Historians From England

"The teaching of axioms should come after conveying the theory in a looser version."

"Grattan-Guiness's uniformly interesting and valuable account of the interwoven development of logic and related fields of mathematics . . . between 1870 and 1940 presents a significantly revised analysis of the history of the period. . . . [His] book is important because it supplies what has been lacking: a full account of the period from a primary mathematical perspective."

"It [ non-Euclidean geometry ] would be ranked among the most famous achievements of the entire [nineteenth] century, but up to 1860 the interest was rather slight."

"Mathematics occupies a peculiar position in cultural life today. 'Everybody knows' that it is one of the most basic, and also ancient, types of knowledge; yet it is not part of normal cultural discourse, and few people know much about its historical development, or even that it has a history."

"Non-Newtonian calculi... have considerable potential as alternative approaches to traditional problems."

"The great historian of logic and mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away about a month ago, aged 73. ... Ivor's work and scholarship spans over an impressive range of topics and areas, and is bound to continue to influence many generations of scholars to come. It is a great loss."

"From the 3rd century onwards, orthodox Christianity, based on a Hebrew story and worshipping the Jew Jesus, also led many campaigns of anti-Semitism."

"When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down rules how good literature should be written."

"Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world."

"I wish that I could save myself constant repetition by printing across the dog's-ear place of these pages the warning, "Never judge a critic by your agreement with his likes and dislikes.”"

"Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage."

"The Book of History is the Bible of Irony."

"We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire."

"So, then, there abide these three, Aristotle, Longinus, and Coleridge."

"Let us also once more rejoice in, and thank God for, the fact that we know nothing about Homer, and practically nothing about Shakespeare."

"In the sect – fairly large and yet unusually choice – of Austenians or Janites, there would probably be found partisans of the claim to primacy of almost every one of the novels."

"[It] is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times."

"Historians may lie, but History cannot."

"But dinner is dinner, a meal at which not so much to eat — it becomes difficult to eat much at it as you grow older — as to drink, to talk, to flirt, to discuss, to rejoice "at the closing of the day". I do not think anything serious should be done after it, as nothing should before breakfast."

"Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it."

"Majorities are generally wrong, if only in their reasons for being right."

"The mental food of which I was most in need at that time was a strict regimen of the modern type of scientific history at its best, to supplement the sweet cake of Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, etc., on which I was gorging myself. Warner gave me that in the form of Stubbs' Constitutional History, without discouraging my love-reading of brighter authors. Stubbs, moreover, was an invaluable introduction to the Middle Ages, hitherto almost a blank spot in my knowledge. I wrote out a full analysis of the three volumes in three massive notebooks."

"Maitland was the antithesis of Stubbs: Maitland is the historian of situations, Stubbs of development. It is fashionable now to depreciate Stubbs and to praise Maitland, and it is easy to see why this has happened. Maitland's precise concepts and lucid exposition are attuned to modern scientific requirements; Stubbs's muddy generalizations and anachronistic concepts are correspondingly irritating. But it should be remembered that Maitland left out those things which elude definition: human character and deep-seated change. There are no portraits in Maitland's history and little sense of social development. All things considered, I believe that Stubbs was the greater historian, but Maitland has more to teach us now."

"From the teacher's point of view it is a notable fact that of late years English constitutional history has become at once more interesting and of higher educational value. If recollections of the undergraduate's standpoint as it was twenty years ago are to be trusted, the earlier part of the subject was deposited in three sacred volumes, which were approached by the devout disciple in much the same spirit as that in which the youthful Brahmin draws near to the Vedas. To read the first volume of Stubbs was necessary to salvation; to read the second was greatly to be desired; the third was reserved for the ambitious student who sought to accumulate merit by unnatural austerities—but between them they covered the whole ground. The lecturer lectured on Stubbs; the commentator elucidated him; the crammer boiled him down. Within those covers was to be found the final word on every controversy, and in this faith the student moved serene."

"He was, so it seems to me, a narrator of first-rate power: a man who could tell stories, and who did tell many stories, in sober, dignified, and unadorned but stirring and eloquent words. If an anthology were to be made of tales well told by historians, and the principle of selection paid no heed to the truthfulness of the passages, but weighed only their verisimilitude and what may be called their aesthetic or artistic merits, Dr Stubbs would have a strong right, and hardly any among the great historians of his day would have a stronger, to be well represented."

"What are we to say of the Constitutional History? Perhaps I have just one advantage over most of its readers. I did not read it because I was set to read it, or because I was to be examined in it, or because I had to teach history or law. I found it in a London club, and read it because it was interesting. On the other hand it was so interesting, and I was so little prepared to criticise or discriminate, that perhaps I fell more completely under its domination than those who have passed through schools of history are likely to fall. Still, making an effort towards objectivity, must we not admire in the first instance the immense scope of the book—a history of institutions which begins with the Germans of Caesar and Tacitus and does not end until a Tudor is on the throne? Then the enormous mass of material that is being used, and the ease with which this immense weight is moved and controlled... While the institutions grow and decay under our eyes we are never allowed to forget that this process of evolution and dissolution consists of the acts of human beings, and that acts done by nameable men, by kings and statesmen and reformers, memorable acts done at assignable points. In time and space, are the concrete forms in which the invisible forces and tendencies are displayed. When compared with other books bearing a like title Stubbs's Constitutional History is marvellously concrete."

"No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising. We are taken behind the scenes and shown the ropes and pulleys; we are taken into the laboratory and shown the unanalysed stuff, the retorts and test tubes; or rather we are allowed to see the organic growth of history in an historian's mind and are encouraged to use the microscope. This "practical demonstration," if we may so call it, of the historian's art and science from the preliminary hunt for manuscripts, through the work of collation and filiation and minute criticism, onward to the perfected tale, the eloquence and the reflexions, has been of incalculable benefit to the cause of history in England and far more effective than any abstract discourse on methodology could be."

"[I]t was Stubbs who did the most to consolidate the new idea of the historical enterprise... The latter [Select Charters of English Constitutional History] was to help apprentice historians to learn to deal with original documents, so that they might try to emulate works like Stubbs's own Constitutional History, which remained the standard work and the exemplar of institutional history until well into the twentieth century. As a model, the Constitutional History taught that history should be rooted in original sources, balanced and temperate in judgements, highly detailed and analytical, and severe and austere in tone."

"Stubbs was primarily a master of all the literary sources of English history between, say, 950 and 1400. In this field he has never been surpassed. How often even now, after searching in vain for a decisive contemporary witness for this or that fact or judgment, do we find that the Bishop, seventy years ago, put it for us in a footnote or an obiter dictum! Few historians would be the worse for reading Stubbs's Introductions and vol. II of the Constitutional History once every four or five years. This intimate knowledge of the period gave Stubbs a background of flesh and blood and mind in all his work. It also made him the master of all those who later broke new ground, and he became as it were father and grandfather of his pupils and pupils' pupils who developed new trends."

"Of all the men whose names I have heard mentioned in connection with the Modern History Chair I should consider Stubbs decidedly the most eligible. He is, I believe, a moderate Conservative—at all events a good Churchman and one whose teaching on religious questions would be thoroughly trustworthy. He is also one whose ability and knowledge would make the appointment unobjectionable. I do not know him personally, but from all I hear of him I should think he is the nearest approach to a Conservative of all the candidates of whom I have heard."

"The work of...Stubbs claims a still higher rank. It shows what can be made of documents, when historic powers of the highest order are brought to bear upon them. We have seldom seen a single volume which was, so thoroughly and almost without a figure of speech, a library in itself. It is hardly too much to say that Mr. Stubbs has here got together all that any one can want to know on his subject, unless he is going to write a book about it, and that, if a man is going to write a book about it, he will find in Mr. Stubbs' volume the best possible guide to his materials."

"It is our considered view that no student of the early history of our constitution can dispense with reading it [The Constitutional History of England] ... I would say at once, with all the force at my disposal, that there is no nineteenth-century historian towards whom it is less possible to be condescending without condemning oneself as unfit to study history."

"[H]e was able to undertake and fully complete an original work of historical synthesis which remains one of the most astonishing achievements of the Victorian mind. On many particular points in his History, scholars would now say Stubbs has been superseded as more subtle and complex explanations have come into fashion, but on no point can it be said that Stubbs' judgment was completely without merit or that the thesis he propounded did not have a plausible basis in the contemporary documentation. And as a general interpretation of the significant trends in the history of medieval English government, the Constitutional History remains the holistic work to which all subsequent research has had to be related."

"Stubbs' history is the most fully realised embodiment of English, Burkean political ideas."

"Stubbs is a name always to be mentioned with veneration in the Oxford History School. He is without doubt the greatest of Oxford historians, as Maitland is equally preeminent among Cambridge men. They have no peers. During the seventeen years in which he was Regius Professor, from 1867 to 1884, the History School changed from being "an easy School for rich men" into an academic discipline of a serious kind."

"In sound Stubbs was a gaudier Macaulay, a subtler Carlyle. His was not (nor, of course, was Ranke's) the "naked truth with-out embellishment" that he pretended at a time when naked truth seemed more attainable and embellishment less desirable than they have come to seem. Stubbs is magnificently persuasive not because he is all owl, but because he is a great deal more peacock, or perhaps nightingale, than he would admit. And it is the pea-cock, Maitland's "bright star" rather than his "good bishop," who is constantly interesting."

"What first struck the readers was its [The Constitutional History of England] massive and organized learning. The book overflowed with indications that its author had an unusual familiarity, not only with existing secondary works, but also—and more particularly—with the relevant original authorities that were then in print. Throughout the book it was to these original authorities that the main attention was steadily directed."

"It is far from easy to determine the mutual relations of the courts of the hundred and shire, and those of the manor and honour, or the co-ordinate departments of the bench, the pleas, and the exchequer, or the rival merits of the chancery, the house of lords, and the judicial committee of privy council. But that very complexity is a sign of growth; simplicity of detail signifies historically the extinction of earlier framework. That which springs up, as our whole system has done, on the principle of adapting present means to present ends, may be complex and inconvenient and empiric, but it is natural, spontaneous, and a crucial test of substantial freedom."

"A national polity is not the creation of a single brain or of a royal commission of brains, but grows with the growth and strengthens with the strength of the nation; cannot be changed without changing much of the spirit of the people, and is strong in proportion to the distinctness of its continuity."

"England alone has a history in which ancient freedom has made its way through, and utilised all that is good in feudalism, widening from precedent to precedent into perfect political liberty."

"National character may be regarded as the result of national history, or national history as the development of national character; either way we cannot fail to recognise the closest connection between the two. Now, of all the evidence that can be taken, and that we shall attempt to take in this course, of the actual origin of each nation and of the persistence of the original character, by far the most clear and decisive are the customs of common law. These customs spring out of the first movements of the race towards social and civilised life; although not recorded in books, they are the most ancient portion of its lore, but they are not the earliest monuments of its literature."

"Nor shall I be going so far as to anticipate what I shall have to lay before you by and by if I say now that I do trace in the old Teutonic system more germs of real liberty than I can in the Celtic system, so far as we know it, or in the Sclavonic, or in the Roman itself, with respect, be it said, to all those who find nothing in civilisation that is not Roman. I do think that in the free tenure of land, the fixed obligations of allodialism, the relation of the freeman to history as the impersonation of the race, the combination of the frankpledge, nay, I will add the compurgation and the ordeal and the wergild, is to be found a more likely basis of freedom than in the community of land, the close tie of patriarchal or family unity, the enormous and disproportionate estimate of blood nobility, and the clannish spirit that one finds in the Highland Scot and Irishman, or in the Pole or Hungarian."

"More satisfying because more decisive has been the critical treatment of the medieval writers, parallel with the new editions, on which incredible labour has been lavished, and of which we have no better examples than the prefaces of Bishop Stubbs."

"Stubbs is more compelling than his evidence demands and more fascinating than his subject would predict... Even at his weakest and dullest Stubbs is interesting; at his strongest and most flamboyant, as in his Benedict of Peterborough and Walter of Coventry introductions in the Rolls Series and in parts of his Constitutional History, he is dazzling. The problem is not overcoming Stubbs's dullness but explaining his brilliance."

"It is that the essence of the historical study is in the working out the continuity of the subject, while the essence of the legal study is in the reducing of it all to certain theoretic principles."

"It is generally agreed that no one has ever edited medieval texts more beautifully or gracefully; no one has more unblinkingly adhered to the knowable "fact." This success in Stubbs was not due merely to careful and hard work. Effort does not in itself produce editions like Stubbs's. A specific sort of talent, evidently very rare, and a specific taste are necessary... It is reflected in his rather intricate view of interrelated forces, a view that is tolerant of and even finds pleasure in an almost infinite elaboration of carefully disposed contingencies."

"We hear of the dead past and the living present: we are bid (and we do well to remember that it is an American poet who so adapts the words) to let the dead past bury its dead. But surely the past lives in the present, the process by which we became what we are is a part of our living being; if we are cut off from what we were, we only half live."

"The old map of France is full of memories—recollections of Gaul and Rome, the empire of the Cæsars, Burgundians and Aquitanians, Franks and Armoricans—Clovis, Charles the Great, and St. Louis—knights, troubadours, saints, and heroes. The history of the land was written on its face. The map of modern France is a catalogue of hills and rivers, a record of centralisation, codification, universal suffrage, government by policemen. Probably the work of simplification will never be carried so far in England, but there is a tendency towards it, which is a sign of the decline of independent thought and character."

"The knowledge of our own history is our memory, and so the recorded history of a nation is the memory of the nation: woe to the country and people that forget it; an infant people has no history, as a child has a short and transient memory: the strong man and the strong nation feel the pulsation of the past in the life of the present: their memory is vital, long and strong. Neglect of historical study and knowledge is to a nation what the loss of memory is to a man—a sign of old age and decrepitude, or the effect of some terrible disease in an individual; it is in a nation a sign of lost independence in manners and ways of thought—a moral decrepitude waxed old and ready to vanish away; or perhaps in this case also the result of some terrible convulsion—a wave of revolution rolling over the land, overthrowing laws and institutions, and washing away old landmarks, as you may see in the France of this day."

"The nation, on whom and by whom he [Edward I] was working, had now become a consolidated people, aroused by the lessons of his father's reign to the intelligent appreciation of their own condition, and attached to their own laws and customs with a steady though not unreasoning affection, jealous of their privileges, their charters, their local customs, unwilling that the laws of England should be changed. The reign of Henry III, and the first twenty years of Edward, prove the increasing capacity for self-government, as well as the increased desire and understanding of the idea of self-government."