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The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Eliz… - J. C. D. Clark
" "The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth I) over many centuries. The cult of the English common law was already ancient, and was revitalised by texts like Matthew Hale's The History of the Common Law of England (1713) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). But the biggest body of literature outlining a shared experience concerned the English church. It was here especially that an image of a free, Protestant people was worked out and sustained, whether in best-sellers like John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1559 and many later editions) or in heavyweight theological texts like Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593; first complete edition, 1662). Between them, these texts kept alive the interpretation long ago placed on English history by the Venerable Bede (d.735) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum that its unifying theme was providential destiny and survival in the face of overwhelming odds.
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About J. C. D. Clark
Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark (born 28 February 1951) is a British historian of both British and American history. He was an undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge. Having previously held posts at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford into 1996, he has since held the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History at the University of Kansas.
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Alternative Names:
J C D Clark
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Jonathan Clark
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Jonathan Charles Douglas
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Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark
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Additional quotes by J. C. D. Clark
History uncovers the inter-relatendess of problems which practical men seek to isolate: recent crises should remind us how mutually dependent monarchy, church and Parliament still are if each is to survive. And their mutual dependence is a clue to their importance. Republicans disagree, for they see the crown as an anachronistic survival, left perched on top of a society already secular and republican to the core. As so often, this half truth is rather less than half true. Whatever the traumas of the 1640s or 1830s, they hardly ranked with 1776, 1789 or 1917: much survives, in the machinery of government (the Queen's peace, the Queen's ministers, unpoliticised armed forces), in manners (deferential more than egalitarian), values (altruistic more than radical-individualist), even speech (the Queen's English rather than cultural pluralism). Tony Benn is right to see England as essentially unrevolutionised; that indeed is his problem. England's differences from societies republican in their essence are still wide.
In any period, as we now see, we have been asked to believe that the rich are always getting richer, the poor always getting poorer, the middle class always rising, the aristocracy always about to disintegrate. The old scenario no longer convinces: it fails to identify and date the real transformations which did occur. Revisionist historians of the ancien regime in England, 1660–1832, being aware that "class" emerged as a terminology only in the last decade or so of their period, and then only as a minority dialect, looked back with incredulity and amazement on the Old Guard in the early-Stuart period, labouring to explain the English Revolution in terms of class conflict, of rising or declining classes, or the aspirations of a bourgeoisie.
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