The Viking invasions of the ninth and early tenth centuries were referred to in a large number of contemporary Frankish texts, including not only annals and chronicles, but also saints’ lives, miracle texts, capitularies, royal and private charters, letters, sermons, biblical commentaries, hymns, poems and prayers. The great majority of these texts were written by clerics, either religious or secular, and as a result the raids are frequently described in religious terms and set within a religious framework. For example, the Vikings are often denoted as ‘pagani’ and the Franks as’ christiani’; towns are burned ‘divino iuditio’ and battles won ‘adiuvante Domino’,1 and the invasions are represented as a punishment for the Franks’ sins in fulfilment of biblical prophecy.

The tracts which John Knox wrote in 1558 are regarded as the core of his political writings and the key to his entire political thought.1 The most famous - and infamous - of his works, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, was published in the spring and was followed in July by The Letter to the Regent [Augmente], The Appellation and The Letter to the Commonalty of Scotland These tracts have suffered from two serious misconceptions. The first is the natural tendency to link all the 1558 material together and in particular to treat the First Blast and the July tracts .as a unified whole. This has distorted the meaning of all the pamphlets and led to vain efforts to mould them into a composite unit which can then be labelled ‘Knox's political thought’. In fact, it is extremely important to separate them and to make a sharp distinction between their intended audiences and purposes. Crucially, the First Blast was written primarily for an English audience and the July tracts intended for a Scottish one.

Historians of education have deepened our understanding of the development of American boarding schools by challenging he popular view of them as straightforward continuations of New England academies or as imitations of British public schools and by tracing their actual roots back to a distinctive series of institutions that began in the United States in the 1820s, ‘30s, and ’40s. Sociologists have increased our awareness of the social and economic conditions that contributed to the flourishing of these schools as upper-class domains during the Gilded Age.1 It remains for the student of religious history to point out the close connection that existed between the prototypical American boarding schools and representatives of the Episcopal High Church tradition, and to attempt to demonstrate that this association was no coincidence but that the schools were themselves concrete expressions of the High Church outlook.

During the final months of the First World War, the General Assemblies of the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland - the established Church of Scotland and the voluntary United Free Church - committed themselves to work for the thorough re- construction of Scottish society. Church leaders promised to work for a new Christian commonwealth, ending the social divisions and class hatred that had plagued pre-war Scottish industrial society. Bound together through the shared sacrifice of the war, the Scottish people would be brought back to the social teachings of Christianity and strive together to realise the Kingdom of God. The Churches would end their deference to the laws of nineteenth-century political economy, with their emphasis on individualism, self-interest and competition, and embrace new impera- tives of collective responsibility and co-operation. Along with the healing of social divisions, church leaders also pledged to end the ecclesiastical divisions in Scottish Presbyterianism. The final months of the war brought a revival of the pre-war movement to unite the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church into a single National Church, and Scottish ecclesiastical leaders held forth to a weary nation the vision of a united National Church leading a covenanted Christian commonwealth in pursuit of social justice and harmony.