For many years, the Scandinavian place-names of northern and eastern England have been regarded as valuable materials for the historian. Their number is so large, and they present so many features which point unequivocally to their origin, that their general significance has long been apparent. Sixty years ago, the broad outlines of their distribution were already clear enough to be used in the reconstruction of unrecorded history, and, mainly through the work of J. R. Green, they were beginning to pass into the familiar body of knowledge about the pre-Norman age. The concentrations of Scandinavian names on the fringe of Cleveland and in the central plain of Yorkshire, in Lindsey and Leicestershire, and around the estuary of the Yare, are all indicated in the Conquest of England, published in 1883. The essential fact that these names are characteristic of the regions settled by the Danish armies of King Alfred's time was well established, and has lain in the background of most that has since been written about the bearing of this settlement on the evolution of Old English society.

When Wulfstan II, archbishop of York from 1002 and bishop of Worcester from 1002 to 1016, alias Lupus episcopus, died at York on 28 May 1023, his body was taken for burial to the monastery of Ely, in accordance with his wishes. From the twelfth-century historian of this abbey we get the only mediaeval account of the prelate, a brief, and in some respects unreliable, account. Among other things, it states that miracles were worked at his tomb, but there is no hint elsewhere that Wulfstan had any special claims to sanctity. There was certainly never any question of canonisation; hence there was little motive for the writing of his life by his contemporaries or successors. When we consider how little we should know of the activities of Dunstan or Oswold if we had been denied the contemporary lives of these saints, it is perhaps not remarkable that political historians of the period refer to Wulfstan, if at all, merely as the author of a sermon, the famous Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, revealing contemporary conditions in England, or as the consecrator of Cnut's church at Ashingdon. Even in ecclesiastical histories Wulfstan is given no prominent place. Some mention his appointment to York, some his refoundation of St. Peter's at Gloucester and his consecration of Ashingdon, none, except recently Professor Darlington, who calls him an ardent reformer, suggest that he had any influence on the Anglo-Saxon church of his time or later.

Strangely enough, it is only during the last few years that constitutional historians have turned their attention to the origin of impeachment. Yet it was one of the most spectacular of parliamentary proceedings, often a decisive weapon in political warfare, and of such proved usefulness that it came to be regarded as an inherent function of any representative legislature, and as such it figures not only in the American constitutions but also in so recent a document as the Weimar constitution of 1919.

The twelfth century was a period of rapid growth in English monastic administration. It saw the establishment of an obedientiary system and of a special organisation for exploiting the estates in all but the smallest of religious houses. At the same time, however, as the monasteries solved the main problems of household expenditure and estate management by entrusting administrative responsibility to the senior members of the chapter, they created a problem of equal magnitude: that of the common control of their revenues. How far, it may be asked, did the English monasteries succeed in meeting this difficulty and in combining the joint control and individual expenditure of their monetary income in one organic system? The present essay has been written as an attempt to supply an answer to this question.

The friendship and understanding which had joined the reformed churches of England and Scotland in the early years of Elizabeth's reign were not menaced until shortly after Whitgift's accession to the see of Canterbury in 1583. The new primate had to deal with problems which had been quite unknown to his predecessors—problems arising from the success of the Scottish presbyterians and the efforts of their English imitators. The constitution of the Scottish reformed church, after developing in the direction of ‘conformity with England’, had not attained stability before being undermined by the emergence of intransigent presbyterianism. In 1581 the general assembly had approved the full presbyterian programme, and in August 1582 a coup d'état, the ‘Ruthven raid’, by the ultra-protestant party among the Scottish nobles had produced a government favourable to the first brief presbyterian experiment. In England also the struggle between presbyterianism and episcopacy had begun, and Whitgift himself had been the protagonist of the episcopalian cause. The English crown was immune from such coups d'état as made possible three changes in the constitution of the Scottish church within five years; but the English presbyterians had powerful friends among the radical politicians and diplomats. Already there were signs of co-operation between the ecclesiastical rebels in the two British kingdoms, and the incipient alliance soon had political repercussions, for the conduct of Anglo-Scottish relations was during several years in the hands of Francis Walsingham and William Davison, two diplomats who, as secretary and ambassador, consistently used their influence on behalf of the Scottish presbyterians, whom they alleged to be the only sincere supporters in Scotland of the cause of ‘amity with England’.