Henry de Eastry, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury from 1285 to 1331, has long been regarded as primarily responsible for the priory's financial health. On his accession, the monastery was deeply in debt. Eastry, by his reorganization of the administration and his far-seeing policies of adding to the convent's property and exploiting these resources to the fullest, was able to raise the priory “from a state of insolvency to what was probably the highest level of productivity in its history.” One reason that Eastry enjoys such an excellent reputation is that he left behind him several extremely significant records, including a register of his writs and a memorandum book in which he set forth his achievements with elaborate detail. Yet some of his predecessors and successors followed policies that were very similar to those pursued by Eastry. It is time to re-examine Eastry's role in the priory's history and to determine whether his contribution was indeed as outstanding as has been hitherto assumed.

The area that most lends itself to this investigation is that of property investment. R.A.L. Smith, in his pioneering study of the convent's administration only touched on this aspect. He stated that during Eastry's priorate the monks “made astute investments in land,” but gave few examples. Moreover he never tackled the problem of how the priory's activities were affected by the statute of mortmain of 1279, which, in theory at least, severely restricted property accumulation on the part of ecclesiastical institutions. Nor did he consider the question of whether the tremendous fall in population after 1348 hindered or facilitated the acquisition of lands and rents. A detailed analysis, over a fairly long period, of the policies pursued by the priory with regard to investment in land, rent, and building, can not only point out the contribution made by Eastry, but also shed light on the more general questions of the economic impact of the Black Death and the effectiveness of the statute of mortmain.

On March 24, 1603, the day on which Elizabeth was both dead and alive, James VI not only inherited the English throne, but also the Queen's Catholic subjects and the policy which she and her council had devised to contain and render neutral a potentially rebellious minority. Unlike religious minorities on the continent, however, the recusants were not an armed force waiting to defend their freedom to worship. Rather, they were a minority considered dangerous because of their potential as rebels. In dealing with that potentially rebellious group James's policy differed from continental solutions to the problem of religious minorities. His policy was based on his firm belief that the human conscience was inviolable and that “force never helped in religious matters and that gallant men should not be forced to die as martyrs.” These beliefs led James to attempt to introduce religious toleration in England. Previous treatments of the first three years of James's reign and previous analyses of the Oath of Allegiance of 1606 have failed to see that James was using the oath as the basis of religious toleration. The oath solved both the problem of religious authority and the problem of fidelity to a monarch with whom one differed in religion, because the oath recognized the King's God-given authority as a monarch while not denying that the Bishop of Rome did have a spiritual authority over the Englishmen who belonged to his church. If Catholic subjects accepted that oath, James would grant them a limited form of toleration.

The origins of the Civil War are apparent from the outset of the History of the Rebellion: “he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of the time,” Clarendon contends, “will find all this bulk of misery to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us, from the same natural causes and means which have usually attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification, and castigation of Heaven.” The relationship between prosperity and calamity is, of course, commonplace in classical as well as seventeenth-century chronicles of civil conflict, but both the sections of the History written in 1646 and those added some twenty years later insist that “the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation” (I, 84). Although he modifies his praise of this peaceful era in The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, claiming that “England enjoyed the greatest Measure of Felicity that it [and not, as he earlier said, any nation] had ever known,” this view of Caroline prosperity remains extreme. Clarendon likens the years of Charles's personal rule to a golden age. Without specifically invoking the classical tradition of the halcyon calm or the return of Astraea, his recollection of the 1630s gives central importance and new immediacy to a well-established Caroline myth of peace.

Modern historians have generally found much amiss in the decade of Charles's personal rule, and they have naturally questioned Clarendon's characterization of unrivalled happiness. Only B. H. G. Wormald's seminal study of Clarendon accepts the notion of “unparalleled prosperity,” which, it argues, “is an indisputable fact so far at least as the gentry were concerned.”

Most studies of eighteenth-century Nonconformity have concentrated upon the Dissenters' political ideology, and their contribution to the emergence of liberal thought is now established. Such well-known reformers as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and less prominent ones like William Smith and Robert Robinson of Cambridge, all illustrate the importance of Nonconformity to the Commonwealthman tradition. Two related issues, however, call for further investigation: the influence of the leaders' progressive ideology upon the laity's political behavior and the Dissenters' relation to Whig party politics and reform. The most widely accepted view of the political impact of Nonconformity was advanced by W. E. H. Lecky and G. M. Trevelyan. Both historians assumed that the laity's behavior was an accurate reflection of the beliefs of the elite, and they proceeded to make large claims for the importance of Nonconformity to the English “party system.” In the Romanes Lecture of 1926, Trevelyan advanced the thesis in its classic form: “from the Restoration to the latter years of the Nineteenth Century, the continuity of the two parties in English politics was very largely due to the two-party system in religious observance, popularly known as Church and Chapel.” Within three years of Trevelyan's writing, the Whig interpretation of party was demolished by Lewis Namier, and with the dismantling of the notion of a two-party system, there seemed little reason to pursue the more refined issue of religion and party. Only recently has the topic been taken up again, and this research suggests that there may have been a significant connection between Nonconformity and party politics at both the national and the local level.

During the unusually hot summer of 1857 English society was shocked and outraged by reports of atrocity and mass murder. News of the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny reached London on June 26, 1857 and, during the succeeding months, tales of massacre and torture followed. Polite Victorian society was incensed. This article examines Parliament's response to this crisis. It reveals that there exists no simple relation between events occurring outside Westminster and the response within. Parliamentary perception passes through the medium of public rhetoric, established policy, party circumstance, and the private concerns of prominent personalities. This creates less a refractive distortion of events than a new aspect to their understanding. Issues such as India acquired significance within a continuing context of parliamentary circumstance long preceding the immediate cause of substantive concern. This article, then, is not about India as such, but about the particular form the Indian question assumed within Westminster. This is a significant concern in itself because of the insight preoccupation with India provided into the tensions, antagonisms, aspirations, and hopes shaping party alignment during the mid-nineteenth century.

A further aspect of this translation of external circumstance into parliamentary perception is that an issue only became the occasion of crisis when it was portrayed as critical. Once again, there existed no simple relation between external events and the response within Westminster. Popular moral outrage over native atrocities became a political crisis over administrative reform. This particular parliamentary response was neither necessary nor inevitable. The recognition of crisis and the particular crisis perceived are themselves historical events that require explanation.

Although in recent years Victorianists have eagerly cultivated the fields of sport and women's history, they have produced surprisingly little relating the two areas. Historians of women have virtually ignored the physical dimension of the struggle for female emancipation, while historians of sport have reflected sport's traditional male orientation by neglecting the distaff side. As W. J. Baker noted recently in the Journal of Sport History, “the history of British women in sports … stands high on the agenda of work to be done.”

What limited material there is on women's sport history as such has tended to be produced by physical educators or amateurs like former players and journalists whose methodology can only be described as narrative-descriptive. A broad historical perspective permitting an exploration of the relationship between women's sport and social change is noticeable by its absence. Interpretation and analysis if they exist at all are usually limited to commonplace and uncritical observations about sport mirroring social attitudes to women and providing them with new opportunities for recreation and physical exercise. Such studies should not be denigrated, for when precious little has been known even of the facts of women's involvement in sport their revelation is certainly an important stage in the journey of discovery. However, if a truly meaningful and comprehensive picture is to be developed interpretative accounts are needed, which deal with such topics as power and control, motivation, the nature of participation, female sport's ambiguities and socially disruptive potential, its emancipating and restricting characteristics, and the interaction between feminism and female athleticism.

The traditional approach to the political crisis of 1931 and the events that followed it is to seek to establish responsibility, or guilt, for the fall of the second Labour Government and the formation of its National successor. Few doubt the conventional wisdom that after August 1931 the Conservatives were “cashing in,” completing the imprisonment of MacDonald, securing a massive parliamentary majority, enacting protectionist legislation, and finally causing the resignation of the free traders in September 1932. This orthodoxy has been reinforced in a recent study by John Fair, in which a new “culprit” has been found in Neville Chamberlain. If the evidence of his “culpability” in bringing down the Labour Government is unconvincing, it is buttressed by the assumption that the Conservatives gained most from the crisis, by controlling the new government and enacting conservative measures.

The study of these events cannot advance beyond the discovery of culprits while it remains confined to the study of individual roles. What is needed, and what this article seeks to supply, is an analysis which takes into account the whole political context, the condition and prospects of all the parties concerned at the time when the crisis broke upon them. It is necessary to separate clearly the expectations of the parties in August from the quite unforseen rewards that they reaped in the October election. The partisan bitterness which has plagued the study of the crisis has largely resulted from a failure to achieve such a separation.