On 25 April 1244 Pope Innocent iv granted Henry III's petition for absolution from any sentence of excommunication he might incur for violence against clerks. At first sight it might seem unlikely that the king of England would get involved in scuffles with clerks. He was in his thirty-seventh year and has been described by Sir Maurice Powiek? as devout, if not spiritually minded. He was of a fiery temperament, however, and may have been aware of the opinion of some canonists as to the culpability of those who instructed or ordered others to violence.

Throughout its history the institutionalised Church has sought in different ways to define its position with respect to the ‘world’, in order to give meaning to the injunction to be ‘in’ this world but not ‘of’ it. During the Middle Ages, the tension was acute because the Church, in its narrow definition of the clergy, claimed to be a separate, spiritual order, set apart from the temporal world. The tangible results of this dichotomy are particularly evident with respect to the real property held by ecclesiastical institutions. Property gave the Church the security to be independent from the lay power and the aristocracy; hence the Church claimed varying degrees of immunity for its property from secular jurisdictions.

A strong case has been made for the appearance of a new kind of history in late sixteenth-century France. Whether or not it deserves the label ‘historicist’, it has been credited with a desire to discover the objective face of the past, with a critical approach to sources, and even, though more rarely, with attempts to explain historical process. Prominent among the new brand of historians are Jean du Tillet, Charles du Moulin, Pierre and François Pithou, Claude Fauchet and Etienne Pasquier. All these men of the robe are also celebrated as defenders of the liberties of the Gallican Church. The Gallican tradition shared an attitude towards the past that was quite contrary to the new history. It did not accept change for its own sake, nor did it see change as improvement pointing towards the present.

Uber dem Berg gibst auch Leute. This ultramontane remark made in 1742 by Christoph Matthäus Pfaff, professor of theology and chancellor of Tübingen University between 1720 and 1756, was intended to shake students out of their cosy, provincial and exclusive Lutheran theology. It was time, so Pfaff argued, they opened windows, put aside their arrogant hair-splitting about correct Lutheran doctrine, and looked at the wider Protestant world beyond Württemberg. Knowledge of the sources of the Christian Church, and of the customs and legal shape of Protestantism in Germany as it had developed since the Reformation, provided the only sure defence of the Protestant Church in an age when autocratic behaviour was fashionable with princes, and the temporal authority of Popes Clement xi and Clement XII was still an inescapable fact.

Most Anglican crises, including recent ones, seem to boil down in the end to two linked questions — those of identity and authority. Is the Church of England pre-eminently a national or a catholic Church, a Protestant Church (and if so, of what kind?) or Anglican and sui generis? With which of these types of Church should it align itself? Where lies the famed via media, and which are the extremes to be avoided? And who has the authority to decide: as a national Church, parliament, the government, the monarch personally; as an episcopal Church, the bishops? Or should the clergy in convocations (or, latterly, the General Synod, including representatives of the pious laity) take decisions? Anglican crises have always raised these twin problems of identity and authority. In the mid-eighteenth century — from the end of the 1730s and particularly in the 1740s — the Church of England faced another crisis. The Anglican bishops had to come to terms with the movement known as the ‘evangelical revival’. Principles had to be applied to a new situation. The bishops had to decide how to categorise the new societies (or would they become new churches?) which were springing up all over England.

Forty years ago the story of the Church in late medieval England was a simple one and not very different from the version which had prevailed half a century before that. The interpretation presented by W. Capes in 1900 had been slightly modified but largely underlined by 1950, and the Church and its development which was commonly depicted in that year would not have been strikingly unfamiliar to him. The current version was that, after the reforming efforts of the thirteenth century, which failed to achieve their end, and the advent of the friars, who even by the middle of that century were departing from their earlier zeal and purity, the Church in the following hundred years was exploited by the pope when it was not saved or oppressed by the Crown. The resulting corruption of the clergy contributed to its negligence and provoked an eruption of heresy which in due course was savagely suppressed and virtually expunged; rid of this threat, the fifteenth-century clergy were so notorious for their laxity, greed and mediocrity that a few devout members of the laity, perhaps inspired by the mystical writings, took refuge in private devotions which anticipated the individualism of the Protestant. The Reformation was viewed as the inescapable result of these circumstances.