My purpose is to trace the development of the study of one particular century in our national history, to show how the knowledge we now possess of it was acquired; how gradually the darkness which overhung the time was dissipated and the truth part by part revealed, and finally by what hands this work was achieved; and by what general causes its progress was promoted or retarded.

Although the formation of our Society was not directly due to movements in the academic world, it did in fact take place shortly before a new epoch opened in English historiography. In 1868 the study of history as an academic discipline was non-existent in England save as part of a classical education. In that field those who seriously attempted to portray the ancient civilization were controlled by an austere literary tradition, and by the excellence and relatively small bulk of their sources. In addition to this, the work of the great Germans from Niebuhr to Mommsen penetrated to England long before Ranke and his seminar, or the early Monumentists, were known and imitated at Oxford and Cambridge. Consequently, the classical historians such as Thirlwall, Grote, Arnold and Finlay were far more sober, critical and quellenmässig than their contemporaries in English history. But they had no direct influence on historians in other fields or on academic practice, and they were all in a sense amateurs: Thirlwall was a bishop, Grote a banker, Finlay a man of private means and Arnold primarily a headmaster. In other fields of history the four principal names—and admittedly very great names—are of men who wrote either all or at least a principal part of their works as individuals at home and without academic position

There are few branches of knowledge that have within the past few years so varied in their character as that of Numismatics. At one time merely the amusement and pursuit of the leisured wealthy or the study of the very learned, it has within the present generation become a study of importance, interest, and value to those who have but comparatively little leisure and recreation, to those engaged in other branches of study, and a source of historical knowledge hitherto little suspected. To this work the existence of the Numismatic Society of London has given no small aid, and in fact has been largely instrumental in both encouraging and carrying on the study of coins and the research for their historical evidence amongst those who are beginning to understand the high value of such research.

In the middle of the seventh century Rome became again, as in ancient times, the ‘centre of the universe’. Thousands of pilgrims came from distant lands, Spain, Gaul, and Britain, to worship at the shrines of the saints. We are told how these pilgrims, when first they caught sight of Rome in the distance, would fall on their knees, chant hymns, and march down to the city. Arrived there they would seek shelter in the various pilgrim-houses, where they would find fellow-countrymen to act as guides to the churches and catacombs; and after their return to their own country they would spread wonderful tales of the greatness and magnificence of the holy town and of the Papacy, until others were moved to set out on a like pilgrimage. Thus the bond between the nations and the ‘Mother of Mankind’ was stronger than one of mere political needs and advantages. It was religious zeal which sent the first newly converted Anglo-Saxons to Rome. In 689 Csedwalla, King of Wessex, after ruling for two years, took ship to Rome, seeking, as the greatest earthly honour to which he could attain, baptism in the atrium of St. Peter's. The Romans of old had been accustomed to see kings of distant lands either as captives following a triumph, or as vassals pleading before their tribunals. Their descendants now for the first time saw a barbarian king in their city. He was led by the Pope to the baptistery in the Lateran, and there on Easter Sunday, dressed in a white robe, his long hair loose, and bearing lighted tapers in his hand, he was baptised from Constantine's porphyry bow and given the name of Peter.

It would be impossible, even if it were desirable, within the limits of this essay, to give a detailed account or even an adequate summary of the causes of the outbreak of the Second Civil War ; but I may be permitted to dwell briefly upon the military conditions under which the crisis was to be met.

The primary source material for the art historian is of course the work of art, and this in itself places him in a fortunate position because the permanent relevance of the work of art is, I take it, self-evident. For the art historian, the work of art is an historical fact, pre-selected for generally accepted aesthetic reasons. But the work of art has no absolute meaning: it does not exist in a vacuum. It has both what we might call a history and a geography—the history being that record of interpretation and evaluation which accrues to the work of art from the moment of its creation down to the present day; and the geography being the particular artistic and social context of its original creation. The history can at times be very misleading: it is obvious that each generation is going to interpret the past as it wishes, and no judgment can be objective. So it is the geography that is more important, and this is extremely difficult to define. But if we are to understand the work of art, we need to enquire into the circumstances of its creation: we must ask, what did this painting or sculpture or building signify when it first appeared? Only from such specific investigations can one proceed to general propositions about the state of art at any particular moment, and perhaps also about the state of society which produced the art.

IT is remarkable when an historical interpretation has stood almost unchallenged for one hundred years. Yet this is the case with the approach to the history of the county palatine of Durham outlined by G. T. Lapsley in 1900; it is a story of the steady decline of this once highly autonomous jurisdiction which has been retold by virtually all those who have written on the subject since. It is even more remarkable when that interpretation has acted as a vital support for two much more far-reaching paradigms. In the case of Lapsley’s interpretation of Durham, these extend not just elsewhere in the British Isles but also to North America. On the one hand is the approach to the territories of the English crown as a precociously centralised polity, characterised by the effective authority of the crown’s institutions and the rapid decline of what little provincial particularism had once been present. With Lapsley’s Durham a pale shadow of its former self by the fifteenth century, historians have been able to propose that even the strongest of the ancient palatinates was effectively defunct and the power of the centre unopposed. On the other hand, there is the paradigm which sees English North America as the scene of a conflict between the direct authority of an ambitious crown and a burgeoning desire for local self-government which was eventually successful.

In the year 1505 the Portuguese, under Albuquerque, discovered Ceylon, and from that date until 1818 the island was the scene of intermittent warfare between its original possessors and successive European Powers.

The Franks were the most successful of the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and the problem of the nature and date of their settlement, bound up as it is with that of the origins of the linguistic frontier in Belgium, is one of the most complex of early medieval history. It is also one of the most interesting, for whatever solution we find for it must influence our interpretation of the historical evolution which gave rise to the Frankish monarchy on the one hand and to the modern Belgian state on the other. It involves a multitude of interrelated questions: the origins of the population, language and customary law of the Germanic (Flemish) part of Belgium; the alignment of the linguistic frontier between Flemish, Walloon and German; the extent of Germanic colonization in the former Latin-speaking regions of northern Gaul; and the agrarian organization and the forms of land settlement in the same region.

In what follows I propose to discuss certain questions concerning frontiers as they affect historians. Most of my time will be devoted to the Anglo-Scottish frontier, for the reason that it displays phenomena much more easily identified and documented than those associated with the frontiers of Europe. Some of the lessons one may draw from Anglo-Scottish frontier history are, moreover, of relevance elsewhere within the Continent, not only between countries but in some instances inside countries.

In the eastern part of the Duchy of Burgundy, in a region which now forms the southern portion of the Côte-d'Or Department, lies Cîteaux. The country around, after gently sloping from the hills on which Dijon stands, some four or five leagues to the north, here expands into a rolling plain formed by the basin of the Saône, and not far away southwards there is the junction of this river with its tributaries, the Doubs and the Denthe. The Côte-d'Or hills to the north-west protect it from some of the more violent storms, and under their shelter and through the congenial nature of the soil has grown up the great vine-growing industry of the district. Around Cîteaux in old days the country was wild, marshy, and a tangled mass of scrub, and even to-day the soil here is marshy, and there is an abundance of pools. The name itself shows the nature of the place: in its older form Cisteaux, or Cistercium, it seems to be derived either from Cisternæ, which Du Cange explains as ‘a marsh with stagnant pools’; or from Cistels, as the Bollandists give the form of the word; or Citeals, which is the form of the word preferred by Courtépée, with a variant Cisteauls. These last are explained as old French words meaning marsh rushes. Whichever be the correct derivation, the fact pointed to is the same; the word itself shows the swampy, unpromising nature of the country. But here was to spring up the mother-house of one of the greatest and most powerful of the religious orders of the Church, which some ot its adherents could claim to have been the mother of 10,000 dependent houses, 4,000 male, and 6,000 female, by the seventeenth century.

1. By Archaian White Races I mean White Races non-Semitic and non-Aryan; and by White Races I mean Races with either long or short heads (dolichocephalic, or bracbycephalic), high noses, unprojecting jaws (orthognathic, not prognathic), long hair and beards, and light-coloured skins.

The treaty of Ryswick has been neglected by recent historians. No satisfactory account of it exists in English, for no one has touched it with serious intent since Lord Macaulay wrote his sketch during the last years of his life. Its economic and colonial aspects have been ignored by French and German historians. Yet this treaty plays a fundamental rôle in European diplomacy between the treaties of Nimeguen (1678) and Utrecht (1713). It is, in fact, a commentary upon the former and a prelude to the latter. The negotiations themselves are not without interest, as the procedure ranks among the most undiplomatic in modern history; for nothing (except the Emperor's interminable delays) passed off according to expectations.

The first of modern colonial empires, the dominion of the Portuguese on the coasts and seas of Africa and India is in one sense more interesting than any of its successors. For it is, of course, essentially and peculiarly connected with the beginnings of that expansion of Europe and Christendom which, above all else, marks off the modern from the mediæval world. In other words, the growth of Portugal through discovery into a position of commercial and naval leadership is of general value to the whole of the Western world, in a way that is not shared by the similar and later growth of Spain, Holland, France or England. The development of these states belongs mainly to their own history. Immensely as they influenced one another, they none of them, to the same extent as Portugal, opened the way by which alone Europe could expand at all. None of them can rival her in the credit of breaking down the middle wall of superstitious terror which parted the unknown worlds along and beyond the ocean from the Christendom of Dante and Chaucer. None of them, in the same special originative way, can claim the glory that Camoens claims for his nation, the glory of

Opening up those wastes of tide,

No generation openèd before.

In my third year of office I may, I hope, congratulate the Society on the satisfactory condition disclosed by the report which is in your hands.

The volume of ‘Transactions’ for the year 1902–3 contains some valuable papers based on original research and providing a varied entertainment for the historical reader. They show, as usual, a dominant interest in British history, a fact of which I do not complain; but I should be glad if the sphere of our activity were more frequently extended, so as to take in ancient and foreign history as well.

The text of the forged Letter of Prester John which began to circulate in Europe about the year 1165 was settled and printed by Professor Fr. Zarncke more than sixty years ago, and although later scholars have added their contributions to the subject and fresh manuscripts have come to light, students as a whole must still base their studies on Professor Zarncke's learned and painstaking work.

In the usually unexciting annals of diplomacy there sometimes occur episodes which belong almost to the domain of chivalry; and such, surely, is that which forms the subject of this paper. It is hard to over-estimate the difficulties which confronted M. Thiers in the second week of September 1870, when he undertook to appeal to the chief neutral Powers of Europe on behalf of France. On September 2 she had suffered the staggering blow of Sedan. Two days later the Napoleonic Empire collapsed during vehement demonstrations in the streets of Paris, which had their counterpart in the chief provincial centres. The Republic was declared in several parts simultaneously; and the deputies for Paris, with one prominent exception, were acclaimed at the Hôtel de Ville as forming the Provisional Government of the French Republic. It is well known that, if that Government had not been speedily installed in office, a Red Republic would have been proclaimed, as was destined to happen in March 1871. The new Government, then, was a hasty makeshift. It had no mandate from the French nation. It promised, at first, to hold a General Election which should regularise the situation; but, as is now the case in Russia, the holding of a General Election during a furious war proved to be surrounded with very great difficulties, which could not be overcome until February 1871, after the armistice with Germany.