Since the beginning of the nineteenth century language has come to occupy a prominent place, often a provocative and intolerant one, in the ideology and rhetoric of nations. ‘Every people (Volk)’, so Herder asserted, ‘has its own language as it has its own culture (Bildung).’ Bishop Stubbs spoke with equal certainty, if only to vindicate the Germanic character of the English people and to clear it of the charge of being infected with Roman or Celtic traits. Language, he pronounced roundly, is ‘the nearest approach to a perfect test of national extraction’. It is a sentiment whose certainty and content would command almost no historical support today. We are much more likely to agree with Eric Hobsbawm's opinion that ‘language was merely one, and not necessarily the primary, way of distinguishing between cultural communities’.

History is not an exact science. In describing and seeking to resurrect—or at least reconstruct—past societies, historians make use of concepts which bear a double freight of meaning. Unlike the elements, atoms and molecules of natural science, which—however much they are artefacts of the inquiring scientist's mind rather than natural ‘givens’ of the outside world—cannot answer back, the terms which historians use to describe the human world are themselves not only part of the way in which that past world was lived and experienced by the historical actors, but are also part of the way in which historians see, experience and act in their own social and political world. Historical concepts at any level of abstraction beyond the most basic and immediate empirical reference are also part of broader contemporary debates.

IN March 1802, the peace treaty of Amiens was signed, resulting in a two-way flow of travellers across the English Channel. Among those arriving at Dover was Joseph Fiévée, printer by trade, littérateur by vocation, and latterly politican by profession. It is said that he was commissioned by Bonaparte himself to report on affairs in London. In any event, his findings were published in the Mercure and reprinted in a work whose title, Lettres sur l'Angleterre, et réflexions sur la philosopkie du XVIIIe siècle, challenged comparison with the most famous of French commentaries on England, that of Voltaire. It reads as polemic rather than analysis, confronting what Fiévée took to be serious errors made by his countrymen when they wrote about Britain. But little of the book was what one might expect of such a work. Fiévée was not primarily interested in British politics, law and government, but in the character and manners of the people. His conclusions may be summed up in one of his many generalizations. ‘If civilization … is the art of rendering society pleasing, agreeable and congenial, the English constitute the least civilised nation of Europe.’

THE novel which won the 1987 Booker Prize was Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. Its central character is an historian whom, on the opening page, we find already near to death. Even so, she is meditating about the completion of a new work: ‘A history of the world. To round things off. I may as well—no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez … The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute—from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine.’ And she adds: ‘I'm equipped, I consider; eclecticism has always been my hallmark.’

HUMAN beings are in a perpetual dialogue with the past from their vantage point in the present. St Augustine put this most succinctly when he discussed what he thought of as ‘three times’, that is, ‘a present concerning past things; a present concerning present things and a present concerning future things. For these three are in the spirit and I do not see them elsewhere: the present concerning past things is memory; the present concerning present things is perception; the present concerning future things is expectation’.

THE award of the Booker Prize for 1995 to Pat Barker's Ghost Road did more than pay tribute to the latest powerful novel in the author's ‘Regeneration Cycle’. It also emphasised once again how much the historical and cultural consciousness of twentieth-century Britain is dominated by images of war. With the obvious exception of Northern Ireland, Great Britain has been an unusually peaceful and stable country in a century marked by revolution and upheaval. Yet our national experience has been shaped, almost obsessed, by two world wars in a way true of few, if any, other countries. Memories of 1914 and 1939 tower over us like Lutyens's massive monument at Thiepval. The war leaders, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, are commonly thought of as our two greatest prime ministers in modern times (though another, more recent, prime minister, victorious in the Falklands, still has her champions). Armistice day, Remembrance Sunday and the wearing of poppies retain their potency as all-powerful national symbols of sacrifice. The British Legion remains an influential pressure group. The eightieth anniversary of the battle of the Somme in July 1996 emphasised anew the enduring impact of the tragedies of the first world war. More generally, the fiftieth anniversaries of VE Day and VJ Day the previous year were nationwide ceremonies of remembrance for the sacrifices of the second. Almost every episode in current history, especially where Europe is involved, is commonly linked with memories of earlier conflict. Even the 1996 crisis in Anglo-German relations, such as it was, arising from ‘mad cow disease’ evoked comparison with 1939.

OVER the last fifteen years, a substantial literature has welled up, practically from nowhere, purporting to anatomise ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’, this literature suggests, is not a true estimate of national character, an enduring national essence, but rather a historical construct that was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by the ‘dominant classes’ in British society in order to tame or thwart the tendencies of their day towards modernism, urbanism and democracy that might otherwise have overwhelmed elite culture. These aspirations for social control determined the lineaments of the new ‘Englishness’. Nostalgic, deferential and rural, ‘Englishness’ identified the squire-archical village of Southern or ‘Deep’ England as the template on which the national character had been formed and thus the ideal towards which it must inevitably return. Purveyed by the ‘dominant classes’ to the wider culture by means of a potent array of educational and political instruments—ranging from the magazine Country Life to the folk-song fad to the National Trust to Stanley Baldwin's radio broadcasts—‘Englishness’ reversed the modernising thrust of the Indus-trial Revolution and has condemned late twentieth-century Britain to economic decline, cultural stagnation and social division.

The 1530s always remained classic Elton territory, in spite of later and fruitful excursions into the Cecilian world and beyond. How distinctive were the thirties? Are we still justified in talking about a ‘Revolution’? In a historical climate which puts the accent on continuities, such talk has become unfashionable. Productive reform was characteristic of the Wolsey ministry, of the reigns of Henry VII and of Edward IV, and perhaps had its origin with Margaret of Anjou's regime. Equally historians are now very aware of the gap between aspiration and reality, the sheer difficulty of effecting real change, and especially in such areas as religious practice. They are also aware of how un-revolutionary in many respects were the succeeding years; of how many of the initiatives of the thirties were not followed up in the later year of Henry VIII or even in the otherwise revolutionary reign of Edward VI; above all of the Elizabethan regime with its avoidance whenever possible of confrontation and its attempts to recreate many of the ancient continuities. The thirties did represent a watershed in very many areas, did introduce changes which would be difficult if not necessarily impossible toreverse. But to try to make the thirties the fulcrum around which English history revolves is to invite refutation and the probability that the degree of real change will be underestimated as a result. Where, for instance, Tudor Revolution in Government deals with the particular it remains a remarkable work: inevitably sharpened by subsequent research, but none the less pointing in the right direction on changes in die financial departments, and above all in the evolution of a formal Privy Council.

READING over Elton's work afresh now, sadly, there will be no more, prompts a series of reflections. It is a great body of writing both in quality and quantity: but it is extremely narrow. Elton wrote about a remarkably short time range to which he repeatedly returned. He had little patience with Wolsey, no great interest in the history of the 1540s or 1550s and his excursion into the history of Elizabeth's earlier parliaments was not one which evidently brought him much pleasure. His first book established the reputation of Thomas Cromwell: one of his last pieces of writing considered how much or how little his view of Cromwell had changed, and the very last piece to be published was a defence of Cromwel from modern claims of corruption. It is hard to think of another major historian who has made so good a living from so short a temporal span. It is also striking how little of Elton's output is actually about politics: he was essentially a student of institutions and even ideas rather than of the interaction of men. His later interest in the law seems almost a rejection of politics.

REREADING the thousands of words that Geoffrey Elton penned on English parliamentary history has been a fascinating and a humbling experience. The analytical power, the mastery of sources, the clarity of argument compel unstinting admiration. Although he generously acknowledged the contributions made by friends and students, he was the paramount revisionist of early modern parliamentary history.

IN attending a conference on ‘The Eltonian Legacy’, most of us are here to pay tribute to a teacher or a patron. I am here for the no less heartfelt, but rather trickier, task of paying tribute to a much-missed sparring partner. My first encounter with Geoffrey Elton was at long range, through his review of The Crisis of Parliaments, which I can now describe, recollecting it in tranquillity, as my first encounter with Test Match bowling. It was a bit like taking guard in one's first Test to find oneself facing Curtly Ambrose. Like many such encounters, it gave rise to a firm, but always competitive, friendship.

THE legacy of Sir Geoffrey Elton to the study of Tudor politics can only be described as paradoxical. For all his reputation as a doyen of what has been termed the Cambridge school of high political history, studies of politics comprise but a small section of his œuvre. He never wrote a substantial account of an episode in high politics in the manner of Maurice Cowling or J. C. D. Clark. If one excludes his textbooks, political subjects are treated primarily in his essays. Even these, though, are not numerous. The section ‘Tudor Politics’ in Studies I contains eleven essays and papers. Four are reviews, two are introductions to reprinted biographies, two are essays on Thomas More and two are the famous studies of Henry VII and Henry VIII (‘Rapacity and Remorse’ and ‘King or Minister?’), which are essentially analyses of personality. Only one article, the early ‘Decline and Fall’, deals with a specific political episode. For a man whose doubts about biography as an exercise are well known, there is a striking amount of biographical material here. Elton's real contribution is to be found in his later essays. Studies 3 contains the ‘Points of Contact’ trilogy, ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’ and ‘Arthur Hall’. ‘Hall’, ‘Piscatorial Politics’ in Studies 4 and the final section of Parliament of England form a distinct corpus of Elizabethan political studies.

‘I AM not’, Geoffrey Elton insisted, ‘I am not a legal historian.’ The provenance of this solemn denial is curious. Elton was giving a lecture in the Old Hall of Lincoln's Inn to the Selden Society, the pre-eminent learned society for the study of legal history in England, in 1978. He had been invited to join its Council in the previous year, and was to preside over the Society from 1982 to 1985. Even from that eminence, writing his study of F.W.Maitland, Elton persisted in his earlier denial: he was not ‘a historian of law’. Manifestly this was not an opinion shared by his colleagues in the Selden Society who invited him to lecture in 1978, and elected him to their presidency five years later. And it is certainly easy to discount Elton's denial as a false modesty. He was the mentor of a cadre of distinguished scholars whose work, more obviously than his own, centred on the study of courts, legal procedures or doctrines. He had emphasised in all his writings that those historians—particularly those social historians—who had plundered the rich records generated by the courts, were obliged to recognise that the ‘stifling formality’ of the latter could conceal essential issues, and badly mislead the neophyte. ‘Critical analysis of the available sources’ was imperative; ‘only a precise knowledge of the machinery can really unlock the meaning of the record’. And, most important, Elton was a distinguished historian in his own right of an instrument of critical importance, one of the three Maine modes of juridical change, for constitutional and legal development and innovation: he was a preeminent student of legislation, more specifically, of parliamentary statute.

‘OH, A paper on Geoffrey and religion’, sneered a friend: ‘that won't take you long!’ But it did: it took ages. For many of us, I am sure, thinking about Elton's work and influence has been an autobiographical experience, surveying our own intellectual development in relation to his. For the first time, I read right through the fat file of twenty-five years of letters from Geoffrey (and I will be quoting from some of them). I recalled the first visit of the man my little daughters called ‘The Teddy Bear’, and how he delighted them with a description of Disneyland. Elton in Disneyland is indeed a thought to conjure with! And I was reminded of all I owed to him. Although this conference has been dubbed ‘Oxford's revenge’ and Geoffrey's graduate students are not giving papers, many here stand in his debt: my own life as a historian was a constant epistolary debate with Geoffrey, and it has been a lengthy and nostalgic business trying to sort it out.

A REVEALING metaphor runs throughout The Practice of History, Sir Geoffrey Elton's first and fullest consideration of the methods and purposes of historical study. The aspiring historian is pictured as an apprentice—at one point specifically as an apprentice carpenter (p. 214)—who is aiming to produce a first piece of work to be inspected and judged by a master craftsman. Elton repeatedly speaks of the need for die young scholar to undergo ‘a proper apprenticeship’ (p. 103). He must acknowledge that ‘his life is that of an apprentice learning a craft’, and that he requires to be ‘instructed, guided, and trained’.

SIR Geoffrey Elton begins his 'essay' on The English in 927, ‘the year in which Æthelstan, king of Wessex and Mercia, took over the Danish and English parts of Northumbria and thereby in effect also accepted the existence of a separate kingdom of Scodand’. It was a characteristic moment to choose. This is the date given by the Handbook of British Chronology, evidendy the consideration foremost in Sir Geoffrey's mind. Ædielstan was the first to declare (in effect) that ‘this realm of England is an empire’, which one might have suspected to be a factor too, had Elton not soon explicitly denied any Anglo-Saxon meaning to ‘such noise’. More pertinently, Ædielstan was actually the first king of about all of what is now England, and the first so to style himself officially. By any standards except his grandfather's he was one of die most gifted and well-counselled rulers in English history, whom only the quirks of surviving evidence and historiographical fashion have denied the status of a William the Conqueror or an Edward I.