Nearly a quarter of a century has elapsed since The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region was published by the Cambridge University Press, and a proposal by the Committee of the Journal that I should write down my afterthoughts on that book and such ‘considerations as I might wish to put to students at the present day’ was a compliment an author could not but appreciate, and an opportunity he could not refuse.

In the great and widespread revival of medieval studies by which the nineteenth century was distinguished, no province was so long neglected as that of academic institutions and scholastic thought. The pioneers of the historical revival were, almost without exception, men deeply influenced by the romantic movement, and many of them were antiquaries rather than historians; their successors, especially in England and Germany, were principally concerned to trace in the Middle Ages the origins of national institutions and racial characteristics; to neither party did the speculations of what seemed an outworn religious organization make any appeal. Even those scholars who, in France and elsewhere, were themselves Catholics and ecclesiastics, were also men who had been brought up in an age of transition and adaptation, when traditional religion was on the defensive, and were often more sympathetic towards the various systems of philosophy—idealist or ontological—that flowered and fell in Germany and north Italy in the period after the French Revolution. Meanwhile, in the century before that great cataclysm, the scholastic thought of the thirteenth century, rejuvenated by the Italian and Spanish theologians of the counter-Reformation, had been all but submerged by successive waves of Jansenism, rationalism and the new philosophy of Kant, and had only survived in a few schools as a dry and formal discipline. To all alike, therefore, whether Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans or free-thinkers, the vast mass of manuscript material which survived from the scholastic period to cumber the libraries appeared destitute of literary or human interest, and daunted the boldest with its bulk and its technical terminology.

The problem that I am going to discuss this afternoon is one which must surely have exercised the minds of all those who have given a moment's thought to the financing of the Hundred Years' War. What conclusions have been reached it would be hard to say. For apart from two or three illuminating though hardly conclusive pages by Mr A. B. Steel, to whom my indebtedness should soon be obvious, nothing seems to have been printed on this subject in recent times. Yet unless we have some idea why men lent large sums of ready money to the English kings of the later Middle Ages, we must approach the political history of the period at a considerable disadvantage. To an increasing extent as the fourteenth century advanced and preponderantly throughout the course of its successor these lenders were natives and drawn from all sections of the propertied classes. The king's treatment of his creditors was therefore bound to affect his relations with his most powerful subjects. It would be surprising if his success or failure in meeting his obligations did not markedly influence their attitude towards his rule.

In the year of 1657, a Shropshire clergyman, George Lawson by name, followed a prevailing fashion among English moralists and political writers of the day in publishing a formal refutation of Hobbes' then notorious Leviathan. Three years later, he further provided a positive and complete enunciation of his principles of civil and ecclesiastical polity in a work which he entitled Politica Sacra et Civilis. While it is perfectly evident that neither of these works attracted anything like that degree of contemporary attention which was aroused by the Leviathan of Hobbes or the Oceana of Harrington, it is no less evident, on the other hand, that they did not fall stillborn from the press. Not only are they to be found listed, with a fair measure of frequency, in extant catalogues of private libraries of the period, but in the critical year 1689—eleven years after the death of Lawson—Politica Sacra et Civilis was well recognized by certain ardent supporters of the revolution then in progress in England to be sufficiently timely to warrant its republication, and was palpably considered by at least one Whig pamphleteer to be well worth the trouble of plagiarizing. The popularity of the work was, however, of the most transient nature. The truth would seem to be that those principles of civil government which were maintained by Lawson were some three decades in advance of the age for which he wrote them; and that when, at length, the circumstances attending the English Revolution rendered them particularly appropriate, a greater political thinker, John Locke, was at hand to give them full expression in a form which, for clarity and fidelity to the spirit of the audience to which they were addressed, has rarely been equalled, and never surpassed. In all probability it is chiefly owing to this fact that the name of Lawson has been almost completely forgotten even by students of the history of English political philosophy, while Locke, for more than two centuries, has been regarded as one of the greatest political philosophers of all time.

Some years ago the late Ronald Balfour wrote a paper on the Study of History at Cambridge. His main preoccupation was the nature of history as a study. To-day interest is focused on more practical matters of detail, and we wish to know why the Cambridge Historical Tripos developed as it did, what was the purpose behind the various reforms, how far the character of the Tripos was affected by the example of foreign Universities, by experience at Oxford or by the requirements of the Civil Service examinations, and, finally, who most influenced the Tripos, the professors or the more junior College lecturers and supervisors.

I have been invited to write something about three friends of mine who, each in his own way, helped to maintain and advance medieval studies in Cambridge during the last generation. Two of them, Charles William Previté-Orton and Zachary Nugent Brooke were bulwarks of the history school as teachers and lecturers, the one for twenty-six, the other for thirty-four years. Both were scholars of St John's College and, although Brooke was six years younger than his friend, were contemporaries as undergraduates; both were editors of the Cambridge Medieval History; each in succession was Professor of Medieval History. It was not easy to think of one without passing on in thought to the other, as a man might take the short walk from St John's to Caius. The third scholar, who survived both the others, was George Gordon Coulton. Born in October 1858, a fortnight before Queen Victoria's proclamation of 1 November announced to the people of India that the territories, possessions and executive powers of the East India Company had been transferred to the Crown, he lived to know that the end of British rule in India would come within a year or two. He was the last survivor of a noble company of medievalists, to whose society, it must be confessed, he owed but a casual, though in general a respectful, allegiance. He was four and a half years younger than John Horace Round, three years younger than Thomas Frederick Tout, eighteen months younger than Reginald Lane Poole, four months younger than Hastings Rashdall, the scholar and friend whom he especially revered.