If not one of the pieces of Edwardian legislation which contributed to the growth of the English legal system, the Statute of Mortmain was nonetheless a most important enactment, a fact which has been realized in the not inconsiderable attention devoted to it by historians. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the crown's execution of the law in the period 1279 to 1348, with reference to the Benedictine houses of Crowland Abbey, Thorney Abbey, and Spalding Priory, and the statute's effects on the territorial policy of each of these.

Information on their territorial policies is to be found in the three chartularies relating to them. These are the Spalding Register, written c1331, numbering 801 folios in two volumes; the Red Book of Thorney, written c1326, numbering 472 folios in two volumes; and the Wrest Park Chartulary, written in the mid-fourteenth century after 1343, numbering 257 folios. No doubt there may be omissions, but a close scrutiny of the Spalding Register and the Red Book of Thorney, which both contain land acquisitions added by later clerks up to 1348, shows how faithfully, if not in the Spalding case carefully, (the original Spalding clerk tended to be rather a haphazard organiser; the original Thorney clerk was a real craftsman) recorded are the land acquisitions made by these two houses from the later thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. There are literally scores of these, with the additional evidence of the Calendar of Patent Rolls, which is useful as a check as well as a supplement to the chartularies, and which almost invariably testifies to the reliability of the clerks.

The compensation of royal officials has been the subject of increasing scrutiny in recent years as historians turn to the study of the court and royal office to discover the realities of power in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. H. R. Trevor-Roper, who sees the growth of the court as the hallmark of the Renaissance state, has declared that royal service was so lucrative that to many persons holding office spelled the difference between penury and financial success. More detailed studies do not completely bear out his contention. Although A. J. Slavin and others have shown how some highly placed officials were able to enhance their financial position dramatically, G. E. Aylmer and Lawrence Stone demonstrated that such cases of spectacular success were exceptional and that most royal servants received only modest compensation for their labors. Furthermore, Wallace MacCaffrey has pointed out that the crown had at its disposal astonishingly few offices whose salaries might justify calling the men who held them a financial elite. The weight of this evidence has not abated the controversy, however. Instead, the debate has shifted from the actual salary to the total amount the official could make his office yield in tips, fees, and other perquisites, both legal and illegal. Trevor-Roper maintains that these extra benefits made royal service very lucrative, while the others question the extent of such additional enrichment, claiming that few grew wealthy in the king's service.

Surveying the state of historical knowledge in his day, Francis Bacon noted with concern that, in contrast to ecclesiastical history and political history, both of which were already “extant,” the history of learning and the arts was “wanting.” Without it, he said, the history of the world is like the statue of Polyphemus without the eye: “that feature being left out which most marks the spirit and life of the person.” Whereupon he proceeded to give the history of learning and the arts a place of its own in the scheme of historical knowledge, and for the first time in English writing. All of which is surely well known; but its significance in relation both to the historical thought of the later Renaissance and to that of Bacon himself has not received quite the attention it deserves. This is not, of course, surprising. Serious as he believed the lack of such a history to be, Bacon himself continued to follow the common Renaissance prejudice in favor of political history — his “Civil History, properly so-called, whereof the dignity and authority are preeminent among human writings.” And in his own relatively brief forays into the formal writing of history he reverted to a more or less sophisticated brand of “politic” history. What has tended to be overlooked is the close relationship his theory of a history of learning and the arts bears to his entire project for the reorientation of learning and, in particular, to the historical critique he in fact made of traditional scholarship. His theoretical category remained, it is true, just a bit too narrow to accommodate the breadth of his own historical reflection. History, to him, still meant a formal literary genre. Taken together, however, his theory and practice should reveal something of importance about his historical perspective, to say nothing of that of his age.

Proceedings of parliament, said Sir Edward Coke in 1624, are of four sorts: by bill, judicature, petition of grace and petition of right. The purpose of this paper is to explore certain aspects of procedure by petition in the reigns of James I and Charles I and to consider the Petition of Right of 1628 in relation to other petitions which preceded it.

The substance of the Petition of Right is well known. It stated that contrary to the laws of the realm, men had been required under duress to grant loans and pay other charges to the crown which had not been voted by parliament. They had been imprisoned without cause shown, tried by martial law in time of peace, and forced to receive into their homes soldiers and mariners billeted upon them. The Petition asked that these practices, which contravened the rights and liberties of the kingdom, should cease.

The form of the Petition, together with its answer, is less well understood than its substance and is often considered unique. It has sometimes been regarded as a declaratory act, sometimes compared to a private bill, or to the petition, also called a petition of right, by which an individual initiated action against the crown. To discover what the Petition meant to men of the seventeenth century, it may be useful first to look at the events that surrounded Charles' several answers to it, and then to examine the petition as a normal form of procedure, of which the Petition of Right was a dramatic example.

The question of why the Liberal Party failed to absorb and channel the increased political activity of the working class after 1885 is one that historians continue to debate. This paper is an attempt to assess the viability of the Liberal Party as a vehicle for working class political aspirations within the context of a single by-election in Sheffield, a city with a strong tradition of Liberal-Labour cooperation. To put the 1894 by-election in perspective, one must first look briefly at the development of the Liberal Party in relation to the demand for Labour Members of Parliament in the last third of the nineteenth century.

1.The Early Movement Toward Labour Representation

The beginning of the movement for direct trade union representation in parliament is usually dated from 1868, when William Newton of the Engineers, William Cremer of the Carpenters and Joiners, and George Howell of the Bricklayers stood for election. All three were defeated despite some Liberal support “notably (if secretly) from party headquarters.” In the following year the Labour Representation League was launched. According to its prospectus, “its principal duty will be to secure the return to Parliament of qualified working men", and it proposed to organize workers' votes regardless of party despite the radical connections of many union leaders. But its party affiliation was soon apparent, and by 1875 the League declared: “we have ever sought to be allied to the great Liberal Party, to which we by conviction belong.”

The resurgence of oligarchies in England's provincial towns during the fifteenth century and their firm control over almost all aspects of civic life during the sixteenth century has received considerable attention and is apparently beyond dispute. The characteristic feature of this oligarchical control was the domination of the important civic offices by urban dynasties whose members practiced the most influential and lucrative trades, were the most affluent citizens, and were linked by close family ties. Comparatively few studies have been made of officeholders of the seventeenth century, especially for the period after 1660, yet the evidence so far accumulated suggests that officeholding remained the exclusive privilege of a closed social elite. Nevertheless, Norwich may provide an instructive exception. An examination of the pool of men eligible for political office in Norwich, the largest provincial capital, indicates that the door to political office was open to men of diverse social backgrounds and occupations to a greater extent than during the sixteenth century and apparently much more so than in the other large provincial capitals.

Oligarchy may be defined as the possession and exercise of power by a few individuals either directly, as a consequence of holding the important political offices, or indirectly, as a consequence of controlling recruitment of officeholders and influencing their decisions. In the former case, which was the general pattern establishsed in those fifteenth and sixteenth-century towns which remained free from the intervention of territorial magnates, oligarchy implies further that the magistrates have either the exclusive privilege of appointing their own replacements or the ability to manipulate the mechanism of political recruitment involving a wider electorate through control of the processes of nomination and election of officeholders.

The British Liberal Party underwent a succession of crises in the years 1886-1905 which nearly destroyed it as a coherent political entity. Perhaps the most critical divisions in the 1890s were those concerning the leadership struggle, so well described by Peter Stansky in his Ambitions and Strategies, and the search for a domestic policy which would qualify the party as the major force for reform in the face of the emerging Labour alternative. But both of these problems and the divisions which stemmed from them were linked with the perennial and highly visible divisions over foreign and imperial policy. Stansky has shown how the imperial question was tied to the Harcourt-Rosebery struggle for the leadership in succession to Gladstone and how concentration on this issue detracted from attention to the more pressing question of finding a viable and attractive domestic program. Jeffrey Butler, Bernard Semmel, and Bernard Porter have illustrated other aspects of the problem of imperial policy.

Historians have long recognized the seriousness of the crisis in the party during the Boer War, when divisions of opinion concerning the war and general imperial policy were formalized in competing organizations, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman fought a frustrating campaign to consolidate his leadership and maintain the party as a functioning unit. Most of the attention, however, has centered on the leaders of the party and on the organization — the Liberal League, which grew out of the Imperial Liberal Council in 1902 — which represented the Liberal Imperialist wing inspired by Lord Rosebery.

The abdication of King Edward VIII of England in December, 1936, shocked and fascinated people all over the world. No other monarch in modern British history since George III has found himself unable to fulfill his hereditary task. Biographers, historians, and playwrights have described in detail the events preceding the dramatic announcement that the King of England had decided to renounce his position in favor of his brother, the Duke of York. Yet none of these accounts attempts to explain Edward's behavior in terms of dynamic psychology, despite the fact that the available data suggests intriguing possibilities regarding the unconscious motivation for his actions.

The following interpretation of the behavior of Edward VIII offers a hypothesis together with historical evidence which bears it out. The repeated use of qualifying adjectives and phrases would only detract from the impact of this interpretation, but the fact that psycho-historical explanations must remain necessarily theoretical is acknowledged at the outset. In spite of the inherent limitations in the historian's use of psychoanalytic theory to explain the behavior of an individual, the application of dynamic psychology to biographical data can bring new insights into puzzling actions like Edward's abdication.

A psycho-biographical approach, focusing on the unconscious, non-rational dimension of Edward's behavior, suggests that the abdication was a final gesture by which he secured possession of a mother figure whom he was able to please, and so he triumphed symbolically over his father. The outstanding psychological characteristic of Edward's development appears to have been the problem of unresolved Oedipal anxiety which governed his relations with women and eventually dictated his choice of a wife.

None of the early Fabians remains more obscure today than William Clarke (1852-1901 ). Although his contribution to the Fabian Essays ranks as perhaps the most interesting and perceptive essay in that volume, histories of the Fabian Society pass over Clarke with a line or two of praise. Nevertheless, Clarke's socialism deserves more attention. It is interesting in itself as an early English analysis of monopoly capitalism and as another example of the relationship between the growth of radical politics and the Victorian loss of faith. At the same time, of course, Clarke's intellectual history also contributes to an increased understanding of the early evolution of the Fabian society.

At the time Clarke wrote “The Industrial Basis of Socialism” for the Fabian Essays he had been a socialist for only a few years. And in spite of this promising beginning as a socialist theorist, he abandoned socialism in the late 1890's, reverting to a more youthful political individualism. Why Clarke remained a socialist for only a decade is, then, the central question raised by his career. Not surprisingly, the answer is complex, dependent in part on accidental personal factors. Clarke approached socialism from two different directions. Politically, it was a logical extension of his radicalism, a necessary corrective to the limitations placed on political democracy by uncontrolled private wealth. At the same time, Clarke came to see socialism as a kind of religious activity, the means to realize a spiritual ideal. In both cases socialism held out a promise of the imminent realization of these concerns.

The full story of the 1918 election can never be told, although its importance as a watershed is, and was at the time, undoubted. Private papers have disappeared and fire destroyed records of the Local Government Board and Home Office. An especially interesting kind of record, the expenditure of candidates, was not even collected, and no questions were raised about this until it was too late.

Churchill was among those who understood that “an election is to be fought, the result of which will profoundly affect political relationships and political issues for several years to come ….” Recent scholarship has concentrated on the divisions within the Liberal Party prior to the election, the special questions of Ireland and of National Democratic Party candidates, and “the stages” by which the drama unfolded in the autumn of 1918. But there has been no explanation of the timing: why did Lloyd George wait so long, and, having waited so long, why did he hurry into a December election, knowing the problems of voter registration and the signs of apathy and even hostility to an election? Moreover, all the discussion of why “coupons” were awarded as they were has obscured the difficulty of planning a coalition program, which was the precondition of any allocation of “coupons.”

The constraints upon Lloyd George went back to 1916. From the moment he succeeded Asquith he was “a Prime Minister without a party.” His claim to have 136 Liberal supporters in the Commons was never substantiated by a name list or verified in the division lobbies.