Besides the programme of. interesting works which we hope to issue to our members as part of the Camden Society Publications, there are two undertakings that specially concern this Society, when we look forward to coming years: the great Bibliography which has been carefully planned and which we hope to carry through by the co-operation of English and American scholars, and the International Historical Congress, which will take place in a: little more than two years' time in London. At the last; Congress in Berlin this Society was represented, and an invitation was given by the British Academy to the members to meet in London in four years' time, and we must as a society do our best to see that the gathering is rendered as successful as possible.

A very large number of ballads written during the reign of James I have been preserved in various collections, though the dates of these productions are often obscured by the fact that those editions of them which have survived bear the imprint of publishers of a later time. The ‘Stationers' Registers,’ so far as the entry of ballads is concerned, were very carelessly kept during the twenty-two years that the king's reign covered, and during some years only two or three appear in the lists. Of those which can be dated, many are amorous and romantic ballads, or illustrate the general aspects of the social history of England during the whole century rather than the limited period with which we are concerned. There remain, however, after all these deductions, a considerable number of still extant ballads which supply a kind of commentary on the political events of the reign, and show what the feeling of the people was at the time when those events happened.

I think it was Lord Halsbury, in the Scotch Church case, who stopped one of the advocates in his use of the word Church, saying that they as a Court had nothing to do with that, and that they could only consider the question as one concerning a trust. In other words, with a religious society as such they could not deal, but only with a trust or a registered company. This is only one instance of a fact exhibited in the whole of that case: namely, the refusal of the legal mind of our day to consider even the possibility of societies possessing an inherent, self-developing life apart from such definite powers as the State, or the individuals founding the body under State authority, have conferred upon them explicitly. In this view, apart from the State, the real society—and from individuals the living members of the State—there are no active social unities; all other apparent communal unities are directly or indirectly delegations, either of State powers or of individuals. To such a view the notion is abhorrent of a vast hierarchy of interrelated societies, each alive, each personal, owing to the State loyalty, and by it checked or assisted in their action no less than are private individuals, but no more deriving their existence from Government concession than does the individual or the family. In other words, these phrases of Lord Halsbury are but the natural expression of the concession theory of corporate life which sees it as a fictitious personality, the creation by the State for its own purposes, and consequently without any natural or inherent powers of its own. This theory is not so universally accepted as was once the case, but Professor Geldart's inaugural lecture on ‘Legal Personality’ shows how great are the obstacles still to be encountered by that theory of realism which is for most of us associated with the name of Gierke, and was popularised by Maitland. The latter, moreover, has shewn how this very English institution of the trust has preserved us from the worse perils of the rigid doctrinaire conception of the civilian. For under the name of a trust many of the qualities of true personality have been able to develop unmolested. But this has not been all to the good. It has probably delayed the victory of the true conception, by enabling us to ‘muddle through’ with the false one. Moreover, the trust is and assimilates itself always rather to the Anstalt or the Stiftung than to the living communal society, the true corporation, with its basis in the Genossenschaft; and consequently, as was proved in this Scotch case, the necessary independence of a self-developing personality is denied to it, and its acts are treated as invalid on this very ground—that it is only a trust tied rigidly to its establishing terms, and not a true society with a living will and power of change.

In drawing your attention to an intrigue to deprive the Earl of Essex of the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland it may perhaps be worth while to say a few words about the dignity and emoluments of that office. At the period of which we are treating, the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland was regarded without question as the most exalted position which an English subject could obtain out of England. In England itself there was only one post, the Lord Treasurership, which surpassed it, and it may be questioned whether the sword of the Lord Lieutenant did not confer more power than the staff of the Lord Treasurer. The Lord Lieutenant directly represented the Crown in a land which, for centuries, no English monarch had visited. He had his Court, his guards; he was head of all the military force in the country. Lord Halifax, on one occasion, expressed disinclination for the post, because ‘he did not love,’ he said, ‘a new scene, nor to dine with a sound of trumpet and 36 dishes of meat on his table.’

If anyone were to ask where he ought to look for the Roll of Agincourt he would probably be told that he would find it in the ‘History of the Battle,’ published by Sir Harris Nicolas in 1827, in which there are seventy-two pages of printed matter containing ‘the names of the Dukes, Earls, Barons, Knights, Esquires, Servitours and others that wer withe the Excellent Prince King Henry the Fifte at the Battell of Agincourt’; and if he wanted to know (as which of us would not?) whether one of his ancestors took part in the fight he would look through that list and if he found the name he would probably say, ‘It's all right, he was there!’ but if he didn't he might say, ‘Rubbish! You mustn't expect me to be convinced by such a mass of confusion as that!’ Such a man's difficulty is the one that I want this learned society to look into this afternoon, and in venturing to set before you the dry bones of the skeleton of what is really a very complicated question I need not say that I am here to-day with the very greatest diffidence, for I expect that there are many experts present who will say of the contents of my paper that ‘that which is true is not new and—’ you know the other half of the epigram. I speak, therefore, under a natural feeling of stage fright such as seized upon Henry Buckle when he first faced a Royal Institution audience and felt inclined at the beginning to run away there and then, though I cannot venture to hope for the success he achieved before he sat down at the end. At the risk, however, of wandering among platitudes, I will, if you please, assume conventionally that some at least in this audience may be as ignorant of the main features of my problem as I was myself when I attempted to look into it several years ago. I was then seeking for such first-hand evidence as might still exist for the details of the campaign that ended with the great battle of St. Crispin's Day and whether there was any hope of getting on to firm ground in dealing with the conflicting statements as to the numbers and composition of the force with which Henry V set sail from Southampton in August 1415 and ten weeks later fought the wonderful fight that had such far-reaching effects on the course of the history, not only of our own country and of France, but on that of the whole of Western Europe.

The Abbey of Chertsey was among the earliest of the great monasteries of the south of England. Its foundation was ascribed to Earconwald bishop of London and Wulfhere, king of the Mercians in the seventh century, supported by Frithwald subregulus of Surrey, whose name is the only extant name of the kings of the Suthrige. The abbots of Benedictine Houses of royal foundation were, as a rule, lords of Parliament in later centuries. The abbot of Chertsey, though a mitred abbot, was not; perhaps the king of the Mercians, though certainly overlord at the time of all southern England, was not sufficiently like a king of England to be counted. The fact of the royal foundation is sufficiently attested by Bede; about the circumstantial accounts of its endowment a little doubt may be entertained. But Chertsey was a rich and an important house, and the abbots occupied distinguished positions. Abbot Hugh accompanied Ralph archbishop of Canterbury to Rome, after 1114, in the capacity of physician, when the archbishop went as an ambassador in the controversy concerning the relative positions of the sees of Canterbury and York.

A notable feature of Baltic politics at the close of the seventeenth century was the rivalry of Sweden and Denmark, which had fought with each other during several centuries for supremacy, or even for existence. To the permanence and strength of this feeling, and its importance in the politics of the North, contemporary and modern authorities, the correspondence of Louis XIV and William III and their ministers, with Ranke, Bain, and the ‘Cambridge Modern History,’ equally bear witness. At this period, however, Denmark hankered after an alliance with Sweden, of course on her own terms. The explanation is that Denmark was a more purely Baltic Power than Sweden; If there had been peace in the Baltic, Denmark could have become powerful and wealthy; but her ministers, themselves wretchedly poor, were actuated by mercenary motives. Hence the dangerous policy of fleecing the merchants who passed the Oresund. Unfortunately, the refusal of Sweden to come to terms with her rival made it possible for the English and Dutch, especially the latter, to maintain a balance of power in the Baltic, and thus diminish Denmark's gains. Griffenfeld, who has been regarded as Denmark's greatest statesman, had seen how beneficial an alliance with Sweden, with the Duchy of Holstein-Gottorp (whose efforts against Danish absorption were vigorously supported by Sweden) and France, the rival of the Sea Powers, would be to Denmark, provided she, and not Sweden, manipulated the policy of the league for her own benefit.

The story of apprenticeship is so interwoven with the general and industrial history of England that it is almost impossible to touch upon any portion of it without travelling over ground already well known. There are, however, certain aspects of the subject which can, perhaps, bear further investigation. It is the purpose of this paper to deal mainly with three such aspects of early English appientice-ship, namely, its flexibility, its use as an instrument of monopoly, and lastly, but most important, the continuity between the guild system and the national and compulsory system established by Statute in 1562.