Presidential Address: Great Historical Enterprises IV. The Rolls Series

1961 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 137-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rev. M. D. Knowles
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
British History ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
The Government ◽  
Early English ◽  
Selective Collection

The publication of the Chronicles and Memorials of GreatBritain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, known familiarly as the Rolls Series, was the outcome of a movement set on foot early in the nineteenth century by Henry Petrie. Petrte (1768-1842), who began life as a dancing master, made himself a learned and zealous antiquary, and acquired a knowledge, unrivalled in his day, of the materials for early English history. He was patronized by the second earl Spencer (1755-1834), then engaged upon the enrichment of Althorp library, and in 1818 a meeting of noblemen and gentlemen was convened at Spencer House to induce the government to support a scheme for printing the early sources of British history. The project was approved by the then prime minister, Lord Liverpool, and took shape in an humble address of the House of Commons to King George IV (25 July 1822), begging for the publication of manuscript sources of history; as a result of this Petrie, who had been appointed Keeper of Records in the Tower of London in 1819, assembled extracts from various sources for the period before the Norman Conquest, which were published posthumously in 1848 as Monumenta Historical Britannica. This was a selective collection, modelled on the Recueil of the Maurist Dom Bouquet, which Guizot had continued in France. Petrie's Monumenta was inordinately costly, while it failed to give real satisfaction to historians.

Canada

2021 ◽  
pp. 193-213
Author(s):  
Christopher Cochrane ◽  
Jean-François Godbout ◽  
Jason Vandenbeukel
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Independent Effect ◽  
Parliamentary Democracy ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Lower House ◽  
The Government

Canada is a federal parliamentary democracy with a bicameral legislature at the national level. Members of the upper House, styled the Senate, are appointed by the prime minister, and members of the lower House, the House of Commons, are elected in single-member plurality electoral districts. In practice, the House of Commons is by far the more important of the two chambers. This chapter, therefore, investigates access to the floor in the Canadian House of Commons. We find that the age, gender, and experience of MPs have little independent effect on access to the floor. Consistent with the dominant role of parties in Canadian political life, we find that an MP’s role within a party has by far the most significant impact on their access to the floor. Intriguingly, backbenchers in the government party have the least access of all.

Towards an Ideology of the Early English Law of Obligations

1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 505-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morris S. Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Functional Consequences ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
Early English

So portentous a title as I have contrived for tonight's lecture ought to come furnished with an appropriately bombastic beginning. In fact, it does not. Instead of concentrating on a beginning, I thought that we might more profitably focus our attention on the beginning, that is, on a time long before the sophisticated legal/administrative system of England's high middle ages had evolved. It will be interesting to get what peeks we can at the jurisprudential assumptions of, say, preconquest Englishmen. As Tom Green has recently demonstrated in his book on the criminal jury, these assumptions could exhibit a durability that had functional consequences for many centuries. If through the jury they could prevail against contrary official versions of what the substantive law was, as Green has shown, how much more potent could they be when the government was not inclined to oppose their effectuation?

Budget woes will slow Canada's hard power build-up

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
White Paper ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Hard Power ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government

Significance Ahead of the rollout of the Liberal government’s new defence white paper, Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland delivered a speech in the House of Commons arguing that Canada’s membership of NATO and history of peacekeeping are core elements of its internationalist foreign policy. The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wishes to finance greater Canadian involvement in multilateral security missions and institutions of liberal global governance. Impacts Defence issues are not politically salient to Canadian voters, but government backtracking on policy is. High polling support for peacekeeping would probably evaporate in the event of Canadian losses abroad. Operational setbacks could see Trudeau’s Liberals bleed support to their New Democratic and Conservative rivals.

Presidential Address

1913 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Archdeacon W. Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Young Men ◽  
British History ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
The Past ◽  
Great Progress ◽  
Made In

During the past year the Society has sustained one loss that overshadows all others. It is not for me to attempt to appreciate the value of the substantial contributions to the published sources of English history to which Mr. James Gairdner devoted himself so assiduously; I can only attempt to express the feeling which many of us here must share on the loss of our friend. I well remember the intense interest with which I read his ‘Life of Richard III.’ when it was first published in 1878, and the pleasure which I felt many years after in coming into contact with a man whom I admired so much. His constant kindliness and readiness to interest himself in and encourage the work of young men are not things to be readily forgotten. The chronicling of the blanks left in the roll of our officials and members is the saddest part of a President's duty. In my first address I expressed our sense of loss sustained through the death of Dr. Charles Gross; at this distance of time we can see more clearly than was possible four years ago how fruitful his work was. This year great progress has been made in the attempt to carry on the Bibliography of British History which he began, and during the last few weeks I have been impressed anew with the freshness and thoroughness of his studies, as I have been trying to look into and amplify the argument of his essay on Scottish Municipal History.

Migrant crisis to complicate Cameron's EU negotiation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Election Result ◽  
Eu Membership ◽  
The Government

Significance As intended, the changes will temporarily ease the Conservative Party's internal atmosphere, most importantly before the October annual party conference. However, they are unlikely to alter the fundamentals of the referendum or its outcome. The more significant internal party battle will be over the terms of Prime Minister David Cameron's EU membership renegotiation. Impacts The government could still face a September 7 House of Commons defeat over 'purdah', despite its reversal on the issue. This would boost eurosceptic elements in the Labour Party before the September 12 leadership election result. Cameron's wish to discourage migration from the Middle East could intensify his foreign policy focus on the region.

Subject to Empire: Married Women and the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Page Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Married Women ◽  
British History ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
British Culture

The 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens (BNSA) Act stated that “the wife of a British subject shall be deemed to be a British subject, and the wife of an alien shall be deemed to be an alien.” By this reenactment of an 1870 law, a British woman who married an alien became an alien herself, losing the rights and privileges accorded to British nationality. During the 1920s and 1930s, British feminists from around the Empire worked to change this regulation, but only in 1948 were women in the United Kingdom granted the right to their own nationality regardless of their marital status. The House of Commons largely supported the feminists' efforts to reform the laws so that women would not automatically lose their nationality on marriage. Members of Parliament introduced several bills to equalize the nationality laws that were read without division. The Government, however, consistently blocked the bills, citing the imperial nature of the nationality laws and Dominion disagreement with the change. This contest over nationality has been a neglected topic in the study of twentieth-century British history. Legal historians have, by and large, only described changes in the laws regarding married women's national status. While some historians of the women's movement in the British Isles have noted the equal nationality campaign, most have not realized how it can contribute to our understanding of interwar Britain and British feminism. Pat Thane, however, has seen in this topic an example of the way the Empire has influenced British culture.

17. Questioning the Government

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Bates ◽  
Peter Kerr ◽  
Ruxandra Serban
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Important Means ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Written Questions

This chapter examines how accountability is carried out in the UK Parliament through various questioning procedures which enable ministers and the government to explain and defend their decisions. Questioning the government provides an important means for Members of Parliament (MPs) and peers to hold the government, the prime minister, ministers, and departments to account. There are two main types of parliamentary questions: oral questions and written questions. Oral questions are both asked and answered on the Floor of the House of Commons or the House of Lords, whereas written questions are ‘often used to obtain detailed information about policies and statistics on the activities of government departments’. The chapter first explains these two types of parliamentary questions before discussing their purposes. It also considers debates over the issue of reforming parliamentary questions, and more specifcally Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs).

Anglo-Saxon Law

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Rabin
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Low Profile ◽  
Early English ◽  
Insight Into

A larger body of law survives from Anglo-Saxon England than from any other early medieval community. The standard edition of early English legislation, the Gesetze der Angelsachsen of Felix Liebermann (Liebermann 1903–1916), contains roughly seventy pre-Conquest texts, to which can be added well over a thousand Charters, Writs, and Wills. If one also includes the numerous surviving quasi-legislative texts, legal formularies and rituals, and homilies derived from legal sources, it is possible to gain a sense of both the diversity of Anglo-Saxon legal composition and the centrality of such texts to pre-Conquest culture. Yet the importance of the Anglo-Saxon legal corpus lies in more than just its size. Linguists observe that the legislation of Æthelbert (c. 604) is the earliest substantial text to survive in Old English, while monastic charters of the 11th and early 12th centuries are among the latest. Historians of the English Renaissance point out that the editio princeps of Anglo-Saxon law, William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568), was one of the first publications to result from the 16th-century revival of Old English scholarship and that a copy now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library even contains what may be a signature of Shakespeare himself. Americanists note the influence of Old English law on the thought of Thomas Jefferson while scholars of 19th-century literature see its traces in the writings of Henry Adams. Nonetheless, this material has yet to attract the scholarly interest given to either the literature of the period or the legal developments of the later Middle Ages. The centuries before the Norman Conquest rarely feature in courses on legal history and introductory Old English students receive only the most cursory exposure to pre-Conquest laws and charters. Despite its comparatively low profile, however, the study of Anglo-Saxon law offers valuable insight into early English concepts of Royal Authority and political identity. It reveals both the capacities and limits of the king’s regulatory power, and in so doing, provides crucial evidence for the process by which disparate kingdoms gradually merged to become a unified English state. More broadly, pre-Conquest legal texts shed light on the various ways in which cultural norms were established, enforced, and, in many cases, challenged. And perhaps most importantly, they provide unparalleled insight into the experiences of Anglo-Saxon England’s diverse inhabitants, both those who enforced the law and those subject to its sway.

The Representative System and the Calling of Elections

1973 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Ward
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Pierre Trudeau ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
Exhaustive Study ◽  
Representative System

Sometime between 30 October 1972 and the spring of 1973, the government led by the Rt. Hon. Pierre Trudeau, with fewer than half the members of the House of Commons belonging to the Liberal party, discovered that, unless it was prepared to use maps based on the 1961 census, one of the courses not immediately available to it was the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of another general election. The handicap (and it must also have particularly affected the strategy of the New Democratic party), was not for any constitutional reason; nor was it based on the possibility that the governor general might refuse the prime minister a dissolution. That possibility existed, although no one in the cabinet or Commons appears to have recognized it. Eugene Forsey concluded years ago, after his exhaustive study of the prerogatives governing dissolution: “Even where a great new issue of public policy has arisen, the Crown would be justified in refusing dissolution if Supply had not been voted, or a redistribution or franchise Act had not yet had time to come into operation, provided an alternative Government could be found, or provided the issue was not one which brooked no delay, e.g. a mandate for the despatch of troops overseas.” Two of the conditions noted by Dr Forsey three decades ago existed in 1972–3: a redistribution act had not yet had time to come into operation, and an alternative government could be found.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document