The author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People was the greatest historian writing in the West between the later Roman Empire and the twelfth century, when we come to William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, and William of Tyre. Bede's qualities as a historian are well known and widely appreciated, and they need no further exposition here. Instead, we propose to be perverse and to attempt to read Bede's text as though he had been a sociologist or an economic anthropologist: What can we learn from him about the “material conditions” of life in post-Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England, especially about life in the sixth and seventh centuries. This is surely a strange purpose for which to use the Ecclesiastical History. We do so both to show that Bede is so rich and so multifaceted that he is immensely valuable for many purposes besides those of greatest obvious interest to him, and because the sources for social and economic life in those years are so poor that everything available is legitimate grist for the mills of our analysis.

Actually there are two reasons why Bede might have furnished us with the kind of information we are seeking. One is that among classical and early medieval historians there was a considerable tradition of describing the barbarian world, of paying particular attention to the institutions, mores, and customs of the Germanic people or whoever might be the subject of the tale.

The main force shaping English institutional development during the late middle ages was the intermittent but seemingly endless war with France—a war that was occasionally expanded to include the struggle with France's enthusiastic Scottish ally. Hardly an aspect of English society remained unaffected by these conflicts: the crown was obliged to organize and manage the war effort; the nobility and many freemen had to fight; and most of the population, with few exceptions of class or status, bore the cost. Even if the average Englishman had been able momentarily to forget the continuing state of emergency prevailing in his country, such things as commissions of array, requests for subsidies, seizures of goods and services, alerts and alarms against invasion, and barrages of propaganda and counter-propaganda would have reminded him of the burdens of war. Especially after the formal beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1338, enormous pressures were placed on the institutions of English public administration by the demands of a war waged simultaneously on several fronts.

Associated with the expansion of the wartime activities and needs of royal government was the emergence both in England and France of an official mentality attuned to the importance of public opinion for facilitating the exploitation of community resources for military purposes. The inherent nature of feudal monarchy, which was heavily dependent on the cooperation and voluntary service of the governed, had always obliged medieval kings to recognize and respect the vox populi; but official awareness of the value of favorable publicity for conducting the domestic and foreign affairs of the crown increased notably from the late thirteenth century as a result of the French and Scottish wars.

Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.

The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.

In 1675 Mrs. Hannah Woolley, schoolmistress and writer of books on cookery and household management, published The Gentlewoman's Companion. Her Introduction contains this unexpected diatribe:

Mrs. Woolley's complaint was intended for a female audience only, but the themes of her indictment—male oppression, the equal intellectual capacity of the sexes, the injustice of barring women from higher learning—appear openly and often in the literature of Restoration England. Rebellious daughters and emancipated wives, female virtuosi, “she-philosophers”—all rebels against male authority—crowd the Restoration stage. So many took up the cause of women in the “Battle of the Sexes” in the last decades of the century that one scholar has found in the pamphlet literature of the time “a large and well-defined movement, an early ‘liberation war’ of the sex.”

Discussions of the unreformed English electoral system usually revolve around its three major flaws: the control of borough seats in the Commons by individual patrons, the general lack of opportunities for popular participation, and electoral corruption. The standard examples of Old Sarum (for patronage), the election of 1761 (for the lack of participation), and the Oxfordshire election of 1754 (for corruption) have been cited so often that certain bits of disparaging information, such as the 20,000-pound Tory expenditure in Oxfordshire in 1754, are permanently imbedded in the secondary literature and have resulted in dismissals of eighteenth-century popular politics as unworthy of serious consideration. Instead of using such extreme examples to illustrate the depths to which electoral politics could sink, this more systematic inquiry into the nature of electoral politics enumerates both electoral patronage and electoral participation over the entire eighteenth century, and considers electoral corruption in a necessarily more speculative fashion. From this broader perspective, it is clear that the dismissals of popular politics in England before the Reform Act are unwarranted. Electoral politics played an increasingly important role in the political system during the reign of George III, and to neglect its importance is to misinterpret the political environment of unreformed England.

Emily Davies' reputation rests almost entirely on her role as founder of the first Cambridge college for women—so much so that her biographer, Lady Barbara Stephen, entitled her lengthy and scholarly work (still the standard life fifty years after its publication) Emily Davies and Girton College. In keeping with her focus on Emily Davies as an educational pioneer, Lady Stephen paid little heed to the blind alleys that Davies first entered and then retreated from during the 1860s—the abortive editorships of the Englishwoman's Journal and Victoria Review, not to mention her brief and vexing stint as secretary of the first women's suffrage organization established in Britain.

Emily Davies' involvement with the nascent women's suffrage movement was not long lived, and was terminated with such ruffled feelings that she remained aloof from the suffrage cause for most of the rest of her career. Yet it was largely between 1865 and 1867, the years during which she played a central role in founding and then leading the first women's suffrage society, that the institutional and ideological strengths and weaknesses that were to characterize the suffrage movement for the next thirty years were shaped.

Emily Davies' father, John Davies, was an Evangelical minister. In 1815, at the age of twenty, he had left his native Wales to attend Queens' College, Cambridge, which had become one of the focal points of the then burgeoning Evangelical movement. He subsequently became both clergyman and schoolmaster, living mostly in Chichester until 1840, and then at Gateshead (near Newcastle) for the next twenty-two years.

“If I desire to pass over a part in silence,” wrote Claudian in his account of Stilicho, the consul, “whatever I omit will seem most worthy to have been recorded. Shall I pursue his old exploits and early youth? His recent merits recall themselves to mind. Shall I dwell on his justice? The glory of the warrior rises resplendent before me. Shall I relate his strength in arms? He performed yet greater things unarmed.” Such was a fifth-century poet's assessment of some of the historian's most persistent problems: how should the historian select his evidence and, once selected, when can this evidence be said to constitute a historical proof? That this problem has not been solved to everyone's satisfaction is evidenced by the recent exchange between two historians of the seventeenth century, J.H. Hexter and Christopher Hill.

Few historians are more qualified to enter the vast historical minefield known as the history of seventeenth-century England than J.H. Hexter. Though he has done some narrative studies, most of his work has been devoted to attacks on conventional ideas. In these works, Hexter has revealed himself as a gifted critic and polemicist, performing the same sort of demolition of established ideas about the English Revolutionary era that Alfred Cobban has provided for the French period. At various times Hexter has denounced theories of new monarchy, the Tudor middle class, the rise of the gentry, the fall of the gentry, historical relativism, and history as social science.