It is perhaps not surprising that the central thread of manorial land law should be found in the pauper problem; for one of the most urgent needs of any age or society is the prevention of destitution. The “sturdy beggar” and “such as walk by night and sleep by day” were the terror of Plantagenet as well as Tudor, while the distress of the aged and impotent was as bitter in the thirteenth as in the sixteenth century, though voiced by no popular poet or press. The Court rolls of the Abbot of Crowland's manors of Oakington, Cottenham and Drayton give constant evidence of the effort consciously or unconsciously made to obviate these unproductive elements of the population, which might become a burden upon the efficient classes.

The struggle between Frederick II and the papacy is the most dramatic of all the medieval contests between Regnum and Sacerdotium and has naturally attracted many historians. Frederick's relations to the church of his Sicilian kingdom is a less obviously dramatic theme and has never been treated except incidentally as one of the contributory causes of friction between pope and emperor. It is, however, worthy of independent study, providing as it does a corrective to the idea of Frederick engaged in almost ceaseless warfare against the church, which one derives from excessive concentration on papal and imperial manifestoes. A study of Frederick's Sicilian constitutions, of his charters to churches and his letters to officials and ecclesiastics, reveals a ruler who is far from being the inveterate enemy of churchmen and of church privileges.

The authorship of the Vindidae has been a vexed question for 350 years, and perhaps it is not likely to be solved. The book belongs, in the main, to a body of Huguenot literature which appeared after 1572 and was concerned with the dangerous question of the right of resistance. A good deal of this literature was sedulously and obstinately anonymous. There was a reason. If a writer advocated resistance, and, still more, if he advocated or even condoned “tyrannicide,” he would be committing himself to something as abhorrent to the general opinion of his age as “Bolshevism”is to the general opinion of ours. If in addition he backed his opinions by his name, and his name were that of a known adherent of the Calvinist cause, he would be committing that cause to certain obloquy and possible danger. He would be trespassing beyond the bounds of cautious and guarded discretion which Calvin had imposed upon himself in this matter: he would be giving to the enemies of Calvinism the very handle which they desired. In these conditions anonymity flourished: pseudonyms were rife; and calculated puzzles were set to baffle future ages. Not only are we confronted by problems of authorship: we have also to face other and lesser problems. Sometimes, for example, the place and the date of publication are falsified. There was indeed a particular reason for such falsification. Printers as well as authors—perhaps even more than authors—had to be wary; and a genuine place and date of publication afforded too easy a clue.

The Action Française dates from 1898—the year when the agitation for the revision of the trial of Dreyfus was at its height—and was an offshoot of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, one of the many anti-Dreyfusard organisations. The leaders of the Patrie Française having announced that in their agitation against Dreyfus they would do nothing illegal, the more extreme members, led by Henri Vaugeois, seceded and founded the Action Française, declaring that where the salvation of the country was at stake they would stick at nothing.