By hook or by crook, sometimes by both at the same time, greatlandowners, and many of the not so great, have survived into thefinal decade of the twentieth century. Some of the survivors are, nodoubt, clinging on by their fingernails, huddled over a single-barelectric fire in a damp and draughty room of a family mansion thatis slowly crumbling over their heads, living on baked beans andmemories in the manner of an A. S. Byatt novel. Many, however, areextremely wealthy. Old-established landed families provide between afifth and a quarter of the 200 wealthiest people in Britain in theearly 1990s, a proportion which has changed very little since the1880s. But what are they for? A hundred years ago it was unnecessaryto ask such a question. Meredith Townsend, who with J. L. Sanfordproduced two volumes on The Great Governing Families ofEngland, writing in 1865 had little need of argument orevidence to support his statement that the great landowners were thegoverning class. He was more defensive in justifying his selectionof just thirty-one families as the core of that class, but in 1865it was not unreasonable to prophesy that ‘in another hundred yearsthese thirty one families will be the marked and ticketed familiesamong two hundred millions of English-speaking men’, and to arguethat: ‘The redivision of property may ultimately shatter theirpower, but short of that their dignity and consideration willprobably for a century steadily increase.’

Among the voluminous papers produced at the Admiralty during theFisher era in anticipation of a war against Germany there is oneentitled ‘Preparation of War Plans’. It is unsigned and undated, butwas printed for internal circulation on 24 June 1908 and may thusform part of the work undertaken by the Naval Intelligence Divisionand the Naval War College in 1908–9 rather than the better-knowndeliberations of the ‘Ballard Committee’ of 1906–7. Its authorshipmust remain a matter for speculation, and it may be the product ofmore than one hand, but the memorandum's breadth of historicalunderstanding suggests that the influence of two men who played aleading part in Admiralty planning at this time: Rear-Admiral EdmondSlade, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Julian Corbett, theeminent naval historian. The memorandum begins by arguing thatBritish war plans must take into account the political dispositionsand commitments of the European powers. Since 1904, it says, thesehave undergone a profound change, resembling the regrouping ofpowers which occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘The result onthe peace strategy of this country has been tremendous; it hasnecessitated a complete reorganisation of the whole of ourarrangements, and it has forced us to face east, instead of southand west.’ Even though Germany must now be reckoned Britain's chiefpotential enemy, the situation is still extremely fluid, and thearea of greatest uncertainly lies in northern Europe.

Because research calls for work, and work for specialisation, thestudy of history tends always to subdivide. The deepest of itssubdivisions is that between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’: betweenthings like war, politics, business and law on one side, and on theother, thoughts and emotions. ‘History’ tout simplehas come thus to refer mainly to the external, things usuallyhandled in the past by men, while from the side of this Adam havesprung separate disciplines with names like die history of ideas, ormentalités,—not to mention the literatures invarious languages. A glance even at the buildings of a universitywill confirm this.

By the fourteenth century the descendants of those who had gone fromBritain to Ireland in the late twelfth and early thirteenthcenturies had come to call themselves ‘the English of Ireland’ or‘the English born in Ireland’. Or, to be more accurate, they did sowhen faced by Englishmen from England: within Ireland they describedthemselves simply as ‘the English’. From the 1340s onwards a seriesof disputes with agents of the king formed a context in which theycollectively stressed their Englishness. By the fifteenth centurythis identity was from time to time problematical, both forthose who claimed it and for the metropolis. Historianswho work on the late medieval and early modern periods have found itequally so, and have argued about the atuitudes and nationality ofthe settler élite. While fourteenth-century evidence has been calledupon in these debates, there has been little serious considerationof the first two centuries of the lordship of Ireland. In whatsenses were those who went to Ireland during the founding period‘English’? Why does the emphasis upon being English appear to haveintensified among their successors as time went by? What does theself-proclaimed Englishness of the fourteenth century signify? Howfar do the complexities and tensions associated with it foreshadowthe better-known difficulties of later periods? These are thematters I wish to explore.

For the past 40 years the dominant influence over architecturalhistory, and in particular over stylistic analysis, has been theModern Movement. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously,architectural history has been seen through the teleologicalspectacles of the Modernists who viewed architecture as aprogressive force leading inevitably towards the ultimate triumph ofModernism. At its most obvious this can be seen in studies oflate-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architecture whichconcentrated on those strands that could be said to have been theprecursors of Modernism, while ignoring powerful contemporaryfactors which do not fit in with the Modernist thesis, like thestrength of Classical architecture in the 1930s. But even whendiscussing earlier periods the same basic assumption has prevailed,that architectural style should be seen as progressive. Thus whatbecame important was identifying new fashions and tracing theprecedents. As architectural style always moved on, anything thatwas not innovative or seemed to be regressive was assumed to be oldfashioned and the result of ignorance or lack of skill, andconsequently of little interest. With die collapse of Modernism, orat least of the assumption that Modernism is the only acceptable wayin which to build, and with the revival of older styles which 10years ago were thought to be dead and buried, this teleologicalapproach to architectural history needs revision. The study ofGothic Revival architecture in England is one area that isrevolutionised by the removal of Modernist assumptions.

This paper requires some justification. In what is otherwise anunder-researched period, the campaign for reformation of manners inthe 1690s has been a very well-ploughed furrow indeed. Since thepublication in 1957 of Dudley Bahlman's The Moral Revolutionof 1688, there have been half a dozen major essays onreformation of manners, as well as some outstanding unpublishedresearch. The work has not only been copious, but also of a veryhigh standard. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of reformation ofmanners that has only been dealt with tangentially in the existingliterature: the relationship between godly reformation and the causeof Protestant union. Historians have noted that the societies forreformation of manners were composed of both churchmen anddissenters, and that this stimulated high church attacks upon thesocieties in Anne's reign. But there has been little analysis of theways in which the ideal of Protestant union coloured some aspects ofreformation of manners. The second half of this paper seeks to fillthat gap. But first it will be necessary to explore theprovidentialist context of reformation of manners ideology. We shallbegin by taking a brief excursion to the island of Jamaica.

The great Helmuth von Moltke, addressing the German Reichstag in May1890 in the last year of his very long life, gave a sombre warningof wars to come: Gentlemen, if the war which has hung over our headsfor more than ten years like a sword of Damocles—if this war were tobreak out, no one could foresee how long it would last nor how itwould end. The greatest powers in Europe, armed as never before,would confront each other in battle. None of them could be socompletely overthrown in one or two campaigns that they would haveto admit defeat, accept peace on harsh terms, and not be able torevive again after a years' -long interval to renew the struggle.Gentlemen, it could be a Seven Years' War; it could be a ThirtyYears' War; and woe to the man who sets Europe ablaze, who firstthrows the match into the powder barrel.

On the north wall of the cloisters in Bristol Cathedral there is asmall headstone ‘Sacred to the Memory of Thomas Daniel Esq … arespectable Merchant of this City who was born in Barbados on the14th March 1730 and departed this life on the 23rd February 1802.’In the north transept, on a floor marble over the family vault,another inscription to the same man can be found. Thomas Daniel Sr,as he was known, came from a mercantile family that had settled inBarbados in the mid-seventeenth century. He spent his early careerin that island and later emigrated to Bristol in 1764. From thenonwards he built up a substantial business as a Bristol West Indiamerchant, and handed this down to his son, Thomas Daniel Jr, at theturn of the nineteenth century. The son expanded his trade inCaribbean sugar and acquired slave plantations in Barbados, Antigua,Nevis, Montserrat, Tobago and British Guiana. After Emancipation in1834 he and his brother, John, received £102,000 in compensation forthe loss of their slaves— the second largest sum awarded to Bristolproprietors. The money accumulated by Thomas Daniel Jr enabled himto purchase a fine town house in Berkeley Square, in a fashionableresidential area, plus a pleasant country seat at Henbury, justbeyond the north-western boundaries of the city. Burgeoning wealthwent hand in hand with civic status. From 1785 until 1835, Danielserved on the Bristol Common Council, the governing body of thecity.

Looking at the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, it seems to methat we still lack a comprehensive view of what changed during thisperiod, where we should set its boundaries, and how we mightinterpret the salient characteristics of the century. Perhaps, wehave been both too general and too specific, simultaneously seekingwith the synthesisers to explain too much and with the morespecialised monographic literature to explain too little.

Over recent years, questions concerning the character and directionof social change in colonial India have become increasingly complex.Until the 1960s, it remained possible to conceive the coming ofBritish rule as representing ‘the beginnings of modernisation’ andto write Indian history in terms of an ‘heroic’ struggle to fulfilthe civilising mission: ‘heroic’, in the British sense, because itlargely failed. Except among a narrow stratum of elites, Indiansociety obviously refused the West's invitation to ‘usher it intohistory’ and India's culture moved very little towards convergencewith the West's.

We live in an age (perhaps particularly apparent to those of us whowork in universities) when informality is derigueur, its own conventions and forms to be masteredif one is to live easily and effectively with colleagues, students,acquaintances or even the members of one's family. That it was notalways so is a truism which attests to the reality of social change.One of the markers of such change, or of changes in socialexpectation, will be the realignment of relationships between theformal and the informal and of perceptions which governinterpretation of such relationships. In an age of revolution, orrevolutionary aspiration, we might expect such realignments to beparticularly dynamic or, more radically, for the categories ofinformal and formal themselves to be called in question.