The object of this paper is to trace briefly the rise of a great Domesday tenant-in-chief (the only Norman to give a name to a county in the United Kingdom), to discuss in broad outline the shape and organization of his great honour in Domesday Book, and to follow the continued rise and sudden fall of the Montgomery family in the years after 1086. Attempts will be made to discuss various problems in the family's story as they occur.

Gladstone came to office for his second ministry in May 1880, after fight marked by bitter strife and uncompromising temper on both sides. The Times considered it the hottest political struggle ever known in this country. The Liberal Government with their large majority came into office in a mood of concentration on domestic legislation and the belief that external affairs had hitherto received too much attention. The Conservatives for their part claimed that, if a minority, they were compact and inspirited. The Opposition, although weak, would be resolute.

The title of my paper may well seem to threaten a mere essay in local antiquarianism, yet I shall have failed to achieve my main purpose should nothing more than this emerge. The purpose at least does not lack ambition, since I seek to outline a fresh scheme of attack upon some important and neglected problems of Tudor social history. No one would dispute our need to know more of the nation's mental interests, of the dissemination of ideas, of Tudor culture within its social setting, than may be gleaned from the histories of English literature. Of their nature, such works afford relatively little provender to the social historian. From the many hundreds of Tudor writers, they must select meagre samples upon an aesthetic basis, whereas to the historian the great mass of mediocre literature reveals more than do the few works of genius. Knowing the ordinary Elizabethans, one finds ‘the Age of Shakespeare’ among the more misleading of labels. Again, the literary observers tend to unbalance a period by concentrating upon its forward-looking as opposed to its declining elements. For similar reasons, their attentions stray too seldom from the letters of the metropolis and hence must underweight that majority of literate Englishmen who read and wrote in the provinces. Yet from our viewpoint, the most serious of all their limitations is their tendency to focus too narrowly upon vernacular literature. For the historian of ideas, the very concept ‘English literature’ represents a most violent abstraction from an age when so many readers and writers still operated in the Latin language.

The century between Reformation and Civil War saw a slow but steady expansion of the cultivated area of England—by bringing new lands under the plough in outlying regions like Devon and Cornwall, Cumberland and Westmorland; by extension of cultivation to forests, wastes and common lands; and by drainage. The same century also saw an expansion of the area of London's trade, and of London influence. Corn and dairy products were being shipped to the capital from Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland. London merchants began to purchase wool direct from North Wales, Wiltshire and the West Riding. Welsh cottons and cattle depended on the London market: early in the Civil War the gentry of North Wales petitioned the King for safe conduct across the fighting lines for their herds. Merchants in Shrewsbury and Hereford kept up trading connexions with the capital throughout the Civil War: Worcester merchants tried to do the same.

At the end of the nineteenth century the British Empire was under great pressure. Several factors had combined to produce this: the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, which had united her two most dangerous antagonists; the growth of powerful new fleets like the Russian, German and American; the decline of ancient non-European monarchies like China, Persia and Morocco, and the appearance in their place of a power vacuum. But none of these new developments would have been so threatening without the novel interest of the great continental nations, and of the United States, in Imperial and naval expansion. Before, Britain had been the only Great Power able or willing to give such issues priority in the formation of her policies. Now she was no longer alone, and the new competition seemed to threaten the very existence of her Empire.

The thirteenth century was a crucial time in the history of the English borough. It saw towns at the height of their prosperity before the calamities of depression and plague, and the last burst of town-making until the spas of the seventeenth century inaugurated our present urban society. It saw an apparent attempt by Edward I's government to define a hierarchy of towns, in which that which was not a borough would be seen plainly to be something else. It marks the time during which the continental commune was tamed and assimilated to English politics, and commune, gild and portmanmote fused together, in as many different ways as there were boroughs, to make the communities for which the Common Law had evolved the doctrine of incorporation. It also produced for us the first substantial quantity of original records written in the towns themselves, records which are from that time onward our principal source of information about municipal affairs. The purpose of this paper is to display the nature and scope of borough archives before 1300, both as a guide to the mass of material that survives from later centuries, and as a commentary upon the thirteenth-century borough. It is confined to those towns, such as the shire boroughs of Domesday Book, which may be presumed to have recruited their own clerks, and not, like the numerous enfranchised manorial towns of this time, to have had someone else provide them.

This inquiry began with some sentences in James A. Williamson's magnificent study Hawkins of Plymouth:

‘In peace or war in Europe', says Williamson, ‘there was no peace beyond the line. The phrase is often quoted by people who do not explain what line they mean. The Tropic of Cancer will not by itself answer the question, neither will the lines of demarcation. “Line” is in fact a misquotation which should be “lines”. The “lines of amity” were verbally agreed upon by the French and Spanish negotiators of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559. They were to be the Tropic of Cancer and the prime meridian passing through Ferro in the Canaries. On the European side of both lines the treaty was to be binding; west and south of them it was to be disregarded. The agreement was a belated recognition of what had long been the practice.’

On the corresponding occasion last year, I ventured to offer some remarks on the subject of medieval Welsh lawbooks, and more particularly on the editing of them. When edited, they serve as historical evidence. I therefore propose on this present occasion to consider the sort of historical evidence that they contain, and the kind of historical question that they raise. As I have to operate within the narrow compass of an hour, I must limit my field of view, and this can be done quite simply. A Welsh lawbook was made up of a series of what, in the absence of a recognized technical term, may conveniently be called ‘tractates’. I am going to consider just one of those tractates. It is, in more than one sense, the most easily distinguishable of them all. It is also the one that forms the very first part of the text of the Welsh lawbooks, coming immediately after the opening prologue. From its situation at the very beginning of the text, it should be the most inescapable document in the lawbooks—though, as Edgar Allan Poe demonstrated in a famous story, a document situated in the most obtrusive position is precisely the one that may most easily escape notice. It is quite a sizeable document, running to some twenty pages of modern print. It is extant both in medieval Latin and in medieval Welsh.