ABSTRACT
The editors of his Festschrift described Lawrence Stone as “one of the towering figures of the historical profession”. This is true both literally-he is enormously tall-and metaphorically-for all his academic life he has been at the centre of innovation and controversy in British historical writing, particularly in the early modern period. My purpose is to use Stone’s writings as a barometer to illustrate some of the changes over the last half century in the writing of history in this country, particularly the way it has interacted with other disciplines. Historical writing is itself a dialectical process: innovators in the field respond positively or negatively to the state of the discipline as they find it in their formative years. At the very real risks of simplification and of adopting too schematic an approach, it may still be helpful to present initially a brief outline of the earlier development in professional historical writing in this country before the beginning of Stone’s academic career during the Second World War. For much of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries many leaders of the emerging historical profession were fascinated by the problems of medieval English society and by the fields of politics and law. Medieval history seemed to offer the greatest opportunities for progress: it appeared that there the gap was largest between the levels of understanding which could be derived, on the one hand, mainly from traditional chronicle sources and, on the other, from the newly available archives of central government, made more accessible by the rapid expansion of editing and publication. For the first time medieval history could be put on a serious academic footing: this was clearly a period in which disciples of Ranke or Comte could show what progress was possible from precise attention to the records of judicial, administrative and political history. At the same time adherents of various historical schools saw the Middle Ages as a key to many of the developments on which they wished to focus: whether their main concern was to emphasize the evolution of political and personal liberty through representative institutions and a principled legal system, the development of the nation state, the (often connected) growth of strong institutions of central government, or even the disappearance of old English liberties before Norman centralization, it seemed that medieval history was of central concern. Fierce debate arose, for example, over the origins of the open-
field system, the effects of the Norman Conquest, the significance of Magna Carta, the early history of the jury, the evolution of Parliament and the role of the Commons. Most of these disputes had contemporary political resonance, perhaps most famously (or notoriously) in the many adaptations for different political purposes of the notion of a “Norman Yoke” still often seen, even in the nineteenth century, as dominating English class relations. Medieval history generated the greatest professional interest, the most marked progress and the most heated controversies.
