Towards the end of the twelfth century an increasing number of the men entering Benedictine monasteries in England had already received a training in the secular schools. At Bury St Edmunds, for instance, there were at least five magistri in the community by 1183. This led to a certain amount of tension there, and Bury's chronicler, Jocelin of Brakelond, records the fierce dispute that arose when Abbot Hugh died between those who wanted a scholar as his successor and those who did not. One monk said, ‘God forbid that a dumb image should be set up in the Church of St Edmund, where it is known that there are many men of learning’, while another felt such strong antipathy that he prayed, ‘From all good clerks, O Lord, deliver us.’ Jocelin himself, ‘being a young man’ at the time, as he said, ‘would not agree to any man being made abbot unless he knew something of dialectic and could distinguish between false argument and true’. In the event, the man chosen was a scholar, the sub-sacrist, Master Samson.

It is widely accepted that the separation of property between abbot and monks in the great English Benedictine abbeys may largely be blamed upon William Rufus. The hypothesis is a coherent one. Rufus asserted, ‘brutally and unjustly’, a claim to hold and enjoy the revenues of abbeys of royal patronage when the abbot died. A firm separation of property, with the development of the obedientiary system as its counterpart, has been seen as arising and hardening in response to the pressures of royal custody in vacancies. Separation, it is said, came about ‘on a grand scale’ in the reign of Henry i immediately following the spoliation of vacant abbeys by his brother, until by the mid-twelfth century the system of separated portions was ‘firmly and completely established in all the great houses’. When the properties were divided the abbot would support himself and his household of knights, officials and servants from his portion and those properties alone would fall under the control of royal officers during a vacancy.

There is a general consensus among historians that there was something quite special about the church policy of the Ottoman and Salian rulers of Germany from Henry i to Henry m. The normal reliance of the medieval king on his prelates was here turned into a deliberate and systematic exploitation of the potential of the Church as an instrument of government. These rulers used bishops and abbots, whom they appointed, as a counterweight to a turbulent and unreliable lay nobility. Many historians have, so to speak, followed them in this, have turned from the Ottomans' and Salians' complex and seemingly unsatisfactory relations with their aristocracy to their church policy. Here they have seen plan, system and harmony, so much so that the Church has come to be regarded as the principal instrument of government available to these rulers. Our picture of the Ottoman and Salian 'imperial church system', the Reichskirchensystem of German historians, has been much refined by recent scholarship, but the essential outlines have not greatly altered since the time of Waitz and Giesebrecht. The purpose of what follows is to re-examine these outlines. The qualifications, doubts and re-interpretations offered are not all new; many have been expressed or at least hinted at in the existing literature. But they have never been fully articulated, and it seems worth looking again at the Reichskirchensystem as a whole to ask how far in fact it did or could have performed the functions usually attributed to it, and to ask also how far it was a system. The focus of attention will inevitably be on the German bishoprics (and to a lesser extent the royal abbeys) before the Investiture Contest, but it will also be necessary to look at the position elsewhere in Europe at this period, because an appearance of uniqueness and system has been fostered by considering conditions in the Reich in isolation

Bede's historical interests frequently manifested themselves in his exegetical writings. In the case to be studied here, his references to Acts ii. 42–7 and iv. 32–7 and related passages, verses which describe the first Christian community at Jerusalem immediately after Pentecost, Bede broke new ground in trying to picture for himself the life of the first Christians, while accepting the traditional monastic reading of these passages almost without question. Alongside, and conflicting with the well-established view of the first Christian community as one distinguished by perfect love and monastic abandonment of the world, there was in Bede's mind a second, more historically minded, tendency to see the primitive Church as having passed through stages of development, and to try to imagine the historical circumstances in which the ideals of Acts ii. 42–7 and iv. 32–7 had been expressed.

The leading studies of the Hospital of St John in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have presented somewhat differing accounts of the power structure at the centre of the Order. Delaville Le Roulx in his brief analysis of government provides an essentially static picture and maintains that although in theory the plenitude of power rested with the chapter general, which delegated executive authority to the master, in practice the latter's power was almost absolute: although the master had few rights of his own and on most matters was expected to seek the counsel of the central convent or of the chapter general, these bodies would not refuse assent to measures which did not conflict with the statutes and usages of the Order; and, as the chapter general met only infrequently, the master enjoyed a considerable freedom of initiative. Therefore, despite the restrictions on his authority, ‘le róle du grand-maítre était prépondérant’. More recently, Riley-Smith has argued at greater length that the relationship between the master, the central convent and the chapter general did not remain unchanged and that during this period the convent and chapter general assumed predominance, as is shown by the convent's victory in 1299 over the master William de Villaret, who was obliged to travel out to the East and hold a chapter general there against his will. The power gained by the convent and chapter general was not the outcome of a process of gradual evolution, but resulted from a series of bitter constitutional conflicts, in which the convent and chapter general - influenced by current baronial ideas - demanded not only government in accordance with law and custom but also the right to be consulted.

In the history of medieval regal and imperial anointing the consecration of Edgar as king of the Angles and Saxons in 973 deserves very special attention. For the ceremony, performed seventeen years after Edgar's succession to the throne of Mercia and fourteen years after he had become king of Wessex, was apparently without precedent either in biblical or medieval times. How are we to make sense of a consecration which by its very nature should inaugurate the reign and constitute the king, and which now took place more than a decade and a half after Edgar had been firmly in power? If we consider the consecration against the background of contemporary continental customs then the magnitude of the problem emerges in all its clarity, for by the late tenth century inaugural anointing had assumed its place at the opening of the reigns of most of the kings of western Europe. Regal consecration had been customary among the Franks for well over a century and for nearly as long in Burgundy; there is evidence that anointing took place from an early date in the small Christian kingdoms of Spain, and finally, after the consecration of Otto 1 in 936, inaugural anointing also became established in the German kingdom. In each case the Old Testament provided the pattern for the anointings: it was the pouring on of the holy oil which worked the regeneration of the prince in virum alium (1 Kings x.6), giving him a new heart (1 Kings x.9) and thereby constituting him as ruler over God's people (1 Kings x.1). Henceforth the spirit of God was with the king (1 Kings x.8) and as the christus Domini he enjoyed divine sanction and protection (1 Kings xxiv.7).

One of the most important weapons in the armoury of the Church during its struggle with heresy in the later Middle Ages was the militant and outward-looking piety of the lay faithful. There were two main ways in which the Church could employ the religious zeal of the laity in the defence of the faith, especially during the critical battle with catharism in the thirteenth century. One was the issue of crusade indulgences and privileges to all who took up arms in, or otherwise contributed to, the struggle against the heretics and their protectors (in technical terms, their fautors). The crusading army which such a move could create was a powerful and relatively inexpensive instrument, but it had its disadvantages. The crusade against the Albigensians showed that it was very difficult to control in the field, while that against the Hussites demonstrated that its failure had serious effects on the enthusiasm of the faithful. The second way of employing lay piety was the establishment of permanent religious organisations, orders and confraternities, which would be at the service of the papal inquisition against heresy. In contrast to the temporary legal obligation of the crucesignatus, membership of such an organisation expressed a permanent commitment to the defence of the faith, a commitment rewarded only in articulo mortis by the grant of the plenary indulgence. My intention here is to examine some political aspects of both the use of the crusade indulgence, together with its associated privileges, and the functioning of anti-heretical orders and confraternities in Italy, mainly in the thirteenth century. Events in Italy deserve study for two reasons.

On 23 January 1120, in the ancient town of Nablus in Samaria, Patriarch Warmund of Jerusalem and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem held a famous assembly of the highest dignitaries of the clergy and nobility. It has become known as the Council of Nablus, although it was not, strictly speaking, a church synod. Because of lay participation it was more of a parlement, or a Reichsversammlung, a kind of assembly common in all medieval kingdoms which would have been summoned to decide matters of general interest. William of Tyre gave it a whole chapter of his chronicle and stated that its decisions were so widely known that it was superfluous to enumerate them. He correctly called the assembly a conventus publicus et curia generalis, and only in the rubric to the chapter was its synodal character referred to: Apud Neapolim urbem Samariae concilium celebratur.

One dinnertime in the early 1540s Thomas Seymour, brother to the future Lord Protector, arrived at Lambeth Palace with an urgent message from the king to the archbishop of Canterbury. He found Cranmer's household at their meal in the great hall, the company sitting in due order under the watchful eyes of the senior officials of the establishment. Seymour was warmly received by the archbishop in his chamber and a meal was pressed upon him; then he was sent on his way with the appropriate response for the monarch. The occasion was more than a routine one for an exchange of messages: indeed it may have been deliberately contrived by Henry vm, with or without the connivance of the archbishop, to force the courtier literally to eat his words. Seymour had been busy denouncing Cranmer for keeping no hospitality ‘or house correspondent with his revenues and dignities’, but, instead, for wasting his income on the purchase of lands for the benefit of his family. When the king enquired of him about the adequacy of the Canterbury household he was, grudgingly, forced to admit ‘he be not in the realm of none estate or degree that hath such a hall furnished, or that fareth more honourably at his own table’. Henry seized the opportunity to lecture the assembled company on the dangers of seeking after episcopal wealth. So long as the prelates continued to dispense hospitality he would not, he asserted, allow them to be despoiled by laymen who had already dispersed the wealth of the monasteries. As for the archbishop he was above reproach and a model to all his fellows ‘for he spendeth (ah, good man) all that he hath in housekeeping’.

Few have studied the early eighteenth-century Church. Caught between puritan triumphs and the Methodist revival, its polemics and efforts at rejuvenation have gone largely unnoticed. Those historians who have noticed describe an Anglican hierarchy lacking in talent and drive and a population devoid of piety and religious fervour. Both of these images are incorrect, as more recent scholarship has begun to suggest. Church historians now concentrate primarily on biographies of famous ecclesiastics and monographs (and articles) on some of the more lively events such as SacheverelPs trial and the Convocation controversy. But no one has systematically explored the Church's attempts to combat the decline brought about by the Toleration Act of 1689 and by its own avoidance of earlier enthusiasms.

The apparitor, usually known by his popular name, the summoner, is a minor character in ecclesiastical administration. Most of what we know about summoners has come from literature, notably from Chaucer's scathing portrait in The Canterbury Tales where the summoner is not given any of the saving graces allowed to other scoundrel-pilgrims. Chaucer's summoner, although an officer of the church courts of moral correction, practised bribery and extortion, and in his illicit sex life ‘was as hot…and lecherous as a sparrow’ his lechery was written on his scabby, syphilitic face. It is not my purpose here to dispel literary illusion, but rather to take a hard look at the world of actual summoners – those with names and careers – in pre-Reformation London. I will then single out one summoner, Charles Joseph, and examine his role in that early sixteenth-century cause célèbre: the affair of Richard Hunne. Joseph, after all, confessed to the murder of Hunne in 1514 and even implicated the vicar-general of London in the crime. With new evidence about summoners, I hope to offer a plausible solution to this baffling case.

Although the Reformation under Henry viii has received relatively extensive examination from recent historians, one of its most crucial elements has continued to evade adequate investigation. Yet its impact upon the average man or woman may have been as revolutionary as the legitimisation of the English bible or the dissolution of the monasteries, and was arguably far more disruptive than governmental propaganda, ecclesiastical reformulations of dogma, or even the transfer of the supremacy from pope to king. This remarkably neglected phenomenon is the Henrician assault upon images.

Among students of medieval monasticism the province of Rouen has long been famous for a unique record: the archiepiscopal register (Paris, B.N.MS lat. 1245) commonly called the Regestrum visitationum or Journal des visites pastorales of Archbishop Odo Rigaldi, or Eudes Rigaud, which extends from 1248 to 1269. Published first by Theodose Bonnin in 1852, during the past sixty years it has been translated into English, reprinted in Latin and much commented upon.

Contemporaries and historians alike have regarded the 1880s as a watershed in Victorian thought. They have argued that before the 1880s the well-to-do held firmly to a belief in Political Economy and attributed economic success to the high moral character and hard work of the individual. By the 1880s these beliefs had begun to waver, and many who had themselves prospered from the new economic system began to question its assumptions and develop a sense of responsibility toward those beneath them in the social order. One institution which seems to represent this change is Toynbee Hall, the first English settlement house, founded in 1884. Headed by a middle-class clergyman, Samuel Barnett, staffed by well-educated and well-to-do volunteers and dedicated to bringing education and culture to the poor, it seems to be an example, par excellence, of the newly heightened middle-class social conscience typical of the 1880s.2 But close examination reveals that the origins of Toynbee Hall date back to the 1870s, to the broad church orientation and parish practices of Samuel Barnett. Rooted in his modest day-to-day pastoral work rather than in new concepts of social justice, Toynbee Hall raises the question of whether in fact the 1880s constitute a great divide in Victorian thought or a period of continuation, expansion and institutionalisation of earlier ideas and practices.

Joan Bocher, or Joan of Kent as she came to be called, is well known as the victim of the Edwardine Protestants in 1550. She was burnt for her Anabaptist view of the Incarnation: that Christ did not take flesh of the Virgin. Her Lollard and sacramentarian background is less well known. The purpose of this study is to draw attention to that background and to its significance. The story of Joan of Kent reveals that Tudor Lollardy, far from being an abortive movement, was a highly influential, eclectic and evolutionary branch of reform in England.

The conference between James i, some of the bishops and representatives of the puritans at Hampton Court palace in January 1604 was one of the most significant events in the political and religious history of England. But at the present time its significance is not clearly understood. The king's puritan policy did not begin or end there, but even in 1604 the conference was understood as a chance for the puritans to gain a measure of toleration or to begin a further reformation of the Church of England. As things turned out neither was the case. The classic accounts of Gardiner and Usher assumed that the conference was a failure for the puritan cause, but in 1961 Mark Curtis, in a widely accepted article, claimed that the king was more sympathetic to the puritans than Gardiner and Usher had allowed. Professor Curtis analysed the creation of the proclamation of October 1603 which announced the conference and claimed that its genesis showed a measure of serious criticism of the Established Church which has never been acknowledged by historians. He pointed out the episcopal bias of the official account of the conference, William Barlow's The Summe and Substance of the Conference… at Hampton Court, and noted the importance of what he felt was a neglected source, an ‘Anonymous Account’, which he believed showed marked differences between the king and the bishops, and emphasised the common ground between the king and the puritans. By considering the decisions made at the conference - whether they were put into effect or not - Professor Curtis was convinced that the conference itself was a puritan success in which the king made important concessions to them.

The role of the press in the history of post-Restoration nonconformity has gone largely unexplored. Indeed, the study of the press in the late seventeenth century has suffered from a lack of serious attention by historians and from a certain narrowness of vision in the otherwise excellent bibliographical work on the period. Bibliographers have tended to study books and printers in isolation from the world that the objects of their study inhabited. Historians have a tendency to see the press as mirroring the struggle for the growth of representative democracy and as playing an important part in national political and religious history only at times of maximum crisis, such as 1659–60 or 1679–81. Historians of Quakerism, although aware that the early Quakers made extensive use of printing, have neither detailed the extent of that involvement nor assessed its implications on a wider level. This article is written in an attempt to remedy, to some extent, these deficiencies.

In reviewing the historiography of the Catholic reform in seventeenthcentury France, one cannot but be struck by the scant attention devoted to the old monastic orders. At a superficial level, this may well be because there are few genuine successes to record or because the numerous failures of attempted reforms make up a particularly depressing and unedifying tale. It is obvious that the more recently founded congregations, both male and female, proved to be more sensitive to the needs of the age and better equipped to deal with them; it was they who succeeded in attracting most of the religious elite who sought entry into the religious life out of a sense of vocation. The rapid growth of the Jesuits, Capucins, Oratorians, Lazarists and Eduists among the male societies, and of the Ursulines, Carmelites and Visitandines among the female are proof enough of that. But this of itself does not demonstrate that the older, monastic orders were not suited to the spiritual or pastoral needs of the age. Indeed, there is abundant evidence to show that, if reformed, they could act as centres for religious revival and attract outstanding individuals. The earliest stirrings of the Catholic reform in the 1590s and 1600s were closely connected to houses of old orders like the Benedictines and the Carmelites; many of the forty new religious houses founded in Paris between 1600 and 1640 belonged to the old orders. As for the inability of the old orders to attract recruits of a high quality, one need but point to the Maurists, Port Royal and the Cistercian strict observance.

The authorship of The copy of a letter written by a Master of Art of Cambridge, or ‘Leicester's Commonwealth’ as it became known, was successfully kept secret when it appeared in 1584. It was common policy for Catholic writers to publish their books anonymously during this period, especially political works, but with one as libellous and seditious as ‘Leicester's Commonwealth’ it was necessary to take every precaution to conceal theidentity of the author. The Earl of Leicester, grossly insulted in the pamphlet, tried hard to find out in France – where the book was known to have been printed – who had written it, and it was reported that he had sent an assassin to the continent to deal with the author. When the book first came to light in London, Walsingham confidently ascribed it – ‘the most malicious written thing that ever was penned sithence the beginning of the world’ – to Thomas Morgan, an agent of Mary Stuart in France, assisted by three other Catholic exiles, Lord Paget, Charles Arundell and William Tresham, but this was no more than a guess and did not convince Leicester. It was not until fifteen years later that the authorship of'Leicester's Commonwealth’ again aroused interest, when a group of English Catholic writers known as the Appellants began to ascribe it to their enemy, the Jesuit Robert Persons. Persons refused to acknowledge authorship, but it was generally accepted that the book was his, and when in 1641 it was republished by a Protestant it was clearly ascribed to the Jesuit. Less certainty was entertained by later historians, but the difficulty remained: if Persons had not written the book, who had? This problem was solved in 1957 in an article by the Jesuit historian, Leo Hicks, who, developing an idea of his older colleague, J. H. Pollen, ascribed the book to a Catholic exile named Charles Arundell and denied that Persons had played any part in its composition. This ascription has been unanimously accepted by later scholars. I wish in this brief paper to question Fr Hicks's findings and to argue that Persons played the major part in the compilation of the book.

Since the major continental archival collections were calendared in the nineteenth century no new sources for the history of the Parliament of 1559 have been reported. Thus it was with some elation that I recognised a draft of a bill from that Parliament among the Lansdowne Manuscripts. Described by the cataloguer as the ‘draft of an act to confirm Bishop Bonner's deprivation and admit Bishop Ridley to episcopal authority’, it had been assigned the date of 1549, but to anyone familiar with the bills introduced in 1559 it obviously belongs to Elizabeth's first Parliament.