Probably the most famous passages in Halévy's work are those attributing England's immunity from revolution after 1789 to the influence of Methodism. The ‘Halévy thesis’ encouraged, though it did not begin, a debate which still fizzes, jumps and occasionally explodes. Little attention has been given to Halévy's first essay in Methodist history, ‘The Birth of Methodism in England’, which appeared in La Révue de Paris in 1906, even though one of its central themes prefigured his famous thesis. After decades of neglect, this has been disinterred, translated and excellently introduced by Bernard Semmel. Compared with Halévy's major writings it is thin and slightly documented, for much of the primary research on which it was based was crowded into a few weeks in the Bodleian Library, after which he seems to have been discouraged by the misleading news that his subject had been pre-empted. The essay remained a rather slender piece, sweepingly written, which found its outlet in a cultural periodical rather than a learned journal. But it is something of a tour de force.

When I offered to read a paper on this subject, I had a particular hypothesis in mind. I thought—perhaps it would be more honest to say, I hoped—it would be possible to show that, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, the practice of the sacrament of penance in the traditional church had undergone a change which was important in itself and of general historical interest. The change, I thought, could roughly be described as a shift from the social to the personal. To be more precise, I thought it possible that, for the average layman, and notably for the average rural layman in the pre-reformation church, the emphasis of the sacrament lay in its providing part of a machinery for the regulation and resolution of offences and conflicts otherwise likely to disturb the peace of a community. The effect of the Counter-Reformation (or whatever one calls it) was, I suspected, to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual. The hypothesis may be thought an arbitrary one: we can but see. I think it will be admitted that, supposing it turned out to be correct, we should have learnt something worth knowing about the difference between the medieval and the counter-reformation church, and something about the difference between pre- and post-reformation European society. If if did not turn out to be correct, we might nevertheless expect to pick up some useful knowledge about something which is scarcely a staple of current historical discourse, though it threatens to become so.

Prudent historians, when they consider the ordered power of the late Anglo-Saxon state, are apt to indulge a professional instinct, to hedge their bets. Such phrases as ‘specious uniformity’ and ‘rudimentary precocity’ have found favour. It has long seemed likely, and it has by now become certain, that such caution is superfluous.

As far as Professor Trevor-Roper was concerned public office in the seventeenth century was commensurate with wealth, and the gaining of office was one of the causes of such rises of the gentry that occurred before the civil war. This view has been substantially modified by a number of historians who have delved more deeply into the mire of departmental records, and have concluded that the rewards of officialdom were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth I and Charles I, and that the more spectacular beneficiaries were small in number. Very little work on the profits of office in the later Stuart period, however, has been atttempted. Excellent departmental studies on the post-Restoration Treasury, for instance, exist, but although they detail the official salaries of treasury personnel they do not indicate all the remunerations that they might expect from their daily toil. One of the main reasons for this neglect is the lack of evidence on which to base any far-reaching conclusions on the unofficial spoils of office. Myriads of departmental records are extant but they do not throw much light on illicit profiteering. It would be a very careless official who admitted all his gains in his accounts or departmental correspondence. Such evidence as does exist in official documents is necessarily scanty and has to be pieced together with scraps of information from private sources. Even then some of the remaining evidence has to be treated with circumspection for, as Professor Hurstfield has pointed out, allegations of corruption are not necessarily good evidence and have to be heavily substantiated.

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.

This paper stems from an initial interest in the relationships between science and technology in the eighteenth century. Hence its concern lies principally with the nature of technical innovation and the sources of technical change during the Industrial Revolution. Exploring the ways in which new technology is diffused can shed light on the nature of technical change itself, which is a complex amalgam of influences governing invention, innovation (the bringing of inventions into productive use) and the diffusion of new techniques. Taking as a topic the diffusion of technology, particularly in machine-making and engineering, between Britain and Europe in the late eighteenth century is thus not meant to be a peg on which to hang wide-ranging animadversions on the differing economic fortunes and pace of advance of Britain and Europe, or a discussion of why industrialization came first and fastest to Britain and lagged elsewhere: it is a much narrower enquiry into seeing what light the processes and difficulties of diffusing new technology cast upon technical change itself at this time.

The most celebrated product of the early English Renaissance was composed not in English but in Latin. It was conceived in Antwerp, completed in London, published in Louvain, and reprinted in Paris, Basle and Florence long before it was finally rendered into English, some sixteen years after its author had been executed. He was executed for refusing to adhere to the doctrine that the head of the Church was to be found in England, not in Europe.

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.

Men of the earlier Middle Ages knew what they meant by war and peace. Their definitions are not hard to find, even though, when found, they prove to be inconsistent. They knew that there were just and unjust wars, good kinds of peace and bad, and they could envisage war and peace as two poles of a single concept. My intention is not to survey this large and ramshackle field but simply to enquire how far some of the definitions tallied with the facts of war and peace; and whether, at the end, the pressures making for peace had affected the nature of war. To ask whether Western Europe in the days of King Alfred and the later Carolingians was more or less peaceful than it had been four centuries earlier is not very meaningful, since an entirely new situation was created by the attacks of the Vikings, Arabs and Magyars; but it is meaningful to ask whether four centuries of additional experience had caused men to look at war and peace in a different way.

Domesday Book stands accused of isolation and its historians stand convicted of isolated devotion to Domesday studies. The isolation is not entirely splendid. ‘An inestimable boon to a learned posterity but a vast administrative mistake’ was the brief verdict of Mr Richardson and Professor Sayles in their treatment of the governance of England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta. Reviewing recent Domesday studies Dr King judged that research ‘in so arid a climate’ has maintained the gap between Domesday Book and its use in eleventh-and twelfth-century government, and made ‘the inquiry into the resources of the tenants-in-chief look rather more lonely than before, and rather less necessary’.

The Tudor Parliament, I suggested to you a year ago, quite properly fulfilled a function of giving legitimate political ambition a chance to achieve its ends, more particularly because from the 1530s onwards, at any rate, experience in the Commons could put a man in the way of entering the royal Council. Of course, this would never be true of more than a few such knights and burgesses, nor was it either a sufficient or a necessary cause of their becoming councillors. Still, the link was there. I now want to turn to the Council itself and ask whether its history and membership similarly reflected a useful function in enabling ambition to be satisfied. Here we enter upon territory far less well known than the Houses of Parliament. The Tudor Council is not now quite so free from the attention of historians as it was even ten years ago; but while we may be really well informed about it here and there, and while indeed we all think that we have a fair idea of its place in constitution and society, it remains true that every time one asks oneself a question touching it one comes up against so far unillumined obscurities. The work of any governing body is always difficult to understand because only those there present actually know what goes on and because so much of what does go on never reaches the record; and the Tudor Privy Council made emphatically certain of preserving itself from scholarly prying by keeping no minutes of discussion at all.