ABSTRACT
A different view of Tawney, and of Elton, however, was given in 1995 by Elton’s successor as Regius Professor at Cambridge, Patrick Collinson. His lecture was called “Tudor England revisited.” Its tone was sombre, but the jokes were light. Collinson was respectful of his predecessor’s achievements, but not of his legacy. The legacy of Elton’s “Tudor England”, in Collinson’s view, was: political history which was skewed towards the governing class; parliaments minus ideas; economy and the society relegated to noises-off. As a sixteenth-century historian, Collinson regretted that the seventeenth century was now having all the best tunes: would future undergraduates want to study Tudor England? Collinson’s title was a pun: he was revisiting Tudor England in two senses-referring both to the field of study, and to the book of that title. For he chose the sixth annual Bindoff lecture at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, to commemorate S.T.Bindoff ‘s Tudor England, first published as a Pelican History in 1950. And he did so by honouring the insights which Bindoff had derived primarily, in his view, from Tawney.
