In the medieval period peace was intrinsically linked to Christianity. St Augustine was the central authority on ideas of peace as expressed through his Civitas Dei, and his notion of peace strongly influenced medieval political thought and the image of the peacemaking king. The major challenge that both the Danish and English kings faced at the outset of the period was the restoration and reformation of royal authority. Diplomacy and negotiations for peace in this period frequently involved reconciliations following rebellion. Peacemaking at the highest, international, level has much in common with more localised dispute settlement. In contrast to the documentary records of dispute settlement, the historian of peacemaking has to rely heavily upon the evidence of narrative sources. The available evidence for dispute settlement as opposed to that for international diplomacy shows that disputes were most commonly over property.

This chapter links individual remembrance to the paradigm of collective memory and shows how history played into postwar European politics. Since the end of the Second World War, the remembered past has increasingly been recognised as an important source of stability allowing individuals and communities to integrate new experiences into existing understandings of the past. Although these narrative frameworks help maintain individual and group identities, the chapter develops a critical theory of memory as a resource for rethinking the foundations of political life in the aftermath of historical ruptures. Building on the work of the Frankfurt School, it argues that the experience of total war between 1914 and 1945 created a rupture in European understandings of its past. Despite its many traumatic consequences, this caesura gave political leaders the freedom to rethink the foundations of political order and provided them with the cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources to reimagine the future.

This chapter records specific services for the reconciliation of excommunicants in Francia in the early tenth, and in England only from the early eleventh century. Investigation of the textual history of these services is intended to help fill this lacuna in the historiography and to illuminate further episcopal ideology in this period. The locus of the English rite is also different from that of the Frankish rite; the repentant excommunicants, with their intercessores, meet the bishop at the gates of the cemetery and not at the doors of the church, as in the Frankish rite. The textual history of the reconciliation rites reveals a living tradition: bishops invested time and parchment in improving a liturgy which symbolized their supreme authority, as the representative of St Peter, who had the power to bind and to loose.

John Horton begins his chapter by acknowledging Rainer Forst’s contribution to rewriting the history of toleration in the West, as well as the important conceptual work he has done by providing an account of the concept of toleration that is notable for its clarity and precision. Despite this, Horton raises questions about Forst’s approach. The weight of Forst’s argument depends on his principle of the right to justification and the robustness of the associated distinction between the moral and the ethical, i.e. between reasons that are general and shareable and those that are not. Despite being a frequently cited principle in contemporary political philosophy, this distinction is more problematic than most of its adherents acknowledge, since exclusive reliance on non-public reasons of the sort that run afoul of the requirements of generality and reciprocity is uncommon in real life. Horton then goes on to criticise the epistemological component of the right to justification, observing that the distinction between the moral and the ethical is difficult to sustain. These and other arguments undermine Forst’s claim to be able to resolve practical disputes about toleration, or at least demonstrate that he is only able to do so by importing controversial substantive content into the argument. Horton concludes that moral/political principles, no less than ethical beliefs, are radically underdetermined by the criteria of reciprocity and generality, and that appealing to reciprocity and generality in order to resolve disputes about toleration is no more than an act of faith.

Often the issue of hostages has been used by contemporary commentators and modern historians alike as a yardstick by which to measure the success or failure of individual kings. A number of historians have highlighted the important socio-cultural, symbolic and political uses of hostages in the early medieval period, but few historians have to date devoted more than a passing reference to the role of hostages in the period after 1100. In the post-1100 period, the most common use of hostages in negotiations was those given to secure the release of adversaries captured in war. Unlike a hostage, those acting as sureties were deprived of their liberty only if there was a breach of the agreement. A good example of the use of real sureties in peacemaking can be found in the Treaty of Messina concluded between Richard I of England and Philip Augustus of France in 1191.

This chapter examines the continuing elision between England, Britain and the United Kingdom that exists in political rhetoric despite twenty years of devolution. Accordingly this chapter shows how English nationalism is simultaneously expressed by and subsumed within a defence of British sovereignty that leads to a particular framing of major political – and especially constitutional – dilemmas in British politics. From the 1990s this defence of British sovereignty led to a nationalist logic of leaving the EU and reconnecting the United Kingdom with a global-era version of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the Anglosphere. By making English nationalism the independent variable, this chapter lays the foundations of the argument that Brexit was a moment of English nationalism.

The charters of the 990s not only give readers a rare insight into the terms of early medieval English political debate, and into the tensions and contradictions within and between them, but also into their successful deployment within a specific historical context. This chapter begins with the 'youthful ignorance' charters. Returning to them now suggests how far the ideals of the 990s, albeit recorded in clerically drafted documents, should be seen as shared values, or ones which at least had strong resonance for the laity. In the context of debates which utilised the values of kinship and family, and in which the king was made to place himself and his actions within a dynastic past, a metaphor of the king's reign drawn from his human life-cycle was a very apposite way of presenting what was claimed as a shift in direction and a king's change of mind.

This chapter considers the ways in which discussion of certain important aspects of peasant society in medieval England, for instance the transfer of land, are sometimes examined by historians as explicable in terms of their significance for society and community. It identifies four main historical approaches which, with differing motives, have explored the nature, and changing nature, of the medieval village community and the durability of the bonds which sustained it. These are institutionalists, social structuralists, Marxists, and individualists. Institutionalists are those historians, such as Helen M. Cam, who have emphasised the importance of legal and quasi-legal structures in defining the village community. Social structuralists have tended to define the village community according to the activities of its constituents, and especially in terms of co-operation. Individualists, an approach associated with Alan Macfarlane but one that also admits a nuanced discussion of individual enterprise and entrepreneurship.

This chapter is about how to encourage household recycling of waste. It presents a detailed case of a nudge strategy that involved canvassing people on their doorsteps, encouraging them to recycle their waste and comparing the results with a randomized controlled trial. The findings show the strength of nudge, in that the canvassing increased recycling, but they also show the potential weakness, as the effect diminished three months later. The chapter also contains a second experiment that examined the role of feedback in encouraging recycling. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the advocates of the nudge strategy.

This chapter introduces the book. It gives a brief overview of Soviet history during the Stalin years (1928–53) and sketches the major debate surrounding it. It provides definitions of key terms, such as ‘Stalinism’ and ‘historiography’, and outlines the book and its arguments.