Charter diplomatics and norms of landholding and lordship between the Humber and Forth, c.1066-c.1250
ii
The Benedictine revival in the north: the last bulwark of Anglo-Saxon monasticism?
The midland houses of Winchcombe and Evesham restored monasticism to the north in a fervent and wholly English form. No one can read the history of this migration and the subsequent history of Durham without feeling that here, at least, English monastic life was sound.’ In these words, Knowles summed up his view of the type of monastic observance which was instituted in the houses of the northern renovatio after the Norman Conquest. Certainly there were important Anglo-Saxon elements present in the revival of Benedictine monasticism in the north of England; Durham, Whitby and St Mary’s, York, owed much to the Anglo-Saxon monastic life as retained at Worcester and Evesham after the Norman Conquest.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.