‘Anyone who undertakes to write a history of England down the ages’, G. M. Trevelyan once said, ‘must needs be out of his depth in one part or another of the course, and must make good as best he may by lusty swimming.’ That was in the 1920s. A lesser mortal undertaking the task in the 1960s must accumulate what Thomas Carlyle called ‘a formidable apparatus … swimbladders … life preservers … and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear …’ To label my own swim-bladders would be to retail the names and titles of a host of scholars, many of whom, I fear, would not wish to be associated with a work like the present; and some of whom, I apprehend, will think that I have been unduly sparing in the use of quotation marks. Perhaps I may be allowed simply, but without any claim to originality, to write here the single word majoribus.

In acknowledgement of personal and private indebtedness I must thank my wife for serving me with infinite patience as both life-preserver and vehicular gear, and in especial for her contribution to the first two chapters, among whose waters I should otherwise have sunk like a stone. Hers also were the labours of the index.