England Under the Tudors

England Under the Tudors

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Title: England Under the Tudors
Author: Arthur D. Innes
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ENGLAND UNDER THE TUDORS
BY ARTHUR D. INNES
SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
FOURTH EDITION
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
BY THE GENERAL EDITOR
In England, as in France and Germany, the main characteristic of the
last twenty years, from the point of view of the student of history, has
been that new material has been accumulating much faster than it can
be assimilated or absorbed. The standard histories of the last generation
need to be revised, or even to be put aside as obsolete, in the light of
the new information that is coming in so rapidly and in such vast bulk.
But the students and researchers of to-day have shown little enthusiasm
as yet for the task of re-writing history on a large scale. We see issuing
from the press hundreds of monographs, biographies, editions of old
texts, selections from correspondence, or collections of statistics,
mediaeval and modern. But the writers who (like the late Bishop
Stubbs or Professor Samuel Gardiner) undertake to tell over again the
history of a long period, with the aid of all the newly discovered
material, are few indeed. It is comparatively easy to write a monograph
on the life of an individual or a short episode of history. But the
modern student, knowing well the mass of material that he has to
collate, and dreading lest he may make a slip through overlooking some
obscure or newly discovered source, dislikes to stir beyond the
boundary of the subject, or the short period, on which he has made
himself a specialist.
Meanwhile the general reading public continues to ask for standard
histories, and discovers, only too often, that it can find nothing between

school manuals at one end of the scale and minute monographs at the
other. The series of which this volume forms a part is intended to do
something towards meeting this demand. Historians will not sit down,
as once they were wont, to write twenty-volume works in the style of
Hume or Lingard, embracing a dozen centuries of annals. It is not to be
desired that they should--the writer who is most satisfactory in dealing
with Anglo-Saxon antiquities is not likely to be the one who will best
discuss the antecedents of the Reformation, or the constitutional history
of the Stuart period. But something can be done by judicious
co-operation: it is not necessary that a genuine student should refuse to
touch any subject that embraces an epoch longer than a score of years,
nor need history be written as if it were an encyclopaedia, and cut up
into small fragments dealt with by different hands.
It is hoped that the present series may strike the happy mean, by
dividing up English History into periods that are neither too long to be
dealt with by a single competent specialist, nor so short as to tempt the
writer to indulge in that over-abundance of unimportant detail which
repels the general reader. They are intended to give something more
than a mere outline of our national annals, but they have little space for
controversy or the discussion of sources, save in periods such as the
dark age of the 5th and 6th centuries after Christ, where the criticism of
authorities is absolutely necessary if we are to arrive at any sound
conclusions as to the course of history. A number of maps are to be
found at the end of each volume which, as it