The growth of subjectivity in the religious life of the later Middle Ages, in discipline and worship as well as doctrine, both without and within the corporation of the clergy, was an important motif in the history of the Church in England. A more personal interpretation of religious obligations affected even matters of bedrock importance to the life of the organized church, such as the duty of tithing. Of particular interest in this connection in England was the cause célèbre created in London in the 1420's by a maverick Franciscan, William Russell, who preached that under certain conditions lay persons might devote their personal tithes at will to any pious or charitable use. Russell's sermon led to his condemnation as a heretic. But the reasons for the extraordinary controversy that he stirred up become clear only when one recognizes the place of his sermon in a long dispute between the parish clergy of London and their parishoners about the precise obligation of personal tithes in the city.

The prosecution of William Russell before Archbishop Henry Chichele and the Convocation of Canterbury was an odd affair and, in spite of their prolixity, its records leave unsolvable riddles for medievalists. The process against Russell comprises the longest trial in Archbishop Chichele's register—perhaps in that of any medieval Archbishop of Canterbury. Minutes of the prosecution and wordy ancillary documents fill all or parts of twenty-six folio pages of the register (fifty-two printed pages in the splendid printed edition of E.F. Jacob). Yet in reading this material one gathers hardly more than a crabbed impression of the learned proofs and literary citations that Russell mustered in defense of this teaching on personal tithes. What is most striking to a reader of this transcript is the vehemence with which Archbishop Chichele and his clergy in the Convocation prosecuted this errant friar, in whose sermon they saw a clear and present danger to the endowment of London parish churches.

The growth of an opposition party in the House of Commons is a primary reason given for the altered distribution of power within the government of England in the early seventeenth century. While historians are not unaware that opposition also emerged in the Upper Chamber of Parliament, little serious investigation of this phenomena has been undertaken since it has not been viewed as essential to an explanation of the growing constitutional crisis within England. Consequently, the nature and extent of noble dissidence continues to be a subject of vague generalization including no small amount of contradictory assumptions and conclusions. The traditional interpretation may be termed the “personalist” view of opposition in the House of Lords and has been dominant at least since Samuel Rawson Gardiner's massive study of England in the early seventeenth century. This explanation, which still prevails among historians, asserts that opposition was based on little more than personal rivalries and jealousies over power and status among the members of the peerage. Indeed it is argued that monarchs encouraged “government by division” as a major weapon in the maintenance of their own authority. Those who view noble opposition in this manner usually assert that it had no important ideological or philosophical underpinnings, little continuity or organization of the type associated with the rise of opposition in the Commons, and minimal constitutional impact and significance.

The subject of this essay is a tract written by the noted antiquary, legalist, parliamentarian and sometime courtier, Sir Robert Cotton. Entitled, “Twenty-Four Arguments,” and composed sometime between March, 1617 and early January, 1618, it dealt with the problems posed to the English State and Church by the Roman Catholics and concerned itself, in particular, with the question of whether Popish priests should be executed or imprisoned for life.

The “Twenty-Four Arguments” appeared under that name in the Cottoni Posthuma, a collection of Cotton's writings, published in three editions between 1651 and 1679. However, the first actual publication of this treatise occurred in 1641, when it was put out independently by two printers, each giving it a different title. In addition, it is quite likely that the tract circulated in manuscript before it appeared in printed form.

This brief excursion into the publication history of the “Twenty-Four Arguments” indicates that it was the subject of interest at an important moment in English history. Thus, while admittedly a lesser known and minor work of the period, it is worthy of our consideration. In fact, to the historian the “Twenty-Four Arguments” presents, I think, three important features which make it of real significance. First, it is the product of one of the outstanding lay minds in early seventeenth century England. Sir Robert was, of course, a man of intense learning who displayed a scholar's love for knowledge in his search and accumulation of manuscripts and books, in his concern with antiquities and legal history, and in his close association with such brilliant contemporaries as Sir Francis Bacon and John Selden.

In the eighteenth century, most military crimes were tried at the Regimental level. In theory, the military law of the day decreed that the General Courts Martial be reserved for major offenses: those that might result in capital sentences or lashings of great magnitude. Murder, rape, robbery, and other crimes deemed capital undgr eighteenth century civil law, were tried at the General Courts Martial, as were specific military crimes that seriously affected the ongoing life of the armed forces—mutiny, desertion, and the like. As one would expect, there were many more petty crimes than major offenses. Still, the General Courts Martial books show a surprisingly small number of cases, even in wartime, when the army grew precipitously to meet a military threat.

For most soldiers, crime and punishment was administered by the Regimental Courts, yet we know very little about them. There are no Regimental Courts Martial records to speak of and few surviving accounts of their procedures. What we do know suggests that they were very important to those military officers who were responsible for the order and discipline of the British army.

Until 1718, the rules and procedures governing Regimental Courts Martial were vague and uncertain. In that year, a modest attempt was made to codify RCM procedures. It was decreed that the RCM could inflict corporal punishment for such crimes as neglect of duty and disorderly conduct in quarters, among others, and that all such trials had to be conducted by five commissioned officers. Conviction was decided by a plurality of votes. Significantly, the oath, used previously when officers were called upon to serve as judge and jury, was eliminated in Regimental Courts Martial cases. As a result, the Judge Advocate noted some years later, “since that time the Prisoner has not had the benefit of that great and I may say, only security to be fairly and impartially tried.”

A few years ago the iconoclastic architectural scholar Reyner Banham declared: William Morris's “ruralizing vision of John Ball's other island as a vast medieval dude-ranch full of bit players addressing one another as ‘Neighbour’ just doesn't stand up.” Surely not, if this indeed was Morris's vision. Yet did this vision originate with Morris or with certain of his interpreters?

E. P. Thompson has called attention to the growth of a “Morris myth.” Thompson argued that William Morris's revolutionism, and specifically, Marxism, had been buried under layers of praise (and disparagement) for a fictitious—and socially harmless—character. This mythic Morris was a mixture of romantic poet and traditional craftsman, in love with old English countryside and old English folk life. As such, he could be—and was—embraced by Liberals, Tories, and right-wing socialists.

Thompson's observation was not the first such, nor the last. By now these protests have altered the commonly accepted view of Morris, and we see the revolutionary within the medievalist, the communist within the craftsman. Yet no one has asked why the myth flourished. Thompson, like R. Page Arnot more briefly before him, saw this myth, properly, as something more than a simple mistake. Thompson followed the Marxist lead of Arnot in implying deliberate distortion for class purposes.

The Cabinet crisis of 1903 was an event of major significance in recent British political history. The Annual Register declared of the 1903 crisis that it was “one of the most sensational political events recorded in the long series of volumes of the Annual Register.” Randolph Churchill, in his great biography of his father, referred to the crisis as a “remarkable and probably unique series of events.” Lord Blake, in The Observer, wrote that it was one of “the most drastic series of expulsions, resignations and reshuffles engineered by any Prime Minister in the twentieth century.” The present writer in a book entitled Balfour's Burden wrote of the 1903 crisis that “this Cabinet was a decisive moment in British history. Ministers had come together in order to decide upon the economic and Imperial future of their country.”

Historians have always recognised the high importance of the 1903 crisis in British affairs. But they have been unable to agree upon the details of it, and they have differed regularly about the role in it played by Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister of the day. Nevertheless, material in the Public Record Office in London, recently made available to scholars, now enables us to resolve the differences which have occupied the attention of scholars for a long time past. Nor is it simply a matter of detail. Significant conclusions about British political practice can be made when the crisis of 1903 is understood, in all its aspects. The crisis occurred as the result of British failures during the Boer War which revealed that Britain was either unable or unprepared to defend the distant reaches of her Empire. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, resolved to restore the situation.