The tyranny of Richard III
To Tudor historians Richard III was a quintessence of tyranny. This belief was derived from the informed opinion of many who had experienced his brief reign. To them a tyrant was one who came to the throne without right or who governed against the interests of the political nation. There can be little doubt that Richard usurped the throne: it is also the case that in one important respect his government alienated a significant section of the nobility and gentry. Following the revolts of late 1483 Richard systematically placed trusted northern adherents in control of the unreliable and hostile southern counties. This action transgressed the unwritten law that the rule of the counties lay in the hands of their native elites. Its highhandedness was recognized by the author of the Croyland continuation and its pattern can be reconstructed from the record of grants from the Crown during the reign. Not only does the settlement of 1483-4 provide dramatic evidence in support of the Tudor tradition, but its circum...
St Thomas More
In 1529, the same year Sir Thomas More was named Chancellor of England, he first published A dyaloge against Luther and Tyndale. This work which is divided into four books, and with a preface contains approximately 175,000 words, touched off the first great religious controversy carried on in English. The Dyaloge was written at the request of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, to refute the heresies in the Lutheran works that had slipped through the tight censorship on the London book trade and also to take issue with Tyndale’s unauthorized English version of the New Testament.
The Provincial Centre at Camulodunum: Towards an Historical Context
Present assessment of the provincial enclosure at Camulodunum, more particularly how far it can be compared to the standard picture of similar centres elsewhere, is inevitably constrained by the limited evidence at our disposal. With no numismatic sources to draw on and in the absence of a single record of the provincial priesthood — a striking void that calls for comment — documentary testimony is restricted to what can be made of two passages in the literary authorities. The first, a notorious sneer in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (VIII.3), tells only that a temple of some sort was associated somehow with the emperor Claudius. The second text, an obscure allusion in Tacitus, is at first sight no more enlightening but, on closer analysis, the phrase templum Divo Claudio constitutum (Ann. xiv.31) yields the invaluable inference that the temple was to the deified, not the living Claudius; in which case construction must have been begun in a.d. 54 or later. Archaeological data throw no light on the origins of the temple or of the precinct in which it stood but exploration has steadily enlarged our knowledge of the site itself, and understanding of the remains has now reached the stage at which, for all its puzzling lacunae, the centre is as well known in some ways as the triple-tiered complex at Tarraco, the provincial enclave of Hispania Citerior. We have arrived at the point where the British sanctuary and its counterparts on the Continent can be mutually illuminating.