henry VII this does not seem to have been the case. By the end of the Tudor period, by 1603, there is little question that both types of political assembly had disappeared; both the quasi-parliamentary Great Councils and the conciliar ‘Great Councils’. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to determine when this disappearance occurred and to offer some tentative suggestions as to how it happened and with what political consequences.

‘No member of this House’, proclaimed Bulstrode Whitelocke in February 1642 ‘ought to publish any speech or passage of this House, though it be very frequent.’ Very frequent it was; by this stage of the Long Parliament more than 100 purported speeches of named members were in printed circulation. Orations attributed to 45 M.P.s had been published, at a time when only ‘75 M.P.s made the motions, spoke to the issues, and delivered the reports of conferences and committees’. Printed speeches must have become a familiar genre to the customers of London booksellers. Invariably they were quarto in format; typically a pamphlet consisted of a single address, between three and eight sides in length and carelessly printed. Titles were informative and unpretentious: Mr. Thomas Pury his Speech upon the clause, the which concerns Deans and Chapters is a representative example. Most gave the date, or alleged date, of delivery, and the name of the printer responsible. There was nothing surreptitious, in other words, about the phenomenon. The chronological Thomason catalogue shows that speeches were significantly more numerous than any other kind of ephemeral tract, at least until March 1642, and that during the first session they were the only source of printed information about parliamentary debates. After March 1642 the flow of publication dried up. Large-scale publication of individual parliamentary speeches is therefore unique to a particular fifteen month period. Their importance, as historical sources, hardly needs stressing. The purpose of this article is primarily to explain the nature, and limitations, of the evidence this material can provide.

From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the middle of the eighteenth century a protracted controversy took place over whether foreigners ought to be encouraged to come to settle in England. The debate was usually couched in terms of whether aliens should be offered naturalization in England. The word naturalize was sometimes used not in a technical legal sense, but in the first sense given in Johnson's Dictionary: ‘to adopt into a community’. In its stricter sense, the question was whether a cheap and convenient way should be offered to immigrants to acquire the rights of native-born English subjects. It was thought by both its advocates and its enemies that such an offer, by means of an act of general naturalization, would encourage a large influx of foreign protestants. The issue was debated repeatedly in parliament. Over a dozen attempts were made to pass an act for a general naturalization between the Restoration and the final passage of such an act in 1709. The act of 1709 was repealed only three years after its passage, but several more bills for a similar statute were introduced towards the middle of the century. The naturalization controversy is more easily followed, however, in the pages of the tracts, pamphlets, treatises, and broadsides, both in favour of and in opposition to a general naturalization, that tumbled from the presses throughout the period, and most profusely in the 1680s, 1690s, and 1700s. The debate aroused the interest especially of the growing ranks of those who, after the Restoration, interested themselves in trade matters.

My first research for this lecture1 was into the name and fame of Lewis Fry, whom it commemorates. The university administration kindly told me that Lewis Fry played a leading role in Bristol's founding, such that a contemporary could call him ‘the father of the university’. It is a nostalgic thought today, for all ofus in British universities, that we once had anything so benevolent as a father. Our institutions now feel like orphans in a harsh world, whose only remaining relative – here (as Canon Chasuble would have hastened to add) I speak metaphorically, my metaphor is drawn from fairy-story – is an unloving and nagging step-mother. The more reason to honour and celebrate past benefactors of liberal education who had humane vision.

Everyone knows that Edwin Chadwick wrote the New Poor Law; or, rather, that he wrote the report – issued in 1834 by the royal commission appointed two years earlier to inquire into the poor laws – which formed the basis for the New Poor Law. The well-informed among us might add the name of the political economist Nassau Senior as Chadwick's co-author. But few would be able to supply any of the further seven names which stood with Chadwick's and Senior's as co-signatories to the report. These seven royal commissioners were Bishop Blomfield of London, Bishop Sumner of Chester, William Sturges Bourne, M.P., the Rev. Henry Bishop, Henry Gawler, Walter Coulson, and James Traill.

The most important elements of Vichy industrial organization were the comités d'organisation (CO). The procedure for the establishment of these bodies was laid down by decree on 16 August 1940. In practice the functions assumed by them varied considerably. But broadly a CO was to oversee one particular industry and to liaise between that industry and the authorities (both German and French). One of the first of these bodies to be established (on 9 November 1940) was the comité d'organisation de l'industrie des combustibles minéraux solides (COH).