Volume 20 Issue 6 June 1970

Mikhail Speransky

Michael Jenkins describes a reforming minister of genius and, according to Napoleon, ‘the only clear head in Russia’; Mikhail Speransky fell from power in the year 1812.

A Page at Versailles

Fourteen years before the French Revolution, writes Felice Harcourt, the son of a Belgian nobleman joined the court of the Bourbons.

Doctors' Commons

Leonard W. Cowie traces the development of a peculilarly English legal institution, from the pre-Reformation era, into Dickensian times.

Longitude and the Sea Clock

John F. Bailey describes how all early navigators, until the mid-eighteenth century, were baffled by the problem of longitude in finding their ships’ position.

A Sixteenth-Century Farmer’s Year

Michael Paffard opens for the visitor Thomas Tusser’s books on husbandry, which expounded the practical virtues of ‘thrift’ to Tudor farmers.