The papers here collected form a reasonable whole: with the exception of the first (included for reasons of familial piety and because it was the first thing I ever got into print), they revolve around the problems of English society between about 1450 and 1650. This coherence now and again produces repetition, but I may hope that there is not very much of that. I have left out some parts of a quarter century's production: an essay on Henry VIII available as a pamphlet published by the Historical Association, my share in the controversy over the Tudor revolution in Past and Present(1963–4) which would look silly without the articles to which I was responding, the greater bulk of even my longer reviews, contributions to encyclopaedias and to the New Cambridge Modern History, and several pieces concerned with the study and teaching of history which do not belong here.

In reprinting these papers, I have left the texts untouched, except that I have corrected printing errors, have standardized spelling and capitalization, and in what originally were introductions to reprints of books have omitted a few words appropriate only to that setting. When I first published these articles I sometimes adhered to the original spelling of citations and sometimes modernized; these differences are preserved, without special notice. The footnotes are in substance identical with their original form, but I have recast their presentation which varied so much from journal to journal that standardization appeared desirable in the interests of seemliness.