This chapter shows how QE has had material consequences for fiscal policy in the UK since 2009 and also leads to potential conflicts in times of QT. It looks to international precedent for lessons on how to manage these fiscal interactions.

This chapter and the following explore aspects of the making of the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle common stock, that is those annals substantially shared by all versions up to c.892. Many elements of the earliest stage of the writing and compilation of the annals remain obscure. The authors and their location(s) are unknown, and their sources only partially defined. The common stock ends c.892 and probably entered into circulation at about this time or soon after. These vernacular annals align in various ways with the Alfredian cultural and political project of the 880s and 890s, and some annals of these decades suggest court connections. Plummer believed in King Alfred's hands-on involvement in the creation of the Chronicle: ‘the idea was carried out under his direction and supervision, this I do most firmly believe’. There is, however, no evidence for Alfred's direct or even indirect involvement. Plummer's belief was challenged by Sir Frank Stenton, and most critics now employ caution concerning the connection between Alfred and the making of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The creators of the common stock annals were as much compilers as they were authors, drawing on a range of sources for historically remote events, as well as authoring new annals for more recent times. This chapter surveys the evidence available from the Chronicle itself for the common stock annals’ authorship, the sources used and the decision to shape the Chronicle as a continuously numbered sequence or years from AD 1.

The news of the accident on the lake had left Franziska deeply shaken. But Josephine, by the time she left the room half an hour later, had succeeded in restoring the equilibrium in her mistress's mind, at least to the extent that the events she had recounted now seemed as if they had taken place in the last century, or far away in some land beyond the seas. In any case Franziska refused to let the incident disrupt her plan for the day, which read simply: letter to Countess Judith.

She had written to the countess as soon as she had arrived, though only a short note, which had neither expected a reply nor received one. It therefore was now truly incumbent on her to write.

“For several days now, my dear Countess, I have been meaning to follow my first note to you with a longer letter, but always found myself hindered in carrying out my intention.

“And today, a serious accident on our lake, in which the priest from Nagy-Foros lost his life—even the Eucharist sank into the waters—seemed likely to keep me from staying true to my intention, yet again. But I shall set aside the feelings arising from this, and write to you.

“I have now been at Arpa Castle for forty days, and this long and short amount of time lies behind me like a dream.

In 2016 Dr Suzanne Paul drew my attention to a project on parchment species identifcation initiated in the Department of Archaeology, University of York. With the permission of Scott Mandelbrote, Fellow Librarian, Peterhouse, I selected Peterhouse, MSS 92 (large folio) and 181 (regular folio) for identifcation, the two manuscripts representing two diferent stages of the Fish Scribe's career. The work was carried out by Emma Nichols, CUL conservator and analysed by Sarah Fiddyment, Department of Archaeology, University of York. I am grateful to Fiddyment for permission to cite her report, which follows.

The part played by the concept of constituent power in prolonging, multiplying or magnifying the divisions in existence in France before and after 1789 has not been given much historical recognition.1 Between 1789 and 1792, however, it came to be used as a weapon in a number of concurrent conflicts centred on the consequences, whether actual or potential, of the disintegration of the French Empire and the growth of emigration from France. Through Sieyès, Ramsay’s concept of constituent power was given a status that was similar to, but less foundational than, Rousseau’s concept of a legislator. As Sieyès wrote in the draft Declaration of the Rights of Man that he presented to the National Assembly on 21 July 1789, constituent power was not required to constitute a nation or society but to constitute a government. This, initially, made its scope more limited than Rousseau’s concept of a legislator. Its focus on government also made it possible for Sieyès to circumvent the two apparently intractable problems that Rousseau had highlighted in his Social Contract. The first was how a sovereign, whose will was general, could elect a government, whose will was particular.

The widespread adoptions of the handwritten codex on the one hand and of the printing press on the other hand seem to dominate modern media histories.

Yet, between these two historical milestones, medieval scribes witnessed an explosion of different types of information technologies in many forms. While the codex became a dominant form of mediating knowledge in the European Middle Ages, the particular forms of books that exist from the period demonstrate a more nuanced media ecology. For example, abundant evidence survives to show that loosely-collected gatherings of booklets were just as widely used as bound codices. Similarly, there was no standard form for books, as they ranged in physical size, quality, and contents. Some are so massive that several people are required to move one, while others are little enough to fit into a satchel or even a small pocket; some are thin like modern-day notebooks, while others are nearly as thick as they are tall or wide.

Even more, the very forms of the contents of medieval books reveal much more about the media diversity of the Middle Ages. Medieval books contain countless different types of texts, glosses, images, charts, diagrams, infographics, and other types of information. The manuscripts held in Bristol libraries contain a similar diversity of manuscript media, which we may understand as varying expressions of medieval information technologies. These manuscripts therefore offer an opportunity to reflect upon how information is categorised, systematised, and organised – essential issues in understanding media across the many centuries of the longue duree.

Medieval theologians generally understood fear as morally ambiguous. Their ambivalence about fear's moral value stemmed from the Bible, which includes some passages celebrating holy fear, e.g. timor Domini sanctus permanens in saeculum saeculi (‘The fear of the Lord is holy, enduring for ever and ever’), and others suggesting fear's incompatibility with crucial virtues like caritas (‘love’), e.g. timor non est in caritate sed perfecta caritas foras mittit timorem (‘Fear is not in charity, but perfect charity casteth out fear’). In an effort to resolve the apparent inconsistency between such passages, patristic theologians like Augustine of Hippo distinguished between two types of fear of God (timor Dei): servile fear (timor servilis) of punishment, which is cast out by charity, and chaste fear (timor castus) of sundering one's soul from God through sin, which endures forever. Although they valued chaste fear above servile fear, they understood both as spiritually salutary, though servile fear must be cast out by love. During the High Middle Ages, scholastic theologians like Peter Lombard expanded this dichotomy into elaborate taxonomies of fear. These generally included natural fear (timor naturalis: an automatic and morally neutral fear that occurs when one is suddenly frightened or anticipates pain), as well as spiritually detrimental fears like human fear (timor humanus: excessive fear of bodily harm that discourages moral behaviour) and worldly fear (timor mundanus: fear of losing worldly goods that discourages moral behaviour), the last of which was angrily attributed to the propertied Church by John Wycliffe.

The National Eisteddfod of Wales, and its attendant robed ‘Gorsedd’ of bards, ovates, and druids, are the most visible legacy of eighteenth-century revivalism in twenty-first century Welsh culture. The first an annual cultural festival, and the second a ceremonial academy of Welsh luminaries in bardic dress, both were institutions creatively reconstructed by revivalists in the 1790s, embodying the movement's attempts to weave aspects of Welsh history and identity into forms that would thrive in modernity. Initially separate institutions – though created within the same revivalist network – the Gorsedd and eisteddfod were eventually united at the Carmarthen Eisteddfod in 1819. This eisteddfod was the first of the so-called ‘Provincial Eisteddfodau’, organized primarily by Wales-based ‘Cambrian Societies’, as distinct from the London-centric revivalism that dominated the movement throughout the eighteenth century: Carmarthen therefore has some claim to witnessing the end of the Welsh revivalist period covered by this book, and the birth of the Welsh National Eisteddfod in its current form. At Carmarthen, Iolo Morganwg unexpectedly performed some of his radically inflected pseudo-druidism outside the eisteddfod venue, inducting new members into his revived druido-bardic order, and establishing a still ongoing partnership between these two symbols of revivalist Welshness.

Since the later twentieth century, one tendency in Welsh scholarship has emphasized radical, anti-British-imperialist, proto-Welsh-nationalist contexts to these events and their legacies.

Sieyès’s political thought stood at the confluence of the intellectual legacies of Hume and Rousseau. There were, certainly, important intermediaries such as Ramsay in Britain and Turgot in France, but the original conceptual building blocks were the work of the earlier pair. From Hume, Sieyès took over the concept of constituent power and the neo-Harringtonian claim about the relationship between property and political power that Ramsay adopted from Hume’s History. From Rousseau, Sieyès took over the concept of a social contract and its place within the structure of rights and obligations that Rousseau associated both with the concept of a general, or common, will and with the distinction between sovereignty and government as the basis of what, in his Letters from the Mountain, Rousseau had called the democratic constitution. From both, Sieyès also had available the possibility of a synthesis indicated by Rousseau’s claim that Hume ‘associated a very republican soul with the English paradoxes in favour of luxury’.1 One measure of Sieyès’s intellectual ambition is that he set out to establish a system in which the two legacies could be combined.

INTRODUCTION

This case arose in Lecropt, a parish south of Dunblane, and was pursued by the presbytery of Stirling between July and September 1590. In the record it begins almost immediately after the case of Isobel Watson, edited above, but seems not to have been connected with it.

The accusation of witchcraft came from Janet Mitchell, wife of William Mayne. Mitchell complained that Marion McNab was a witch, and told a story of how McNab had bewitched her husband's malt. This initially prompted Mitchell to seek reparation and reconciliation – she told of having given McNab malt and honey in order to restore the quality of the malt. There was also mention of William Mayne's own sickness. Evidently the reconciliation attempt failed, and Mitchell then complained to the presbytery. The earliest record shows that she had already been induced to put the complaint in writing – she ‘producit in wret certane hedds of wiche craft practesit be the said Marione and of hir abwsione of the said Jonet’. This document does not survive, but the presbytery's procedurally inquisitorial response has its own interest.

McNab was then summoned. She denied most of what Mitchell had said, but her own story also told of a reconciliation attempt. She related setting out with Mitchell to seek the aid of ‘ane womane callit NcGilerss’ – probably a Highlander, whose name seems to have been a patronymic, ‘daughter of Gillies’. This woman was evidently a magical practitioner. But, McNab explained defensively, on the way she became uneasy about the mission and turned back.

The presbytery arranged for McNab to be imprisoned by the magistrates of Stirling, where she remained for two months, but they do not seem to have attempted to interrogate her there.