If not one of the pieces of Edwardian legislation which contributed to the growth of the English legal system, the Statute of Mortmain was nonetheless a most important enactment, a fact which has been realized in the not inconsiderable attention devoted to it by historians. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the crown's execution of the law in the period 1279 to 1348, with reference to the Benedictine houses of Crowland Abbey, Thorney Abbey, and Spalding Priory, and the statute's effects on the territorial policy of each of these.

Information on their territorial policies is to be found in the three chartularies relating to them. These are the Spalding Register, written c1331, numbering 801 folios in two volumes; the Red Book of Thorney, written c1326, numbering 472 folios in two volumes; and the Wrest Park Chartulary, written in the mid-fourteenth century after 1343, numbering 257 folios. No doubt there may be omissions, but a close scrutiny of the Spalding Register and the Red Book of Thorney, which both contain land acquisitions added by later clerks up to 1348, shows how faithfully, if not in the Spalding case carefully, (the original Spalding clerk tended to be rather a haphazard organiser; the original Thorney clerk was a real craftsman) recorded are the land acquisitions made by these two houses from the later thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. There are literally scores of these, with the additional evidence of the Calendar of Patent Rolls, which is useful as a check as well as a supplement to the chartularies, and which almost invariably testifies to the reliability of the clerks.

The compensation of royal officials has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in recent years as historians turn to the study of the court and royal office to discover the realities of power in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. H. R. Trevor-Roper, who sees the growth of the court as the hallmark of the Renaissance state, has declared that royal service was so lucrative that to many persons holding office spelled the difference between penury and financial success. More detailed studies do not completely bear out his contention. Although A. J. Slavin and others have shown how some highly placed officials were able to enhance their financial position dramatically, G. E. Aylmer and Lawrence Stone demonstrated that such cases of spectacular success were exceptional and that most royal servants received only modest compensation for their labors. Furthermore, Wallace MacCaffrey has pointed out that the crown had at its disposal astonishingly few offices whose salaries might justify calling the men who held them a financial elite. The weight of this evidence has not abated the controversy, however. Instead, the debate has shifted from the actual salary to the total amount the official could make his office yield in tips, fees, and other perquisites, both legal and illegal. Trevor-Roper maintains that these extra benefits made royal service very lucrative, while the others question the extent of such additional enrichment, claiming that few grew wealthy in the king's service.

The question of why the Liberal Party failed to absorb and channel the increased political activity of the working class after 1885 is one that historians continue to debate. This paper is an attempt to assess the viability of the Liberal Party as a vehicle for working class political aspirations within the context of a single by-election in Sheffield, a city with a strong tradition of Liberal-Labour cooperation. To put the 1894 by-election in perspective, one must first look briefly at the development of the Liberal Party in relation to the demand for Labour Members of Parliament in the last third of the nineteenth century.

1.The Early Movement Toward Labour Representation

The beginning of the movement for direct trade union representation in parliament is usually dated from 1868, when William Newton of the Engineers, William Cremer of the Carpenters and Joiners, and George Howell of the Bricklayers stood for election. All three were defeated despite some Liberal support “notably (if secretly) from party headquarters.” In the following year the Labour Representation League was launched. According to its prospectus, “its principal duty will be to secure the return to Parliament of qualified working men", and it proposed to organize workers' votes regardless of party despite the radical connections of many union leaders. But its party affiliation was soon apparent, and by 1875 the League declared: “we have ever sought to be allied to the great Liberal Party, to which we by conviction belong.”

The British Liberal Party underwent a succession of crises in the years 1886-1905 which nearly destroyed it as a coherent political entity. Perhaps the most critical divisions in the 1890s were those concerning the leadership struggle, so well described by Peter Stansky in his Ambitions and Strategies, and the search for a domestic policy which would qualify the party as the major force for reform in the face of the emerging Labour alternative. But both of these problems and the divisions which stemmed from them were linked with the perennial and highly visible divisions over foreign and imperial policy. Stansky has shown how the imperial question was tied to the Harcourt-Rosebery struggle for the leadership in succession to Gladstone and how concentration on this issue detracted from attention to the more pressing question of finding a viable and attractive domestic program. Jeffrey Butler, Bernard Semmel, and Bernard Porter have illustrated other aspects of the problem of imperial policy.

Historians have long recognized the seriousness of the crisis in the party during the Boer War, when divisions of opinion concerning the war and general imperial policy were formalized in competing organizations, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman fought a frustrating campaign to consolidate his leadership and maintain the party as a functioning unit. Most of the attention, however, has centered on the leaders of the party and on the organization — the Liberal League, which grew out of the Imperial Liberal Council in 1902 — which represented the Liberal Imperialist wing inspired by Lord Rosebery.

The abdication of King Edward VIII of England in December, 1936, shocked and fascinated people all over the world. No other monarch in modern British history since George III has found himself unable to fulfill his hereditary task. Biographers, historians, and playwrights have described in detail the events preceding the dramatic announcement that the King of England had decided to renounce his position in favor of his brother, the Duke of York. Yet none of these accounts attempts to explain Edward's behavior in terms of dynamic psychology, despite the fact that the available data suggests intriguing possibilities regarding the unconscious motivation for his actions.

The following interpretation of the behavior of Edward VIII offers a hypothesis together with historical evidence which bears it out. The repeated use of qualifying adjectives and phrases would only detract from the impact of this interpretation, but the fact that psycho-historical explanations must remain necessarily theoretical is acknowledged at the outset. In spite of the inherent limitations in the historian's use of psychoanalytic theory to explain the behavior of an individual, the application of dynamic psychology to biographical data can bring new insights into puzzling actions like Edward's abdication.

A psycho-biographical approach, focusing on the unconscious, non-rational dimension of Edward's behavior, suggests that the abdication was a final gesture by which he secured possession of a mother figure whom he was able to please, and so he triumphed symbolically over his father. The outstanding psychological characteristic of Edward's development appears to have been the problem of unresolved Oedipal anxiety which governed his relations with women and eventually dictated his choice of a wife.