Hilton - Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?

THE NEW OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLAND
General Editor J. M. ROBERTS

ENGLAND
17831846

BOYD HILTON

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Boyd Hilton 2006

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ISBN 0198228309 9780198228301

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FOR
MARY
TOM ELIZA ZO

The first volume of Sir George Clarks Oxford History of England was published in 1934. Undertaking the General Editorship of a New Oxford History of England fortyfive years later it was hard not to feel overshadowed by its powerful influence and well-deserved status. Some of Clarks volumes (his own among them) were brilliant individual achievements, hard to rival and impossible to match. Of course, he and his readers shared a broad sense of the purpose and direction of such books. His successor can no longer be sure of doing that. The buildingblocks of the story, its reasonable and meaningful demarcations and divisions, the continuities and discontinuities, the priorities of different varieties of history, the place of narrativeall these things are now much harder to agree upon. We now know much more about many things, and think about what we know in different ways. It is not surprising that historians now sometimes seem unsure about the audience to which their scholarship and writing are addressed.

In the end, authors should be left to write their own books. Nonetheless, the New Oxford History of England is intended to be more than a collection of discrete or idiosyncratic histories in chronological order. Its aim is to give an account of the development of our country in time. It is hard to treat that development as just the history which unfolds within the precise boundaries of England, and a mistake to suggest that this implies a neglect of the histories of the Scots, Irish, and Welsh. Yet the institutional core of the story which runs from AngloSaxon times to our own is the story of a state structure built round the English monarchy and its effective successor, the Crown in Parliament, and that provides the only continuous articulation of the history of the peoples we today call British. It follows that there must be uneven, and sometimes discontinuous, treatment of much of the history of those peoples. The state story nevertheless, is an intelligible thread and to me appears still to justify both the title of this series and that of its predecessor.

If the attention given to the other kingdoms and the principality of Wales must reflect in this series their changing relationship to that central theme, this is not only way in which the emphasis of individual volumes will be different. Each author has been asked to bring forward what he or she sees as the most important topics explaining the history under study, taking account of the present state of historical knowledge, drawing attention to areas of dispute and to matters on which final judgement is at present difficult (or, perhaps, impossible) and not merely recapitulating what has recently been the fashionable centre of professional debate. But each volume, allowing for its special approach and proportions, must also provide a comprehensive account, in which politics is always likely to be prominent. Volumes have to be demarcated chronologically but continuities must not be obscured; vestigially or not, copyhold survived into the 1920s and the AngloSaxon shires until the 1970s (some of which were to be resurrected in the 1990s, too). Any single volume should be an entrypoint to the understanding of processes only slowly unfolding, sometimes across centuries. My hope is that in the end we shall have, as the outcome, a set of standard and authoritative histories, embodying the scholarship of generation, and not mere compendia in which the determinants are lost to sight among the detail.

J. M. ROBERTS

The pen might be mightier than the sword, but it is not always as quick. This book has taken a third as long to write as the events that it describes took to happen, or, to put it another way, about as long as the Great War that led to the creation and then destruction of a French imperium throughout most of continental Europe. During this books laboured gestation I have incurred so many debts to colleagues, students, and others that it is impossible to mention all of them by name. My first draft of a thankyou list was so long as almost to devalue the quality of the thanks on offer, besides which the longer the list the greater the solecism of inadvertently dropping someone off it. So I hope that my legion of intellectual creditors will understand if I pare this section down to bare essentials.

I must start with five people who are no longer alive to receive my thanks. Angus Macintyre was my first mentor. Anyone lucky enough to have been tutored or supervised by Angus will know how wonderfully inspiring and uplifting he could be. Bob Robson did not do uplift exactly, but he had an encyclopedic knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Britain, and was endlessly solicitous as I started on my long task. Colin Matthew was not so much solicitous as chivvying, but for thirty years I regarded him as my alter ego, the person with whom I shared all my thoughts about the nineteenth century, a period we gossiped about as though its inhabitants were alive and kicking among us. Arguably John Roberts, the general editor of this series, should have chivvied harder in the earlier stages. Like some other contributors, I feel guilty about the time I took to bring things to the boil. But no one could have asked for a wiser, shrewder, or kinder editor when at last the prose began to flow. This manuscript must have been almost the last thing John read. Perhaps the most moving letter I have ever received is the stoical, encouraging, and wholly unselfregarding one in which he informed me, two weeks before his death in 2003, that he physically could not read any further. A very recent loss is that of Maurice Cowling, a mesmerising colleague, sometimes brutal and alarming but always funny and endearing.