Serious study of the origins of the jury began in the time of William Stubbs and F. W. Maitland, when the work of the German historical school of jurisprudence reached England. Until then knowledge of the medieval English jury before the time of Henry II had been more legendary than real. William Blackstone had traced the common law to a compilation that King Alfred supposedly commanded to be made. Blackstone had written in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, “Some authors have endeavoured to trace the original of juries up as high as the Britons themselves, the first inhabitants of our island; but certain it is that they were in use among the earliest Saxon colonies.”

In the mid-nineteenth century the Anglo-Saxon origin of the jury was still a popular legend in England, but the German school of legal history sought a more scientific study of the problem. A representative of that group, Heinrich Brunner, in his book, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, rejected the traditional teaching that the jury was Germanic and popular in origin. Instead, he believed it to be royal in origin, an authoritarian means of gathering information, particularly information of a financial nature. It first appeared as the inquest of the Frankish kings, inherited from the imperial Roman fisc. It passed from them to the Norman dukes and then was introduced to England with William. According to Brunner the Norman kings reserved this fact-finding technique for themselves, extending it to their subjects in only a few cases.

Who were the Independents? This is one of the unsolved puzzles of the English Civil War. Contemporaries gave differing answers. To some they were the godly; to others they were “the godly gang.” They were both a Puritan group and a political segment of the Long Parliament. S. R. Gardiner and the Whig historians tended to make a clear connection. Religious Independency was for toleration, and the political Independents were, simpliciter, the party of toleration opposed to the intolerant Presbyterians. This view was broadly accepted until 1938 when it was permanently shattered by J. H. Hexter, whose penetrating article showed that many political Independents (and for this purpose he defined them as the Regicides and those who survived Pride's Purge) were elders in the established church which after the Westminster Assembly had a Presbyterian form of government. He therefore urged that the term Independent was really a label for the most ardent political Puritans applied to them by the more conservative.

Then in 1953 H. R. Trevor-Roper in his brilliant essay on “the Gentry” introduced a new approach by equating the Independents with the lesser and declining gentry who had been shut out from the spoils of court office and therefore pursued a policy of decentralization.

It was at this stage that I wrote an introductory study on the problem of the Independents that questioned in part the suggestions put forward in both these works. Against Hexter I urged that the term Independent had a greater religious content that he allowed, for many of his “Independent” Presbyterian elders in fact became Independents in religion or certainly veered in that direction.

Few men have been studied more but understood less than Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. He has suffered at the hands of those writers who have written of other aspects, or concentrated on other personalities, of the age in which he lived. In one of his purple passages Winston Churchill, anxious to defend his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, dismissed St. John as an “unpurposed, unprincipled, miscreant adventurer.” Louis Kronenberger was even more vehement in his denunciation: “He had neither moral stamina nor intellectual honesty nor emotional benevolence; and as he was in his heart, so was he in his dealings with men. In short, he was a scoundrel.” In his biographers St. John has suffered almost as badly. Walter Sichel, who wrote two large volumes covering his whole career, fell into the obvious trap of being “excessively adulatory.” Sir Charles Petrie and Sir Douglas Harkness concentrated almost exclusively on his early career, and the older works by G. W. Cooke and Thomas Macknight have been largely invalidated by the discovery of a mass of new evidence and by new interpretations of eighteenth-century politics. Three recent works are really only studies of different aspects of his political philosophy and his published works rather than of his political career. Moreover, only one of all these studies on Bolingbroke has been written by a professional historian, and his study is based solely on printed sources. The result is that mistakes made by early biographers have been accepted uncritically by later writers on Bolingbroke.

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift has provoked a continuing interest among scholars and critics. Commentators on the subject have described the attitude as an inherent prejudice and have questioned its possible causes. From James Boswell's repeated comments that Johnson apparently had an unaccountable prejudice against Swift and his pointed question to discover the source (“I once took the liberty to ask him, if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me, he had not”) to Walter Raleigh's facile summation that an essential difference in their characters separated them, speculation has been persistent, if not always rewarding. Perhaps the final statement of explanation is set forth in W. B. C. Watkins's essay, “Vive la bagatelle,” where Watkins maintains that though Johnson had “a residue of sheer, inexplicable prejudice” against Swift, much that appears prejudice can be made understandable. That understanding comes largely from Watkins's well-documented theory that Johnson and Swift were more alike than different: “Curiously, his antagonism is intensified by certain similarities between the two men in circumstance and personality.” Watkins's theory convincingly explains the source of a behavioral trait clearly revealed in Boswell's record of Johnson's conversation.

Yet the character of Johnson's biography of Swift has its own peculiar problem. Most of Johnson's attacks on Swift came at impromptu moments when conversation led Johnson to lash out hastily at the Dean. Boswell indicates that Johnson's behavior was habitual: “He attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions.” Watkins explains this in part by referring to Johnson's belief that Swift was overpraised; thus Johnson voiced his irritation whenever excessive acclaim prompted a reply.

From their dismissal in November 1834 to their return to power in April 1835, the Whig Party was confronted with the problem of how to function effectively in opposition and, ultimately, return to power. This problem contained a dilemma which disquieted the aristocratic leaders of Whiggery. The party could conform to a tradition that regarded association with more “radical” groups as contrary to its principles; or it could join the Radicals and Repealers in an attempt to overthrow the new Tory Government. Such was the choice that underlay the politics of the Whigs in the winter of 1834-35.

Historians have considered the “honorable” nature of the Lichfield House Compact and its strictly political consequences. One interpretation emphasizes the Whigs' dependence upon Daniel O'Connell and the Repealers during the second Melbourne administration. Another, perhaps closer to the truth, suggests that the Repealers rather than the Whigs became the captive party. The significance of the Lichfield House Compact is distorted when its political consequences, however immediate, are emphasized. It is best understood as a commentary on the immediate past. The question to be considered is how and why the Whig Party was maneuvered into its association with Radicals and Repealers. It must be examined in terms of the party's disunity and the temporary, if propitious, ineffectiveness of spokesmen of traditional Whiggery who could proffer no alternative means to return to power.

R. W. Church began his classic work on The Oxford Movement with the remark that “What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt, in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the days of the Reform Bill.” Historians of the Oxford Movement who, unlike Church, were not participants in the events of which they write need continually to remind themselves that the Oxford Movement was not a premeditated and carefully planned theological campaign. Rather, it was an ad hoc measure to meet a definite and immediate problem.

In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, agitation for reform of all the national institutions swept across England, and included in these national institutions was the Church of England. In 1828 a resolution favoring the repeal of the Test Act was carried in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, and in 1829 the Relief Bill was carried, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold offices under the crown. With the Reform Bill of 1832 the electoral structure for seating men in Parliament was brought into partial conformity with contemporary developments and population distribution. And with the success of parliamentary reform, English churchmen feared that church reform would soon be thrust upon them. The bishops as a group had been hostile to parliamentary reform and to reform in general, with the result that popular pamphlets against churchmen and demand for church reform reached alarming proportions.

No area of Victorian administrative history is more richly documented or less adequately explored than that concerning the development of public policy by professional or scientific “specialists” within the civil departments of Government. Traditionally, texts on the evolution of the modern state have concentrated upon the role of political philosophy, economic motivation, and parliamentary expedience in determining the direction and timing of government involvement in the private sector. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in the anatomy and function of institutional change within the so-called “Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government.” Now a number of attempts are being made to describe the manner in which science, technology, and “special professional knowledge” were used administratively by the state to conserve and protect the wealth of the nation.

The Salmon Acts administration reveals this phenomenon of development particularly well. These acts embodied what one contemporary observer called the first permanent attempt by Parliament to protect and regulate private property in the public interest. Their administration involved the first permanent staff appointed to supervise the fisheries of England and Wales and laid the foundations for British nature conservancy policy. Government intervention in the salmon fisheries followed different lines of development in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales during the course of the century. The following pages, however, will be confined to salmon administration in England and Wales during the period 1860-86, in what was essentially the “heroic age” of policy-making by the salmon inspectors at the Home Office and the Board of Trade.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Britain joined other European nations in the scramble for territory in Africa. Guided largely by strategic considerations, she showed little interest in exploiting the areas which she had acquired. In what might be called the first phase of colonial rule, lasting until about 1914, a thinly staffed colonial administration was preoccupied in each tropical African dependency with maintaining law and order and achieving economic self-sufficiency. To this end Africans were encouraged to grow crops such as cocoa and coffee, while a rudimentary communications system was established so that produce might find its distant markets. European plantation agriculture was allowed in only a few enclaves, such as the highlands of Kenya, but substantial mining concessions were widely granted to European companies. Politically, normal British policy was to retain and rule through such large traditional units of government as existed; among them were Buganda and the emirates of northern Nigeria. This policy was substantially modified in Ashanti, which therefore furnishes an important exception to the general pattern.

British policy remained essentially empirical throughout the second colonial phase, which roughly coincides with the interwar years. With the growth, however, of the notion of trusteeship, the British Government recognized a duty not only to govern but also to develop its dependencies economically, socially, and politically. After 1918 a modest expansion of government agricultural, medical, and educational programmes therefore took place — mainly financed, however, from local revenues.