The topic is doubly important. First, the heiress was one of the fluid elements in the social structure. By marriage, families forged links with each other, landless knights and ambitious officials made their way into the noble hierarchy, and established lineages renewed their military reputation or improved their access to government circles. If the bride was an heiress all this was underwritten by a territorial endowment far larger than the usual marriage-portion. She also brought to her husband title to office, all the legal and quasi-legal claims which came to be concentrated in her from her lineage, and sometimes even the family name of her forbears to be assumed, if not by him, then by the offspring of their marriage. So the heiress was special; she magnifies for us all the problems and consequences of marriage.

When in the summer of 1902 Helen Bosanquet published a book called The Strength of the People she sent a copy to Alfred Marshall. On the face of it, this might seem a rather unpromising thing to have done. Mrs Bosanquet, an active exponent of the Charity Organisation Society's ‘casework’ approach to social problems, had frequently expressed her dissatisfaction with what she regarded as the misleading abstractions of orthodox economics, and in her book she had even ventured a direct criticism of a point in Marshall's Principles. Marshall, then Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge and at the peak of his reputation as the most authoritative exponent of neo-classical economics in Britain, was, to say the least, sensitive to criticism, and he had, moreover, publicly taken issue with the C.O.S. on several previous occasions. But perhaps Mrs Bosanquet knew what she was about after all. In her book she had taken her text from the early nineteenth-century Evangelical Thomas Chalmers on the way in which character determines circumstances rather than vice versa, and, as the historian of the C.O.S. justly remarks, her book ‘is a long sermon on the importance of character in making one family rich and another poor’. Although Marshall can hardly have welcomed the general strictures on economics, he was able to reassure Mrs Bosanquet that ‘in the main’ he agreed with her: ‘I have always held’, he wrote to her, ‘that poverty and pain, disease and death are evils of greatly less importance than they appear, except in so far as they lead to weakness of life and character’.

The relationship between London and the rest of the nation is an important but perhaps somewhat neglected aspect of English history. In recent years this theme has, it is true, directly or indirectly, engaged the attention of a number of distinguished scholars, but it is still not generally recognised to be as vital an ingredient in the history of this country as is the rôle of Paris in the history of France. Henry James even went so far as to say that ‘all England is in a suburban relation’ to London, and the standpoint of this paper is equally metropolitan. Its theme is that the loss of its normal preeminence which London seemed to sustain in the nineteenth century was in reality short-lived, and more apparent than real.

In 882 the Emperor Charles III was forced to break off his siege of the Norsemen's camp at Asselt and make peace with them. One of their leaders, Gottfried, got a Carolingian wife and the benefices in Frisia formerly held by Rorich; the other, Siegfried, got a large sum in gold and silver. Commenting on these events, the Mainz cleric who composed this section of the Annals of Fulda wrote:

and what was still more of a crime, he did not blush to pay tribute, against the custom of his ancestors, the kings of the Franks, and following the advice of evil men, to a man from whom he ought to have exacted tribute and hostages.

This paper is concerned with one aspect of the history of the English legal profession—the annual payment of sums of money to lawyers by institutions and private individuals in medieval England.

Just before lunch on Tuesday 13 October 1942 the British War Cabinet assembled for a hasty meeting in the Prime Minister's room in the House of Commons. Sandwiched on the agenda between discussion of the impending visit of the South African premier and the arrangements for celebrating Armistice Day was a unique item, one on which no less than six different Cabinet ministers had submitted papers. The subject was the treatment of the black soldiers who were in Britain as members of the US Army's expeditionary force. The American policy was to segregate them as much as possible from white troops. The Cabinet had now to make up its mind about a War Office proposal that British troops should be encouraged to adopt a similar attitude to the black GIs. The issue, bluntly stated, was whether the British Government should approve a discreet colour bar.

To speak of ‘atheism’ in the context of early modern England immediately invites confusion, and it is for this reason that I shall place the word in inverted commas throughout this paper. On the one hand, I intend to deal with what a twentieth-century reader might expect ‘atheism’ to imply, namely overt hostility to religion. On the other, I want to consider at some length the profuse writings on ‘atheism’ that survive from the period: in these, as we shall see, the word if often used to describe a much broader range of phenomena, in a manner typical of a genre which often appears frustratingly heightened and rhetorical. Some might argue that this juxtaposition displays—and will encourage—muddled thought. But, on the contrary, I think that it is precisely from such a combination that we stand to learn most. Not only are we likely to discover how contemporaries experienced and responded to the threat of irreligion in the society of their day. In addition, by re-examining the relationship between the real and the exaggerated in their perceptions of such heterodoxy, we may be able to draw broader conclusions about early modern thought.

The hispanic-converso predicament developed over a considerable period of time and was the consequence of intolerance. It affected both Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity, frequently under extreme pressure. The former are generally known as conversos and the latter as moriscos. The rise of intolerance involved a reclassification of notions of purity and danger, most notably during the reign of Henry IV of Castile. It also eventually entailed the establishment of an Inquisition. But intolerance was not simply a matter of religion, for both conversos and moriscos found that their habits, customs, and styles of life were viewed with suspicion and hostility. This, then, was their predicament. This paper will consider the predicament in the light of developing intolerance, and brief attention will also be devoted to the possibility that conversos encoded secret predicament messages in literary works. The emphasis is on the kingdom of Castile but, where apposite, examples have been used relating to Portugal, the Crown of Aragon, and Italy.