England was conquered twice in the eleventh century: first in 1016 by Cnut the Dane and again in 1066 by William Duke of Normandy. The influence of the Norman Conquest has been the subject of scholarly warfare ever since E.A. Freeman published the first volume of his History of the Norman Conquest of England in 1867—and indeed, long before. The consequences of Cnut's conquest, on the other hand, have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Because England was conquered twice in less than fifty years, historians have often succumbed to the temptation of comparing the two events. But since Cnut's reign is poorly documented and was followed quickly by the restoration of the house of Cerdic in the person of Edward the Confessor, such studies have tended to judge 1016 by the standards of 1066. While such comparisons are useful, they have imposed a model on Cnut's reign which has distorted the importance of the Anglo-Scandinavian period. If, however, Cnut's reign is compared with the Anglo-Saxon past rather than the Anglo-Norman future, the influence of 1016 can be more fairly assessed.

Those non-medievalists who had the opportunity to see the film The Lion in Winter may well have concluded that the intensity and extent of hostility among the members of King Henry II's family had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. It would appear, however, that the rivalries between Henry and his sons, and of the latter among themselves, provide a noteworthy example of an historical reality that was even more virulent than the fictionalized version. For example, in 1173-1174, Henry's sons, Henry the Younger, Richard, and Geoffrey, revolted against their father despite the fact that they were only teenagers at the time. The youths were joined in this effort by their mother, Eleanor. However, she was captured by Henry II, who imprisoned her until his own death sixteen years later. In 1182, Henry the Younger again threatened to revolt against his father. The next year found the youth at war with his brother Richard. This conflict widened when Geoffrey joined his brother against Richard, who subsequently was supported by the king. During this campaign Henry the Younger and Geoffrey appear to have attempted to have their father killed. In 1184, following Henry the Younger's death, Geoffrey and his youngest brother, John, went to war against Richard. Finally, in 1189, King Henry died while at war against Richard, who was supported by John.

Henry's family problems were not limited to hostilities with his sons, for on two earlier occasions, in 1152 and 1156, he went to war against his own brother Geoffrey. In a similar vein, Henry's sons did not only find themselves in conflict with their father but, as noted above, they fought against each other. This did not end with Henry's death: John and Richard were in conflict with each other on several occasions, and the former certainly was responsible for the murder of his nephew Arthur.

In his seminal work, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone cites legal change as part of the evidence for his claim that a new sort of family marked the eighteenth century. Property law especially is pointed to as proof that the patriarchal family had given way to what has come to be known as the affective family. It was, of course, natural to seek a basis in law for a theory of family development. Law at any time tells us much about family life. It is certainly fundamental to changes that are said to mark the affective family. Because of an increase in affect (or in another word, love) it is claimed that the new family type saw an increase in the independence of children, and an increase in the status and property of women. Indeed, recognizing the importance of law, Stone has found each of his three stages in family history to be paralleled in property law. The discussion of law does not occupy much space; but it occupies strategic space. Law is the first, or almost the first, thing discussed in each of the stages of the family. The legal arrangements governing property are not just a part of the evidence for the theory; they are a most important part. They can be seen to provide the framework, the hard structure, on which the theory is built. “The hardest evidence”—Stone's words—for the great change he sees in the eighteenth century he finds in law.

In March 1761 the diarist Horace Walpole complained that “West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals” were attacking every parliamentary borough in the general election. Although it lacked statistical proof, this sour observation became an accepted tenet in political histories of Britain written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the one full-length study of nabobs published in 1926 echoes Walpole's refrain; Holzman depicted them as a group of nouveaux riches “determined to raise their power and position to the level of their credit. This precipitated a fierce class strife, which was signalised [sic.] by changes in the ownership of landed estates and pocket boroughs.” The investigations of the Namierite school have long since demolished the myth of an East Indian onslaught on English politics and society in the mid-eighteenth century. Only a handful of novice MPs were returned to parliament in the general elections of 1761 and 1768, and those elected did not constitute a concentrated and coherent East Indian lobby at Westminster.

Yet should Walpole's observation be dismissed so readily? This was an age of ignorance of the nature of the British presence in India, of considerable misgivings over the many effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain, and of a resultant lack of enthusiasm for an Asian empire. The leading historian of the British connection with India in the eighteenth century has recently pointed out that this reluctance derived in part from fears that it would upset not only the social and political, but also the moral underpinnings of established society.

The question this article poses is: Are the assumptions about women in Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 sound and should his conclusions form the point of departure for the work of the growing number of scholars in both history and literature interested in early modern English women? The question really needs to be asked because of the commanding reputation of the author, his pioneering attempt at constructing an overarching conceptual framework for the evolution of family modes—an effort that has contributed to bringing into focus the work of other scholars in the fields of family and women's history—and the remarkable popularity of the book. By 1979, two years after its first publication the demand for this big, 800 page volume was lively enough to warrant an abridged paperback edition, and today the book is used in “hundreds” of courses and seminars in history, literature, sociology, and women's studies in universities and colleges in the United States and the United Kingdom. Personal conversations with scholars and students, especially those who do not work directly in women's history, indicate that Stone's assumptions about women have won uncritical acceptance. This is surely accountable to the fact that no scholar has published a close examination of Stone's treatment of women and only a few reviewers have suggested the need for caution in following his views about the condition of women.

Between the 1880s and 1914, British liberalism underwent a significant transformation. During this period, liberalism was redefined by liberal intellectuals so as to be more explicitly an ideology of social reform. At the same time, from 1906-1914 Liberal governments enacted a radically new social welfare policy. Both of these phenomena were the product of a growing awareness on the part of most Liberals that their party was critically dependent upon the votes of working men for electoral success. Following the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and the launching of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign in 1903, the Liberals were faced with an overt challenge from both the left and the right to their claim to be the party of the working man. The articulation of a new liberalism—both as ideology and as policy—was central to the Liberal response to this challenge.

If, however, the Liberal party were to persuade working-class voters that it remained the best political instrument for defending their interests and promoting their needs, the evidence of a transformed liberalism could not be limited to the ideology of intellectuals and the policy of the parliamentary party. The language and behavior of the party activists in the constituencies had to reflect a similar transformation. These were the men who represented liberalism to the local voter. At the same time, these were the men upon whom the national party depended for the unstinting work that was crucial to electoral success. This Liberal rank-and-file was dominated by middle-class Nonconformists. They shared with Liberals a belief in individual liberty and an abhorrence of privilege. Their political agenda—disestablishment of the Anglican church and an end to its privileged position in the education system, temperance reform, the application of Christian principles to foreign policy—reflected these concerns, and after 1886 it increasingly was identified with the policy of the Liberal party. To what degree, then, did the new liberalism affect them?

In July 1399, the exiled Henry of Lancaster returned to England with the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, and a few followers and successfully wrested the English throne from Richard II. Historians have long debated the events of the revolution of 1399 and Henry's subsequent reign. In the last century Stubbs argued that Henry “had risen by advocating constitutional principles” and had “made the validity of a parliamentary title indispensable to royalty.” Lapsley, on the other hand, claims that it was Henry's followers, not Henry, who promoted parliamentary power; they tried to force a parliamentary title on him, but to no avail. McFarlane agrees with Lapsley that Henry was not inspired by constitutional principles; rather Henry “duped” and “outwitted” his followers in his successful usurpation of the crown.

McFarlane goes on to describe a baronial opposition to Henry which was led by Thomas Arundel. In his Cambridge Medieval History article on the Lancastrian kings, he writes: “At the beginning of the new reign he [Thomas Arundel] seemed to stand with the Percies and other noble supporters of the revolution for the preponderance of the baronage in the affairs of the realm.… In Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights this interpretation is somewhat qualified:

McFarlane adds that Arundel was “evidently not altogether happy at the way the new king was already behaving.” He and Henry “only gradually … came together.”

Few in Britain were suprised by Quaker opposition to the Great War; the Society of Friends had traditionally condemned war and violence. Many, however, were startled by the nature and intensity of Quaker resistance, which far exceeded anything they had previously attempted. One possible explanation for the militancy of the Society's anti-war stand certainly would be the prospect of enforced military service, a contingency that had not seriously confronted Friends since the seventeenth century. However, this article will argue that the attitudes and actions of Quaker war-resisters were most significantly influenced by a revitalization of the peace testimony that had remained dormant for nearly a century. In her study of Victorian Quakers, Elizabeth Isichei has already noted that the “patterns of world history have made pacifism, which was a peripheral importance in the nineteenth century, one of Quakerism's … central beliefs, and, for some, its most essential element.” The aim here is to show how this development not only transformed British Quakerism, but also gave the Society of Friends—a religious body of less than 20,000 members—a crucial role in shaping the first significant peace movement of the modern era.

In 1974 Professor Marc Schwarz published a review article on the historical reputation of King James I, in which he pointed out that that reputation had considerably improved in recent years. The slobbering pedant, lazy, conceited, cowardly, alcoholic, spendthrift, fancying pretty young men and giving them far too much influence in court and council: the lineaments of this caricature, first drawn by that foul-mouthed discharged officeholder Anthony Weldon, have not altogether vanished. But as historians have examined various aspects of the king's reign, reread the sources un-blinkered by the biases and assumptions characteristic of the Victorians and perpetuated in this century, from their widely varying points of view, by the disciples of Gloriana and of Karl Marx, a different view of King James has begun to emerge. The new picture of the king is that of a seeker of the via media at home and of peace abroad, a man with acute political antennae whose style was anything but confrontational and whose success in achieving that via media, and in keeping the peace, was comparable to that of his much-admired predecessor. Typical of the converts is Professor J.P. Kenyon, who in 1958 adopted the traditional view of James in his collection of essays on the Stuart kings, but who twenty years later described him as “a strange medley of opposites: he was a fool in some sense, but in others a great man.”

Professor Schwarz's analysis of the recent literature dealt in some detail with four areas: the king's policy toward the church and especially toward the Puritans; foreign affairs; James's views of the constitution and his relations with parliament; and his rule in Scotland. On some other matters there had been no attempt to defend the king: his disastrous economic and fiscal policies, including the inflation of honors, and his predilection for favorites like Somerset and Buckingham. In a number of these areas the work of the past ten years has done nothing to alter Schwarz's verdicts. No significant new work on foreign policy has appeared save in connection with other matters, to be discussed below; the era awaits its R.B. Wernham. There has been no attempt to defend James's irresponsible attitude toward money, which was by far his worst failing as a king, and there is reason to suppose that his financial reputation is irredeemable. It might be pointed out, however, that the Jacobean age was a postwar era, a period of relaxation after the long period of domestic and foreign tension which began when Henry VIII decided to put aside his wife.