Since the reading of their father's will, Robert and Thomas le Parker had been arguing over a piece of land which their father left to Thomas. Robert decided to force Thomas into a settlement and on the day of the murder had taken two of his kinsmen to Thomas's house. Abducting Thomas to his own house, Robert locked the door and began to threaten Thomas with a knife. Thomas tried to escape but, finding the door locked, he seized the knife from Robert and killed his brother in self-defense. When discussing the involvement of family in criminal activities, it seems appropriate to begin with the oldest crime in our tradition — that of brother killing brother, Cain killing Abel. But despite the sensational qualities of this type of dispute, normally the families who appear in medieval criminal records were cooperating in felonious activities rather than directing their wrath toward each other. More typical is the rather pedestrian case of Simon Tut of Wappenham and his son Richard, who were convicted for stealing sheep in Bodecote in Northamptonshire. This paper will examine several quantitative indices which will shed light on both intrafamilial crime and that involving family cooperation: the frequency of familial as compared with non-familial crimes; the specific types of crimes involving family and the degree of kinship between family members appearing in criminal courts. Finally, the essay will suggest some general conclusions about tensions in rural society and within the medieval peasant family which contributed to family involvement in crime.

Edward III's foreign ambitions, which in 1337 precipitated the Hundred Years' War, generated such severe financial pressures at home that eventually the fiscal crisis became a political one. Exasperated by the inability or unwillingness of the government of regency under Archbishop Stratford to provide him with money and matériel for his continental campaign, an outraged Edward returned to England on November 30, 1340, determined to purge the government of those corrupt and disloyal officials whom he blamed for his humiliation. The attack on the chief ministers, especially Stratford, who was both primate and principal councillor, created a political crisis of considerable proportions, wherein some dominant issues of medieval English politics — the liberties of the church and clergy and the role of the baronage in political decision-making — were re-stated and re-argued. Modern historians have focused their attention on the more dramatic aspects of the crisis of 1341, particularly its “constitutional” implications. Lapsley, Clarke, and Wilkinson, for instance, examined the conflicts of the king with Stratford and with the baronage — events reminiscent of the confrontations of Henry II with Thomas Becket and of Edward II with the Lancastrians. Tout explained the administrative reforms of the early part of Edward III's reign, which, by subjecting the great offices of state to the control of the king's itinerant household, were designed to transform the administrative system into a device for purveying supplies and cash to feed the English war-machine. More recently, E. B. Fryde has described the ordinary and extraordinary financial techniques employed to subsidize the king's expensive foreign policies.

In this way Sir Edmund Verney, the patriarch of an old Buckinghamshire gentry family, explained his decision to side with the King in the Civil War, a choice which cost him his life at the battle of Edgehill. In 1642, many English gentlemen were confronted with a similar choice. It is significant that Verney attributed his choice of King over Parliament to “honour and gratitude.” In Sir Edmund's explanation we may find the basis on which many English gentlemen supported the King in 1642.

The political behavior of the Royalist gentlemen in the 1640s is part of a problem which has long plagued historians of the English Civil War. The economic interpretations proposed by both R. H. Tawney and H. Trevor-Roper stimulated much interest because they seemed to provide what had long been sought — a theory that could consistently account for the political choices of upper class gentlemen in the 1640s. When tested, however, neither theory proved satisfactory. Careful studies of key institutional bodies like the Civil Service and the Long Parliament revealed no significant social or economic differences between Royalists and Parliamentarians.

Most of the details about the life of Henry Fitzalan, fourteenth Earl of Arundel, come from a biography written in 1580, which was the year of his death, by a close associate, probably his private chaplain, who had clearly been an eyewitness to most of the events described. The latter wrote the essay for the benefit of the Earl's two daughters and heiresses, “for the perpetual memory of a personage very honorable, and that ye who shall remain of his blood may the rather rejoice in so noble a progenitor.” Since this was his purpose, there can be little doubt that the author has a tendency to stress the virtues and successes of his subject, and to gloss over his defects and omit his failures. What is recorded, however, carries the ring of truth, and the selectivity of the presentation throws light on the values and actions which the author considered important and praiseworthy.

The Earl of Arundel was no ordinary nobleman. He was the representative of the most senior and one of the richest and most powerful aristocratic families in the country. He was a man who inherited vast estates and equally vast authority in his native Sussex, and who lived in a style appropriate to his position. Unlike the more modern-minded nobles, he does not seem to have been much affected by the educational reforms of the Renaissance. When on embassies abroad, he certainly confined himself to speaking English, and it seems possible that he lacked the skill to do anything else.

It has long been a critical obligation for commentators on the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to remark on Edward Gibbon's failure to explain the reasons for that fall. Historians in particular have been bothered by this: both J. B. Black and D. M. Low have fretted over Gibbon's refusal — or inability — to deal with the ultimate meaning of the events he describes or, in the last three volumes, to “propound and answer questions explicitly.” Readers of the History, on the other hand, may feel that the historian belabors too often the “causes” of events, those “connections in a sequence.” Regularly, Gibbon reminds us that he is dealing with a process of degeneration involving successive stages of decay; and both within individual sections and at the close of units, he carefully recapitulates that the policies of Augustus or Septimius Severus, the strengthening of the Pretorian Guard, the spread of Christianity, the weakening of senatorial authority, monetary and land policies, the invasions of the Goths and Huns were all “causes” for the decline of the Roman Empire.

The contradiction between the reactions of critic and casual reader is merely apparent. His commentators grant that Gibbon assayed explanations for the events he recounted; but, they say, his purported “causes” are not primary or even secondary ones. They claim, in fact, that the explanations seldom account for the single chains of events he describes, much less for the long, intricate process that Gibbon sees as steady and unmitigated decline.

One of the more important features of the transformation of the departmental service of the eighteenth century into the civil service of the nineteenth century was the emergence of the permanent official. There had always been a degree of permanence in the bureaucracy, particularly in the clerical positions, but in the higher ranks and especially among the undersecretaries the distinction between political and clerical officers tended to be blurred and each man had responsibilities in both spheres. By 1830 these officials no longer occupied ambivalent situations. In most departments one was a political appointee whose position was dependent on the political fortunes of the minister. The other undersecretary, however, had shed his political responsibilities and as a consequence was more or less immune to the political forces of parliamentary politics.

Yet the process whereby these events took place was to a certain extent individualized in different departments. In the case of the Foreign Office the impact of financial and political changes in the state was considerably less important than in departments such as the Treasury. Neither of the foreign undersecretaries had ever had much influence over the formation of policy, nor were they to gain responsibility in this area during the 1830s. Yet clearly by the time Lord Palmerston became foreign secretary one of these men, John Backhouse, occupied a permanent position while his colleague, Sir George Shee, held a more temporary status. The distinction between the two positions became more rigid during the period Backhouse remained in office not so much as a result of political forces in the state, though these forces contributed somewhat to the changes that occurred, but as a consequence of Backhouse's growing responsibility for supervising the establishment.

On October 10, 1800, a group of whigs and radicals met in the Shakespeare Tavern to celebrate the anniversary of the first election of Charles James Fox for the city of Westminster. But there was little to be festive about. The speeches, toasts, and songs betrayed a sense of despair tinged with nostalgia. Fox and the Lord Mayor, Thomas Erskine and Lord Bessborough, all toasted “the Memory of the Liberty of the Press” and joined in a song, written for the occasion, which reflected the general disillusionment:

HOW chang'd are the times, and our people of late,
When my brother John Bull has no use for his pate?
A head without tongue ev'ry wise man maintains,
Is just as absurd as a tongue without brains.
Sing ballinamona or a,
No head without tongue then for me.
Fine laws have been made, for the good of the land,
And our heads are now placed where our heels us'd to stand,
Topsy-turvy's the word where fair Order and birth,
And this once land of plenty's now chang'd to a dearth.
Sing ballinamona, &c.
No plenty of starving for me.
But still it is some consolation to think,
How little we need either victuals or drink,
For the Minister's able, who fram'd these wise laws,
Has given to a Justice the key to our jaws.
Sing ballinamona, &c.
No justice to lock jaws for me.
When enslav'd thus the People, the Ministers then
Send to Botany Bay all who dare to complain,
And religion they mock, when we've scanty of meat,
For they publish a Fast, when there's nothing to eat.

In July, 1872, one of the most curious articles in the history of British journalism appeared in the much respected Contemporary Review. The anonymous essay, entitled “The ‘Prayer for the Sick’ — Hints Towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate Its Value,” challenged the Christians of the nation to conduct an experiment to determine the physical efficacy of prayer. A letter from the physicist John Tyndall, controversial professor at the Royal Institution, introduced the proposal, the author of which was later identified as Henry Thompson, an eminent London surgeon.

Thompson admitted that few prayers were actually open to scientific or quantitative investigation. However, the prayers for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer appeared to constitute a set of petitions “from a study of which the absolute calculable value of prayer … can almost certainly be ascertained.” These fell into two categories — general prayers said every Sunday and specific prayers offered for particular individuals. Thompson desired no one to be deprived of the benefits afforded by general prayers.

In 1887, Joseph Chamberlain wrote a letter to The Baptist in which he blamed the preoccupation of Liberals and Radicals with Home Rule for delaying social reform. “Thirty-two millions of people,” he complained, “must go without much-needed legislation because three millions are disloyal.” Early in the 1890s, socialists and militant working-class spokesmen sometimes took up this cry to express their discontent with the Liberal party. And in later years, the Liberal-Radical commitment to Home Rule provided one of the main historical explanations for the founding of an independent working-class party; thus the dampening of Radicalism supposedly caused by Home Rule has been regarded as the source of the most important political transformation of recent British history. In the words of G. D. H. Cole:

D. A. Hamer, in a recent article, takes essentially the same view, with some modifications. The Liberals, he says, took up Home Rule in a deliberate attempt to paper over confusion and disagreement within the party over other policies. In the 1880s, the Liberal party tended to be dominated by “faddists,” who could not agree on the precedence to be given various reform proposals.

“Liberal Imperialism” has been a confusing label ever since the Boer War, when it was first widely applied. It was then a source of controversy within the Liberal party, much of it centering around Lord Rosebery, who introduced the term. Some of his contemporaries considered Liberal Imperialism to be marked by dangerously aggressive policy, while J. A. Spender, who also lived through these years, later interpreted it as a revival of the Palmerstonian spirit. More recently historians have treated it as ideology. Bernard Semmel has called it “social imperialism,” placing its origins in the 1880's. G. R. Searle has argued that many of Rosebery's Liberal Imperialist ideas were part of an ideology of “national efficiency,” a set of ideas that crossed party lines and that emerged in 1900 as a consequence of wartime failures. “Liberal Imperialism” has also been used to refer more generally to the “imperialism” of Liberals before as well as after the outbreak of the Boer War. I shall argue that Liberal Imperialism is best understood, not as ideology, but as the rhetoric of party infighting during the Boer War, that it is best to confine the use of the label to the period of the war and its immediate aftermath, and that the spirit of the ideas used by Liberal Imperialists, particularly as regards their perspective on the Empire, was defensive and pessimistic. In these years the Liberal right — no less than the Liberal left, with its attack on “imperialism” — was engaged in reassessing Britain's world position.

One of the distinctive characteristics of the Conservative Party's history has been its ability for a century or more to moult its plumage at the right political season without really altering its gestalt. This comment does not imply an act of deception by Conservative Party leaders. Rather it recognizes that Peel, Pitt, Disraeli and, in the twentieth century, Tory leaders like R. A. Butler, Harold Macmillan, Iain Macleod and before them, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, somehow understood the need for social change and the politics of compromise; so much so that they were quite prepared, in the words of New York's Mayor Jimmy Walker, “to rise above principle” where and when it appeared to be necessary. The Conservative Party has endured as a party because of its unusual adaptability compared to conservative parties in other Western societies. Indeed, it has more than merely ‘endured’: the Conservative Party in an apparently hostile atmosphere, has been able to take and hold power for huge blocks of time in the past century.

This adaptation to reality in the interests of power was particularly apparent after the landslide Conservative defeat in July 1945. Some party leaders were determined to adapt to the new realities by attempting to recapture the support of as sizeable a segment of the British working class as the party had enjoyed at the turn of the century. Promulgation of the Industrial Charter through the efforts of a high-powered Tory Committee and the Conservative Research Department was a significant step in that direction.

It has been said with at least the spirit of truth that the British Empire was founded in a fit of absence of mind. And certainly the growth of Great Britain into a power on whose possessions the sun literally never set was not the result of clearly conceived policy or of some governmental master plan emanating from the corridors of Whitehall. Religious deviationists, commercial adventurers and jailers in quest of prisons were more often than not the founders of British colonial settlements. Given such a history, it is not surprising that enthusiasm for empire grew but slowly in Britain and that no lofty rationale for imperial advance was for many years forthcoming. Eventually, humanitarianism, evangelical Christianity and the “civilizing mission” associated with “bearing the white man's burden” combined to produce an imperial philosophy of sorts — a rather undefined dedication to “fair play” and an official determination that all subjects of the crown, regardless of race, color, religion or ethnic background, should be equal before the law.

The common conception of Empire was reflected in an article in the April 1896 issue of the North American Review. “Wherever her [Britain's] sovereignty has gone,” the writer, David Wells, contends,