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.

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.

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.

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.

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.