From 408 to 420 two men dominated the political landscape of southern Gaul: Constantine III and Constantius. They found there a region that was rife with centrifugal forces - fierce city rivalries, a squabbling priesthood, and an opportunistic nobility. But they also found a region whose unique resources made it indispensable to the stability of their regimes; southern Gaul was then both highly urbanised and rich in commerce, a prime source for taxes and educated bureaucratic officers. Not surprisingly, both Constantine and Constantius focused a great deal of energy on ensuring the continued loyalty and stability of the region. Both men were soldiers, and thus occasionally brutal in pursuit of their objectives, but their Gallic policies also reflected intelligent statecraft and an acute awareness of the changing world in which they lived. It was a world in which the border between Christianity and politics was rapidly fading, and the work of these two men both anticipated and epitomized the mixture of religion and realpolitik so characteristic of the medieval world.

The Church of post-Conquest England experienced a number of ecclesiastical and administrative changes brought on, in part, by the Normans’ implementation of Gregorian reform. Despite the growing fervour for non-lay intervention in ecclesiastical matters, many of the Norman innovations actually increased the king’s involvement with the Church. For example, a new practice emerged whereby the king appropriated a church's revenues upon the death of its abbot or bishop. Before this time, vacant houses were apparently cared for by their priors or other ecclesiastics and the king played little or no role in their administration. William the Conqueror altered forever this custom when he took direct control of vacant churches and placed their administration, although generally not their revenue, in the hands of royal officials.

When the first clerical marriage took place in defiance of church law, the Reformation embarked on a course which involved far more than mere tinkering with the moral regulation of the priesthood. Clerical marriage necessitated a reconsideration of one of the oldest Christian conundrums, the relationship between the holy and the body. Now that a life of celibacy was no longer mandatory for the clergy, and sexual abstinence was no longer considered to be the estate most pleasing to God, reformers had to build a new accommodation between sexuality and the sacred. Sexual renunciation and holiness, once indivisible, had been riven apart.

Significant exceptions to the pervasive latitudinarianism of the Georgian Church have lately been found in the domain of public worship. With respect to theology however the traditional view canonised by Sir Leslie Stephen (‘Oxford was then at the very nadir of intellectual activity’: at Cambridge ‘the intellectual party of the Church was Socinian in all but name’) remains undisturbed. It is my object in this article to reappraise the performance of ‘the intellectual party’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

The history of the Established Church from the 1740s to the 1830s is viewed as a period of inertia and complacency. Failure to respond to the exigencies of the economic and demographic revolutions resulted in the increasing weakness of the National Church when compared with extra-establishment religion. In the face of increasing pastoral responsibilities, the Church was slow to augment its existing accommodation, or to respond to the challenge of modifying the ancient parochial structure in the face of patron and incumbent interest, and increasing Nonconformist hostility. The resulting decline of the Church from its near monopoly position in 1800, to that of a minority Establishment by 1851, is well documented. Yet while the general pattern of Church extension is known, there have been few studies of the Anglican decline at the diocesan level. Of the twenty-seven dioceses in existence in 1800 one is of particular importance – the diocese of Durham, ‘where the Church was endowed with a splendour and a power unknown in monkish times and in Popish countries’. Here the Church possessed its greatest concentration of resources; here also it was to suffer its greatest reverses.