During the last twenty years, the study of English place names has placed a large body of new evidence at the service of those who are interested in the earliest phases of Anglo-Saxon history. It may at once be admitted that the study has sometimes shown its vitality by becoming controversial, and that much of the evidence may be interpreted in more than one way. It is gradually becoming clear that when all the available material has been collected and discussed, there will remain a very large number of place-names of which no conclusive interpretation is ever likely to be given.

Though the subject of this paper is over-large, its purpose was begotten of piety, not presumption. If, therefore, I lack the confidence which pertains to discovery, I am not for that reason without my apology; and I aspire to the hope that the Fellows of this Society may deem it a seemly relaxation to pause from their labours for the space of an hour in order to reflect gratefully upon some of their forerunners in learning. Between 1660 and 1730 English medieval scholarship advanced to a notable achievement, and the names of the chief men who contributed thereto are almost household words to all modern students of medieval England. But the history of that pregnant movement of research has still to be written and few of us would claim that we had made full use of the work of our predecessors. Consequently, since the distant converse of dwarfs with giants conduces to humility, it may be salutary to recall once more this great adventure of English erudition, and profitable, also, with an eye to the present, to speculate upon the cause and character of its astonishing success. The praise of famous men has earned an ancient commendation and even a cork may sustain a draught of fishes.

The chief purpose of this paper is to formulate a question. What, to put the matter briefly, have we in mind when we talk of the mercantile state; and what functional value is possessed by our ideas about it when we are engaged in the processes of reconstructing the political and economic life of the centuries in which it is commonly believed to have flourished? Various meanings have been given to the words mercantile system and also to the more austere mercantilism which German scholarship has coined for us to use when we wish to attempt a distillation of the policies attributed to practitioners of that system. Most of us would doubtless be ready to admit that these terms of art of the economist have been useful in bringing large groups of facts and theories into focus; and therein lies their justification. But the concepts which they awkwardly try to express have had a steadily diminishing utility in recent years as our knowledge has advanced, and (like other premature generalisations in the history of ideas) it would seem that they are being perpetuated because we shrink from generalising anew.

This paper is a preliminary study of the relative indebtedness of the Husite movement in Bohemia to the English reformers of the latter half of the fourteenth century on the one hand, and the native Čech predecessors of Hus on the other; but it will also raise questions of historical method and of the influence of nationalism on modern historiography, which will perhaps justify the infliction on you of a subject remote from the topics usually discussed by this Society, and one which you will perhaps deem arid and uninvitingly recondite in itself.

On 31 May, 1641, in the House of Commons, Edmund Prideaux, the member for Lyme Regis, reported the findings of the Committee on the Star Chamber in a Bill for the abolition of that Court.

There was at once a commotion. Before the Speaker had an opportunity to put the question for the engrossment of the Bill, Mr. Coventry, member for Evesham, rose to his feet to complain that the Committee had exceeded the bounds of its prescribed duty in bringing in such a Bill. Sir Robert Hatton thereupon desired that the original instruction for committal might be read, and, on this being done, it was found that Coventry was correct. On the previous 1 April, a Bill for the “ Reforming of the unlawful Proceedings ” of the Court had been given its second reading. It was consigned to the Standing Committee on the Star Chamber.

The story of the overthrow of Fox and North has often, been told. Since the publication of the papers of John Robinson it has been very generally held that public opinion did not express itself at the 1784 election to any great degree. Professor Laprade pillories the view that Pitt was carried into power by a frenzied wave of popular hostility to the Coalition as the incorrect view of every historian from Lecky to Dr. Rose. The landslide theory was indeed unquestioned till the publication of Robinson's papers. Since then it has been generally dismissed. In fact, some writers have accepted the popular hostility theory without consideration of the circumstances of an eighteenthcentury election; they were naturally taken for granted by contemporaries to whom they were all too familiar.