North Americans are today living through a period of historic commemorations: the centennial of the Civil War, the centennial in 1967 of the Dominion of Canada, and a striking series of bicentennials, few years which lack their events to remember or to celebrate. Two hundred years ago this year the Treaty of Paris was signed. It and the events of which it was the culmination and the outcome changed the course of history, for they determined that England, not France, was to give her language and culture to that large part of the lands beyond the seas over which the fighting had taken place. No period has been more closely examined. The examination has gone on for the two centuries intervening, and will go on. In 1959 there appeared several new books on Wolfe and the taking of Quebec: by 2059 no doubt there will be still others. Why not? In those years a world was changing hands.

Gipson's huge work is the latest full dress account of the period, and so wide is its scope that it has been in the making for over thirty years. The British Empire before the American Revolution has now reached its tenth volume. Two more are planned: one to cover the period 1770-75, one to include comments on other accounts and bibliographical material. Since Volume X actually reaches only to 1766, it may be that the author will, if spared, add three. The undertaking has built up into a massive historical structure.

This is the third in a series of studies dealing with the history of the proxy system in the House of Lords. The first, after tracing the origin of proxies to the Roman law of agency, dealt with the emergence and spread of representation by proctors in the ecclesiastical and political assemblies of medieval England. The second study demonstrated how the proxy system was perfected in the upper house during the reign of Henry VIII and how the Crown benefited from that system. The ensuing article concerns proctorial representation during the crucial years of the Edwardian Reformation. Because of the brief period under consideration — only six years — it seemed best to cast the study in an analytical rather than a chronological framework. The first section deals with the general characteristics of proctorial representation in mid-Tudor times; the second and third sections cover the spiritual and temporal lords, respectively; and the fourth section treats the relationship between the proxy system and conciliar government.

I

Knowledge of the proxy system in the mid-sixteenth-century House of Lords remains somewhat fragmentary and limited in scope. A satisfactory treatment of the subject does not exist. Constitutional and legal historians have paid little attention to proxies and less to the procedure governing their use in the upper house. As one might expect, Bishop Stubbs dealt with proxies in medieval Parliaments and correctly associated them with parliamentary privileges, but at the same time he concluded that “its history has not yet been minutely traced.

This paper is concerned with two different sorts of problems. It is an attempt to explain and interpret the diplomatic and political concepts which guided Castlereagh and his fellow-negotiators at Vienna; it also raises questions about certain conventional interpretations of the nature of Castlereagh's own accomplishment. The credit generally accorded Castlereagh for his work at Vienna derives largely from the acceptance of conclusions reached by the late Sir Charles Webster. Since Webster's analysis reversed an earlier adverse judgment on Castlereagh, it must not be thought that the purpose of this study is to reassert the old view. Quite the contrary; the intention, very simply, is to ask whether Webster and those who have followed him have not neglected to ask certain sorts of questions about the Napoleonic era, most particularly about the climate of opinion which prevailed at that time. While twentieth-century historians have succeeded in rescuing Castlereagh from his critics, it is just possible that they have tended to think of his accomplishment in terms more appropriate to this century than to the early nineteenth. As a result, they may praise him for qualities which are less remarkable than they imagine, while failing to appreciate his unique capacities, which were not so much intellectual as diplomatic.

This should not be taken to imply that a fundamental revision of the main outlines of this period is in prospect. The debt owed Sir Charles Webster by those who have followed him in the study of early nineteenth-century European diplomacy is not likely soon to be redeemed. Had Webster's sole accomplishment been to create order in an area where something like chaos had previously existed, this would have been reason enough to perpetuate his memory. By his imaginative and meticulous methods, however, he achieved considerably more than this; he restored a reputation which had too long remained in question and showed conclusively that certain traditional judgments about the Vienna accords reflected a thinly veiled political bias. Webster succeeded in doing what Lord Robert Cecil, the later Lord Salisbury, attempted in 1862 in the Quarterly Review, where he expatiated on the unusual qualities of the man who served as British Foreign Secretary in the tumultuous decade 1812 to 1822.

In Maitland's words, “Of all the centuries the twelfth was the most legal.” It was a time of growth for the great legal systems in the West: English common law, revived Roman law, and canon law. Students of medieval England have rarely concerned themselves with the question of the connection between these legal systems. For six centuries, from Bracton until the rise of modern legal history with Maitland, the study of English law was insular, ignoring the continental legal systems. When a seventeenth-century civilian wrote that “our common law, as we call it, is nothing else than a mixture of the Roman and the feudal,” he aroused the anger of Coke and the common lawyers. Recently scholars have taken such a view more seriously, and a number of studies have sought Roman or canonistic influences on English law. It might be useful, then, to reconsider the matter of the impact of Rome on English law in the light of recent scholarship, asking three questions: To what extent was Roman law known and studied in England before the time of Bracton? What influences, if any, do scholars find that it had on the legal innovations of Henry II and his sons? Why did the English fail to ‘receive’ Roman law in the way that countries on the Continent did?

Any influence of Roman law in England during the centuries after the withdrawal of Roman legions and before the Norman Conquest can be dismissed quickly. Once Christianity was re-introduced to the island, the revival of Roman Law, or at least of some notion of Roman legal concepts, was possible.

The purpose of this paper is to set forth, somewhat arbitrarily, a composite view of the British Labour Party's history between the Wars, to be labelled the orthodox Labour interpretation, and then to set against it a contrasting view which has been expressed by several left-wing writers within the Labour Party. This examination of conflicting opinions can scarcely be dignified with the title historiographical inquiry. In the first place, there are other more or less coherent interpretations of Labour Party history in this period besides the two sketched herein, most notably a Communist view, expressed in such works as Allen Hutt's The Post-War History of the British Working Class. Secondly, as Stephen Graubard has recently said in relation to the Fabian Society, much of the Labour Party history in this period is in fact autobiography. Finally, as will soon become distressingly apparent, the interpretations that most writers have given of Labour between the Wars have been influenced by, connected with, even in some cases identical to the same authors' views on Labour today. History used to be called “past politics”; in this case it cannot entirely escape becoming “present politics.”

According to the orthodox view, the Labour Party was emerging from its infancy in the 1920s, having established its claim to be considered a major contestant for power as recently as 1918. As Francis Williams puts it:

After John Buchan, Nevil Shute. In the long progression of popular British writers who have woven stories around the social facts and cultural values of empire, a progression which extends from Charles Kingsley and G. A. Henty through Paul Scott and, arguably, Ian Fleming, Nevil Shute occupies a distinguishable and important place. Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt. This essay offers the elements of such an analysis and suggests some lines along which further inquiry might proceed.

For at least a decade before his death in January 1960, Nevil Shute had been the best selling of English novelists. Altogether, his nearly two dozen works of light fiction have sold over 14 million copies. When he died his books were earning him an income of about $175,000 a year. Such extended popularity can hardly have been fortuitous. Without venturing too far into the psychology of literary response, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shute must have gauged accurately the issues and situations which, imaginatively presented, would interest his readers, and further, that he must have expressed in his work a pattern of values which conformed generally to their moral predispositions (or at least did not offend them.) Hence it should prove worthwhile to take a close and comprehensive look at his themes and ideas on the premise that they can tell us something useful about his audience.

T. S. Ashton has described the Industrial Revolution in England as a time when the “chimney stacks rose to dwarf the ancient spires.” He has also described it as a time when the voluntary association replaced state initiative in governmental affairs. These two phenomena of modern society – the urban industrial complex and the growth of public opinion – are usually paired. Perhaps it is natural to think of the growth of public opinion as something made possible by the growth of cities.

Yet it is known that the Industrial Revolution profoundly affected not only the cities but the countryside as well; that the new technology prompted (among other things) an enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. This is evident in the formation of numerous societies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were devoted to purely agricultural pursuits. With the decline of rural prosperity after 1815, however, there arose societies of a different sort which had as their object not the improvement of farming through better techniques but the improvement of agriculture through political action. Both kinds of society revealed the stirrings of public opinion in the countryside.

This essay is concerned with the second type of society, which rose and spread among what are loosely termed the tenant farmers of England. These societies were numerous enough and sufficiently of one mind to take on the character of a movement. The movement was to fail, as agrarian movements are notorious for doing.