The Wordsworth Dictionary of British History [antikvár]

t Foreword \ Norman Stone, Professor of Modem History, , University of Oxford > The present Director of the N-ational Gallery in London, a ' Scot, remarked upon appointment that when he was young he ' had thought of England as a place you had to go through to • reach France. Another immigrant to England remarked in the 1940s that when you came to England you loved the first six ' months, hated the next ten years and then began to love the country once more. As a Scot myself I can see what these people mean. In fact I only began to see the great interest of English history when I started to write a book about continental Europe in 1900: England fitted into my European pattern, but in a very [f i odd way. For instance, England had a Conservative party that I > managed, quite early on, to do what continental equivalents - f i' i the ancestors of today's Christian Democrats - disastrously | ^ failed to do. Throne, Altar, Nobility got votes, maintained i; stable government that was nevertheless creative and was even I ¦ ' on occasion susceptible to argument. Therefore England never vacillated between Communism and Fascism as was the case in if i other European countries and, from roughly the middle of the | eighteenth century, the English model had a hold on the European mind, ^ ' In other words, something serious happened in the British 1. : Isles about which every historian must be interested. The ? trouble is that it is quite complicated and all kinds of oddities | abound. For instance, when would you guess that serfdom was h abolished in England? Everyone else in the Western World, | including the Scots, got round to it in the later part of the , eighteenth century. However, I learn from John Kenyon's | magnificently efficient book, that serfdom was only formally I abolished in England this century. 'Copyhold', if you look it up, 1 meant doing feudal services (doubtless the handing over of a ^ mangelwurzel on Boxing Day) in return for land and, though partially abolished in 1922, these final relics of feudal services ^ were not finally abolished in England until 1935. Therefore a fascinating question about English history is: why was England