The rule which Benedict Biscop had laid down for the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at Wearmouth and Jarrow is twice mentioned in some detail in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Unfortunately both passages are rather vague in that no clear indication is given of which particular rule Biscop introduced at Wearmouth–Jarrow. It is certain, however, that Biscop did not compose a totally new rule, but accepted for his own houses the monastic institutes which he had learned abroad.

The debate about the social and political attitudes associated with Pelagian theology has exercised a stranglehold on the discussion of Pelagianism in Britain in recent years. Edward Thompson's new book on Saint Germanus and the end of Roman Britain prompts a re-examination of the nature of Pelagianism, a re-examination in which its fate in Britain must take a key part. It will not be necessary to recall here the interesting views on Pelagianism and the end of Roman Britain associated with Dr J. N. L. Myres and the late Dr John Morris which, as Gerald Bonner has rightly remarked, have ‘always appealed to historians of Roman Britain rather than to church historians who approached Pelagianism as a Christian movement of the Mediterranean region’. I do not want to take sides between the historians of Roman Britain and the church historians; and from the debate aroused by Myres and Morris I want to stand aside. In this paper I pursue the implications of thoughts which have germinated in the course of reading Thompson's fascinating book.

The correspondence of Augustine that Johannes Divjak recently discovered and then edited in CSEL lxxxviii has provided new grist for the scholarly mills of commentary and exegesis. One of these letters (Ep. 11*), sent to Augustine from Consentius, a learned Christian living on one of the Balearic Islands, has been hailed as an important source about ‘the Priscillianist cause’ and ‘secret Priscillianists’ in northern Spain during the early fifth century. In fact, the information in this letter is more teasingly inexplicit. Consentius had composed some anti-Priscillianist writings, but only on the basis of second- and third-hand sources. Fronto, a monk in northern Spain, then apparently used these writings in order to pose as a heretic and discover other heretics who included, he claimed, some local clerics; but once accused of heresy, his opponents insisted upon, and finally ‘proved’, their orthodox Catholicism. And although in his deposition about his heresy-hunt Fronto never once mentioned Priscillianism, Consentius nevertheless glossed the whole affair as one involving Priscillianism when he included a copy of Fronto's deposition in his letter to Augustine.

In a very real sense the case of Richard Hunne is far from over. Ever since Hunne was found dead in his cell on the morning of Monday 4 Decembern 1514 – hanging from a staple by his own girdle – the issue of why he died and who was responsible has been the object of furious controversy among polemicists and historians alike. Many explanations have been put forward – some convincing, others merely ingenious – and all, in one sense or another, plausible. An equally interesting facet is the controversy that surrounds the account of the case. It is to this often neglected aspect of the affair – in particular in relation to The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe – that this paper is principally directed. ‘The Story of Richard Hun’ ofers the student of Foxe remarkable scope for exploration. Here we see Foxe not only as archivist – but for his zeal various documents, such as the transcripts of Hunne's interrogation and trial for heresy, would almost certainly not have survived – but also as a commentator in his own right. Over a third of the martyrologist's account – an unprecedented amount incidentally, in Foxe's treatment of the Henrician period – was devoted to developing his own line of thought while, at the same time, he attempted to work out for himself and his reader the peculiar inconsistencies that governed the course of Hunne's life and death. The question then arises, how reliable is Foxe on Richard Hunne. Did he faithfully report the facts of the case or are there signs that he might have been biased? Clearly the first consideration when answering this question must be to ascertain the exact circumstances of Hunne's interrogation and trial and the events leading up to his death: what happened to Richard Hunne in the Lollard's Tower and why?

Thomas Cyrcetur belonged to the second generation of anti-Wycliffite theologians. He must have been born c. 1376, and was a Fellow of Merton College in 1395 or 1396 and until at least 1401. He had graduated BD by December 1417, and probably left the university for residence in Somerset about 1418/19. The immediate Wycliffite threat had thus passed by the time of his Oxford career, and he was not involved in scholastic polemic against Wyclif. On the other hand, he was little influenced by the new orthodox outlook which developed in the universities and in London from the 1420s onwards. He had left Oxford by the time of the publication of Dr Thomas Walden's (alias Netter's) Doctrinale antiquitatum ecclesie, with its new patristic approach to combating heresy, and he shows no sign of acquaintance with that work, although it achieved immediate success. He had long ceased to reside in the university, and was of advanced years, by the time of the opposition to Bishop Pecock in the 1440s and 1450s, which was led by a group of theologians, many from Cambridge but including some Oxford men, whose approach appears also to have been patristic as well as consciously orthodox, and whose best-known member is Thomas Gascoigne. Cyrcetur's approach to theology remained conservative, but it was also pastoral. Even before he graduated BD he took an interest in pastoral work.

It has long been a favourite theme of ecclesiastical historians, particularly in Germany, that the separation of cathedral chapter from episcopal estates was an important step in the development of ecclesiastical administration, not least because it assisted cathedral chapters to become independent and powerful electoral colleges. It was shown by Gerhard Kallen in the 1920s and, more recently and in greater detail, by Rudolf Schieffer, how this separation of estates, which took a long time to be effected, began with grants made to the cathedral ‘for the use of the brothers’ or with grants for more specific purposes, usually of a liturgical nature. This paper looks at a closely related issue, the splitting up of the estates held by the chapter. This division was to some extent inherent from early on, because of the conditions attached to certain benefactions, but it increased throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The way the chapter's revenues were organised had important consequences for the cohesion of the chapter as a community and also for the way in which clerical preferment operated. This can be very clearly demonstrated by a comparative study of the ways in which German and English cathedrals managed their property in the twelfth century. Since the differences between the German and the English systems are so striking the two will be considered in turn, and a comparison will also be made of the control which German and English clerks had over their personal property, which deserves attention not least because the dividing line between personal and chapter property was sometimes a fine one.

In the summer of 1535 Anglo-German relatios assumed a new dimension. Faced with the prospect of a Catholic alliance on the continent and the possibility of a general council in the near future, Henry VIII was forced to consider more seriously than ever before a defensive alliance with the German Protestants. In August of that year, while Robert Barnes was approaching Wittenberg via Hamburg, commissioned by Henry both to prevent Melanchthon's rumoured visit to France and to make preparations for a full diplomatic mission to the princes of Lutheran Germany, Philip Melanchthon sent copies of the latest edition of his Loci Communes to the king of England, to whom they had been dedicated. The envoy on this mission was the Scottish Augustinian, Alexander Alesius, who was lecturing at the University of Wittenberg at that time. Alesius had received his own university education in St Andrews. Upon his graduation in 1515, he had entered the Augustinian priory there and subsequently proceeded to the study of theology. As a successful student of scholastic theology he had felt himself called to refute Lutheran theology as soon as it began to be debated in Scotland. In February 1528 he was commissioned to bring about the recantation of Patrick Hamilton, but the discussions with this first martyr of the Scottish Reformation as well as the latter's steadfast death at the stake led to a profound questioning of his own convictions. In the following year Alesius emerged as a severe critic ofthe old Church, for which he paid dearly by persecution and imprisonment. After an adventurous escape from St Andrews and months of travelling he finally reached Wittenburg, where he was inscribed in the faculty of arts in October 1532. So far very litde is known about Alesius' activities in Wittenberg. Yet there are two reasons why some elucidation of his academic activities and theological development during his three years at Wittenberg is highly desirable. First, it would be surprising indeed if his first experiences at this university, and especially the direct contact with Luther and Melanchthon, had not left a mark on his thought and career as a reformer. Second, his close friendship with the English reformers and his involvement in the doctrinal debates in England during the late 1530s suggests that Alesius formed an important link between the Reformation in England and in Germany.

In the summer of 1337, representatives of the English King Edward III and the German Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria concluded negotiations leading to the formation of an Anglo-imperial alliance. Edward, who was in the midst of preparations to pursue by force his dynastic claim to the French crown, received from Ludwig the title of imperial vicar-general per Alemanniam et Galliam, an act which conferred upon him sovereign rights over subjects and lands west of the Rhine. In return, Edward provided the emperor with the substantial financial remuneration which he required to stabilise his own position within Germany. This Anglo-imperial treaty, the greatest achievement of Edward's early diplomatic programme, was solemnised in a ceremonial meeting between the two rulers during September of the following year. One figure who was no doubt in attendance throughout these events was William of Ockham, the Franciscan philosopher and theologian exiled from his native England as the result of a dispute with Pope John XXIL. Ludwig, while never an entirely reliable protector, had sheltered Ockham and numerous other intellectuals who had run afoul of the papal court at Avignon.

Between 1 June and 1 August 1508, the newly refounded tribunal, known to history as the Spanish Inquisition, was subjected tojudicial investigation by a ‘General Congregation’ at Burgos, in Old Castile. The process resulted from the activities of Diego Rodriguez Lucero. As inquisitor of Córdoba, he was accused of making false charges of ‘judaising’ against conversos, or converts from Judaism and/or their descendants, and ‘Old Christians’ alike. During the Congregation's examination of his work, many of the tensions and difficulties which had arisen in Spanish society as a result of the Inquisition's work were exposed. To date, the only detailed consideration in English of Lucero's rise and fall - published in 1897-has been that of the great liberal Protestant historian of the Inquisition, H. C. Lea. As ever, his work was solidly based on the best early printed sources, but also on documents from the Castilian national archives at Simancas and the cathedral archives in Cordoba itself, as well as other places. In recent years, however, many more documents have come to light, which make possible a more profound and thorough investigation of the Lucero affair. Progress towards increased knowledge has not, however, been uninterrupted. Many of the manuscript sources in the Cordoba Cathedral archives to which Lea refers are no longer traceable, having, in some cases, been torn from their bindings; others have simply vanished. Such, it appears, is the degree of passion which the name of Lucero still inspires.

The economic standing of the English parochial clergy in the early sixteenth century has been re-examined recently by Michael Zell, and the evidence at his disposal suggests that many of them were poverty-stricken in the extreme. He points to the large surplus of unendowed curates, chaplains and the like, and to the fact that when employment was available it was neither rewarding, in a monetary sense, nor necessarily secure. Stipends were officially regulated by an early fifteenth-century statute which set a maximum of £5 6s. 8d. per annum, and ‘evidence from all regions of England indicates that very rarely were curates and chaplains given more than that’. It was not uncommon for areas in the north to pay even less than this. In Lancashire, for example, the average salary of about 100 curates and chaplains in 1524 was £2 9s. 6d. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a year later it was £4. On the basis of such evidence, Mr Zell reasonably concludes that the unbeneficed clergy must have found it very difficult to survive, and that ‘the average country priest could not have been a person of high social status’.

It is perhaps the most fitting comment on a Christian scholar to note that, whereas his work has been of importance to the Church down the years, the details of his life have passed into obscurity. This remark is particularly appropriate in looking at the figure of Zacharius Ursinus, the main author of the Heidelberg Catechism and one of the founding fathers of the German reformed tradition. Most previous analysis has been focused on his growing sympathy with the teaching of Calvin in the period prior to his open adoption of the reformed cause following the death of Melanchthon. The effort to explain the background to the break-up of the Philippist party in the 1560s has yet deflected attention from a proper consideration of Ursinus' own views. Even the most recent account by Derk Visser, where some new insights have been provided on the basis of the published correspondence, is mostly concerned with this problem of his early development. Yet any serious attempt to place his writing in its historical context must concentrate on the situation in Heidelberg, which was the setting for the bulk of his work both as a reformer and pedagogue. In seeking to fill this gap, it is the purpose of the present paper to rediscover something of the man's character and the nature of his religious conviction, rather than to take up the now established debate about the relation of his theology to that of the other leading reformers. Such a study should furnish a useful basis for a more balanced assessment of his own contribution to the broader history of the Church.

The Act of Six Articles of 1539 affirmed half a dozen key Catholic beliefs and their denial was made punishable by law: a heretic's death was automatically prescribed for repudiation of transubstantiation, and possible death as a felon for those who denied the divine authority of clerical celibacy, vows of chastity, private masses or the practical necessity of auricular confession. The measure was made even more severe as recantation was of no effect where transgression of the first article was concerned. Little wonder its detractors called the act ‘the whip with six strings’, or the ‘bloody statute’. From early on, the passage of the act was often seen in terms of a personal triumph for Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, along with Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, who piloted the measure through parliament. All of the allusions to Gardiner's involvement come from hostile sources, and most of these ascriptions are vague and lacking in circumstantial detail. William Turner, in The rescuyinge of the Romishe fox, referred to the act in a much quoted statement as ‘the six articles, otherwise called Gardiner's gospel’; it remains a moot point whether Winchester's enemy, Turner, was ascribing to Gardiner authorship of the act or merely endorsement of its orthodoxy. An unknown author, whose work is to be found in Narratives of…the Reformation, argued that the act stemmed from the king's anger against reformist bishops who quarrelled over his deployment of monastic wealth, so Henry, ‘being stirred thereunto by Winchester and other old papists in the next parliament, made vj new articles of our faithy.… The most comprehensive and detailed indictment of Winchester's involvement comes in a highly virulent, and extremely effective, piece of propaganda directed against the bishop.

They [the Puritans] drew in a sea of matter, by applying all things unto their own company, which are any where spoken concerning divine favours and benefits bestowed upon the old commonwealth of Israel: concluding that as Israel was delivered out of Egypt, so they spiritually out of the Egypt of this world's servile thraldom unto sin and superstition; as Israel was to root out the idolatrous nations, and to plant instead of them a people which feared God; so the same Lord's good will and pleasure was now, that these new Israelites should under the conduct of other Joshuas, Samsons and Gideons, perform a work no less miraculous in casting out violently the wicked from the earth, and establishing the kingdom of Christ with perfect liberty.

When Immanuel Bourne published his larger catechism in 1646, he prefaced it with an unusually full account of the history of catechising. He was not the first author of the period to trace the practice back to the examples of religious instruction in both Old and New Testaments, or to cite the works of Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen as proof of the existence of religious education in the early Church. Nor was he alone in praising the efforts of those continental reformers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who thought they had revived the characteristic form of instruction of the early Church after centuries of neglect, though it may be added that Bourne's list of contemporary European catechists was longer and more cosmopolitan than others'.

In his reinterpretation of ‘Henry vm and the praemunire manoeuvres of 1530-31’ Dr J. A. Guy asserts that the principal aim of the king in his dealings with the Church in these years was to secure a large sum of money. The purpose of the prosecution of churchmen for offences against the statute of praemunire was ‘to reinforce the demand for a clerical subsidy’. ‘Some serious praemunire offence had to be constructed in order to encourage the clergy to settle quickly for a general pardon’ for which they would pay a hefty fine. ‘The king had already decided by mid-1530 to seek a repeat performance of the clerical subsidy of 1523, and … he acted to outfoot those who had identified themselves as stalwarts in Wolsey's day [i.e. those who had opposed the subsidy in 1523] by accusing them of praemunire.’ Dr Guy cannot ignore Henry was desire for an annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon altogether. The king's true objectives were ‘supply and the divorce’. But the latter was subsidiary. ‘Henry VIII wished to raise a clerical subsidy as substantial as that achieved by Wolsey in 1523. Second, he aimed to subdue the opponents of the divorce in convocation’.

The events which together finally resulted in a restructuring of the Church of England along Presbyterian lines had been lengthy, complex and exceedingly frustrating for all concerned. Since the earliest days of the Long Parliament, both pulpit and press had been brimming not only with invective against Laudian Episcopacy, but also with a plethora of ideas about church government. After 1643, having accepted the conditions of the Solemn League and Covenant, the Westminster Assembly laboured fitfully to fulfil its responsibility of producing a new polity for parliament's approval. The assembly conducted its work in the midst of independent Dissenting Brethren who argued for a congregational form of gathered churches in the context of toleration, Scottish commissioners who would not be satisfied with anything less than their own rigid model of Presbyterianism, and a parliament that was generally desirous of a Presbyterian settlement but committed to an Erastian structure that would make its own body the highest judicial authority in the Church.

Religious revivals in early industrial England have received considerable attention from historians concerned with explaining their appearance in relation to social, economic, and political trends. R. B. Walker, for example, in a general assessment of the impact of external forces on Wesleyan Methodist growth after 1830, argued that political tension in the years 1832 to 1834 may have contributed to religious revival, and that the outbreak of cholera in 1832 certainly increased religious excitement. Chartism, on the other hand, probably competed with the chapels and made revival less likely, while general economic trends of boom and depression had no apparently conclusive impact. Some historians have noted these connections between religious revivals and secular stimuli and have gone on to ask what functions revivals might serve for those participating in them. Eric Hobsbawm in 1957 suggested that, in the half-century after 1790, intense political and religious excitement often coincided and that at such times ‘preachers, prophets, and sectarians might issue what the labourers would regard as calls to action rather than to resignation’. E. P. Thompson, by contrast, forwarded an ‘oscillation’ theory by which it was conceivable that religious revivalism reflected ‘the chiliasm of despair’ amongst working people and occurred ‘just at the point where “political” or temporal aspirations met with defeat’. More recently, Hobsbawm appeared to concur with this theory when he interpreted the revivalism which superseded Swing riots in several parts of the country in 1830 as ‘an escape from, rather than a mobilisation for social agitation’.

The issue in the series of crises leading to the suppression of the Jesuit order in France in 1764 was the absolute obedience owed under the Jesuit Institute by every French Jesuit to the superior general of the Society of Jesus resident in Rome. On the eve of the suppression, the French law courts and the Crown reasoned that Jesuit subjects of the king of France ought not to owe such obedience to a foreign superior living on foreign soil. In the eyes of the secular authorities, the French Jesuits' connection with their superior general constituted a threat to the security of the French state. Initially, most French Jesuit leaders accepted this point of view and tried to come to an accommodation with the state which would have loosened their ties to the general.

With one minor exception, it was not much more than a series of coincidences which linked Jowett and Colenso. The one exception was when Colenso was in England after being excommunicated by Robert Gray, bishop of Capetown, as metropolitan. Samuel Wilberforce refused to allow Colenso to function in the diocese of Oxford but Jowett invited him to preach in Balliol chapel, which was not under the bishop's jurisdiction. Apart from this there seems to be no evidence of direct personal contact between the two men.