The economic history of Ireland in the late seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies unfolded in an age marked by considerable legislative interference by the British parliament in Irish affairs. The impact of this interference was all the greater because the executive in Dublin was, from the point of view of an Irish colonial nationalist, constitutionally irresponsible, answerable to the king's ministers in London rather than to the Irish legislature. It is not surprising that against this background colonial nationalism emerged at an early date. The interpretation of economic issues fell inevitably under the shadow of constitutional controversy and rising colonial nationalism. In the eyes of contemporaries, and subsequent Irish historians who have borrowed largely both their facts and interpretation of events from the writings of the period, economic development was subsidiary to political issues; not only subsidiary but its achievement or negation a product of policy.

The Order of Preachers was created under the skilled direction of two great men: Dominic of Caleruega and Jordan of Saxony. Whatever else they may have been, both were brilliant organizers; they sketched between them the most sophisticated constitutional organization known to the Middle Ages; for good or ill, they created for us the idea and technique of committee government. Both, it is clear, had tidy and lucid minds. We know that Jordan wrote excellent Latin, was capable of making plain in a few words the nature of the casting vote in general chapter, and equally capable of communicating to his friend Diana Dandalo, and to us, the inwardness of spiritual friendship and the delight of missionary work among the students of Bologna and Paris, many of whom he gathered into the Dominican Order.

So many books and articles have been devoted to the life and career of He´rnan Cortés that it may well seem presumptuous to add to their number. But there is still no satisfactory biography, and it is only quite recently that his writings—his ‘letters of relation’ to Charles V, his general correspondence, and his military and administrative directives—have been subjected to the close critical scrutiny which they deserve. In particular, Dr. Richard Konetzke has drawn attention to the constructive aspects of Cortés's career as the founder of a colonial society, while an Austrian historian, Dr. Viktor Frankl, has analysed with extraordinary ingenuity Cortés's idea of empire and his indebtedness to Spanish medieval traditions and ways of thought. Other important contributions have been made by Mexicans:Dr Manuel Alcalá, who has drawn an extended parallel between

Return of writs has been considered an essential privilege of the greater liberties in medieval England, because it entitled liberty-holders to exclude the sheriff and hence to execute royal writs through their own bailiffs. Maitland construed it thus when discussing borough privileges, and again when he included it among the powers of lords exercising ‘the highest justice’. Although return of writs had acquired this meaning by the time Edward I died, neither the king's lawyers nor liberty-holders understood it in this way in the thirteenth century. Each side interpreted it differently. The conflict which ensued has attracted little attention hitherto, yet return of writs can only be understood in its context. This struggle has also a wider significance, as it illuminates the attempts of Henry III and Edward I to impose a new definition of royal sovereignty on libertyholders. The present paper will argue that the franchise of return of writs was the product of conflict between king and magnates.

In the reign of James I, Sir Walter Ralegh, a prisoner in the Tower and under sentence of death, occupied some of his leisure in writing a History of the World. Unfortunately, he never got beyond 130 B.C.; but in his Introduction he did pause to comment on more recent history. Now that Elizabeth I was dead, he felt able to speak quite freely about her father:

Though with the passing of October 14 the major junketings are perhaps over, the year is still 1966, the nine-hundredth anniversary of the Norman Conquest of England, and such an occasion, I trust, is a sufficient excuse for reading a paper to you on the subject. There are many more qualified than I to undertake the task, but at least I can claim to have been working—though scarcely alone—on a book about the Conquest over the last few years, and the vastly enjoyable experience has prompted certain thoughts which become increasingly strongly held as I progress. Some of those thoughts I should like now to put together into what I hope may be a coherent pattern.

Historians should be grateful to President Cleveland. It was his insistence on the arbitration of the dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the boundary of British Guiana that led to an intensive search in Spanish, Dutch, British and other archives for the evidence of European activities between the Amazon and the Orinoco during the three centuries after the discovery of America. The documents so found and printed are essential for any understanding of the historical background of the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute and of great interest to the colonial historian in general.