Downloaded from the Humanities Digital Library http://www.humanities-digital-library.org Open Access books made available by the School of Advanced Study, University of London Press ***** Publication details: The Creighton Century, 1907–2007 edited by David Bates, Jennifer Wallis and Jane Winters http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/creighton-century DOI: 10.14296/720.9781912702749 ***** This edition published 2020 by UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, United Kingdom ISBN 978-1-912702-74-9 (PDF edition) This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses IHR Conference Series The Creighton Century, 1907–2007 Edited by David Bates, Jennifer Wallis and Jane Winters The Creighton Century, 1907–2007 The Creighton Century, 1907–2007 Edited by David Bates, Jennifer Wallis and Jane Winters LONDON INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Published by UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU See individual lectures for copyright information All introductory chapters © their respective authors 2009 Foreword © David Bates and Jo Fox 2020 All rights reserved This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Available to download free or to purchase at https://www.sas.ac.uk/publications ISBN 978-1-912702-75-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-912702-74-9 (PDF) Cover image: Mandell Creighton by Sir Hubert von Herkomer, oil on canvas, 1902 Copyright: National Portrait Gallery, London Contents Foreword to the 2020 edition vii Foreword to the 2009 edition xiii Acknowledgements xv Notes on contributors xvii Robert Evans, ‘The Creighton century: British historians and Europe, 1907–2007’ 1 R. B. Haldane, ‘The meaning of truth in history’ (1913), with an introduction by Justin Champion 25 R. W. Seton-Watson, ‘A plea for the study of contemporary history’ (1928), with an introduction by Martyn Rady 55 R. H. Tawney, ‘The economic advance of the squirearchy in the two generations before the Civil War’ [published as ‘The rise of the gentry, 1558–1640’] (1937), with an introduction by F. M. L. Thompson 77 Lucy Sutherland, ‘The City of London and the opposition to government, 1768–74: a study in the rise of metropolitan radicalism’ (1958), with an introduction by P. J. Marshall 123 Joseph Needham, ‘The guns of Kaifêng-Fu: China’s development of man’s first chemical explosive’ (1979), with an introduction by Janet Hunter 155 v The Creighton Century Keith Thomas, ‘The perception of the past in early modern England’ (1983), with an introduction by Ariel Hessayon 181 Donald Coleman, ‘Myth, history and the Industrial Revolution’ (1989), with an introduction by Julian Hoppit 219 Ian Nish, ‘The uncertainties of isolation: Japan between the wars’ (1992), with an introduction by Antony Best 247 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The present as history: writing the history of one’s own time’ (1993), with an introduction by Virginia Berridge 269 R. I. Moore, ‘The war against heresy in medieval Europe’ (2004), with an introduction by Jinty Nelson 287 vi Foreword to the 2020 edition The first edition of The Creighton Century was published in 2009 to mark the recent centenary of the Creighton Lectures at the University of London. The lecture series was established, and substantially supported by, the historian and social activist Louise Hume Creighton (1856–1930) to commemorate her husband, the historian and Church of England bishop Mandell Creighton (1843–1901). The first lecture was delivered on 4 October 1907 and has since been followed by annual events at the University. For The Creighton Century, I and my fellow editors – Jennifer Wallis and Jane Winters – chose ten lectures from the first 100 years of the series. Each lecture was introduced by a historian who was then teaching at the University of London. In addition to these ten lectures and commentaries our 2009 collection included the published version of Robert Evans’s 2007 Creighton Lecture, ‘The Creighton century: British historians and Europe, 1907–2007’. In 2009 The Creighton Century was available only as a print publication. I am therefore delighted that the Institute of Historical Research (I.H.R.) and University of London Press are now reissuing the collection in July 2020 as a free open access edition, with this new joint foreword by myself and Jo Fox, the current director of the Institute. After re-reading my original foreword, in preparation for writing these new remarks, my first reaction was to repeat everything that I wrote in 2009. The opinions and sentiments it contains certainly merit repetition. But re-reading the volume steadily moved my thoughts in a different direction, back to the ideals that animated Mandell and Louise Creighton and forward to the year 2020 and the unknowable beyond. In relation to the first, I started to think of the Creightons’ belief in the international vii The Creighton Century importance of the study of history and the unshakeable commitment to history’s significance in national and public life. And as far as the second is concerned, while I need hardly remind present readers that 2020 is the year of Covid-19, it may be necessary to jog the memories of future ones. This is also a year of much else besides. It is assuredly a time when we are starting to reconsider the inherited values and ethics that have shaped the way in which we think about the past and write history. Tempting as it is, I cannot – and must not – start to paraphrase the extraordinary richness of the eleven Creighton Lectures reprinted in this volume. Nor indeed the insightful commentaries by distinguished historians based in the colleges, schools and institutes of the University of London. But no one could surely object if I made an initial specific reference to Eric Hobsbawm’s 1993 lecture, ‘The present as history’, with its theme of writing the history of one’s own time. Both poignant and profound as a reflection on the twentieth century and, at the end, on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ideals it was supposed to embody, the lecture’s concluding broadening of perspective and Hobsbawm’s reflections on how history might be written in the future supplied signposts to be followed. I found the invitation to reflect on the subsequent thirty years just one of the multiple messages his lecture conveyed. It also made me wonder how he might have interpreted those years if he had been able to revisit and update the lecture. The medievalist that I am cannot resist making reference to R. I. Moore’s lecture on the twelfth- and thirteenth-century war on heresy and the profound social, legal, political and cultural changes it brought about. Here is another case of a historian changing opinions over a life- time; Jinty Nelson makes this point in her commentary. The war, as Bob Moore says in a lecture at which I presided in 2004, can be seen as a case of the imposition from above of a set of ideological beliefs that led to the destruction of thousands of livelihoods and major political and religious change. He also comments that it had happened before and was to happen many times again, a reminder that we never neglect the seemingly remote past. Alongside these two lectures, and no matter what historical period they were dealing with, many others in this volume reflect on the use that the present they were writing about has made of the past. This is clearly there in the lectures given by Robert Evans, R. B. Haldane, R. W. Seton- Watson, Keith Thomas and Donald Coleman. viii Foreword to the 2020 edition A foreword must be brief. But I must speculate on how Robert Evans might deliver his 2007 centenary lecture on British historians and Europe, which I heard, in these post-Brexit years. This lecture must certainly be required reading for anyone charged with responsibility for this country’s future. And when I re-read the other lectures, I can only reflect that R. H. Tawney’s has surely been more productive of constructive controversy than most and that Lucy Sutherland’s on eighteenth-century London radicalism is another one that must give food for thought in present times. And that in these times, when university and school history syllabuses and historical perspectives are becoming increasingly global, the lectures by Joseph Needham and Ian Nish – devoted respectively to Chinese and Japanese history – widen horizons in remarkable ways. I will conclude by saying that, approximately twelve years after writing my first foreword, it has been an immensely stimulating experience to be invited to write a second one for this new edition of The Creighton Century. All the lectures seem just as ‘relevant’ as they were then. To read them in 2020 is every bit as thought-provoking as it was in 2008–9. I might even say that it has been more so, second time around. Alongside other recent experiences, I have been made to think about the history of my own times. A lot has changed since the Creighton centenary year of 2007. New values indicate that there are subjects which we would now want to be there in the first one hundred years. That they are not is ultimately a reflection on how the discipline continues to evolve and needs to change. All of this fully justifies the reissue of this volume. The breadth of historical vision that it brings together makes this collection required reading for all who are committed – as Louise and Mandell Creighton were – to the cause of history in national, public and international life.