In this book it is proposed to deal with three aspects of the Church in England during the fourteenth century. First, I want to consider the social and political aspect of the Church, particularly in such matters as the composition of the episcopate, the exercise of patronage in the Church, the influence of the Crown and papal provisions, and, in general, to try to explain the relation of the Church to the contemporary society in which it was embedded. Secondly, I want to consider the intellectual activities and controversies that exercised the Church in this century, and to see where these were carried on and what were the main topics of controversy, and to review some selected personalities, particularly some of the less familiar ones. The fourteenth century is above all things an age of continual controversy, of which the familiar Wycliffite controversy is but the culmination. Thirdly, I want to examine fourteenth-century religious literature, such as the manuals of instruction for parish priests, the religious and moral didactic works, and the relations of these writings with the mystical writings of the period. We are only slowly beginning to appreciate and understand this aspect of the age, and historians, I am afraid, have been much slower at this than students of literature. With all the faults and scandals of the times, and they were many, it was at the same time a profoundly religious period. It was the golden age of the English Mystics, when Englishmen made the greatest contribution they have ever made to the mystical and ascetical literature of Christendom.