In 1927, when Beryl Smalley began to study the Bible in the Middle Ages, I think it would be true to say that the Bible had almost no place in the minds of medieval historians. The strongly constitutional emphasis of the Oxford historical school of Stubbs and the tutors in Oxford, and the elaboration of this tradition by his pupils Tout and Tait in Manchester, was distinctly hostile to the intrusion of unsubstantial intellectual distractions into the business of the historian. It was generally understood of course that the Bible became important as a moving force in politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it could be left out of account, so it seemed, during the preceding thousand years. And this was not just an English phenomenon.

In the first three of these papers I have examined three aspects of the European historical tradition—aspects which I may briefly characterize as classical, early scientific, and prophetic. The models for all these modes were derived from the ancient world, and all three have played an important part in the development of western attitudes to history. Yet no one who looks dispassionately at the works produced by these three modes of studying history will think that they are the main sources of our modern ways of thinking about and writing history. So we must now ask whether it is possible to identify any central tradition in historical study leading to the practice and assumptions of most historians today.

A Year ago I took as my theme the origin of that comprehensive but limited view of human progress which dominated European historical thought from the twelfth century to the eighteenth. This idea of historical development had the great merit of embracing every aspect of human life from the first moments of history to the last days. It brought together in a single pattern of development the improvement in man's material condition, the discovery and perfecting of the sciences, the movement of empires, and the enlargement of man's spiritual life. Taken as a whole it was one of the grandest expressions of the beneficent unity of nature, reason, and revelation, which has stamped the chief products of European culture during the greater part of its history. From the time of Hugh of St Victor to Voltaire, it continued despite many setbacks and aberrations to be refined and enlarged by scholarship–and never more confidently than in the last moments before its collapse. In the end the system collapsed as a result of a totally unexpected failure in the foundations on which it was based.

A YEAR ago I took the opportunity presented by this obligatory address to survey the working out of a classical formula for historical writing during the three hundred years which separate Einhard's Life of Charlemagne from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. History written in accordance with these rules had many merits, and its emphasis is often right, or at least illuminating, but it never had a more than uncertain hold on the matter-of-fact world. Geoffrey of Monmouth was a historian who followed the old rules, but he did his job so well that he could have no successor except in the realm of romance. This is no place for us, and it is time for us to come down to earth again.

I hope the Society will not think that I am wasting its time in taking the European tradition of historical writing as the general theme of the addresses that I am required to deliver during my term of office. Although there have been many studies of the wide range of problems that fall under the general heading of historiography, the study of the aims, methods and limitations of the historians of the past has been somewhat neglected, in this country at least. There are of course some conspicuous exceptions. The historical attitudes and aptitudes of St Augustine, Gibbon and Macaulay have been examined again and again. But outside the great names comparatively little has been done to examine historical works for what they can tell us about the way in which historical writing is affected by the intellectual presuppositions and environment of the writer. As historians we are generally content to use the chronicles and histories of the past quite simply as quarries of facts that require to be sifted and purified to make them usable for our purposes, but do not require any profound investigation of the principles of selection, emphasis or composition that determined their preservation. This is how Stubbs dealt with the many chronicles that he edited so admirably. They were the raw material for his own works and those of other historians. He examined them for reliability, and he asked whether they provided new facts that could not be found elsewhere.

The importance of Flambard in Rufus's reign has always been acknowledged. All the chroniclers, in more or less strident language, put him in the forefront of those responsible for Rufus's exactions and lay the blame chiefly on him for the misfortunes they relate. Stubbs in working out his idea of constitutional development gave Flambard a more determined position in this scheme than he had ever held before. It will first be useful to see what kind of picture of Flambard he and, later, Freeman evolved. The chief difficulty Stubbs had in Rufus's reign was to find some guiding hand for the “hardening and sharpening” of feudalism which in his view was going on at that time, and for the introduction of new feudal practices. He required some single and unscrupulous innovator to account for a process which he thought time alone would not have brought about. Stubbs, looking from the point of view of constitutional development, explained the evolution of the conditions described in Henry I's coronation charter as the work of Flambard. The charter showed, for instance, heirs to feudal fiefs having to buy back their lands on the death of the holder instead of merely paying a relief—a stringency which he explained by the discovery of a legal mind working out feudal principle.