The theme of the environment is one of the most popular and pressing themes of the present time. Somewhat late in the day we have become aware that we have been blindly secreting around ourselves conditions in which it is increasingly difficult for human or any other life to be lived. We have managed to build up a technological and economic order based on machine production and the possession of material goods which inescapably determines to a greater or lesser degree die lives of all the individuals born into it, reducing a great many of them to a state bordering on panic or hysteria. Indeed, we are told that the only real issue before us in this respect is whether uncontrolled technological destruction or uncontrolled population will be the first to tear the fabric of our civilisation to pieces. In spite of this, in the name of a ‘war on want’ or of developing ‘underdeveloped’ countries, or simply of progress or evolution or efficiency we go on methodically trying to apply on an even more diorough and extensive scale-on a global scale - exactly the same techniques and habits which have brought about the bleakness of our own world - a bleakness which one might describe as resulting at least in part from a desanctification of nature.

Ireland was odd in the early middle ages. She lay on the outer edge of the world, the survivor of that Celtic civilisation which had once covered much of the west. She had never immediately known the pervading influence of Rome, which continued in so many ways for so long after the Roman empire collapsed. Christianity had reached her rather early (there were enough christians to make it worth while to send a continental bishop, Palladius, in 431) and it came before many of the developments which determined the nature of monasticism in early medieval Europe. Ireland’s political and social organisation were somewhat different from those of the Germanic peoples of the west; and though the early church in Ireland had an episcopal, diocesan structure, within two hundred years or so of its inception it had been fundamentally modified by native Irish laws and institutions. It is therefore not surprising to find that both Ireland’s sanctity and her secularity had peculiar features.

The problem I want briefly to focus on concerns the significance of the saint-king in early medieval cosmology: what is his relationship to the sacral king of so many pre-industrial societies? A commonly-accepted view has been that the sacral king was, quite simply, the immediate ancestor of the saint-king. To quote the recent but in some respects old-fashioned work of W. A. Chaney on Anglo-Saxon kingship: ‘The sacral nature of kingship.... would lead the folk to expect God to honour the stirps regia. The recognised form of this in the new religion was sainthood.’ Christianity, so Chaney implies, simply makes a saint out of the sacral king: in essentials, nothing is changed.

That the changes which occurred in the conduct of the regular and ascetic life in the eleventh century were deep seated has long been accepted, and their dependence on a fundamental reappraisal of the principles and practice of that life is clearly demonstrated by contemporaries. This ‘crisis’, as it has become normal to term it, was characterised by a rejection of the world and worldly values. In a general social context it can be seen in ‘gregorian’ ideas and attitudes on the relations between church and state, on the status and attributes of the clergy, and on the position and authority of the popes as individuals and the papacy as an institution. In the context of the regular life it is evident in a rejection of the formal round and ritual over-elaboration of monastic observance, and in an abhorrence of die complex inter-relationship and inter-dependence of monastic communities and the secular society in which diey were set. When the papal legate Hugh, archbishop of Lyons, wrote to Robert of Molesme accepting and authorising the abbot’s proposed initiative he indicated where the issues and problems lay

Around 1180 Conrad of Eberbach writing about the history of his own order, the cistercian, noticed that it had been founded the year before Jerusalem was freed from the saracens and close to the beginning of the Carthusian and premonstratensian orders. This seemed to him a significant cluster of events, for as the holy city was restored to the Christians, so the orders of monks, hermits and canons were being brought back to their old and proper ways of life by the new orders. Whilst today we may find Conrad’s chronology a little puzzling (La Grande Chartreuse and Prémontré were founded in 1084 and 1120, Cîteaux in 1098, whilst Jerusalem was freed in 1099), we can recognise that the first cistercians were aware that they were attempting a new thing; they called their first home at Cîteaux the New Monastery, thus distinguishing it from Molesmes, the old monastery from which they had come, and from the monastic world at large.

The early thirteenth century was an extraordinary period in the history of piety. Throughout Europe, and especially in urban communities, lay men and women were seized by a new religious fervour which could be satisfied neither by the new orders nor by the secular clergy. Lay groups proliferated, proclaiming the absolute and literal value of the gospels and practising a new life-style, the vita apostolica. This religious feeling led to the formation, on the eve of the fourth lateran council, of numerous orders of ‘poor men’ and shortly afterwards, to the foundation of the mendicant orders. From this novel interpretation of evangelical life women by no means wished to be excluded and many female groups sprang simultaneously into being in areas as far distant as Flanders and Italy. Yet how were such groups to be regarded because current attitudes to women were based on inconsistent and contradictory doctrines? It was difficult to provide the conditions under which they could achieve their desire for sanctity as they were not allowed to enter the various orders available to men. How then were men to reply to the demands of these women for participation in religious life? That there should be a reply was evident from the widespread heresy in just those areas in which the ferment of urban life encouraged the association of pious women. And heretics were dangerously successful with them! For the church, the existence of religious and semi-religious communities of women raised, in turn, many problems, not least the practicalities involved in both pastoral care and economic maintenance. Only, after 1215, when it attempted to regulate and discipline them, did it realise the widespread enthusiasm on which their movement was based.

The service of God in Church and State’: in medieval England these two usually separate activities were combined in the parliamentary attendance of the clergy. Two methods were employed in summoning the clergy: parliamentary abbots and the bishops were called by individual writs of summons; the lower clergy were called indirectly.

The writ of summons to each bishop of England and Wales included a mandate, called, from its opening word, the premunientes clause, ordering the bishop to cause to appear in parliament the head of his cathedral chapter, one proctor for the cathedral clergy, all the archdeacons, and two proctors for the diocesan clergy. After 1340, obedience to the premunientes clause was not enforced by the crown, so technically the command to the lower clergy to be present in parliament was episcopal, not royal. It is not the intention to discuss here the theoretical and constitutional issues involved but to describe the execution of the premunientes clause between 1340 and 1400 as far as the limitations of the sources allow.

The charges with which I shall deal in this paper were almost certainly a tissue of nonsense. Indeed a recent – hostile – account dismisses them as containing motifs presque folkloriques rappellant la legende de Sylvestre II. The folklore is itself interesting however, and so are the circumstances in which it could be delivered solemnly as fact to auditors at a general council by a powerful group including doctors of law and even a cardinal.

The circumstances in which the charges were brought were as follows: In 1409 popes Gregory XII and Benedict XIII were tried by the council of Pisa, with the intention of deposing them to end the schism. First, 37 charges were brought against them, giving a fairly detailed and damning account of the recent behaviour of both in failing to keep their oaths to end the schism. Some members of die council must have felt that these charges were not adequate, however, because on 17 May 1409 the council gave permission for new charges to be added if necessary. Ten new charges were indeed prepared and heard from May 27–30, so we have the full account of the evidence of the witnesses. Among these charges are accusations of witchcraft against each pope.

In this paper I wish to show a possible line of relationship between the careers of some fifteenth-century English bishops and their deathbed bequests. This attempt to correlate episcopal secularity, as revealed by the ‘careerism’ of the bishops, and episcopal sanctity, as revealed by their philanthropy, touches three major themes of historical inquiry. One of these is gift-giving. Anthropologists have taught us to see how the giving of gifts in pre-industrial societies can illuminate the role of symbolic relationships, of ties between lineages, of the bonds of social solidarity, status and hierarchy. Medieval historians know from their own work the importance of gift-giving in the economic sphere. I am also attempting to carry out a ‘group study’, one particular form of sociological history. The purpose of such endeavours is not, as Elton asserts, to reopen the quarrel as to whether history is or is not scientific. It is rather to ask questions about the past which the people of that day did not think to ask about themselves. As such I believe it to be a legitimate and proper form of historical inquiry. Lastly, I seek to shed some light on a particular aspect of medieval espiscopal activity. Anything we can learn about the ecclesiastical élite is that much more known about medieval people and medieval society.

Historians of west-European Christianity in its late medieval and early modern phases have recently been much concerned with the relations of the church and the devil. Our subject here, the church and the world, may seem by comparison, and notably for the period immediately preceding the reformation, a well-worn topic; inspired by the achievements of historical demography, we may be tempted to abandon it for more promising researches into the relations of the church and the flesh. This is indeed what I shall be doing here, at least to the degree that ‘flesh and blood’ can be considered as falling under the last heading. Yet, since it may be argued that ‘flesh and blood’ formed, for the average western Christian of this time, a major constituent of his ‘world’ or social environment, I do not feel that I am stretching a point in offering, within the present context, some comments on the subject indicated in my title. I am concerned with the connections of the Church and the ‘world’, meaning by that the complex of human relations it lives in. I am particularly concerned with the structure of one such society, that of western Europe in the immediately pre- and post-reformation age. And I am finally interested in pursuing or criticising some socio-historical arguments about what happened to European Christianity in and after the sixteenth century.

John hacket was the son of a Scot who had prospered in business in London and had become a burgess in the city of Westminster. John was born in 1592 and passed through Westminister school to Trinity college, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in 1616. His later episcopal eminence is attested in the full-scale portrait which adorns the walls of the Wren library in the college and in the bishop’s hostel which was founded in the college by his generosity in 1670. He was ordained by bishop King of London on 20 December 1618. By then he had already come under the influence of John Williams, a fellow of the neighbouring St John’s college, whose ability and charm were soon to take him to the deanery of Westminster, the bishopric of Lincoln, and the high office of lord keeper of the great seal. He took Hacket into his household as his chaplain and furthered his career by introducing him to the court where he became a royal chaplain. Williams also assisted his rise in the ecclesiastical firmament by appointing him to a prebend in Lincoln cathedral and then to the archdeaconry of Bedford, and by influencing the king to secure his appointment to the rectory of St Andrew’s, Holborn, and to the rectory of Cheam. His Holborn pulpit proved to be a position of great influence and he drew a large congregation, especially from the upper classes of society. His prestige among the clergy of London was so high that he was chosen by them in 1634 to be the second president of Sion college, an institution founded in 1633 as a centre where the city clergy could meet and study.

As far as the protestant countries are concerned the eighteenth century, the ‘age of reason’, might as well be called ‘the age of revival’. On the one hand, we meet with a strong desire to escape the snares of this world by concentrating upon the mysteries of salvation: the road to sanctity is a narrow road, to be trodden in fear and trembling. On the other hand there are those for whom this world is a world full of new and unexpected possibilities, a world to be explored and to be made instrumental to the fulfilment of the divine plan with regard to the development of humanity in its secular context. Naturally, also in the eighteenth century ‘sanctity’ and ‘secularity’ were not seen as in themselves mutually exclusive concepts. While many revivalists looked forward to the enlightenment of this world by the knowledge of God, many men of the enlightenment saw before them the prospect of the sanctification of the world by the combined influences of reason and revelation. Some of the fathers of the enlightenment - notably Locke and Leibniz - were essentially committed to the cause of Christianity, while on the other hand protagonists of the pietist and revival movements such as Francke and Edwards cannot in fairness be accused of an anti-rational attitude and of a lack of interest in the well-being of this world. Nevertheless, within the circle of eighteenth-century protestant Christianity there were conspicuous differences with regard to the evaluation of and the attitude towards the world in which the Christian community, while living in the expectation of the kingdom, still had to find its way and its place.

If it had ever been coined, the slogan ‘holy worldliness’ would have been welcomed in nineteenth-century England. So many of the longings, and half-formed visions of the period seemed to be pressing in that direction. And yet the fact that it never appeared, so far as I know, suggests that the thinking of the time was somehow deeply inhibited. In this paper, I wish to try to show how close theologians and popular religious thinkers came to framing the concept of ‘holy worldliness’, and how and why they were held back.

My reading has unfortunately been inadequate and this paper can be no more than a first impressionistic sketch. I have not taken the well trodden highroad of F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley and the like. This is not to deny their importance, but given a limited space, I want to explore some of the by-paths, if only to keep open the historian’s rights of way. Only as we walk them well shall we be able to understand die merits and demerits of the highroad. To speak plainly, figures like F. D. Maurice are studied too much in isolation from their context; even when this procedure does not lead to positive error, it cannot help but reduce claims for their special significance to mere assertions. To judge whether a man had a unique or seminal role involves comparing him with his competitors, and that means, doing equal justice to them all. By itself, the biographical method – the hero against a backcloth – gives no grounds for estimating the hero’s significance, since it has already been prejudged by the biographical form. But this reflection is no doubt an inaptly grandiose apology for the deficiencies of what I have to offer.

In 1863, when a London printer, called Collingridge, produced a handbook for the aspiring author, he made it clear that one particular class of aspiring author was of dominant commercial importance: