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The article focuses on the history and evolution of hockey. It says that hockey which originated from ice skating, began as a more convenient mode of winter transportation across the slippery ice. It mentions an old British ancient game called camp, created in the 11th century after the Norman invasions and theories where the word skate came from. It talks on the evolution of the game in North America, the modern game of ice hockey, and its early beginnings in Minnesota.

Francia o Spagna, purché se magna. (France or Spain, as long as we can eat.) The supposed growth of state power was long considered as one of the defining elements of the early modern period. Whether it be Burckhardt's state as a work of art or Weber's bureaucratic impersonal state, historians up to a generation ago saw the rise of a centralized, absolutist state as a central characteristic of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in most of Europe. The works of Federico Chabod are perhaps the best application of these ideas to Italian history. In the last twenty-five years or so, however, historians have begun to doubt the actual extent of state power; while the state apparatus certainly grew in bulk, its effectiveness in replacing or weakening other centers of power has been called into question. Historians have studied phenomena like patronage and clientage networks, and Italian historians in particular have stressed the persisting importance of local elite groups and traditional institutions in Italy's regional states, and the dialectic relationship between center and periphery within them. State power grew, when it did, in fits and bounds, and often in the service of the vested interests of particularistic groups. The concept of absolutism does little justice to a complex process that witnessed the continuing thriving of traditional centers of power and social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It gives one position and it prevents one from keeping it up. That's all that can be said about land. It was through the acquisition of a fief, and later of a title, that the Caracciolo Brienza established themselves as a new, separate family within the Caracciolo clan. As late as the Aragonese period (1442–1503), many families and clans of undisputed nobility, including several members of the Caracciolo clan, did not own fiefs and were content with the ownership of allodial land in or near the city of Naples where they resided. By the mid-sixteenth century, however, the old urban patriciate and the provincial baronage had become much more integrated; many barons moved to Naples and managed to enter the Seggi before their closure, while the increased commercialization of fiefs, encouraged by the Aragonese and Spanish kings, led to greater availability of fiefs for both new and old aristocratic families. The fief, and especially the titled one, became, therefore, an essential element of the aristocratic patrimony, both for its economic value and for the status and powers it conferred. By the late sixteenth century, and until the abolition of the feudal regime in 1806, to be a member of the high aristocracy of the kingdom meant to be a feudal lord, to be a baron. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beatrice: Rustic people, indiscreet people! It does not befit you to decide the rights of those who are destined to be your masters. The preceding chapters have discussed the patrimony of the Caracciolo Brienza and have shown the considerable importance that feudal lands and rights had for the barons' income throughout the viceroyal period. The traditionalism and continuity that marked the barons' management of their revenues from the fiefs also characterized other aspects of the relationship between the lord and his vassals. Feudal power affected the communities beyond its strictly economic consequences, and the presence of the lord was not only a burden for the communities but could represent an advantage, due to the paternalism that at times informed feudal rule. The location, population, and economic and social characteristics of the communities, their local traditions of feudal rule, and the ease with which external powers like the church or the central state could intervene between lords and vassals, determined the strength and traits of feudal power. The four communities which constituted the feudal stato of the Caracciolo Brienza differed greatly in the degree and form of their subjection to their lord, and their study allows us, therefore, to discuss the varying conditions of feudal rule in the kingdom of Naples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the eve of the French Revolution, after over thirteen centuries of post-Roman statebuilding, two common features distinguished the polities of Latin Europe – an area comprising the southern Netherlands, France, and the Iberian and Italian peninsulas – from the other states of western Christendom. First, with the exception of Sicily and the three remaining Italian republics (Venice, Genoa, Lucca), all had long since dispensed with their national representative assemblies. In a word, this was the early modern West's most thoroughly absolutist area. At the same time, however, its rulers, while de jure enjoying quite extensive prerogative powers, had lost direct control over much of the administrative, judicial, and financial infrastructure of their realms to proprietary officeholders, officeholder-financiers, and tax farmers. Over the course of many centuries these groups had succeeded in appropriating substantial portions of their respective states' public powers for their own private ends. Thus Latin Europe was the homeland of an early modern state form that I have termed “patrimonial absolutism,” an ideal type most closely approximated by ancien régime France. How is it possible to account for this common outcome to the long process of medieval and early modern political development among a group of countries which, after all, differed greatly in size, wealth, geographic position, and significance within the world of European power politics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the decades prior to the French Revolution, principalities with absolutist political regimes dominated the complex world of states found within the borders of the confederal Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Germany's rulers had long since secured the unfettered powers of legislation – also enjoyed by monarchs in France, Iberia, and Italy – which were the sine qua non of absolutism. Unlike their counterparts in Latin Europe, however, German princes also had at their disposal administrative and financial infrastructures that were free of proprietary officeholding, tax farming, and “inside” finance. These infrastructures were instead built around proto-modern bureaucracies largely staffed by full-time, professional, university-trained officials, the so-called Beamten. As such, the states of Germany must be categorized as exemplars of bureaucratic, as opposed to patrimonial, absolutism. In this chapter, I argue that two factors were responsible for this outcome: a pattern of administrative, top-down local government, itself the legacy of failed dark age statebuilding; and the late onset of sustained geopolitical competition. As in Latin Europe, the fact that the German principalities arose in an area previously occupied by large scale – and ultimately unsuccessful – dark age polities predisposed them towards absolutism. This was so because the fragmented, decentralized political landscape which the collapse of these polities left in their wake led Germany's new generation of state-forming princes to adopt nonparticipatory, centralizing solutions to the problem of local integration. Nobles, churchmen, and burghers in turn responded to the threat posed by intrusive princely officials to their traditional rights by organizing themselves into corporate groups, thereby laying the groundwork for the later appearance of estate-based representative assemblies which were internally divided and defensive, and hence weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than that between the patrimonial absolutism of 18th-century France and its Latin neighbors and the bureaucratic constitutionalism of France's great geopolitical rival, Britain. The absolutist rulers of Latin Europe could legislate, tax, and conduct foreign policy as they saw fit, unconstrained by national representative assemblies; whereas in Britain, the monarch, though still influential, had lost many of his effective powers to a Parliament without whose approval no new laws could be passed, revenue raised, or wars begun. State infrastructures in Latin Europe were built around proprietary officeholding, “inside” credit, and tax farming; while Britain possessed a set of core administrative, financial, and military departments numbering close to 10,000 employees organized along modern bureaucratic lines, and an entirely market-based system of public finance. Finally, Latin Europe's confused patchwork of local administrative districts overseen by competing proprietary officials constrasts sharply with an orderly pattern of 52 English and Welsh and 33 Scottish counties enjoying a substantial degree of self-government. Certain similarities can of course be found between these two disparate state types, most notably the survival within Britain of isolated pockets of proprietary officeholding within the Exchequer and the royal household. Yet on the whole, the two types do seem to represent polar opposites within the world of early modern Europe. This is all the more remarkable given that England shared many common historical experiences with the countries of Latin Europe. Like them it had been part of the Roman Empire, and during the Anglo-Saxon period had maintained significant cultural ties with the Carolingian realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in a great age of statebuilding. With the disintegration of the last colonial empires, the second half of this century has witnessed the birth of dozens of new nations in Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe. The high incidence among these young states of dictatorship, corruption, and separatist threats to central authority has lent added relevance to one of the central questions of political science: how is it possible, under conditions of rapid social and economic change, to construct stable and legitimate governments and honest and effective systems of public administration and finance, all while maintaining an often fragile national unity? The European statebuilding experience, the only case of sustained political development comparable in scale and scope to the one unleashed by the recent wave of state formation, can cast new light on this question. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and the French Revolution, Europe witnessed the creation of scores of new polities where once a single empire had held sway. Across the length and breadth of the continent, successive generations of leaders were confronted with the arduous task of constructing stable governance structures and state apparatuses capable of unifying often diverse territories in the face of both internal and external threats and of continuous market expansion, urbanization, and social and religious upheaval. Yet despite the similarity of the challenges involved, and the relatively homogeneous cultural setting in which Europe's rulers sought to meet them, the durable state structures which emerged by the end of the early modern period were anything but uniform in character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE “OLD CREW” In September, 1567, about two weeks before the Huguenot attack on the royal court at Meaux precipitated the second civil war, Melchion Gatico, commissaire extraordinaire des guerres, and Jehan Girard, commis par le roy au conteroolle de ses guerres, conducted musters of two companies of veteran French infantry stationed at the piedmontese fortress city of Pignerol. One of the units was a regular infantry company commanded by the young Count Brissac, colonel general of all French infantry stationed beyond the mountains and son of the recently deceased Marshal Brissac. The other was the garrison company of the citadel of Pignerol, commanded by its governor, Jehan de Monluc, son of the famous Blaise de Monluc, the future marshal of France. Commissioners Gatico and Girard pursued two different purposes at the muster. The first was simply to pay the men of both companies for their service during the previous months of July and August. The second was to compile a roolle signale of each company, that is, a roster containing a detailed individual description of each soldier. An order to compile such rosters had been sent earlier in 1567 to the duke of Nevers, the military governor of French Piedmont, and reissued to the commissioners a week before the muster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Union of 1707 did not mark the end of a political culture dominated by Scottish history. Indeed it is anachronistic to assume that the viability of early eighteenth-century whig discourse depended on a native parliamentary establishment; for dynastic and ecclesiastical questions were at the core of political and constitutional argument in both Scotland and England in this period. Nor had parliament been of central importance to the tradition of Buchananite whig historiography, which emphasised instead the freedom of the nation and limitations on the monarchy, and depicted these in martial rather than procedural terms, recalling how domestic tyrants as well as foreign invaders had been dispatched in bloody encounters. Whereas in England a parliamentary tradition prevailed, in which there was room for a measure of consensus and compromise, Scottish whig historiography was oriented towards incidents of king-killing and deposition as the means of resolving constitutional disputes. Prior to George Ridpath's attempt to concoct a historical account of an operative parliament in the early years of Queen Anne's reign, no concrete constitution had been adumbrated by Scottish historians. Whig historians were wont to argue that the community of the realm had the power to check the monarchy, but without clearly defining the composition of this body. Buchanan himself used a number of terms for the guardians of the Scottish constitution – ‘primores’, ‘proceres’, ‘populus’ – sometimes appearing to equate them with the people at large, sometimes with the nobility or clan chiefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first serious native challenges to the prevailing historical ethnocentrism arose out of the twin Scottish economic crises of the late 1690s. A run of disastrous harvests which resulted in exceptional famine, and the failure of the Darien colony, Scotland's first attempt to catch up ground lost to other European nations in the race for overseas territory and markets, coming as they did so soon after the promise of the Revolution, disturbed the complacency of Buchananite ideology. Following the famine the population fell in the range of 5 to 15%, with drops of over 20% in the worst afflicted areas. The traumatic social experience of vagrancy, poverty and agrarian failure oriented comment towards the negative aspects of Scottish husbandry, obscuring the substantial improvements of seventeenth-century Lowland agriculture, which revisionist scholars are only now rediscovering: the trend towards single-tenant farms, the appearance of longer written leases from the 1620s and 30s, and the commutation of rents in kind in pastoral areas. There was a rage for economic improvement, and a number of Scots pamphleteers concocted schemes for the introduction of new agricultural methods such as marling, for mining and metallurgical projects, and for institutional responses to the crisis: suggestions included an academy of practical learning, a national bank, and a special Council of Trade. The rise of economic discourse may also have had roots in the culture of Restoration Scotland, where natural jurisprudence, which involved tracing the rise of societies from the state of nature, and geography, a branch of learning which included the study of local economies, were both influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the best way to understand the strength of the whig historical ideology inherited by the eighteenth-century Scottish political nation, at least in comparison with that of England's, is to trace the emergence of English and Scottish conceptions of national identity in the late medieval and early modern eras, and to sketch the evolution of their respective ‘whig’ traditions prior to the Revolutions of 1688–9. The English whig tradition developed in a process whereby various historical claims were endorsed, amplified or rejected. Medieval Englishmen took great pride in the Trojan origin myth of the British and their first king, Brutus, constructed in the twelfth century by the Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth (1100–54). This was appropriated by the Norman, Plantagenet and, later, the Tudor monarchies, and disseminated widely in many ‘British’ chronicles. By the late fifteenth century, another claim had surfaced in the work of Sir John Fortescue (1394?–1476?), which was later to become the core of the English whig tradition – the exaltation of the English constitution as a happily mixed ‘dominium politicum et regale’. However it was the English Reformation, involving as it did an apparently radical break from a historic Christianity whose continuity was embodied in the Catholic church, and the assertion of national independence as an imperium free from any subordination to the papacy, which galvanised English national consciousness. English history was imbued with an apocalyptic significance, in which the Reformation was a critical stage on the way to the millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries from the early ninth to the early fourteenth saw the rise and splendor of medieval civilization. They saw also the emergence of a political organization of the land which underwent little fundamental change before the end of the eighteenth century: an increase in population which stretched to its limits the agricultural resources of Europe, and the development of a pattern of cities, that remained almost unaltered until the Industrial Revolution. Not until the nineteenth century do we encounter again a period of comparable development and change. THE INVASIONS The period began with another wave of invaders from beyond the core areas of western and central Europe. These came from Scandinavia, westward from the fjords of Norway and the plains of Denmark to the British Isles and France, eastward from Sweden to the shores of Russia and overland to the Black Sea (Fig. 5.1). The first of these sea raiders reached the shores of western Europe before the death of Charlemagne; the last landed on those of northern Britain two and a half centuries later. Their raids were but an episode in European history, but they had, locally at least, far-reaching consequences. The sudden explosion of Nordic peoples in the ninth century is as enigmatic as that of the Tartar peoples during previous centuries. It has been attributed to political struggles within Scandinavia, to overpopulation, and to environmental change in this climatically marginal land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harrison expected to find significant meaning in history, for he approached it with the same scrupulous care for the limits of regenerate understanding which he observed in the most important spheres of human knowledge, such as theology. More precisely, his caution in dealing with historical and chronological patterns and periods testifies to their importance in his thought, for he only accepted those which he believed conformed to Elect doctrine. Any periodisation which did not originate in what Harrison regarded as Elect prophecies, or which did not conform to the knowledge transmitted by the covenant line, had to be rejected. Therefore, the periodisations which Harrison rejected only serve to emphasise the importance of those patterns that he accepted as part of Elect knowledge. The following discussion also illustrates the individuality of his vision within this general framework, for the boundaries of legitimate knowledge which he recognised emerged through a process of constant interaction between his contemporary circumstances and his response to the particular Scriptural interpretation of history. Indeed those boundaries could shift under the changing pressure of circumstances. These various and variable influences led Harrison to some strikingly original conclusions on the chronological questions which absorbed the energies of sixteenth-century intellectuals, but the ways in which he arrived at those conclusions have wider implications for his thought. Thus, much can be learned about Harrison's way of thinking by examining his attitudes towards the prophecy of Elias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harrison's obsession with ‘the exact correction of the time’ in his historical studies reflects his belief that the apocalyptic conflict of the Two Churches provided the backbone for his ‘Chronology’. For the True Church suffered and prospered in accordance with God's predestinate will, expressed through his prophets in their calls to obedience. Time therefore played a dynamic role in fulfilling the prophecies concerning the True Church, and Harrison felt that in studying the mysterious patterns and symmetries of chronology he participated in a divine revelation whose enormous contemporary significance could be dimly apprehended, but which would only be fully explained at the end of history. For to his way of thinking the past fulfilment of divine prophecy confirmed its contemporary relevance; the present merely continued the irresistible working-out of the majestic divine plan. Harrison's confidence in the historical and chronological evidence for the existence of this predestined continuum of events allowed him to gloss over internal discrepancies in Scriptural prophecy and chronology which later commentators came to find increasingly disturbing. In turn his unclouded trust in the authority of the Scriptures further encouraged his interest in the assumed prophetic patterns of chronology. What he imagined to be Scriptural criteria always directed his interests in such fields, enabling him to reject or adopt current historical patterns and prophecies by reference to the shared experiences and teachings of the Elect covenant line. Eventually this secure vantage point allowed him to extend the canon of legitimate prophecy to areas where other prophetic interpreters felt unable to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the True Church showed William Harrison that the human institution of perpetual monarchy was inherently unable to overcome worldly considerations in order to achieve a full reformation. Yet this bitter lesson contradicted his careful acknowledgement that the presbyterians, whose historical vision of the True Church he shared, threatened dangerous social upheaval in their attempts to reconstruct the godly society without tarrying for the magistrate. Despite his low opinion of princes in general, Harrison had dutifully to suspend his disbelief about Elizabeth's commitment to further reformation. This tension can be partly resolved by an examination of Harrison's views about England's relationship to the ideal godly commonwealth, but an element of incoherence must always be allowed for in his thought, since he belonged to that historical majority of individuals whose less than rigorous thinking allowed them to accept simultaneously a number of logically contradictory propositions. Harrison's very situation encouraged such a lack of rigour, and his subjective interpretation of his contemporary political, social and economic environment also partly explains why this tension never became a destructive element in his thought, why he never developed his views to their logical, extreme conclusion. In this connection we have seen how on different occasions the actions of the political elite both dispelled Harrison's doubts and revived them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]