Historians From England

"[T]he whole of the constitutional history of England is little more than a commentary on Magna Carta."

"In the preservation of the old forms,—the compurgation by the kindred of the accused, the responsibility for the wergild, the representation of the township in the court of the hundred, and that of the hundred in the court of the shire; the choice of witnesses; the delegation to chosen committees of the common judicial rights of the suitors of the folkmoot; the need of witness for the transfer of chattels, and the evidence of the hundred or shire to the title to lands; the report of the hundred and shire as to criminals and the duty of enforcing their production and punishment, and the countless diversity of customs in which the several communities went to work to fulfil the general injunctions of the law,—in these remained the seeds of future liberties; themselves perhaps the mere shakings of the olive tree, the scattered grains that royal and noble gleaners had scorned to gather, but destined for a new life after many days of burial. They were the humble discipline by which a downtrodden people were schooled to act together in small things, until the time came when they could act together for great ones."

"The Great Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity: the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates, and lawyers have been labouring for a century. There is not a word in it that recalls the distinctions of race and blood, or that maintains the differences of English and Norman law. It is in one view the summing up of a period of national life, in another the starting-point of a new, not less eventful, period than that which it closes."

"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."

"The general tendency of the process may be described as a movement from the personal to the territorial organisation; from a state of things in which personal freedom and political right were the leading ideas, to one in which personal freedom and political right had become so much bound up with the relations created by the possession of land, as to be actually subservient to it: the Angel-cynn of Alfred becomes the Engla-lande of Canute."

"In a further stage the land becomes the sacramental tie of all public relations; the poor man depends on the rich, not as his chosen patron, but as the owner of the land that he cultivates, the lord of the court to which he does suit and service, the leader whom he is bound to follow to the host: the administration of law depends on the peace of the land rather than that of the people; the great landowner has his own peace and administers his own justice. The king still calls himself the king of the nation, but he has added to his old title new and cumbersome obligations towards all classes of his subjects, as lord and patron, supreme landowner, the representative of all original, and the fountain of all derived, political right."

"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."

"No legislation turned the free owner into the feudal tenant: whatever changes in that direction took place were the result of individual acts, or of very gradual changes of custom arising indirectly from the fact that other relations were assuming a territorial character."

"Without some knowledge of Constitutional History it is absolutely impossible to do justice to the characters and positions of the actors in the great drama; absolutely impossible to understand the origin of parties, the development of principles, the growth of nations in spite of parties and in defiance of principles. It alone can teach why it is that in politics good men do not always think alike, that the worst cause has often been illustrated with the most heroic virtue, and that the world owes some of its greatest debts to men from whose very memory it recoils."

"England, although less homogeneous in blood and character, is more so in uniform and progressive growth. The very diversity of the elements which are united within the isle of Britain serves to illustrate the strength and vitality of that one which for thirteen hundred years has maintained its position either unrivalled or in victorious supremacy. If its history is not the perfectly pure development of Germanic principles, it is the nearest existing approach to such a development. England gained its sense of unity centuries before Germany: it developed its genius for government under influences more purely indigenous: spared from the curse of the imperial system and the Mezentian union with Italy, and escaping thus the practical abeyance of legislation and judicature, it developed its own common law free from the absolutist tendencies of Roman jurisprudence; and it grew equably, harmoniously, not merely by virtue of local effort and personal privilege."

"The History of Institutions cannot be mastered,—can scarcely be approached,—without an effort. It affords little of the romantic incident or of the picturesque grouping which constitute the charm of History in general, and holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of Truth. But it has a deep value and an abiding interest to those who have courage to work upon it. It presents, in every branch, a regularly developed series of causes and consequences, and abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realisation of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is."

"The English nation is of distinctly Teutonic or German origin. The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, who, according to Bede, furnished the mass of immigrants in the fifth century, were amongst those tribes of Lower Germany which had been the least affected by Roman influences... This new race was the main stock of our forefathers: sharing the primeval German pride of purity of extraction, still regarding the family tie as the basis of social organization; migrating in groups of allied and kindred character, and commemorating the tribal identity in the names they gave to their new settlements, honouring the women of their nation, and strictly careful of the distinction between themselves and the tolerated remnant of their predecessor."

"It is unnecessary to suppose that any general intermixture either of Roman or of British blood has affected this national identity. Doubtless there were early intermarriages between the invaders and the natives, and probably in the west of England a large and continuous infusion of Celtic blood. But though it may have been locally or relatively great, it could only be in very small proportion to the whole. The language, the personal and local names, the character of the customs and common law of the English, are persistent during historic times. Every infusion of new blood since the first migration has been Teutonic; the Dane, the Norseman, and even the French-speaking Norman of the Conquest, serve to add intensity to the distinctness of the national identity."

"The result of this comparison is to suggest the probability that the polity developed by the German races on British soil is the purest product of their primitive instinct. With the exception of the Gothic Bible of Ulfilas, the Anglo-Saxon remains are the earliest specimens of Germanic language as well as literature, and the development of modern English from the Anglo-Saxon is a fact of science as well as of history. The institutions of the Saxons of Germany long after the conquest of Britain were the most perfect exponent of the system which Tacitus saw and described in the Germania; and the polity of their kinsmen in England, though it may be not older in its monuments than the Lex Salica, is more entirely free from Roman influences. In England the common germs were developed and ripened with the smallest intermixture of foreign elements. Not only were all the successive invasions of Britain, which from the eighth to the eleventh century diversify the history of the island, conducted by nations of common extraction, but, with the exception of ecclesiastical influence, no foreign interference that was not German in origin was admitted at all. Language, law, custom and religion preserve their original conformation and colouring. The German element is the paternal element in our system, natural and political."

"Almost any student who has read the usual books, if he were asked to mark what was the foremost idea of the three centuries that intervene between the year 1500 and the year 1800, would reply that it was the idea of the balance of power. The balance of power, however it be defined, i.e. whatever the powers were between which it was necessary to maintain such equilibrium, that the weaker should not be crushed by the union of the stronger, is the principle which gives unity to the political plot of modern European history."

"The study of Constitutional History is essentially a tracing of causes and consequences, the examination of a distinct growth from a well-defined germ to full maturity: a growth, the particular direction and shaping of which are due to a diversity of causes, but whose life and developing power lies deep in the very nature of the people. It is not then the collection of a multitude of facts and views, but the piecing of the links of a perfect chain."

"Froude informs the Scottish youth That parsons do not care for truth. The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries History is a pack of lies. What cause for judgements so malign? A brief reflexion solves the mystery – Froude believes Kingsley a divine, And Kingsley goes to Froude for History."

"Among the first truths which the historical student, or indeed any scientific scholar, learns to recognise, this is perhaps the most important, that no theory or principle works in isolation."

"It is of the greatest importance that this study should become a recognized part of a regular English education. No knowledge of English history can be really sound without it: it is not creditable to us as an educated people that while our students are well acquainted with the state machinery of Athens and Rome, they should be ignorant of the corresponding institutions of our own forefathers: institutions that possess a living interest for every nation that realizes its identity, and have exercised on the wellbeing of the civilized world an influence not inferior certainly to that of the Classical nations."

"But although English society was divided by sharp lines, and broad intervals, it was not a system of caste either in the stricter or in the looser sense. It had much elasticity in practice, and the boundaries between the ranks were passable."

"There are no constitutional revolutions, no violent reversals of legislation; custom is far more potent than law, and custom is modified infinitesimally every day. An alteration of law is often the mere registration of a custom, when men have recognised its altered character. The names of offices and assemblies are permanent, whilst their character has imperceptibly undergone essential change."

"Second only to the Bible in its influence, Foxe's work frequently stood beside the Bible on pulpits and in libraries."

"No one would now argue, as a certain Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries once did, that the vanished register of Bishop Longland of Lincoln on which Foxe drew for his account of the Lollards of the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire and their trials (the fullest and most valuable of all records of early Tudor Lollardy) never existed but was forged by Foxe to give his narrative a spurious "appearance of veracity". A. G. Dickens has observed that Foxe lacked the intent, the incentive and the diabolical erudition to forget his voluminous and highly specific mass of evidence. The missing Lincoln act book is not now likely to be rediscovered. Foxe seems to have used a transcript of it together with other Lollard trial records at Lambeth Palace, where it no longer exists. But other "registers" in similar form have been found by modern research (notably the record of the Coventry trials of 1511) and comparison of these sources with the passages in Foxe which are based on them suggest that the martyrologist worked only a little more carelessly and a few shades more partially than would be tolerable in a modern doctoral thesis, but with essentially the same methods."

"Nor is it any longer profitable to debate whether certain episodes in the Book of Martyrs were Foxe's own invention, or accepted by him as factual in such a casual fashion as to bring his credibility into general question. It was natural that readers should have doubted the facts of the bizarre episode in Guernsey, when a woman reportedly gave birth in the fire and the newly born infant was tossed back into the flames to share the mother's grisly fate. The circumstances stretch credulity. But it appears from other documents that this obscenity indeed happened very much as Foxe reported it. If there were any remaining doubts about Foxe's fundamental honesty in such respects, they were removed by J. F. Mozley's scholarly albeit overly defensive study published in 1940, John Foxe and his Book. Acts and Monuments is stuffed with as many detailed and minor errors as we should expect of a history written on this scale and in great haste, in Foxe's words "so hastily raked up...in such shortness of time". There are mistakes of both person and place, mistakes of dates in plenty, faults of transcription and in proof-reading. But the only elements of pure invention (and not primarily Foxe's own invention) occur in the recounting of sundry extraordinary "providences" and other acts of divine judgment visited upon those responsible for the deaths of the martyrs: fragments in the manner of the De mortibus persecutorum of Lactantius."

"Afterward she opened the matter more plainly to M. Rise and Mistres Clarentius (if it be true that they tolde me, whiche hearde it of M. Rise himselfe) who then being most familiar with her, & most bold about her, tolde her that they feared she took thought for king Philips departing from her. Not that onely (sayde she) but when I am dead & opened, you shall find Calice lying in my hart."

"At last, after muche reasoning, when no reason woulde serue, although he deserued no death, he was…brought forth to the place of execution, was there tied to þe stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterward with fire consumed in the morning at the towne of Filford, an. 1536. crieng thus at the stake with a feruente zeale, and a loud voyce: Lord open the King of Englands eyes."

"Then brought they a fagot kindled with fire, and layd the same downe at D. Ridleys feete. To whome Maister Latymer spake in this maner: Be of good comfort maister Ridley, and play the man: wee shall this day light such a candle by Gods grace in England, as (I trust) shall neuer be put out."

"Acts and Monuments made Foxe England's first literary celebrity."

"There is no keeping down of veritie, but it wil spring and come out of dust and ashes, as appeared right well in this man. For though they digged vp his body, burnt his bones, & drowned his ashes, yet þe word of God and truth of his doctrine with the fruit & successe therof they could not burne."

"To say that Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Christian Church (to give the Book of Martyrs its official title) was hugely influential on English thought during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would be a gross understatement of the case. Only the Bible was read more frequently and more avidly."

"M. Tyndall hearing thys, ful of godly zeale, and not bearing that blasphemous saying, replied againe & sayde: I defie the Pope and all his lawes: and further added, that if God spared hym life, ere many yeares he would cause a boy that driueth the plough to know more of the Scripture, then he did."

"When old men decided to barter young men for pride and profit, the transaction was called war."

"...But love is like the measles; the later in life it affects you, the more severe the consequences" "Is there anything you can take for it?" "Only wedding vows"

"The factory workers say that it's impossible to do anything right. If you arrive five minutes early you are a saboteur; if you arrive five minutes late you are betraying socialism; if you arrive on time they say, "Where did you get the watch?""

"Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse."

"Progress is man's indifference to the lessons of history."

"The tragedy of marriage is that while all women marry thinking that their man will change, all men marry believing their wife will never change."

"Riches should come as the reward for hard work, preferably one's forebears'."

"I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destinies of man."

"Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with a sword."

"More important...was the evidence that the "passion of labour...to make the world a better place for the people who inhabit it" was reciprocated by many outside the movement. They found their justification in R. H. Tawney's Acquisitive Society, published in 1920. This was a persuasive indictment, blandly self-confident and witty, of the system in which industry was not directed to the service of the community and in which the rights of property existed quite apart from any contemporary justification. The system was not merely unjust but morally wrong and socially absurd."

"The entrenched left cannot identify with Tawney in honesty for several reasons: The patriotic old wounded soldier from the Somme was always contemptuous of those of us who were in CND, and he strongly supported Gaitskell's "fight, fight and fight again" speech; Tawney never accepted that conference decisions should overrule the judgment of the Parliamentary Labour Party or individual conscience... He did not accept majorities based on what he considered the total non-democracy of the block vote... The right would hesitate to vote for Tawney's ghost because his commitment to Clause 4, to extensive public ownership, to his philosophical attack on the sanctity of private property... The ghost of Tawney, the whole Tawney, would shake them all."

"Tawney the politician barred the way to Tawney the scholar. Time which he might given to studying history was devoted instead to the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, and he tended to see the world past and present in terms of socialist dogma. Hence his wholly untrue picture of early capitalism as cruel and greedy, destructive alike of social welfare and true spiritual values. No one would wish to deny that Tawney was a great man, but this greatness caused him to lead whole generations of history students into grievous error."

"I always think of him as the Democratic Socialist par excellence."

"Tawney's Socialism...derived from a Christian inspiration. Tawney's Socialism, thanks no doubt to his memories of the First World War, comprised a full-blooded defence of the way Britain must be physically defended... Tawney's Socialism was also inextricably soldered with his democratic faith; the two together so that no one could ever put them asunder. Tawney's Socialism could not be traced solely to William Morris...but Morris's ideas and idealism were woven into the rich pattern of his political faith... His writings were read and loved – it is not too much to say – by one generation of Socialists after another."

"Service, not profit, should be the motive force of economic activity, Tawney declared in The Acquisitive Society; and Tawney's doctrine was repeated, with varying degrees of eloquence and emphasis, from a thousand Labour platforms. This doctrine is, of course, inherently at variance with the basic assumptions of Keynesian economics, one of which is that the profit motive is the engine of economic progress."

"Tawney held out hopes of a better world to come, and he possessed a quality that impressed all who met him: purity of heart."

"I read R.H. Tawney's book, The Attack, which is a series of pieces written over the course of his life... Reading it, I realised that the right wing of the Labour Party, that is to say the Croslands and the Hattersleys, have really stolen Tawney and made him their apostle, whereas when you actually read what he had written you find he was an intensely radical man. I have been asked to write a preface for the new issue, and I intend to try to get him reinstated as the spokesman for the mainstream, democratic, Christian socialist left... The more I read Tawney, the more I become convinced that his words would be helpful and comforting to us now and would assist in preventing the so-called Social Democrats from breaking away from the Labour Party."

"Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow."

"Mankind may wring her secrets from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy themselves."