PEOPLES are back on the historian's agenda. Their return to the historical limelight, or at least out of the historical shadows, is doubtless in part a response to the growing awareness of the power of ethnicity in our own contemporary world. So it is with changes of historical fashion at all times. But it also no doubt arises in part from the growing recognition that the centrality that academic historians have so long given to the unitary nation state as the natural, inevitable and indeed desirable unit of human power and political organisation is itself a reflection of the intellectual climate in which modern academic historiography was forged in the nineteenth century. The linear development of the nation state is no longer of necessity the overarching theme and organising principle in the study of the past that it once was. Once our historical gaze could be shifted from the state and its institutions and from the seductive appeal of its prolific archives, other solidarities and collectivities could come more clearly into historical focus. Some of them seemed to have as great, if not occasionally greater, depth and historical resilience than did the nation state. At the very least they deserve to be studied alongside it. Not least in prominence among such collectivities are the peoples of Europe.

BOTH during his lifetime, and after his death, General Franco was reviled by his enemies on the left and subjected to the most absurd adulation by his admirers on the right. As the victor in a bloody civil war which inflamed passions throughout the world, that is hardly surprising. Leaving aside his personal political success in remaining in power for nearly four decades, his victory in the Spanish Civil War was his greatest and most glorious achievement, something reflected in the judgements of detractors and hagiographers alike. For the left, Franco the general was a slow-witted mediocrity whose battlefield triumphs were owed entirely to the unstinting military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini. For the right, Franco the general was the twentieth-century incarnation of Alexander the Great, of Napoleon and of the great warrior hero of Spanish legend, El Cid.

BEATNIKS, hippies, punks; marines, convicts, monks—it does not need much reflection to see that styles of head and facial hair in our own society convey meanings about status, attitude and role. The same is equally true of other societies, including those of the past, and the purpose of this paper is to explore some of those meanings as found in medieval Europe.

PATRIARCHY was very old when Queen Elizabeth ascended the English throne. Historians have sought its origins in die Old Testament record of the creation of Jewish monotiieism and in the social conditions of Hebrew society. They have explored die contributions of classical Greece and early Christian thinking to its development and evolution. By the time that the Tudor dynasty ruled in England, the institutionalised male dominance over women and children in die family and die extension of diat subordination to women in society in general, die scriptural patriarchy with which I am concerned, had become so deeply embedded diat it has appeared immutable. Something so permanent, something that was so given, has seemed not to deserve scrutiny by die historians of early modern England. It was socialist and radical feminists who took up die notion of patriarchy in die 1960s because they needed a concept which would help diem to theorise male dominance. From dieir contemporary perspective also, patriarchy appeared immovable and monumental. There was a tendency among them at first to study it as such: feminist historians approached die past wim die premise diat there has always been an undifferentiated and consistent male commitment to domination and control over women in every sphere of life. The conflation of patriarchy with misogyny, I suggest, produced an unhistorical patriarchy as die staple of women's history. It is only fairly recendy diat historical studies of gender have broken free from diese shackles, diat historians have begun to penetrate die discourses and strategies dirough which men have—or have not— coerced, or oppressed or subordinated women through die ages.

He that will fraunce wynne, must with Scotland first beginne.

WHEN I tell people that I'm studying English strategy in the Hundred Years War, the response is very often something to the effect of ‘did they really have “strategy” in the middle ages?’ This idea, that strategy was absent from the medieval period, remains deeply embedded in the historiography of the subject. Sir Charles Oman, probably still the best-known historian of medieval warfare, wrote of the middle ages that ‘the minor operations of war were badly understood, [and] strategy— the higher branch of the military art—was absolutely nonexistent. Professor Ferdinand Lot said much the same. Other scholars have argued that the medieval commander ‘had not the slightest notion of strategy’, or that ‘never was the art of war so imperfect or so primitive.’ But the truth is that most medieval commanders did not show ‘a total scorn for die intellectual side of war’ nor ignore ‘the most elementary principles of strategy’; nor is it fair to say that ‘“generalship” and “planning” are concepts one can doubtfully apply to medieval warfare.’

IN June 1536 Thomas Starkey, a royal chaplain, humanist, and ‘commonwealth man’, wrote to Henry VIII concerning the Act passed in the spring of that year suppressing monasteries worth less than £200:

many ther be wyche are mouyd to iuge playnly thys acte of suppressyon of certayn abbays bothe to be agayne the ordur of charyte & iniuryous to them wych be dede bycause the foundarys therof & the soulys departyd seme therby to be defraudyd of the benefyte of prayer & almys dede ther appoyntyd to be done for theyr releyffe …

—to which he argued that the common weal of all took precedence over arrangements made for the private weal of the individual. Moreover, in answering those who would argue for ‘rather a just reformatyon then thys vthur ruynose suppressyon’, he went on,

for though hyt be so that prayer & almys dede be much to the comfort of them wych be departyd, & though god delyte much in our charytabul myndys thereby declaryd, yet to conuerte ouer much possessyon to that end & purpos, & to appoynt ouer many personys to such offyce & exercyse, can not be wythout grete detryment & hurt to the chrystian commynwele … & though hyt be a gud thyng & much relygyouse to pray for them wych be departyd out of thys mysery, yet we may not gyue al our possessyonys to nurysch idul men in contynual prayer for them …

Starkey was certain that the possessions of monasteries had been given to the ‘end and purpose’ of providing spiritual benefits for the ‘founders’, to help the passage of their souls through Purgatory.

ON the 18th June 1902 the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, wrote to his government in London:

The fact is that your Political Committee and the Foreign Office have gone completely off the rails … Now, why could not the India Office trust me …? You send me out to India as an expert and you treat my advice as though it were that of an impertinent schoolboy.

SOCIALIST unity became an issue for the British left with in a year of the formation of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884. The secession of William Morris and his supporters from the SDF and the formation of the Socialist League in reaction to the autocratic leadership of Henry Mayers Hyndman brought about a fundamental division within British socialism. Subsequently the creation of other socialist parties, most particularly the Independent Labour Party (ILP) led to further disunity within die British socialist movement. Nevertheless, notwidistanding die proliferation of British socialist societies with their distinctive socialist credentials, diere were several attempts to form a united socialist party between 1893 and 1914. They were normally encouraged, on the one hand, by advocates of the ‘religion of socialism’ such as William Morris, Robert Blatchford and Victor Grayson, and, on the other, by Hyndman and the SDF. The aim of these efforts was to strengdien socialist organisation in times of both political failure and success, but in every instance diey failed due to the intractable problem of bringing together socialists of distinctively different persuasions under the umbrella of one party. These failures have led recent historians to debate two major questions connected with socialist unity. First, diey have asked at what point did socialist unity cease to be a viable alternative to the Labour Alliance between the ILP and the trade unions? Stephen Yeo feels that socialist unity became impossible after die mid 1890s, David Howell suggests that this ‘suppressed alternative’ became unlikely about five to ten years later, as die leaders of die Independent Labour Party opted for the trade union rather than socialist alliance,

DUST has scarcely had time to settle on Lady Thatcher; yet already a thick sediment of historical significance attaches to the fifteen years of her ascendancy. The period between 1975 and 1990 looks likely to prove as significant for the political ideologies of the twenty-first century as that between, say, 1885 and 1906 currently looks for our own. In the twilight world of John Major (who appears part-antidote, part-surrogate), Conservative ideology is becoming informed by reviews from both sides as they reflect on not only what went wrong but what it was that seemingly went so right, from a party point of view, for so long. We have just had placed before us, for example, John Campbell's admirable biography of Sir Edward Heath, on theone hand, and Alan Clark's transfixing diaries very much on the other. Such documents supplement amass of theorising and comment by political scientists and journalists, most of which dwells on the twin themes of discontinuity and dichotomy. The history of the Tory party is seen to enter a period of catastrophe by the end of the Heath government out of which there emerges a distinct party ideology which people call ‘Thatcherism’: a ‘New Conservatism’ radically distinct from the compromise and accommodation that marked politics after 1951. But that process was contested within the party—hence a dichotomy between two persuasions: the hawks and the doves, the dries and the wets, the Tories and the Conservatives, the true blues and the Liberals. Language of this kind has a particular interest to historians. They want to raise issues about its chronological deep-structure: how ‘new’ was this ‘New Conservatism’?. They recognise the need to situate the dichotomies of the moment in a wider context of Conservative experience: how singular is a doctrine of dichotomy within Conservative party doctrine? Above all they bring into question bald postulates about the nature of current Conservatism which do not compare experience across time

MY purpose today is to do a kind of David Bellamy on the least promising patch of that unmapped, unloved bog-of-a-phenomenon we call ‘The British Constitution’. You know the sort of thing—‘this might just look like a boring old bundle of procedures and conventions to you, but there's life and insight in here!’

If ennui is already setting in, don't be upset. You are part of the grand tradition of our political nation. For my text today is from Mr Gladstone—his celebrated remark to the effect that:

If there are two things on earth that John Bull hates, they are an abstract proposition and the Pope.

IN 1779 William Alexander published what is probably the first history of women in English. The work is in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment tradition of Montesquieu or the Scot Millar in its wide comparative reference; it ranges over ancient and modern societies, civilised and savage. Alexander was interested, like Millar, in the historical changes which had produced change for women; and convinced, like so many eighteenth-century thinkers, that change was a western phenomenon. In his story, the first great change after Rome came with the arrival of the Germans, who gave ‘law and custom to all Europe’ and who brought with them a new view of women. ‘Their women were in many respects of equal and sometimes even greater consideration and consequence than their men’. His sentiments echo those of the French writer Thomas, whom he had certainly read. In 1772 Thomas had begun his essay on the character, manners and spirit of women in different centuries by dividing the world into savages, who oppress as tyrants, orientals, who are driven to oppress due to an excess of love, and the denizens of temperate climates, where less passion allows greater freedom. It was thus from the cold ‘shores of the Baltic and forests of the North’ that the primitive Germans brought to Europe their spirit of gallantry and great respect for women. Both Thomas and Alexander echoed and adapted Tacitus’ classic picture of Germanic women. Tacitus had long since written of the high regard in which the German women were held: of the mothers and wives who urged their sons and husbands to valour, of their inspirational chastity, of the austere frugality of Germanic marriage, of wives whose controlled passions loved the married state itself rather than their husbands.

AFTER a long period of neglect, during which historians had looked towards the petite bourgeoisie primarily to heap upon it the responsibility for fascism, the last fifteen years has seen a growing research interest in the social and political history of die world of small retail, artisanal and manufacturing enterprise. The result of diis attention has been paradoxical, on the one hand establishing the petite bourgeoisie as a focus for sustained research, while on the other confirming how difficult it is to see the owners of small retail and manufacturing enterprise as a coherent social group or social class. The combination of the owner's labour and capital widiin family-centred enterprises might indicate a distinct position for the petite bourgeoisie within the social structure, but various forces militated against a social or demographic identity for die proprietors of small enterprise: the high rate of business turnover, die limited proportion of petits bourgeois who remain in diat position through their careers, and die low rate of continuity between generations. Although political struggle was important in die formation of any class, one could go further widi respect to die petite bourgeoisie and suggest that it was only at times of political crisis and action, only through die discourse and actions of its organisations, diat a petit-bourgeois identity might emerge. It is not surprising, dierefore, diat research has focused above all on diose years between die 1880s and the First World War, when die emergence of interest groups and increasing political mobilisation seemed to offer evidence of a real petit-bourgeois identity.