Review Articles

The United States Foreign Service. MARTIN WEIL. A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service. New York: W.W. Norton & Company 1978. Pp. 313; RICHARD HUME WERKING. The Master Architects: Building the United States Foreign Service, 1890–1913. Lexington: The United Press of Kentucky 1977. Pp. xvi, 330; RACHEL WEST. The Department of State on the Eve of the First World War. Athens: The University of Georgia Press 1978. Pp. viii, 183. Reviewed by F.M. Carroll

Friends in Need, Allies in Competition. PETER LOWE. Great Britain and the Origins of the Pacific War: a Study of British Policy in East Asia, 1937–1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977. Pp. 318; JAMES R. LEUTZE. Bargaining for Supremacy: Anglo-American Naval Collaboration, 1937–1941. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1977. Pp. 328; WILLIAM ROGER LOUIS. Imperialism at Bay 1941–1945: The United States and the Decolonisation of the British Empire. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1977. Pp. 595; CHRISTOPHER THORNE. Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan, 1941–1945. London: Hamish Hamilton 1978. Pp. xxii, 772. Reviewed by T.B. Millar     

敦煌印沙佛文与燃灯文校录补正

王三庆、王雅仪先生联名撰写的文章《敦煌文献印沙佛文的整理研究》将印沙佛事的研究向前作了推进,但是文末所附的"印沙佛文本"和"《燃灯文》文本"存在着一些问题。本文试对两位先生整理的录文进行校勘,希望能利于该研究的进一步发展。     

胡适史料补阙

2003年《胡适全集》出版后,笔者发现该书遗珠之憾比较严重,即致力于胡适史料的辑佚补遗。三年来,笔者对北洋军阀统治时期有关胡适史料进行较为系统的勾稽,薄著成效。这些新辑的史料,涉及到胡适的方方面面,如政治活动、文学革命、思想观念、教育主张、人际关系,等等。现从中撷出若干,供识者采择。     

Abstracts of Articles

STEPHEN M. LEWIS, ‘Vikings on the Ribble: Their Origin and Longphuirt’. Parts of north-west England were settled by groups of Scandinavians in the tenth century, certainly Cumbria and the Wirral. South-west and northern Lancashire also witnessed Scandinavian immigration. Some, but very likely not all, of these Scandinavians had come from Dublin after they were temporarily expelled by the Irish in 902. But where did these Irish Northmen establish their initial winter camps and their first ship-bases, what were called longphuirt (sing. longphort) in Ireland? There is little doubt that such bases existed before some of these Irish exiles stopped being a raiding force and started to settle down. Not one ship-base has ever been found in north-west England, unlike in Ireland or even in other parts of England. Based on an examination of geography and longphort site-types, this article proposes and evaluates the three most likely sites for such longphuirt along the Ribble estuary. The historical background and context for Scandinavian activity and settlement in south-west Lancashire is also discussed; as are related events in Ireland and Northumbria. The period covered is roughly 902 to 919.     

Abstracts of Articles

ANDREW BREEZE, ‘Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37’. A mega-eruption of 535 in the Americas produced a volcanic winter in 536-37, with crop failure throughout the Northern Hemisphere. It thus reveals a Welsh annal for 537 on 'mortality in Britain and in Ireland’ as referring to famine, not plague. Mention in the same annal of Arthur’s final battle at Camlan, located at Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, will further point to a campaign by starving North Britons under Arthur's leadership to seize food-supplies from their neighbours. The extreme weather phenomena of 536-37 also suggest that Gildas wrote his De Excidio in the summer of 536 (as implied by David Woods of Cork), because in chapter 93 of that work he alludes to a ‘thick mist and black night’ sitting ‘upon the whole island’ of Britain, but says nothing on the harvest failure which it led to. We may infer as well that the Britons defeated the Saxons at ‘Mount Badon’ in north Wiltshire in early 493, because Gildas declares that the battle was won at the time of his birth, forty-three years and a month before he was writing.’

DAVID M. YORATH, ‘Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windemere, c. 1441–99’. To date, researchers have little cared for Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windermere (c. 1441–99), Member of Parliament for Westmorland, conservator of the peace with Scotland, escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland and steward of Penrith. There exists no ODNB article or source-based examination of his career — only a brief, error-strewn note in J. B. Wedgwood’s ‘Biographies of the Members of the Commons House 1439-1509’. This is unfitting, for it is clear there was a mastery of technique about Moresby — something that not only ensured his survival during one of the most turbulent periods in English history, but also made him an indispensable political figure, regardless of regime. What follows is an examination of his hitherto unstudied career, with some remarks on wider developments pertinent to the history of the North West.

VICTORIA SPENCE, ‘Adapting to the Elizabethan Settlement: Religious Faith and the Drive towards Conformity in Craven, 1559 to 1579’. This article explores the reception in Craven to Elizabethan religious reform. Until the 1569 Rebellion the interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement was broad, pragmatic and accommodating. Following Elizabeth’s excommunication and the stringent enforcement of conformity, Catholics, supported by Marian and seminary priests, resorted to recusancy and a separate Catholic identity. Archbishops Grindal and Sandys installed university-educated preaching clerics to establish and promote conformity in the northern diocese. Many were Puritan nonconformists who felt reform was incomplete, and opposed a hierarchical Church with surviving Catholic rituals. Increasingly confessional identities diverged, although eventually the majority of the Craven laity adapted and conformed.

IMOGEN PECK, ‘The Great Unknown: The Negotiation and Narration of Death by English War Widows, 1647–60’. The truism that death is life’s only certainty may have seemed far from obvious to the women of mid seventeenth-century England. For the conditions of the British Civil Wars, in addition to causing significant physical destruction, also brought much uncertainty to the lives of the civilian population, who could struggle to ascertain whether men serving in the wars were alive or dead. Drawing on the relief petitions of war widows and court depositions from the northern counties of England, this article explores the impact this uncertainty had on the wives of Civil War soldiers. In particular, it focuses on the strategies women used when navigating the problem of how they could know, or prove, that their husbands were dead, the ways they narrated and interpreted the loss of a spouse, and the predicaments faced by ‘phantom widows’: those women who believed their husbands to have been killed in the wars, only for them to return home alive sometime later. In doing so, it illuminates a little-studied dimension of female experience during the revolutionary period, while also contributing to our understanding of early modern mentalities more broadly, and, in particular, attitudes to death and civil war.

CONOR O’BRIEN, ‘Attitudes to St Cuthbert’s Body during the Nineteenth Century’.

St Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral was opened in 1827, occasioning the start of a cycle of polemic and counter-polemic between Protestant and Roman Catholic writers throughout the rest of the century. The excavation of 1827 aimed to disprove the medieval legends about the incorruption of Cuthbert’s body, but it (and the many texts which debated its findings throughout the course of the nineteenth century) must be understood in the light of local religious controversy as much as of Victorian antiquarianism. The texts which addressed the issue of Cuthbert’s body in the years which followed were concerned with religious, as well as historical, truth and reveal shifting attitudes in both the Anglican and Catholic communities to the role of saints, miracles and relics within their own forms of Christianity. While this paper mainly concerns a comparatively small element of Victorian religious debate, one focused upon issues of local interest and identity, it problematises some of the traditional paradigms used to understand nineteenth-century scholarship. Not the increasing secularisation of historical practice and antiquarianism, but the continuing, albeit changing, importance of Durham’s patron saint, is the most striking feature of the dispute.

EDWARD M. SPIERS, ‘Yorkshire and the First Day of the Somme’. Given the prominence of the First Day on the Somme in the UK’s collective memory of the First World War, it is timely to reconsider the impact of that disastrous battle upon Yorkshire, a county that contributed more fighting units (c. 20 per cent), and suffered more casualties, than any other county in the United Kingdom. The fighting experiences of Yorkshire units ranged from utter disaster (not even reaching their own front line), and suffering the largest proportion of casualties of any unit in the British army, to making the largest gains of ground on the day. The spread of bereavement, however, was far from uniform, and so partly on account of the units engaged, and their recruiting whether pre-war (where regular) or wartime (in the case of Kitchener’s Service battalions), losses were concentrated within the West Riding. Moreover, despite the heavy losses within the “Pals” battalions, the legendary burden of bereavement within local communities did not apply uniformly because some units in 1916 were nothing like the “Pals” of 1914. The process of releasing details about deaths over days and weeks, with a huge ‘missing’ sub-group, robbed the First Day of anything like the significance it now holds. The dominant Press narrative, supported by letters from the front, remained overwhelmingly positive about the battle, the role of Yorkshire units and the prospects for the war itself. Political, military and religious elites reinforced this narrative at the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of the war, which coupled with the reception of the film, ‘Battle of the Somme’, assisted in sustaining the coping mechanisms within the country.     

胡适史料续辑

2003年以来笔者致力于胡适史料的辑佚工作,初具成效。这些佚文经笔者整理后分别刊登于《历史档案》2004年第4期、2005年第1-2期、《民国档案》2006年第4期、《历史档案》2007年第2-3期、《文献》2007年第3期,对于促进胡适研究的深入不无小补。最近,笔者在撰写《安徽通史》有关章节的过程中,又发现了一批有关胡适的新材料,其中数则颇有文献研究价值。现整理公布,以供同好甄录。     

张謇佚文

随着近年来对中国近代著名实业家、教育家张謇研究的深入,相关史料的收集、整理、校订、出版工作也不断得以开拓,在原有《张季子九录》(中华书局民国二十年版)、《张謇日记》的基础上,先后出版了《张謇存稿》(上海人民出版社1987年版)、《张謇全集》(江苏古籍出版杜1994年版)及《张謇著作及其事业档案资料篇目索引》(江苏人民出版社1999年2版)等,但关于张謇的文稿和言词记录仍有大量散佚在以上汇编之外,笔者对此稍有留心,现将所见佚文点校整理,希有裨于学术研究。