Charter diplomatics and norms of landholding and lordship between the Humber and Forth, c.1066-c.1250
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Address and Delivery in Anglo-Norman Royal Charters
The writ is now widely recognized as an innovative diplomatic instrument, created in Anglo-Saxon England, developed by Anglo-Norman rulers, and by the end of the twelfth-century influential elsewhere. Its essence is that it was delivered to a particular person or body responsible for the appropriate aspect of the administration of the realm or the doing of royal justice. In diplomatic terms, this is expressed in the address clause which is generally the vital clue to the way a document would be used and therefore to what it was meant to accomplish. There was an inherent linkage between the nature of the transaction, the person or body to whom it would be delivered, and the address clause. Who actually delivered the document would vary according to the nature of the business too, but the documents themselves do not spell out this step in the process: that must be inferred from understanding the relationship between address and function.
Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity
Historians working in the present day, just like their medieval and early modern predecessors, are confronted with difficult choices when they write of human population groups.1 When, if at all, is it reasonable to employ the word race, the word nation, the word tribe ? What collective term best describes, say, the Goths, the English, the Jews? What meaning does the concept “ethnic identity” have? It is hard to do without some collective terms, but neither the medieval nor the modern terminology of race and ethnicity is simple or uncomplicated. Even the distinction between those two central terms, race and ethnicity, is drawn in different ways by different people. In the United States both popular and official usage tends to associate race with the troubled history of white and black, while the term ethnicity summons up Italians, Irish, or Greeks, for example. Hence the former term suggests a distinction based on an inherited biological feature, skin color, while the latter points to cultural differences between groups. Recent large-scale immigration into the United States from Asia and Latin America has complicated the issue by posing the question of whether the categories Oriental and Hispanic belong to the question of “race” or the question of “ethnicity.” For the historian, such usage is to be regarded as an interesting fact about the intellectual and political history of our own times but cannot itself provide a tool of analysis. The expedients of the U.S. Census or Immigration administration are no starting point for scholarly inquiry. Among social scientists of the present generation ethnicity has a different set of connotations. For them it serves as an acceptable alternative to race, a word that many consider permanently unusable because of its association with racism. In the discourse of the social sciences, the word ethnicity with this meaning is recent, the first occurrence recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dating to 1953. (An earlier meaning was “paganism,” but