There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.

In 1591 Julius Caesar, then judge of the High Court of Admiralty, initiated ‘ an important experiment…in the Admiralty court's continuing quest for greater respect and authority’. Despite high expectations on the part of Caesar, however, the experiment, a circuit of the west and southwest of England undertaken ‘in hopes of forcing the local authorities in those regions to submit to the supremacy’ of the Admiralty, was abortive. Caesar, beset by corrupt local officials and profiteering inhabitants, abandoned his circuit when only half completed and after obtaining results far less than he had anticipated. Caesar's failure, according to Lamar Hill, the historian of the ill-fated experiment, was not merely that of one Westminster bureaucrat unable to impose his authority in the provinces.

In the final chapter of the final volume of his magisterial Commentaries on the laws of England, Sir William Blackstone sketched the’rise, progress, and gradual improvements of the laws of England’. Nearing the end of that chapter, he laid it down as his considered opinion ‘that the constitution of England had arrived to its full vigour, and the true balance between liberty and prerogative was happily established by law, in the reign of king Charles the second’. Now this is not a self-evident truth, for that reign is more likely to conjure up in our minds (along with Nell Gwynn and other not strictly legal relationships) unhappy visions of quo warranto proceedings against borough charters; the perjuries of Titus Oates; the double jeopardy of Stephen College; and Sir William Scroggs and Sir George Jeffreys blaspheming their undignified and brutal way through the pages of the State trials. Why should Blackstone have felt impelled to say such a patently silly thing?

In February 1842 a wealthy lay congregationalist named Thomas Thompson wrote to the secretaries of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society urging them to do more to interest the young and the working classes in the cause of foreign missions. Missionary advocates were needed, insisted Thompson, who could shew to our manufacturing population that Christianity Civilization & Commerce are only synonimous terms - that the extension of the former will do more for a World recovery - the bonding of distant nations with a Love of amity & good will & do more for the employment of hundreds of thousands, than all the Anti Corn leaguers can ever accomplish, even were they to realise all their members so fully anticipate, & we shall thus obtain the auxiliary aid of a class of countrymen, whom we have hitherto left to the worst foes of our species.

Whilst it would be wrong to claim that voluntary societies in Britain were new in the period 1780 to 1850, the growth of large industrial and urban populations was accompanied by an increase in the foundation and prosperity of such societies. These societies were diverse in their purpose, form, size and membership. Edward Baines, junior, one of the self-appointed tribunes of the industrial middle class, in 1843 described recent developments as follows:

Two central developments in the economic history of Edwardian Britain are rarely considered in conjunction. Large flows of investment overseas between c. 1905 and 1914 have been regarded as a feature of ‘high imperialism’, or more innocuously, as a phase in the growth of an international economy. In domestic politics, the ‘New Liberal’ achievement of tax and welfare reforms has been viewed as a stage on the road to the ‘welfare state’, and as a bid for political survival. Was there any link between the export of capital and domestic politics? This article will describe how capital flows affected the choice, timing and scope of Liberal social and economic policies.

During the years following the end of the Second World War the British Labour government was preoccupied with the threat posed by Russia. Britain could not contain Russia on its own; indeed, only the United States possessed the necessary power. At the beginning of 1949 this was emphasized by the newly formed permanent under secretary's committee headed by William Strang. That committee considered the Anglo-American special relationship as the pivot of British foreign policy: British interests were best likely to be ensured by its maintenance and consolidation. An inequality was, however, inherent in the association, and Britain thought that the alliance would be least effective in Asia and the far east, an area where American naivety and selfishness were particularly evident. The spread of Mao Tse Tung's communists across the Chinese mainland emphasized Britain's predicament, especially as, initially, the Chinese were regarded as orthodox communists.