The rapid increase in monastic acquisition of parish churches in the twelfth century reflected a number of trends, both temporal and spiritual, in the Christian society of western Europe. It was an expression of the laity's continuing devotion to the monastic ideal, now reinforced by the foundation and spread of new religious orders, and it was in part a consequence of the redefinition of relations between the laity and the clergy following in the wake of the Gregorian Reform. More than that, however, it raised within the Church questions as to the proper relationship between the monastic clergy and the pastoral and juridical structure of the Church. To understand the phenomenon, therefore, it is necessary to examine the motives of donors of parish churches and those of the religious who received them, to bear in mind the climate of respectable opinion (both lay and-ecclesiastical) which came increasingly to deny possession of parish churches to the laity and yet could countenance their passage into the hands of religious houses, and to consider the repercussions of widespread monastic acquisition of churches in the Church at large. This article is concerned in particular to re-examine the means by which monasteries obtained grants of churches, viewed against the background of the Church's assault on lay ownership of churches and tithes, and to reconsider the evolution of the vicarage system, as the ecclesiastical authorities strove to accommodate within the mission of the reformed Church monastic efforts to exploit the churches in their possession.

It has become a commonplace of modern historical scholarship that most Elizabethan Protestants regarded the pope as Antichrist. The present article is an attempt to penetrate beneath the surface of that commonplace. It does not seek to cast doubt on the existence of such a common perception of the pope as Antichrist. However, it will be argued that within that consensus, and to an extent masked by it, there existed very important implicit differences over the consequences of that doctrine.

The great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with ‘vindications’ of the Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism of public events.

In an article in the last number of this JOURNAL, Caroline Walker Bynum drew attention to the way in which historians during the past few decades have written of the twelfth century in terms which would once have been thought more appropriate to the fifteenth. We have become used to hearing about the twelfth-century renaissance, about the classical revival and the growth of humanism and about the discovery of the individual. The period has been credited with a rapidly growing awareness of the regularity of the natural order and with an increased confidence in the power of reason. The idea has now been widely accepted that the twelfth century saw the emergence of institutions and sensitivities which were to become characteristic of western civilisation, but which previously did not exist or played only a subordinate cultural role. It is then, as R. R. Bolgar has expressed it, that we can discern for the first time the lineaments of modern man. This is obviously not to say that the attitudes displayed were the same as those in subsequent centuries; it would be absurd to look for the humanism of the fifteenth century, the rationalism of the eighteenth, or the individualism of the nineteenth, in the writings of Cistercians or magitri. Some phrases will strike us by their modernity, but the context of thinking is usually different in important ways from our own. The question is not whether there is a cultural identity between the twelfth century and the modern world, for there obviously is not, but whether in the twelfth century we can discern elements of respect for humanity, reason and individuality which were largely lacking during the preceding five hundred years, and which were to have a lasting impact on the growth of.western culture.