ABSTRACT
Once upon a time historians of England did not have to worry about Humpty Dumpty’s reply to Alice, in making sense of the words they used to describe things. They had confidence in a knowable past and believed they could enter into some dialogue with it through the philological methods of the German School. Archival study gave direct access to a phenomenal world and had as its chief concern the story of the building of the modern sovereign state. This building had an architecture resting on the solid foundation of events, each marking a turning in the road leading from 1485 to 1832-framing dates in state-building and the shaping of democracy,
It is now rarely asserted that the accession of Henry VII ended the divisions and civil conflict that had haunted the fifteenth century or that the first Reform Bill marked the triumph of democracy. Even the notion that in the Tudor era an ascendant Commons had emerged as a force capable of limiting royal power has been modified almost beyond recognition. We are now told that what was forged in the furnace of the Reformation was a nation-state about the core of royal sovereignty. Parliament appears as a body confmed in the main to legislation in aid of the crown.2
