During the thirteenth century, English lords acted to halt the deterioration of their feudal powers brought about by social and legal changes at the end of the twelfth century. Their determination produced a long line of legislation on feudal incidents, mortmain, and subinfeudation that stretched from Magna Carta to the Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290. Yet, until that legislation was finally in place, landlords had to find other methods of maintaining their lordship over free tenures. Professor Donald Sutherland, for example, has shown that lords asserted “a new authority to take into their hands the holdings of their free tenants if the tenants attempted to alienate the holdings in ways that prejudiced the lord's rights.” Lords also used conditional grants to restrict alienation, and beginning in the early thirteenth century, they played an important role in the effort to reassert tenurial lordship. Conditional grants have been studied primarily in the context of the family, which used them to create marriage portions, jointures, and entails. This study of a sampling of cartularies and charters, however, analyzes the different forms of restrictions on alienation in order to demonstrate how lords used the expanding remedies of the royal courts to reinforce their private lordship.

The right to consent to a tenant's alienation of his holding had been an essential prop of lordship prior to Henry II's legal reforms. Through his consent, the lord could determine the acceptability of his tenants and ensure the adequate performance of services attached to the holdings. He also protected himself against a serious loss of resources through grants in alms to the Church or through dowries to women marrying out of his lordship. Seizure of the tenement was the sanction that lords used to enforce their rights of consent. If a tenant failed to obtain that consent, he lost his land.

Contemporary society has discovered—or in some cases been forced to discover—the worth of women. Historians have provided valuable insights into the social, cultural, and legal status of women in an effort to highlight the roots of attitudes that have excluded women from positions of power in the western world. Much of this research has focused upon new ways of viewing history, and the fine series of monographs Women in Culture and Society being published by the University of Chicago Press provides a prime example of the new awareness of the distaff side of history. Yet, little attention has been paid to some of the most basic assumptions of past generations of medieval historians about women and society. The claim that male chauvinist attitudes are founded in the primative Germanic concept of a warrior fraternity from which women were physiologically excluded from membership was already hoary when Fritz Kern published his classic account of medieval law and society in 1914. The comitatus band of Tacitus has been seen as a central component of the leitmotiv that produced chivalry. The chivalric love ethic has, of course, received great attention from women's historians, but the chivalric orders into which such views were distilled have been largely ignored.

The traditional view of the chivalric orders as fossilized parodies of the values they espoused so eloquently advocated by Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages still holds the field. Only in the last year have the chivalric orders been rehabilitated as genuine expressions of the human values of their age. The position of women within the tradition of the chivalric orders is worth a look for the intrinsic interest of the subject and for the insights that the investigation provides into the shifts in attitudes toward females over the centuries. The chivalric orders, and the Arthurian legends that inspired them, placed a high value on women, much higher than the earlier chansons de geste. While it is true that this tradition tended to place the lady upon a pedestal from which her daughters have fought to climb down, the greatest and longest lasting of these late-medieval chivalric fraternities, the Order of the Garter, also gave women a role in its celebrations.

It is the intent of this article to restore to Lanfranc's early career some of the luster that recent scholarly investigations have chipped away. I intend to show that historians have become overly skeptical of the traditional view of Lanfranc's dominating position during his eighteen years as prior of Bec (c. 1045-63). On the basis of the best current research, he is no longer regarded during these years as a major ducal adviser but as a back-bencher, overshadowed by other Norman churchmen. His once-celebrated school at Bec has gone the way of the school of Chartres: it was a good school, but it functioned for only a short time, opening c. 1059 or 1060 and closing three or four years later on Lanfranc's elevation to the abbacy of St-Étienne, Caen, in 1063. And some of its most famous alumni, including Pope Alexander II, are now believed not to have studied there at all. Similarly, Lanfranc's association with the papacy is thought to have been much exaggerated by earlier scholars. It is now doubted that he had anything to do with the dropping of the papal ban against Duke William's marriage with Matilda of Flanders, or with William's establishment of the two great abbeys at Caen.

It will be argued here that Lanfranc was indeed intimately associated with both the duke and the papacy, and that the school of Bec flourished as an international center of learning for many decades. No such reinterpretation can be attempted without taking into full account the growing sophistication in source analysis that has characterized recent scholarship on Lanfranc, and the systematic doubt that has been directed at the testimony of twelfth-century writers about eleventh-century Normandy. The dominating prior of Bec who emerges from A. J. MacDonald's 1926 biography of Lanfranc is no longer fully recoverable; yet the sources, when carefully evaluated, continue to portray Lanfranc as a major force in the political and intellectual life of his times.

In 1935 in New York the publishing house of Harrison Smith and Robert Haas published George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England. Now, fifty years later, the book is as vital, if not more so, as when it was first published. It was quite appropriate that the book, and its author, were celebrated last Spring at a meeting of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies at San Luis Obispo in California, quite close to Santa Barbara where Dangerfield lives overlooking the Pacific ocean. Even nicer, perhaps, is that in this year we shall see Halley's Comet again, which Dangerfield remembers having seen as a child, and being told that it would not appear again in his lifetime. The comet appears on the first page of the book (heralding the dazzling prose to come), observed by the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, from the deck of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, “to blaze forth the death of a king”: Edward VII.

The Strange Death of Liberal England has had, eventually, a strong impact upon the historical profession, as well as something of an odd history. The original publishers quite soon went out of business and the book was not kept in print in America. It was published a year later in England for the first time by Constable, but in a slightly truncated form without the important epilogue on Rupert Brooke. Over the next twenty-six years it was a book known only, I believe, by a few, recommended by word of mouth and not, on the whole, given much attention by the historical profession or the reading public.

The campaign for better public health was a major social issue in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. As in the case of Poor Law and factory reform, Edwin Chadwick stands as the person who directed public interest toward the need for sanitary reform. He did this through his association with the Poor Law Commission in the late 1830s, then through his seminal and widely read 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population. Chadwick's report captured the minds of many in the British upper middle class. The Health of Towns Association, founded in 1844, helped to diffuse information on the “physical and moral evils that result from the present defective sewerage, drainage, supply of water, air, and light. …” Although the sanitary reformers had made some minor gains by 1847, they had failed to produce a satisfactory bill that would allow government some role in coordinating sanitary improvement. At this point, neither Chadwick, nor any other leading proponent of sanitary legislation wanted to put full authority in the hands of the central government, but they did desire a more efficient combination of local and national control.

The sanitary reformers, and particularly Chadwick, achieved a measure of success in 1848 when the Public Health Bill received parliamentary approval. It was hoped the Act would bring about a useful consolidation of responsibility for drainage, sewerage, water supply, and road maintenance. Instead, the legislation spurred a furious debate over how much national government interference was acceptable. It did little to improve public health because the argument over government interference for a time took attention away from critical issues of sanitation reform. Although never completely overcome, the argument over principles faded in the 1850s in the face of an urgent need for reform.

In March 1985 the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies devoted its annual meeting to honoring George Dangerfield upon the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his book, The Strange Death of Liberal England. Scholars from various parts of the United States and from several British Universities came together to pay their respects to Dangerfield, and to talk about his famous history.

The principal organizers of the meeting were Professor Peter Stansky of Stanford University; Professor R. J. Q. Adams of Texas A&M University; and Professor Dan Krieger, California Polytechnic State University. These organizers made two requests of me. They invited me to deliver an oral comment upon a paper about Dangerfield which was presented to the conference by Professor Carolyn White of the University of Alabama; and they also asked that I write this essay about “Dangerfield—the man and historian.” The idea was to make his personality known to a wider audience by recalling certain experiences and by relating certain anecdotes which illustrate the character of this remarkable scholar and man of letters.

The celebration of the anniversary of The Strange Death of Liberal England actually began a few months earlier when the Chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. R. A. Huttenback, presented Dangerfield with a University Medal in commemoration of the book. At this ceremony at U.C.S.B. Dangerfield casually remarked that The Strange Death of Liberal England had appeared in nineteen editions and he thought, but was not entirely certain, that a twentieth edition was about to be produced.

On 22 June 1631 the government of Charles I issued Letters Patent proclaiming Captain Sir Charles Vavasor of Skellingthorpe, Lines., a baronet. The grant of honors to Sir Charles Vavasor was among the most distinctive made in England during the seventeenth century. By its special terms, Sir Charles became the first baronet (of approximately 285) to receive rights of precedence—in spite of parliamentary statutes opposing such rights. A clause of precedency declared the title retroactive to 29 June 1611, and that, in turn, made Sir Charles's father, Sir Thomas Vavasor, who had died in 1620, a baronet post mortem. The baronetcy of Sir Charles Vavasor is also unusual as one of the few which did not depend upon the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham, as the only one created during the whole of 1631, and as the last one created before the eve of Civil War.

The competition for honors among the gentry is an important element in the social history of early seventeenth century England, and a factor in the complex origins of the Civil War. The full dimensions of that competition can be illuminated by studying the motives of individual families, and the processes by which they achieved their titles. The Skellingthorpe Vavasor make an especially interesting study because of the unusual distinctions which attend their title.

Heretofore, however, paucity of evidence made it nearly impossible to reconstruct the quest for honors of the Skellingthorpe Vavasor. The evidence did show that before he died in 1620, Sir Thomas Vavasor sought the title of baronet without success, and that eleven years later, Sir Thomas's son, Charles, finally received a baronetcy with precedency. The intervening years, 1620-1631, had to be filled with conjectures about Charles Vavasor's motives, timing, and patronage, and also with some conjectures about why the government granted him honors of dubious legality.

George Dangerfield's book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, would have been an influential, indeed a seminal, piece of historical writing whenever it had appeared: published in 1935 it constituted an immense liberation. In 1935 the writing of modern British political history was dominated for academic people by Lewis Namier, whose two great works—The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution—had been published in 1928 and 1930. Namier's immense gifts were balanced by a startling defect. He was psychologically incapable of writing historical narrative, that is of dealing on any considerable scale with the development of events. Here, at the very start of the Namierite era, was a young scholar named Dangerfield writing history in the classic manner, writing, that is, as Thucydides and Tacitus had done, with a wide narrative sweep about the fateful and tragic events of yesterday. The result was the book which was so eloquently analysed this afternoon. It has been issued, if I heard this rightly, some nineteen times; and three editions, two American and one British, are in print today, after fifty years.

At the end of his life Disraeli, by then Lord Beaconsfield, congratulated Matthew Arnold on having “coined unforgettable phrases.” Mr. Dangerfield may surely be offered the same congratulations. In the week in which I was composing this paper the Spectator of London carried an article under the headline: “The Strange Death of Liberal America”; and I note that a work will be published in London this September entitled “The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England.” Where the phrasing of the title is concerned we may be celebrating tonight, not only a jubilee, but the ghost of a centenary. When Mr. Dangerfield chose his arresting title he echoed, unwittingly as we understand, one devised fifty years earlier; for in 1885 a young British journalist in India named Rudyard Kipling had written a story entitled: “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”

In the autumn of 1935 an obscure New York publishing house brought out a book by a young British writer which had an arresting title, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914. Reviewers praised the book for its superb writing, brilliant wit, and elegant style. It was noted, however, that the thesis of the book was either indecipherable or if discernible lacking in conviction. Its author was George Dangerfield, a recent immigrant to New York and literary editor of Vanity Fair, the demise of which shortly followed the publication of its editor's book. In the middle of the 1930s Dangerfield appeared to represent those young Englishmen without birth and without resources who had “the will not to let any sentiment for the beauties of that England which is gone, or any compromise with the unreal thinking of the men who enjoyed it, stand in their way as they mold the England that shall be.” After 1935 Dangerfield was a professional writer and lecturer until World War II when he joined the American army as an infantryman and assumed American citizenship at Paris, Texas, in 1943. Thereafter he could no longer speak with the clear, authentic voice of the new young England. Rather he identified the persistence of “good, sound American doctrine” from the Federalist Papers as “one of the glories of our republic,” and he evoked that doctrine in defense of free association and the open competition of ideas. As the cold war ensued and Joseph McCarthy reached for national office, George Dangerfield continued to speak for liberal democracy.

In the continuous discussion of how and how much Lloyd George was influenced by Germany in formulating Old Age Pensions and National Insurance, attention seems to have been almost wholly diverted from the degree to which the Danish example was discussed, recommended and clearly present in the consciousness of those who made the British Old Age Pension Act of 1908. There is no discussion of the issue in the standard work on the subject, Bentley B. Gilbert's The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain, (London, 1966) nor even any mention of “Denmark” in the index. The subject is likewise missing from Francis H. Stead's How Old Age Pensions Came to Be, (London [? 1910]), which Gilbert calls “indispensible.” Patricia Mary Williams barely mentions the subject in her detailed dissertation, “The Development of Old Age Pension Policy in Great Britain, 1878-1925” (University of London, 1970), and does not even do that much in the book she wrote under the name Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (Essex, 1982) nor in the chapter on old age pensions in the book she edited, Origins of British Social Policy (London, 1978). Hugh Heclo in Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, 1974) mentions (p. 167) that the proposals of the commission in 1899 “resembled” the Danish system, but Heclo does not say how or why, and then never mentions the subject again. John Grigg, in his biography of Lloyd George is concerned with the man more than the issue, and does not analyze the source of the ideas behind the old age pension bill of 1908 in his Lloyd George, The People's Champion (Berkeley, 1978).