There is a well-established notion among Irish and British historians that local self-government began in Ireland in 1898, when the Local Government Act created the system of elective county councils to replace the old grand jury system in the government of the counties. The grand juries, it is well-known, were instruments of the Irish “landed interest”—the gentry and aristocracy—whose dominance over these bodies was protected by a rigid system of property qualifications and appointing procedures that admitted only trustworthy landowners to the jury seats. Since only the juries were empowered to levy and expend the county tax known as the “cess,” they were therefore also able to dominate the lesser county authorities, the county and baronial presentment sessions, through control of the purse. When the 1898 act abolished this aristocratic system and replaced it with a new system of representative county and district councils, the result was a de facto transfer of power in local government from the old landowning class to the peasantry. This view, which was first promoted by the founders of the 1898 act, has been repeated by numerous historians since then, and for lack of evidence to the contrary it prevails today.

Willian O'Brien, the nationalist M.P. and editor of the Parnellite newspaper United Ireland, might well have disputed this view if he were alive today. As a practicing politician who understood well the ways in which power can be exercised, he was more inclined to look at the practical operations of public bodies rather than their constitutions to determine which party held the real power. In his Recollections, which were published in 1905, O'Brien reminisced about the turbulent years of the great “land war” of 1879-1882 and recalled how, in 1882, that historic struggle between Irish landlord and tenant for control of the soil focused for a time in a struggle for control of the Irish boards of guardians, the 163 bodies which administered the Irish poor law in the localities.

The morale or fighting spirit of an army has always been a most important if intangible factor in military success. Clausewitz believed that “the moral [psychological] elements are among the most important in war.” Field-Marshal Montgomery went so far as to claim that “the morale of the soldier is the greatest single factor in war.” And Napoleon's dictum has often been quoted: in war “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” Since morale is such an elusive quality, however, its role in military history can be nearly lost in the study of battles of long ago. Indeed, the historians of medieval warfare have been little concerned with it. Philippe Contamine, in his War in the Middle Ages, includes a short chapter on courage, which focuses on theological definitions of courage as a virtue and risk assessment in the wars of the later middle ages. J. F. Verbruggen makes a number of valuable comments on the psychology of war. But these two are notable exceptions. Of course, the evidence for mental states in medieval battles is severely limited, but even what little there is has been largely overlooked.

For at least one significant battle, the Battle of the Standard, there is evidence which shows the psychology of one of the two armies which faced one another on a foggy August morning in 1138. We can see in considerable detail the low morale of the northern English forces as they tried in desperation to stop a devastating invasion by the king of Scotland. We can see their concerns and fears, and some of the attempts by the leaders to overcome them and rouse their spirits. We indeed get a remarkable glimpse of “the face of battle”—or at least the pre-battle. Military historians of the middle ages have neglected this building of battle morale entirely; although other historians have made passing reference to it. Since the evidence for the morale of the English army at the Battle of the Standard is so unusual and full, it deserves greater attention. The developments leading up to the battle will be considered briefly, and then evidence that reveals the psychology of a medieval army will be considered in detail.

With the collapse of presbyterian efforts to effect structural change in the Church of England in the 1590s, reformers were forced to realize that only widespread and sustained popular support could bring about further reform of the church. It is in this last decade of Elizabeth's reign that Christopher Hill sees the emergence of what he calls a “new Puritanism” designed to nurture such a broad base of support for further reform. This “new Puritanism,” which emphasized preaching and the cultivation of an individual piety rather than ecclesiastical reorganization, “with the household as its essential unit rather than the parish,” could also be described as a return to earlier values that had characterized Puritanism before the rise of the presbyterian party. Whether one chooses to interpret the trends of the late 1590s as “new” or “old,” what is important is that reformers by 1600 were making extensive use of both pulpit and press as instruments for influencing the hearts and minds of the English laity. An examination of the more frequently reprinted works of practical divinity in the first generation of the seventeenth century (which included much sermon literature) ought to reveal the themes that reformers hoped would strike a responsive chord with English readers.

Surveying such publications from the 1580s into the early 1600s, we may be surprised to find that two of the most popular works were Protestantized versions of Catholic works: Thomas Rogers's translation of De imitatione Christi (1580) and Edmund Bunny's A Booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to Resolution (1584), adapted from Robert Parsons's First Book of the Christian exercise (1582).

In the election campaign of 1859, after twenty-five years of tirelessly defending the church rate principle that ratepayers of all religious denominations were liable to the rate levied for the maintenance of Anglican parish churches, Lord John Russell declared that he had come to favor abolishing church rates. The Tory Standard railed that the aging statesman had caved in to “senile ambition,” while another conservative critic charged that Russell had agreed to sacrifice church rates at the Willis's Rooms meeting in 1859 as part of a deal made to win the political support of Protestant Nonconformists. Spencer Walpole, the High Church chancellor of the Exchequer, was more charitable and more accurate, however, when after the election he responded to Russell's decision by acknowledging that the establishment was indebted to Russell for stalwartly having defended the church rate for decades as a bulwark of the church establishment.

Although Russell was too clever a politician to disregard political advantage or public opinion during his quarter-century fight to retain church rates, it was not his Whig politics but his Broad Church ecclesiology that best accounts for his long and dogged defense of the church rate. From 1834 through 1837, during the first four years of the church rate conflict, Russell's stance appeared to be that of the Whig statesman. First in Earl Grey's administration and then in Lord Melbourne's, he attempted to reform the church rate system sufficiently to satisfy Dissenters that they could count on the Whig party as the party of reform.

Surveying the state of historical knowledge in his day, Francis Bacon noted with concern that, in contrast to ecclesiastical history and political history, both of which were already “extant,” the history of learning and the arts was “wanting.” Without it, he said, the history of the world is like the statue of Polyphemus without the eye: “that feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person.” Whereupon he proceeded to give the history of learning and the arts a place of its own in the scheme of historical knowledge, and for the first time in English writing. All of which is surely well known; but its significance in relation both to the historical thought of the later Renaissance and to that of Bacon himself has not received quite the attention it deserves. This is not, of course, surprising. Serious as he believed the lack of such a history to be, Bacon himself continued to follow the common Renaissance prejudice in favor of political history — his “Civil History, properly so-called, whereof the dignity and authority are preeminent among human writings.” And in his own relatively brief forays into the formal writing of history he reverted to a more or less sophisticated brand of “politic” history. What has tended to be overlooked is the close relationship his theory of a history of learning and the arts bears to his entire project for the reorientation of learning and, in particular, to the historical critique he in fact made of traditional scholarship. His theoretical category remained, it is true, just a bit too narrow to accommodate the breadth of his own historical reflection. History, to him, still meant a formal literary genre. Taken together, however, his theory and practice should reveal something of importance about his historical perspective, to say nothing of that of his age.

Twentieth-century historians of the development of British political institutions have been persuaded by the late Sir Lewis Namier that the eighteenth century cannot fruitfully be analyzed in terms of party politics. “In 1761,” Sir Lewis observed, “not one parliamentary election was determined by party, and in 1951 not one constituency returned a non-party member.” J. H. Plumb has admittedly discerned a temporary “rage of party” during the reign of Queen Anne, and Donald Ginter has noted significant anticipations of modern party rivalry during the 1780s and 1790s while the late Richard Pares found “a tendency to a two party system” present during the immediate post-Napoleonic War years. Yet the modern political party system is generally seen as a direct if unwitting consequence of the Reform Act of 1832. In J.B. Conacher's words:

They were unlikely choices for revolutionaries and hardly the haughty autocrats the phrase “Little Tin Gods” conjures up. Yet many East African district officers felt it their duty to change the lives of the Africans they ruled, and against great odds they did. Sent out by their superiors in London and Nairobi as policemen and tax collectors, they saw themselves as secular missionaries for a superior culture. Working in the decade before the catastrophic first world war, they were the last generation of Europeans who easily believed their own superiority. Under pressure to produce revenue many district commissioners fostered economic development as a first step in reforming African society. They wished to develop an exchange economy based upon the fruits of a settled and productive peasantry working on its own land. They believed the Africans would adopt the basic values of hard work and even self-reliance, making an Edwardian revolution. If their assumptions about social change, economics, or even civilization itself seem unsophisticated, it is because they were amateurs. They had few resources beyond their own confidence and sense of mission. They began a revolution, but it was not the one they intended for they failed to retrieve colonial Kenya from the clutches of a handful of white settlers. Their vision of peaceful prosperity for the Africans was ultimately denied, and the hopes they raised became murderous frustrations. They offered Kenya an alternative course which imperialism could not accept.

Kenya's first district officers came from diverse backgrounds, but most shared the middle class values they proposed for the Africans.

The controversy over the respective merits of free trade and protection was an old one in 1903 when Joseph Chamberlain launched his campaign for tariff reform which became a dominant theme of Edwardian polities. Workingmen, with the exception of those in the Conservative workingmen's clubs and the National Free Labour Association, had not generally been very receptive to the ideas of fiscal reform mooted in the last years of Victoria's reign. In 1887, for example, J. M. Jack, chairman of the Trades Union Congress, had claimed that although there existed a “somewhat hazy conviction that the depression we are suffering from is in some way attributable to the fiscal system of the country,” it was well known that in protected countries “trade depression existed in an equal, if not greater degree.” The Social Democratic Federation took its opposition to fiscal change even further, organizing counterdemonstrations against the meetings held by the Fair Trade League in the 1880s. One such demonstration attracted an audience of thirty thousand in February 1886.

In spite of its extravagant claims, however, it is doubtful whether the N.F.L.A. enjoyed a very wide influence; thus when Chamberlain left Arthur Balfour's Government in 1903 to concentrate on his national campaign, he knew that he needed the support of workingmen on a far larger scale than protectionists had hitherto been able to secure, a fact he openly admitted in October 1903: “If I do not convince the working classes I am absolutely powerless. I can do nothing.”

“The country towns are grown poor,” declared Hugh Boscawen, member for Tregony, to his colleagues in the House of Commons in November 1670, “the inlands grow generally poor. The trading people abroad deal only with London.” Sir Robert Howard agreed: “It was ever said by the wisest men he could meet with that the greatness of London … would be the ruin of the country.” But in 1670 the complaint was hardly new. For well over a century English men and monarchs alike had watched with an anxiety increasingly acute as London, already a giant among English towns, continued to add to her size and population. Many in the country had feared, as did Boscawen and Howard, the effects of such growth upon the rest of England, while those close by tended to be aware of the special economic, political, and social problems which the unhealthy and crowded conditions in the overgrown old city presented.

On March 12, 1564, Queen Elizabeth had issued a proclamation stating “Rules to prevent crowding, in plague ridden Westminster, close by London.” And on July 7, 1580, she proclaimed from Nonsuch Palace that

Following the loss of Surinam to the Netherlands in 1667, the English Crown attempted to evacuate those of its subjects living in the colony under Dutch rule. In doing so, its representatives laid claim to members of the Jewish population, who Surinam's English governors had previously declared to be “considered as English-born.” In the resulting dispute between the English and Dutch over who could be removed, Crown officials embraced articulations of subjecthood forged in the colony that differed from metropolitan norms. In asserting that Surinam's Jews remained subjects of the king, and by implying that they would continue to do so once evacuated, the English delegation departed from the Crown's frequent rejection of the wider efficacy of colonial naturalization. Surinam's Dutch governor, meanwhile, dismissed the assertion that members of the “Hebrew nation” could be subjects of an English king, arguing that subjecthood and nationality were identical and that only those of the English nation could be removed. The dispute between the English and the Dutch over the status of Surinam's Jews reminds us that English subjecthood was shaped by colonial settings and by the contested status of groups who found themselves transferred between imperial powers.

On 14 February 1716 at Ruthven in Badenoch, the remaining officers of the Jacobite army in Scotland gathered to decide their next move. They had turned out the previous autumn in high hopes of restoring the Stuart dynasty to the throne it had lost in 1689 and forcing an end to the union with England, but their confidence and enthusiasm had long since evaporated in the face of the defeat of the English rising at Preston and failure on their own part at Sherrifmuir. Their king and his chief minister had fled the country just after the army began its retreat from Perth. Now the weather had deteriorated, and desertion had reduced their once impressive force to a shadow of its former self. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the officers drafted a letter to the duke of Argyll, the commander of the British army in Scotland, asking for an indemnity and ordered their men to make their own way home. Then they themselves dispersed. It was the final act in the botched complex of conspiracies and uprisings that has gone down in history as the Jacobite Rising of 1715.

Reflecting on the consequences of the Jacobites' failure, the earl of Mar, by then the Old Pretender's secretary of state, sadly remarked: “I much doubt if ever a [rising] can be established there again.” It was a percipient observation. For over a generation, it was to prove extremely difficult to persuade most of the leaders of Scottish Jacobitism even to contemplate another uprising.

It is the intent of this article to restore to Lanfranc's early career some of the luster that recent scholarly investigations have chipped away. I intend to show that historians have become overly skeptical of the traditional view of Lanfranc's dominating position during his eighteen years as prior of Bec (c. 1045-63). On the basis of the best current research, he is no longer regarded during these years as a major ducal adviser but as a back-bencher, overshadowed by other Norman churchmen. His once-celebrated school at Bec has gone the way of the school of Chartres: it was a good school, but it functioned for only a short time, opening c. 1059 or 1060 and closing three or four years later on Lanfranc's elevation to the abbacy of St-Étienne, Caen, in 1063. And some of its most famous alumni, including Pope Alexander II, are now believed not to have studied there at all. Similarly, Lanfranc's association with the papacy is thought to have been much exaggerated by earlier scholars. It is now doubted that he had anything to do with the dropping of the papal ban against Duke William's marriage with Matilda of Flanders, or with William's establishment of the two great abbeys at Caen.

It will be argued here that Lanfranc was indeed intimately associated with both the duke and the papacy, and that the school of Bec flourished as an international center of learning for many decades. No such reinterpretation can be attempted without taking into full account the growing sophistication in source analysis that has characterized recent scholarship on Lanfranc, and the systematic doubt that has been directed at the testimony of twelfth-century writers about eleventh-century Normandy. The dominating prior of Bec who emerges from A. J. MacDonald's 1926 biography of Lanfranc is no longer fully recoverable; yet the sources, when carefully evaluated, continue to portray Lanfranc as a major force in the political and intellectual life of his times.

The revival of the Foxite opposition from the demoralizing effects of its rupture of 1792-1794 and the subsequent secession of 1797 is an important and not fully understood episode in Great Britain's political history. The central feature of that recovery was the alliance struck in January 1804 between Charles James Fox and William Lord Grenville. It was not only to provide the foundation for the “Ministry of All the Talents” of 1806-1807, the whig opposition's sole tenure of office between 1783 and 1830, but it was to have profound effects on the activities of the whig party for at least a decade after the fall of that ministry. The arrangement and reception of the “cooperation,” as it was termed, illuminates the condition and the preoccupations of the Foxite opposition during Henry Addington's tenure in power. The alliance involved the most important political decisions Fox made in the last decade of his life, and the history of its establishment explains many of the workings of his mind after the secession. The actual proposition of association was one of the key incidents in the career of its initiator, Grenville, and it provides much information on a man who remains one of the least understood major politicans of George III's reign. The alliance has as well its own interest as a study of how two opponents with differing aspirations and ideals could form a successful union, each with motivations more complicated than the mere desire for office.

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle, who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins posed the question, is a friend a friend because he helps you, or does he help you because he is your friend? Most cultures, Sahlins noted, could choose one of the two. Individuals in Tudor-Stuart Britain, however, would be hard-pressed not to reply, both. Thus, in 1577 after their children’s marriage Sir William Gerard wrote to Moras Wynn of Gwydir that he appreciated Wynn making the match out of “very friendship without respect of gain,” by which Gerard meant affection and goodwill, but went on to add that he understood Wynn now “expected friendship” from him, meaning practical assistance using Gerard’s Court connections. Friendship was both chosen and given, a fortunate accident or a tie strenuously worked for and assiduously cultivated. Ubiquitous and vital, friendship was an act as much as a state of mind: Richard Brathwait spoke to its scope in claiming “there is no greater wilderness than to be without true friends.”

This article explores the lay-clerical relationship in Catholic Ireland from 1850 to the 1930s through an analysis of oratory, rhetoric, and storytelling. It examines how words, speech, and storytelling constructed and complicated the lay-clerical relationship. The Catholic priest's spoken word was a valuable tool in his parish mission; by preaching and making announcements from the pulpit, he transmitted the ideas of Ireland's postfamine Catholic revival, known as the “devotional revolution,” to the laity. Yet as the Catholic Church came to dominate much of cultural life and the position of the parish priest expanded, he sometimes found his authority undermined by parishioners who challenged his clerical performances and who employed their own forceful words and long-standing oral traditions, including legends and storytelling, to qualify clerical power. As a result, the local existence of the Irish Catholic priest was complicated and contested, and the Catholic laity successfully tempered and moderated clerical power.

Although party was a considerably more limited force in the British political system between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Second Reform Act than it had been either during the thirties and early forties or in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was nonetheless a significant fact of English political life throughout the Victorian period. Few students of nineteenth-century British politics, however, would look to J.S. Mill, perhaps the most influential political thinker of his time, for insights into the role of party. The consensus has been that very little of a positive nature can be said about Mill and party. In The Elements of Politics, Henry Sidgwick observes that “Mill… hardly seems to contemplate a dual organisation of parties as a normal feature of representative institutions.” A.H. Birch asserts, in his Representative and Responsible Government, that Mill “simply ignored the existence of political parties.” Dennis Thompson's study of the structure of Mill's political thought devotes some three pages to Mill's attitude towards party government, the author concluding that he was hostile to it and did not consider it necessary “for effective, stable democracy.” Indeed, Mill's major political treatise, Considerations on Representative Government, says remarkably little about parties, and where they are referred to no constructive influence is imputed to them. His discussion of Thomas Hare's plan of personal or proportional representation, for example, makes clear that one of its numerous virtues is the security it provides for insuring the representation not of “two great parties alone” but of every significant “minority in the whole nation.”

The creation of the National Government of 1931 has been a theme of unending comment and controversy. Politicians and writers of the left, with their party suddenly decapitated and bereft of office, not surprisingly were bitter. Their tendency was to castigate anyone who had played an obvious role in the crisis. Therefore, Ramsay MacDonald, who presided over the change, has been branded a traitor by his former colleagues and by later generations of Labour supporters. Even for historians he has remained at the center of the controversy.

From a slightly wider perspective, it has been possible to suspect a “bankers' ramp,” and the king has been singled out for special abuse on the charge of misleading the prime minister. Although some of these elements have been dismissed as myths in Reginald Bassett's 1958 treatise, the controversy hardly has been brought closer to a solution. In his review of that polemical study, Richard Crossman contended that “no one has yet succeeded in writing about this crisis without violent partisanship” and that it remained “the kind of live political issue about which no one except a political eunuch can write dispassionately.” That the debate continues is evident from the recent biography of MacDonald by David Marquand, who, in an attempt to vindicate his subject, once more reverts to the king as the agent most responsible for the creation of a coalition. Amazingly, no writer has yet interpreted the formation of the National Government as a Conservative Party bid for power, despite the control manifested by that party in the ensuing general election and the eventual successions of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain to the premiership.