Contemporary perspectives on the activities of English medieval ships and mariners are somewhat distorted, since historians are rarely able to examine mercantile or marine activity from the personal records of merchants, mariners, shipbuilders, corderers, or others involved in maritime affairs. The sources are overwhelmingly royal and so they reduce the individual efforts of men and their ships to entries of income and expenditures in exchequer records, commissions of arrest or impressment, legal briefs, and occasional parliamentary records. The chroniclers prove of little help because of their general unfamiliarity with maritime affairs or because of the restricted interests of their patrons. Consequently, historians are forced to revert to the well-preserved English archival material which can shed light on the topic. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of the administrative records of medieval England in the study of ships and mariners. The focus of the essay is on the early history of the royal navy as opposed to the merchant ships impressed by the crown. Although this approach is not unique, questions regarding the composition, maintenance, or manning of royal fleets are traditionally answered by a discussion of the merchant marine. This study has been confined to the fourteenth century — a period crucial to the English experience because of the origins of the Hundred Years' War with France and the demands which the war placed upon the naval resources of England.

English fleets in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relied heavily upon the Cinque Ports whose commitment of 57 ships for 15 days' service per year was formalized in the thirteenth century by “ancient custom.”

It has been Octavia Hill's fate to survive, rather like some great “classic,” well-known by name, but neglected and unread – of the major Victorian social reformers perhaps the most misunderstood and inadequately handled. Geoffrey Best in his study of the Church of England Ecclesiastical Commissioners has drawn attention to her profound respect for the principle of self-help and comments, “She was on one of history's losing sides, and, as is the way with losers who are in no way romantic, she has rather dropped below the horizon of modern knowledge.” Octavia Hill has, unfortunately, been the victim of partisan history. Abruptly dismissed, on one hand, as an absurd anachronism, a devout believer in individualistic solutions in an age of creeping state and municipal socialism, she has been too uncritically praised, on the other, by those who were related to her or closely associated with her work. Her life (1838-1912) encompassed many vital reforms. She was co-founder of the National Trust and a great Victorian conservationist, whose devotion to the preservation of commons and parks, and concept of a “green belt” enabled London and other large towns to pass into the twentieth century, civilized and relaxing places in which to live. Her successful efforts to save Parliament Hill and Hampstead Heath from the encroachments of late Victorian speculative builders deserve the closest examination, from all those interested in urban development and the preservation, in and around our cities, of the natural environment.

Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change. Much of what is still being written about colonial administration in the nineteenth-century British Empire rests on the partisan and even malicious writings of critics of the Government in England in the 1830s and '40s who had never seen the colonial correspondence and were unfamiliar with existing conditions in the distant colonies. The impression conveyed in most textbooks is that the Colonial Office after 1815 was a well-established bureaucracy concerned with the policies of the mother country in the overseas possessions, and that those policies changed very slowly and only under pressure. Initially Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller were responsible for this Colonial Office legend, but it was soon accepted by most of the people who had business to transact there. Annoyed by the fact that the measures proposed by the Wakefield group did not meet with instant acceptance, Wakefield and Buller attacked the Permanent Under-Secretary, James Stephen, as the power behind the throne in 14 Downing Street and assumed that his ideas of right and wrong were being imposed willy-nilly on the unfortunate colonists and would-be colonists.

The picture of Stephen as all-powerful in shaping imperial policy was probably strengthened by the publication in 1885 of Henry Taylor's Autobiography. Taylor was one of Stephen's warmest admirers and had served with him longer than anyone else; when he stated that for a quarter of a century Stephen “more than any one man virtually governed the British Empire,” historians were naturally inclined to give credence to his words.

Looking back on his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1771 to 1782, Lord Sandwich considered that one of his most important accomplishments was the introduction into the royal dockyards of task work for shipwrights — “a matter very little known in the world, but the only material improvement … which will enable us to build and repair a much larger number of ships.” Task work had long been universal in private shipyards, and its use in the navy's own yards was discussed at intervals for eighty years at least before its adoption in 1775. But opposition to the method — from the Navy Board and the shipwrights and their officers — was entrenched. Arguments against it, having once prevailed, afterwards were seemingly invincible, their mere invocation being enough to stop further consideration. The obstacles after so long a time might have been insuperable to one less confident and determined than Sandwich. Indeed, the innovation when it was made produced a strike of shipwrights which forced its partial abandonment before the scheme had properly been tried.

Task workers, instead of being employed for a fixed daily wage with an additional allowance for overtime, were paid according to the amount of work actually performed, the ship itself being divided into parts, for each of which an over-all labor price was established and apportioned equally among the men. The advantages of the method appear on the face of it overwhelming. The shipwrights were encouraged to work steadily and rapidly in order to increase their earnings, which thus were greater than those of the day workers.

The art and mind of Jonathan Swift have been the objects of ever greater critical attention for the last twenty or thirty years. So thoroughly have the commentators discussed Swift's attitudes and their origins that there would seem to be little left to discover about the Dean's views or why he held them or how he applied them. In respect to the rôle played in Swift's thought by his reading in historiography, however, and the importance of history in the conceptual bases of his writings, critics have assumed more than they have demonstrated. In spite of some useful published disquisitions — by Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis — the implications of the importance of Swift's historical outlook have not been fully explored, nor have the formation and configuration of his historically founded beliefs been clarified and documented. The present study will attempt to explain in some detail Swift's ideas of history, where he got them, and how they affected his non-historiographical compositions.

Swift's vital interest in historiography is now commonly acknowledged. The post in government he most actively tried to get was that of Historiographer Royal. Between 1714 and 1720, he devoted a good deal of time to composing his “histories” of political activities during the Tory ministry. He essayed a history of England. His letters as well as his other works are packed with references to a multiplicity of historians drawn from disparate ages and cultures. In his library, which numbered about five hundred separate works at the time of his death, at least three fifths were historical opera, including diaries, memoirs, and chronologies.

George Yule's “Independents and Revolutionaries” suggests that in many respects he and I are not so far apart. We agree that a “rigid two-party view” of Interregnum politics is a mistake, that not all members of the Rump were political Independents, that “Independent” was not commonly used as a political term after 1648, and that the clue to the events of 1648-49, the climax of the Puritan Revolution, lies in the existence of a group of genuine radicals who can and ought to be identified. He also seems to agree in one place that the criticisms of his statistical methods in The Independents in the English Civil War which I advanced in “The Independents Reconsidered” are justified, though in another he argues that the table in The Independents enables the reader to surmount these difficulties. This being so, if a technical dispute over methodology was all that remained between us, his latest article might well be left unchallenged. It contains, however, a number of assumptions about seventeenth-century religion and politics which are either unfounded or need serious qualification, and on which a few further comments are necessary.

First, as to method. It is true that the table referred to enables the reader to obtain Yule's estimates of the total numbers in various groups, such as (a) “Fled to Army, 1647,” (b) purged, 1648, and (c) Rumper, and of how these break down by social position and religious affiliation. But nowhere is there any entry for all of Yule's allegedly Independent M.P.s and of the breakdown for these, nor is there any way of obtaining it from the table.

The Grenvillites were one of the more durable and long lasting of the political groups or factions which functioned within the Westminster scene during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Yet several years before the Reform Bill of 1832 substantially reduced their borough strength in the House of Commons, the Grenvillites as a group had ceased playing even a peripherally important role in the political nation. The decline of this faction illustrates one of the problems implicit in a system which places emphasis upon a great peer or wealthy Commoner acting as paterfamilias of a political clique. It is all very well when there exists an individual of some talent or even a moderate degree of gravitas to lead the group, but what will follow when an internal shift within the faction throws up a total incompetent, who neither properly prunes nor tends his preserve, to run the corporate affairs? This article will examine how such an occurrence overtook the Grenvillites during the years after 1817.