The draughtsman of a foundation charter in the century after the Norman Conquest had the choice of two distinct diplomatic forms, each of which was a legacy from earlier times. He might cast it in the shape of a letter, authenticated by the seal of the donor, informing the superior lord or the relevant bishop of what had been done: or he might use the more ancient, solemn and pretentious form of the diploma, authenticated not by the seal but by the sign of the cross made by the hands of the witnesses. In either case he would be careful to include a list of witnesses who could prove the grant; and the most obvious difference between them would lie in this—that the letter referred to the act as already past (sciatis me dedisse…), while the diploma described the actual moment of gift (do—or trado—deo et abbati…). To the latter an exact date was appropriate—hence the elaborate dating of the Anglo-Saxon landbocs: for the letter, on the other hand, a date was superfluous, since the act was recorded as a thing of the past. Whichever form he chose, his purpose was the same, viz. to supply evidence for the remote future of a grant made verbally. There is no question about this so far as letters or writ charters are concerned: for not only are they often addressed to all men present and future, but they sometimes include preambles which leave us in no doubt as to the current conception of the written word.

THE PAPACY of Leo the Great gives us a good halting place in papal history; it closes one period and leaves another to begin. The Bishop of Imperial Rome could never be a mere ecclesiastical official of the greatest city; while it had been the home of Emperors he had been often enough a trusted adviser to them; when it ceased to be their dwelling-place fresh responsibilities and new opportunities came to him. There is hardly need even to mention the change due to the foundation of a new Rome in the East, with its fresh magnificence, so largely brought from the Western capital, and with its political outlook on the richest and most important provinces. Moreover the wealth of the Roman Church had long been great and it was matched by its Christian generosity; its influence in this way had passed into a tradition, which grew steadily from the time of St Ignatius onward. In all the cities where a church had been founded there was Christian organisation, and the Roman episcopate could not but profit by the business-like methods of the imperial and civic governments. Roman ecclesiastics were naturally distinguished for the same characteristics as were the civilians. The gravitas Romana could be noted even in the eleventh century, and its mere existence would have given peculiar weight to the decisions of Roman bishops and the decrees of Roman councils. Everywhere throughout the provinces local churches and local municipalities had almost alone stood the shock of the barbarian hordes; these inheritances from the past were naturally much greater in Rome itself than elsewhere, and owing to the turns of history advantage from them fell mainly to the papacy. And for the most part the papacy did not fail the Western world; it faced its dangers and its duties boldly.

On the death of Tiberius, Gaius Caesar, the son of the popular Germanicus, and often known in history by his nickname of Caligula, was acclaimed by the Senate as ruler of the Roman Empire, amid scenes of universal rejoicing, on 18 March in the year 37. On 24 January in the year 41 he lay dead, a tyrant murdered by Cassius Chaerea and his confederates, while the consuls convened a meeting of the Senate, not in the Curia Julia, for the name had now such hateful associations, but on the Capitol, to discuss the restoration of the Republic. In the space of a little less than four years the young man—he was under twenty-five when he became Emperor—had so alienated men's minds from the system of Augustus that Senators were ready to consider the abolition of the Principate and the condemnation of the memory of the Caesars. Ignominy and ridicule have fastened upon his name ever since: the common view held was (put briefly) that Gaius was mad and bad, and went from bad to worse. The nineteenth century witnessed the activity of scholars who questioned the traditional account of all the Julio-Claudian emperors, by using the new knowledge offered by inscriptions or by analysing and criticising closely the account in the literary authorities.

Of all the institutions that grew up in the medieval church none has received so little attention from English scholars as the chantries. That they played an important part in the religious life of this country before the Reformation is indeed generally recognised; but our historians have done little more than to indicate the purposes for which chantries were founded, and to point out that their numbers increased greatly towards the end of the Middle Ages. In the present essay an attempt is made to render our knowledge of the chantries less vague by discussing at length some of the more important problems of their history, giving a detailed account of them during a single half century. For this purpose the reign of Edward III has been chosen, partly because its close is practically contemporaneous with our most important literary references to the chantries, those of Chaucer and Langland, but mainly because, since the Black Death occurred within a few years of the middle of this period, it affords an opportunity of studying the effects of the pestilence on this phase of English life.

The ordinance 1353, later confirmed in Parliament, introduced an entirely new conception of the office of the Mayor of the Staple. The compulsory marts in which the chief export wares had to be sold were then fixed in English ports, at each of which a Mayor of the Staple was appointed. Until then the Staples had only been fixed in English ports for two very brief periods, from the Kenilworth Ordinance of May 1326 to August 1328, and from September 1332 to February 1334, subject to interruptions owing to the needs of Royal finance: otherwise, from 1313 to 1326 and from 1340 to 1353, the Staple had been fixed in a Netherlands town.

Applied to Britain and the First Partition, Campbell's “unwept” is perhaps misleading. Through five generations, despite much European slandering of the Poles, Britain always condemned Dismemberment. In 1772, when three Great Powers completed that “suicide of the old Europe” which the seizure of Silesia had begun, Burke styled their operations “fatal to the rights of mankind.” In the language of diplomacy, Suffolk's “disagreeable” sounds hardly less emphatic. The First Partition, we must remember, was a blow to France, struck by the group to which Britain looked for allies against the natural enemy. Yet our minister in Poland spoke unequivocally of “all this mischief,” and ascribed it to Frederick, the Satan of those behind the scenes. Voltaire, to whom the persecuting Poles were as odious as the persecuting French, sent Catherine the most ambiguous of congratulations. His heroine, he declared, had undertaken a task more useful and noble even than the expulsion of the Turks—that of destroying anarchy in Poland “en rendant a chacun ce que chacun croît lui appartenir, et en commençant par elle-même.” But Suffolk's official utterance was more pungent still. “Le Roi,” he replied to the ministers of the partitioning Powers,” veut bien supposer que les trois cours sont convaincues de la justice de leurs preventions respectives.”

Bankruptcy law in early nineteenth-century England called less loudly for reform than did the machinery of its courts. The “Commissioners in Bankruptcy,” spoken of in evidence before parliamentary committees as “London's main commercial court,” sat in a room in the Guildhall, always inadequate for their needs, but at times overrun by cooks when it was claimed as an extra kitchen for municipal feasts. There were seventy commissioners, grouped in fourteen lists of five. The post was in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, and as it was agreed that £300 a year was the most commissioners could expect to earn, it is not surprising that they were respectable rather than distinguished men, though in ambitious youth men as distinguished as Lord Macaulay might be glad of the Chancellor's patronage. The income, consisting of a guinea fee for each meeting, was brought to its maximum by expedients which destroyed the dignity and impaired the efficiency of the court. Of the five men, the necessary majority of three sat, while the other two went about other work, which might at times be that of practising as counsel before other “lists.” Guineas were easily added to by adjournments which increased the number of meetings. It was less obvious that they might be multiplied by three, by hearing before each set of three commissioners three bankruptcies, but this seems generally to have been done. Thus in a crowded room, at many tables, many bankruptcies marched on, at varying speeds, broken by frequent adjournment, which brought extra fee but at times better progress by resort to a private room in a coffee-house near by.

The capitulation at Sedan was signed on the morning of 2 September 1870, and the news reached Palikao that same day. But the public as yet knew nothing; the reports received by ministers were conflicting, the details uncertain, and Palikao preferred to delay any announcement of disaster until it was confirmed officially and beyond a doubt. On the morning of the 3rd rumours began to circulate; telegrams arrived from Brussels and passengers from Belgium spread the tidings of a great defeat. At the session of the Corps Législatif in the afternoon Palikao made a statement: the attempted junction with Bazaine had failed, MacMahon had been forced to retreat to Mézières and Sedan and “perhaps even in small numbers on to Belgian territory.” This cautious admission prepared his audience for the worst. Such a statement from the reticent Palikao had an ominous significance, and when the Minister further confessed that no news or instructions had been received from the Emperor, Jules Favre declared that, since the government had in fact ceased to exist, all parties should in order to avoid confusion give place to a soldier who would undertake the defence of the nation. Everyone understood who was the soldier thus referred to by a member of the Left. It was clear that once the news of complete disaster was officially confirmed deposition would be demanded in the streets and formally proposed in the Chamber. That fearful confirmation was soon to come. Not long after the close of the afternoon sitting the Empress, who as yet knew nothing, received a laconic telegram: “The army is defeated and captive; I myself am prisoner. Napoleon.”

There have been in England since 1600 three great monetary controversies. The first—and because of the place which it made for itself in literature, the most famous—was that between John Locke (1632–1704) and William Lowndes (1652–1724); the second arose over the Report of the Bullion Committee of 1810—for or against its adoption; the third was in the early eighteen-forties between the Currency and the Banking Schools. Locke, the Bullion Committee and the Currency School won. Lowndes’ proposal was rejected: the resumption of cash payments was decided upon in 1819: Peel's Bank Act of 1844 was a triumph for the Currency School. In each case the cause of “sound” money prevailed.

During the Eastern crisis of 1875–8 it is currently accepted that England was represented at the two key capitals of St Petersburg and Vienna by two nonentities, in sharp contrast with Elliot and Layard at Constantinople, Lord Odo Russell at Berlin, and Lord Lyons at Paris. Disraeli's strictures are well known. To him Lord Augustus Loftus was “Pomposo,” “a mere Polonius,” “a mere Livadian parasite, and afraid even of G(orchakov)'s shadow.” “As for Buchanan, that is a hopeless case.… I… can testify that it is not age, which has enfeebled his intelligence or dimmed his powers. He was, and ever has been, a hopeless mediocrity.”

Baron Aehrenthal told the British Ambassador at Vienna in 1908 that British policy was “idealistic and humanitarian” while “his was frankly realistic.” In practice British “idealism” hasnowhere been more strongly dashed with “realism” than in Turkey. The dogma of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire became established as a principle of British policy during the late thirties. This result was mainly due to Palmerston and to the revelation of the dependence of Turkey on Russia implied in the Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. The presence of Russian warships on the waters, and Russian troops on the shores, of the Bosphorus taught a lesson to Englishmen. The defence of Constantinople became a sort of dogma, which ultimately extended to almost all parties in the state. Cobden and Bright resisted the infection but they were in a small minority. The Crimean War was a result of this dogma, and it is to be noted that even Aberdeen—who so greatly regretted the bloodshed—thought it right for England to defend Constantinople. Even so late as 1878 Disraeli was able to rally the majority in Parliament and in the country in defence of the same cause and city. And the reason for this defence was British interests.

On 21 June, 1897, the German Ambassador at Rome, Herr von Bülow, found on his table in the Palazzo Caffarelli a telegram summoning him to Kiel. On his arrival there he was greeted on board the Hohenzollern by the Emperor William II with the words: “My dear Bernhard, I'm sorry for you and even more for the Contessina (for this is what the Empress Frederick and her children always called my wife) but you must go to the front. The Man from Baden has betrayed me.” In conversation William II proceeded to explain that Marschall von Bieberstein—the “Man from Baden”—had forfeited the Imperial confidence by intriguing with the Social Democrats and the Centre to introduce parliamentary government into Germany. In consequence, the Emperor added, he proposed to appoint Bülow Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in succession to Marschall von Bieberstein. Bülow was too clever to accept the proffered office at once and contented himself by pleading that, “until I had thoroughly informed myself about our international situation by studying the documents of the Foreign Office, I could not possibly give a definite answer as to whether I could conscientiously accept the post offered to me or not. Besides, I would have to collect my thoughts before I made the final decision, not through any kind of timidity, but because I felt my responsibility towards the country and the throne.”