Labour took office in 1945 amid high hopes that its socialist message could be applied abroad as well as at home. Although Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and other Labour leaders had had almost as much responsibility as their Conservative counterparts for Britain's wartime foreign policy, it was widely believed that once on its own Labour would play a different role in world affairs. Let Us Face the Future, the party's election manifesto, pledged to “apply [a] Socialist analysis to the world situation.” Bevin's famous “Left understands Left” remark was widely taken to mean that Labour would be more sympathetic to revolutionary developments throughout the world but above all to the Soviet Union. For many in the Labour movement, a socialist foreign policy and sympathy for the Soviet Union also implied distrust of the United States and its attempt to create what the New Statesman called a capitalist “economic empire.” For the Labour movement as a whole, the story of these years can be summarized simply: the reluctant abandonment of hopes of Anglo-Soviet friendship and the grudging acceptance of an Anglo-American alliance.

Labour leaders, of course, did not fully share the assumptions of their more enthusiastic followers, and they made clear from the start that they intended no radical break with the foreign policy of the wartime coalition that they had helped to shape. Ernest Bevin told the Commons in his first major speech as foreign secretary that he accepted the foreign policy of his predecessor, Anthony Eden. But a commitment to continuity in foreign policy did not immediately entail complete hostility to the Soviet Union or a special relationship with the United States.

Paul Rich has written that “nationalism in English society has not been a subject that has especially interested historians until comparatively recently.” This judgment could equally be applied to what Gerald Newman has described as that “mere primitive feeling of loyalty,” the less complex and far more ancient phenomenon of patriotism, which, for the purposes of the present article, will simply be taken to mean “love of country.” In the last few decades, the attention given to patriotism by British historians has grown rapidly. However, historians of party politics, particularly those interested in the late nineteenth century, have proved something of an exception to this rule. Although few would dispute Lord Blake's view that “‘patriotism’ … has usually been a valuable weapon in the Conservative armoury,” even work done on the tory party has avoided serious discussion of the subject. Most writers, particularly those of textbook studies, have found it difficult to move beyond rather general allusions to the Conservatives' transformation into the party of patriotism in the 1870s, with “Disraeli's speeches of 1872–3” and his “performance at Berlin in 1878” establishing once and for all “the image of the Conservative party as the champion of national honour.” This argument, of course, owes much to Hugh Cunningham's important History Workshop article of 1981, which put forward the view that patriotism—originally an antistate and libertarian “creed of opposition”—had by the late nineteenth century passed from the hands of the radicals into the possession of the political Right.

Whatever else it might be, whatever its other functions or activities in modern democratic societies, a political party is first and foremost an organization that seeks control of government through the electoral process. Unless it first attains the legitimate governing authority that accompanies majority status, a political party cannot implement the policies necessary to realize its vision of the just society, nor can it fulfill the other roles assigned to parties by modern democratic theory. For just such reasons, it is commonly said that votes are to political parties what profits are to corporations; just as corporate behavior would be incomprehensible without reference to the profit motive, so party behavior is often inexplicable without recognizing the centrality of electoral competition. For parties with normative goals in countries with democratic political systems, the drive for electoral supremacy must be a constant concern.

In Franz Kafka's The Trial, a horrifying fable of human alienation from human institutions, there is a central encounter between Kafka's persona K. and the painter Titorelli, whose task is to reproduce endlessly the icons of the judicial system—arbitrary, logically absurd, yet cruel and inescapable—of which K. has become the latest victim. Approaching a painting in progress, K. recognized its subject as a judge, but could not identify a large figure rising in the middle of the picture from the high back of the judicial seat:

There is now a strong case for banning the word “community” from all academic writing and an even stronger one for banning it from the vocabulary of politics. As one early modern historian has put it, the word is becoming a “shibboleth.” It is employed where “group” or “society,” for example, would be more appropriate, and, worst of all, its use is often not just a matter of slack thought but expresses an implicit hankering for some mythical past when there were “communities.” The increasing overworking of the word by politicians and other public figures can be related to an uneasy feeling that the sense of belonging and of mutual obligation implicit in the idea of “community” are disappearing. Accordingly, if they call things “communities” often enough, that will somehow create them. This prelapsarian attitude to communities is, as we shall see, quite as fundamental to historical use of the term. It is the purpose of this article to examine critically how the word has been applied in relation to the medieval English gentry, to ask whether there can be any legitimate use in this context, and to look at the types of identity, whether communitarian or not, that may have obtained among this important group within medieval society.

Historiographically, the “gentry community,” as is well-known, first appeared in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Alan Everitt.

Every student of the Anglo-Saxons accepts the existence of feud as a feature of society before the Norman Conquest. Yet there has been no serious study of feud in over a century of intense scrutiny and debate on almost every other aspect of English culture in the period. Scholars have marginalized the subject; though a set topic of the books, feud seldom seems to affect the main currents of Anglo-Saxon history. Anglo-Saxon England, possessing the statelike characteristics now identified by scholars, emerges in modern accounts as a society very different from the ones where scholars have usually located, described, and analyzed feuds. Much current scholarship has lately depicted England during the century and a half separating Alfred “the Great” from the Norman Conquest as a highly centralized society, one more closely subject to royal leadership than other contemporary medieval societies. Such centralization was rarely attained in the later medieval period, with the exception of the often-lauded “Angevin Kingship” itself.

In attempting to juxtapose the evidence for feud with the case for “the Late Old English State,” I have come to view the process of feud as a pillar central to Anglo-Saxon political culture. However, two interesting questions—where to strike the balance between feud and royal central action, and between private initiative and public authority in the maintenance of order?—remain unanswered, given inconclusive sources that are patently incapable of sustaining any quantitative judgments. Inevitably but unapologetically, my case is framed by the premise that in arguments a silentio, assumptions for the existence of a particular practice or pattern, are just as much assumptions as those for its absence and nonexistence.

The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens (BNSA) Act stated that “the wife of a British subject shall be deemed to be a British subject, and the wife of an alien shall be deemed to be an alien.” By this reenactment of an 1870 law, a British woman who married an alien became an alien herself, losing the rights and privileges accorded to British nationality. During the 1920s and 1930s, British feminists from around the Empire worked to change this regulation, but only in 1948 were women in the United Kingdom granted the right to their own nationality regardless of their marital status. The House of Commons largely supported the feminists' efforts to reform the laws so that women would not automatically lose their nationality on marriage. Members of Parliament introduced several bills to equalize the nationality laws that were read without division. The Government, however, consistently blocked the bills, citing the imperial nature of the nationality laws and Dominion disagreement with the change. This contest over nationality has been a neglected topic in the study of twentieth-century British history. Legal historians have, by and large, only described changes in the laws regarding married women's national status. While some historians of the women's movement in the British Isles have noted the equal nationality campaign, most have not realized how it can contribute to our understanding of interwar Britain and British feminism. Pat Thane, however, has seen in this topic an example of the way the Empire has influenced British culture.

The relative quiescence of British working-class radicalism during much of the two decades after 1848, so central to the foundations of mid-Victorian stability, has been the subject of many explanations. Though Chartism did not expire finally until the late 1850s, its mainstream strategy of constitutionalist organization, huge meetings, enormous parliamentary petitions, and the tacit threat of violent intimidation seemed exploded after the debacle of Kennington Common and the failed march on Parliament in April 1848. But other factors also contributed to undermine the zeal for reform. Alleviating the pressures of distress, emigration carried off many activists to America and elsewhere. Relative economic prosperity rendered the economic ends of reform less pressing, and proposals like the Chartist Land Plan less appealing. The popularity of various self-help doctrines, including consumer cooperation, also militated against collectivist political action. “Labour aristocrats” and trade union leaders, moreover, preferred local and sectional economic improvement to the risks and expense of political campaigning.

Accounts of mid-Victorian political stability have had little to say, however, about the impact of European radicalism on the British working-class movement after 1848. That the failure of the continental revolutions brought thousands of refugees to Britain is well known. But although useful studies exist of the internationalist dimensions of Chartism prior to 1849—and of some of the refugee groups generally in this period—the effects of the exiled continental radicals on British working-class politics in the early 1850s have remained largely unconsidered.

In the fall of 1589, ten-year-old Jane Throckmorton pointed to the old woman who had settled into a seat in her family's cavernous stone hearth and cried out, “Looke where the old witch sitteth … did you ever see … one more like a witch then she is?” With those words the child set in motion a four-year-long drama that culminated in the hanging of three of her neighbors from their fenland village of Warboys in north Huntingdonshire. Within weeks after the executions, Jane's father and uncle, with the help of a trial judge and the local parson, published their version of this tragic story in a pamphlet that now resides in the British Library.

After Jane Throckmorton and her sisters had shared symptoms such as violent sneezing and grotesque seizures for several weeks, and two medical doctors at Cambridge had suggested the possibility of witchcraft, Gilbert Pickering—a relative from Northamptonshire—arrived at the Warboys manor house to conduct numerous experiments with Jane and her neighbor, Alice Samuel. His intention was to demonstrate that the old woman was the cause of the girl's symptoms. In February 1590 one of the sisters was taken to the Pickering home in Northamptonshire where the results of further experiments were recorded for eventual inclusion in the pamphlet.