Putting the boat in the water.

Just as you can't start a journey at its destination, you can't start reading history at the period that interests you. All the great histories of the 17th century provide examples of this. Rushworth, who wanted to write about the Civil War, found that he had to go back to 1618—and spend most of two volumes—to provide the necessary background.

But where to start? The problem is like floating a river: you want to put in far enough upstream that you explore it all, but at some point you must choose an arbitrary, convenient access point, put the boat in the water, and try to pick up the flow.

The first 49 pages—Chapter 1—of Gardiner's History of England give a very brief view of the headwaters of the stream of history we will tour. His choice of incidents is arbitrary, and one might say quirky, but it scarcely matters because he consciously decided to leave so much of it out.

I recommend that you read the entire chapter, but if you don't have time for that much, start around page 29, where we see some of the structural changes in English religion that will have great importance later on.

Think of this part of the tour as a bullet train ride to the country we will tour. I remember riding the fast train from Frankfurt airport to Köln in Germany. At Bonn, where the train slowed, I saw an elegant building which I told myself must have been the Poppelsdorf, the palace of the Prince-Elector. In fact, all I know is that such a building does exist in Bonn (it is the main building of the University), but not whether it is the building I saw. That is the level of understanding you should expect to get from Chapter 1.

We will pick up at page 42—the death of Elizabeth—next time.

At the bottom of page 2, Gardiner comments that it would be more appropriate to have a statue of Edward I in front of Parliament than that of Richard Lion-Heart. I had not known that this statue was move to Palace Yard only in 1860 (it was in Hyde Park before), and therefore would have been fresh in Gardiner's mind.

On page 7, Gardiner mentions two statutes that greatly affected the relations of the English state with Rome. The Statute of Provisors, in the reign of Edward I, dealt with nominations to church positions by the Pope; it said, in essence, that if someone other than the Pope has the right of a nomination, the pontiff may not usurp it. The Statute of Præmunire, in the reign of Richard II, forbade the appeal of judicial decisions outside the realm of England—and specifically appeals to Rome. (Gardiner assumes you knew this; pardon me if you did.)

At the top of page 8 is the first of 633 footnote references, and the note itself is a good example of what to expect from Gardiner's asides. Many are citations, of course; some give critical background on sources; and some, like this one, are just remarks: "Chaucer not being a medieval poet at all, except in point of time, but standing in the same relation to Shakspere as that in which Wycliffe stands to Luther." The poet he is discussing in the text is of course Dante.

The Colet mentioned in conjunction with Sir Thomas More on page 9 is an interesting figure, John Colet, the founder of St. Paul's School.

I'm going to break off at page 12 because there Gardiner mentions Francis Bacon's defense of Elizabeth, and I believe there is no easily accessible English translation of it on the web. I'll take a few hours to put one together [Done.] and then add some more random observations on the first chapter.