At its lowest and most popular, verity concerning the war between England and France in the fifteenth century was slipped into the minds of its recipients by such itinerant chansonniers as the one who, according to Louis XI, ‘se soit mis a aller par nostre royaume pour chanter et recorder chancons, dictez et records touchant les bonnes novelles et advantures qui nous sont survenues et surviennent chacun jour au bien de nous et de nostre seigneurie’; it could be found obfuscated in the mysteries of semi-heraldic prophecy, to which even so respectable a figure as Christine de Pisan in her old age contributed; its sediment settled in commonplace note-taking on both sides of the Channel.

In every generation since the pace of economic and social change began to accelerate in the late-eighteenth century the wildest hopes, aspirations and fears of the previous generation have been realized. The revolutionary prospect of heeding the will of the people in the 1790's became the conservative measure of 1832. The terrifying demands of the Chartists were well on the way to enactment by 1885, and with the payment of M.P.s in 1911 were substantially achieved, apart from the silliest of all the demands, that for annual parliaments.

Montesquieu's misunderstanding of the British constitution has long been notorious among students of political history and theory. In so far as his error influenced the French constitution of 1791 and the American constitution of 1788, it must be accounted one of the most significant—and expensive–scholarly howlers of all time. Somewhat different, because it is avowedly normative whereas Montesquieu's purports to be descriptive, is Harrington's doctrine of separation.

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in liberta’ etc., and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism.

The concessions presented by Archbishop Warham and representatives of Convocation to Henry VIII on 16 May 1532 have been the subject of endless controversy, while the background and circumstances of the enactment have received remarkably uniform treatment from later generations. Despite the proliferation of Reformation and Convocation histories since the eighteenth century, historians have, by and large, been content to repeat or elaborate an outline of the event first found in Wake's The State of the Church (1703). According to this interpretation, the King and Cromwell employed the Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries presented in March 1532 to compel the clergy's approval of the articles of 16 May.

England was a rich country in the eleventh century, far richer than most neighbouring parts of the continent, and this explains the many raids and attempts at conquest which the English suffered in that century. It was the wealth of England, not the inadequacy of the English defences, that tempted so many continental adventurers to come here in search of loot and tribute.

MY subject this afternoon has been chosen because the emergence of majority rule in the procedure of the House of Commons provides some instructive parallels to the subject which I attempted to discuss on the corresponding occasion last year—the subject of the emergence of majority rule in English parliamentary elections. Our starting-point last year was an act of parliament, the statute of 1430 about county elections. Our starting-point this afternoon is a book: a book written in 1565 but first published in 1583, the book known as De Republica Anglorum: the Manner of Government of the Reγm of England, by Sir Thomas Smith, one of the principal Secretaries of State under both Edward VI and Elizabeth I. We start from that book because its chapter entitled “The form of holding the parliament” contains a passage of some length which provides the earliest set description of the majority-procedure of the House of Commons. The forms of that majority-procedure as described by Smith in 1565 remain basically the same in 1964. Smith emphasizes three features.