Very few animals have succeeded in permeating so many human cultures like the wolf. Wherever the two, humans and wolves, have been sharing the same land, both have had a massive impact on each other. Large carnivores have always had a special role in human cultures, a sort of fascination rooted in a fear of carnivores as potential killers of humans and human envy of the carnivores’ strength and success as hunters. Lions in Africa, tigers in Asia, jaguars in central-south America, all have played a prominent, often central role in human values, perceptions and attitudes towards nature. The wolf fills this role throughout its vast distribution range, from North America to most of Eurasia and southwards to the sands of Arabia and the forests of central India. But the wolf is not just another large, fearsome carnivore that may occasionally kill a human; it is much more than that, as it pervades human cultures more deeply and extensively than any other species on earth. Why so? I believe there are at least two main reasons for this intimate relationship.

The first is that wolves can easily adapt to live near humans, hang around villages in search of food, and, if not chased away, remain in the vicinity of human settlements. Without entering the discussion about the beginning of wolf domestication into dogs, wolves’ ability to establish a contact with humans and share the same resources gave them a tremendous advantage over other species in becoming the privileged link between humans and nature. The second reason for the close bond between humans and wolves is probably to be found in the extraordinary similarity of the biology of the two species: both are social animals, live in family groups, live in and defend their territories, hunt in groups, communicate through sounds, odours and body gestures, kill intruders, migrate, disperse, and so on. We could talk about wolves and humans in the same terms for several aspects of their biology, and the words and concepts would be the same.

Similarity often brings competition and respect, and these are the fundamental coordinates of the human–wolf relationship throughout the millennia and the vast diversity of the patterns of their coexistence.

The fact that railway connection came to Dunstable before Luton caused little satisfaction in the latter town particularly as a scheme for a railway had been mooted since 1844. There is a relevant letter from Thomas Bennett, the Woburn Steward, to C. Haedy dated 10th May of that year. The Duke of Bedford owned land in Caddington, and Bennett was concerned about severance, i.e. the line so dividing fields that the pieces of land left are difficult to farm.

The letters and papers now printed are a part of the muniments of the Boteler or Butler family of Biddenham co. Beds. By the friendly mediation of Mr. Alexander Alston, they were generously deposited at the County Record Office in 1932 and 1933 by Mrs. Trevor Wingfield, and are published with her kind permission. The interest of the documents lies in little local details of the Civil War, not to be found in historical text-books, yet valuable as showing some of the difficulties of the Parliamentary party in the provision of men and money, and the cost and disorganisation which accompany civil war. It seemed best to calendar the entire collection of papers, even when least interesting, in case that they should attract more detailed study by others; they are arranged in order of date. The editor has tried to restrict commentary1 as far as possible, the history of the county during this period having been admirably summarised by the late C. Gore Chambers (Viet. Co. Hist., Beds., ii, 42-55).

In the transcripts, verbatim quotations are marked by “inverted commas,” omissions by ‘…’ or ‘[etc.].’ The original spelling has been retained, except for expansions, ye yt etc. being printed as ‘the’ ‘that’ etc. Signatures are printed as written, but in the Index the modern form is generally adopted. Endorsements are only printed in special cases. Capital letters have occasionally been adapted to more modern practice; for the punctuation the editor is responsible. In dating, the days Jan. 1 to Mar. 24 at the end of the legal year have been assigned to the next calendar year.

Though W.B. was not an original member of the County Comm., he was soon deeply engaged in its business, especially in matters of finance, to which he seems to have applied the newly invented method of Logarithms (no. 97); he was active also on the Comm, of Sequestration of the estates of the ‘delinquents’ who supported Church and King. No trace has been found of the appointment of a presiding officer to any of the local Committees of Parliament; but so many letters from Parliament and the London Committees are in the collection that probably W.B. acted in that capacity, at any rate sometimes.

FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, the key reference point for twenty-first-century Scottish constitutional medievalism of a separatist bent has been the debate on independence from the UK, and particularly the Scottish Independence Referendum that took place on 18 September 2014 and ended in defeat for the separatists. After the reasonably close result (55.3 against 44.7 per cent) on a very high turnout (84.6 per cent), the constitutional future of Scotland, inside or outside the Union, remains uncertain. This uncertainty has been compounded by the narrow British vote in 2016 to leave the EU, which saw a majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland vote to remain. Soon after the European referendum, the clear Scottish ‘Remain’ vote caused the First Minister of Scotland and leader of the SNP, Nicola Sturgeon, to think aloud about a second ‘indyref ’ and the EU membership of an independent Scotland. At the time of writing, Sturgeon appears to have settled into a long game of trying to get Westminster to approve a second Scottish independence referendum.

For many, the country’s constitutional future is tightly bound up with the matter of Scottish national identity. The search for national identity has intensified in Scottish cultural discourse since the 1980s. Notably in the Scottish literary sphere, the question of Scottishness in the twenty-first century has been addressed with urgency, vigour and, often enough, playfulness. This engagement has not shied away from taking a political stance, with a clear majority of commenters supporting independence. The political interventions of cultural actors on the topic of Scottish independence have also been significantly more likely to turn to medievalism than have been those of their politician counterparts. Because even though the SNP leadership did refer to the Wars of Scottish Independence and particularly the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath during the referendum campaign, theirs was relatively lowkey engagement with the medieval past.

The Cartulary of the Arrouaisian Priory of Harrold was written in the first part of the xvth cent., but after 1417 (no. 315). It contains a few charters which seem to have been transcribed word for word, but it is chiefly made up of mere brief abstracts of the original documents. From the standpoint of Latinity or diplomatic, it would be of no advantage to print these abstracts in a Latin which occasionally is markedly shaky; but the Cartulary has a real value for local and personal history and for topography, which can be better gleaned by most readers from a translation. In spite of this local value, the Society would have hesitated to print a mere translation, had it not been justified by a piece of good luck. Among the muniments of the family of Boteler or Butler of Biddenham, presented in 1932 and 1933 to the County Record Office at Bedford by Mrs. Liliane Trevor Wingfield through the kind offices of Mr. Alexander Alston, were no less than 88 original documents of this Priory, many of which deserved publication; these have here been incorporated with the Cartulary, and are styled below the TW charters. In order to make the record of this little known foundation more complete, it seemed worth while to supplement these by a few other early instruments from various sources, even if already printed. The present volume therefore contains—

• A. Abstracts of the majority of instruments in the Cartulary, translated into English exactly and completely, except that in the later documents, when the formula is fixed and perfectly well known, the lengthy clauses of warranty, of sealing, and (especially in leases) of distraint and re-entry, have been merely mentioned in [ ] crotchets, for example in nos. 187, 280; the monotonous ‘said,’ ‘aforesaid,’ ‘aforenamed’ have been omitted:

• B. The (apparently) verbal transcripts of some documents in the Cartulary, presented in Latin:

• C. Original documents from the TW collection, given in the original Latin or Anglo-French. (a) Of some of these, there was already an abstract in the Cartulary, which they now replace under the same serial number, (b) Others are supplemental to the Cartulary, and are distinguished by one or more asterisks suffixed to the serial number (for example, no. 185**).

The year 1946 began promisingly with the première of Maconchy's Theme and Variations for String Orchestra (1942–3), which was featured in a Radio Éireann symphony concert broadcast on 13 January. In May, the Americanborn organist Virginie Zinke-Bianchini included one of Maconchy's works in a concert held at her home in Paris on the 18th, providing a boost for Maconchy's career in Europe after the war. October saw a performance of The Voice of the City in a studio recital arranged by the Committee for the Promotion of New Music (CPNM), and on 27 November, Maconchy's Viola Sonata was included in a BBC Midlands Home Service broadcast. Maconchy's isolation from London briefly seemed poised to come to an end when she and her husband began searching for homes in Hampstead and Highgate. For whatever reason, they abandoned this idea in favour of remaining in Essex. Maconchy celebrated when she learned that she was pregnant with her second child, Nicola, who was born on 28 April 1947. Despite all this good news, she was dissatisfied with her own works during this period as she detailed in a letter to Williams in March 1946:

While one can point to a multitude of factors that posed challenges for Maconchy during this period, such as her reputation as a ‘modernist’ composer, her continued isolation from London, as well as the inherent challenges of balancing motherhood and a career, there were also broader shifts in the postwar music scene that made re-establishing her expanding pre-war reputation a daunting, if not insurmountable, task. Much had changed within the music profession during the war, and despite any appearances to the contrary, there was a great deal of continuity from the late 1930s that spilled into the ways in which decisions were made in the initial post-war years.

The years between 1929 and 1931 were a period of transition for Maconchy. Though she was still officially a student of the RCM while she held the Octavia Scholarship, her development – both musically and professionally – took place outside its supportive and inclusive environment.

It was not long after Maconchy began her studies with Vaughan Williams that she voiced a desire to study abroad. As Vaughan Williams had benefitted tremendously from his studies with Ravel in Paris, he was keen to help his own pupils to do the same. Initially, however, Vaughan Williams had been unsure about where to send Maconchy, and in 1926 – approximately a year after Maconchy had begun studying with him – he sought out the advice of E.J. Dent, professor of music at Cambridge University, writing in a letter dated 1 July 1926,

Along with the snake or serpent, the wolf is one of the most culturally demonised creatures in Western society. Within the Bible and the canons of English literature the wolf is used repeatedly as a symbol of violent predatory destruction but also to suggest vicious cunning. This cultural representation is perhaps most powerfully reinforced in fairy tales and, in particular, by the tale of Little Red Riding Hood which, as Zipes (1993) has shown, became itself an influential cultural myth, being rewritten multiple times in many different contexts. It is notable that even within one of the most radical of these rewritings – in which we see a revisionary empowerment of ‘Red’ entering into a ‘savage marriage ceremony’ with the wolf – the story reaffirms key aspects of wolf mythology: ‘The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh, then nothing else will do … They are grey as famine, they are unkind as plague’ (Carter 1979, 118; 110–11). Given this legacy of wolf demonisation, especially within European cultural contexts, Sarah Hall tackles a doubly controversial topic in her 2015 novel, The Wolf Border: not merely the fraught and divisive question of rewilding within the Lake District National Park, but the reintroduction of one of the most feared of apex predators, an animal which has been ‘hunted with every age's weapon, stone axe, spear, sprung-steel trap, and semi-automatic’ (Hall 2015, 7). In its fictional engagement with a wolf reintroduction programme, Hall's novel must therefore negotiate with powerful myths relating to both the wolf and the ideologically complex landscape of the English Lake District.

Proposals to reintroduce a small pack of wolves in Scotland in 2010 foregrounded the notion of the wolf as an agent of rewilding in a UK context. Hall makes reference to the debates which resulted from these proposals in a 2015 interview, describing studies which suggest ‘Scotland would be good for three wolf packs’ and noting that she would like to see this happen (Hall cited in Vasishta 2015).

The chansons de geste

The three poems presented in this volume are representatives of the medieval Romance epic or chansons de geste, which were traditional heroic tales that flourished from the late eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Chansons de geste are long narrative poems in monorhymed or assonanced stanzas of unequal length, called laisses. The poems themselves ranged from as few as 870 lines (Voyage/Pilgrimage of Charlemagne) to over 34,000 (Lion de Bourges), and the laisses could be as short as three or four lines, or over a thousand. The word geste refers to the subject matter of the poems – the heroic deeds of an individual hero or the collective deeds of a family or clan. Chanson suggests a musical dimension for the genre. Although no extant chanson de geste manuscripts contain musical notation, evidence from textual and iconographical sources suggests that the earliest such poems were performed to the accompaniment of a vielle, which is a type of medieval fiddle. The origins of the genre are controversial, but they most likely began as oral poems recited or sung by professional entertainers known as jongleurs, then eventually came to be written down, beginning in the late eleventh century. The first written texts may have been taken directly from oral performances, but the later poems are essentially written products designed to imitate the formulaic style of the oral tradition.

Despite being set generally in the eighth and ninth centuries, at the height of the Carolingian empire, the poems are highly politically engaged and reflect the feudal realities of the time when they were first written down. The chansons de geste were instruments of both religious and social propaganda. This was notably the time of the great Crusades to the Holy Land (1095– 1291), led by powerful barons and the occasional king, so that conflicts between Christians and Muslims are a central feature. The crusading ethos called upon the European warrior aristocracy to defend Christendom against the military and cultural forces of Islam, and chief among those defenders was the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (r. 768–814), who actually spent much of his reign fighting the Saxons in the north and the Muslims in Italy and Spain.

On the surface, the year 1956 seemed both successful and highly productive. In addition to completing her Concerto for Oboe, Bassoon, and String Orchestra (1955–6) as well as a series of part songs for St Mary's School, Maconchy also arranged A Country Town for small orchestra for the school, composed a new work titled String Trio, and wrote two new songs for voice and piano. Although domestic responsibilities continued to take priority over her career, as indicated by her appointment diary, she was nevertheless able to make an increasing number of trips to London to attend concerts and Composers’ Guild meetings.

Though performances outside the UK and Ireland continued to remain rare, on 7 November, the Quintet for Oboe and Strings (1933) was featured in a broadcast in Denmark. The mastermind behind the broadcast was violist Richard Dahl Eriksen, who had played in the orchestra for the performance of Maconchy's Concertino for Clarinet and String Orchestra at the ISCM Festival in Copenhagen. This trajectory of events demonstrates just how vital a role the ISCM Festivals played in promoting the works of composers such as Maconchy to international audiences.

Maconchy's improved relationship with the BBC also led to a number of broadcasts in 1956. Of these, the majority were on the Third Programme and restricted to small-scale works. Although there were plans for another broadcast of the Symphony for Double String Orchestra in March, the programme was unfortunately cancelled and Maconchy had to wait another year before it was included in a Third Programme broadcast on 10 March 1957. Some of her works, however, were featured in much more desirable slots on the Home Service, with a broadcast of the String Quartet No. 5 on 15 March, and Proud Thames taking place on 26 November.

While it was surely a relief for Maconchy to have her music featured more frequently in broadcasts, she continued to find herself dissatisfied with the quality of performances. With musicians often asked to learn her works at short notice, combined with an inadequate number of rehearsals, dismal outcomes could hardly be surprising.

The Great Northern was a late-comer, and had to fight for both its construction and survival. The Great Northern Railway Bill was bitterly opposed by the London and North Western Railway, by the Midland and by the Eastern Counties. At the outset there were two companies, and the Direct Northern Railway and the London & York were foes in the early 1840s, but combined in the face of the formidable opposition. When the line was built it served few large cities - the first was Peterborough, 76 miles from the Maiden Lane terminus, and then there were only Lincoln and Retford before York was reached by the grace and favour of other lines. The Great Northern was superbly built, which is hardly surprising as William Cubitt was the engineer and Thomas Brassey the contractor. The company were fortunate in having an able chairman in Edmund Denison, MP, who appointed Cubitt after Joseph Locke had had to resign the appointment, partly because he was busy building lines in France.

While the Direct Northern and the London & York were still in competition, they are mentioned in the Bedford Estate correspondence. The Woburn Steward, Thomas Bennett, wrote to the Agent-in-Chief on 19th April 1844: