From its foundation the Carthusian Order cultivated letters as the most fitting form of labour for those who dwell apart in the desert; for although they lived and worked in strict solitude, they still spoke to the Christian world through the books which they wrote, copied and transmitted. Adam of Dryburgh (†1212 at Witham), one of the first and best-known English Carthusian authors, wrote of this activity in his work On the Quadripartite Exercise of the Cell, recalling a passage of the Consuetudines of Guigo 1 which is often cited as evidence of the Carthusian attitude to letters:

‘If the prior has so provided, there is one work to the performance of which you ought especially to attend; that is either that you learn to write (if, of course, you can learn), or if you can and know, that you do write. This work is, as it were, immortal work; work, if one may say so, not passing but lasting; work certainly, may we say, and yet not work; the work, finally, which, among all other works is most fitting to literate religious men …

There are many accounts of the ‘prebendaries' plot’ of 1543 against archbishop Thomas Cranmer. Some view the event as a counterattack against advancing heresy in Canterbury diocese. Others see a ‘papist’ revolt within Cranmer's own household. Nearly all agree that the plot was a wholly clerical enterprise. They have studied the clergy alone, focusing on the prebendaries' and preachers' activities against their ordinary. Recent accounts have stressed the relationship between the prebendaries' plot and the conflict between Cranmer and bishop Stephen Gardiner. That there was factional strife in the royal council, which could easily focus on religious issues, is not in question here. What is lacking, however, in recent accounts is any consideration of the substantial involvement of a number of Kentish gentlemen and royal officials, although their part in the affair was noted in near-contemporary accounts. By following these traces we may enlarge our understanding of the intrigue of 1543 in the context of Reformation politics at the county level.

The religious revival during the 1740s, in Britain and the American colonies, resulted in a vast output of printed matter. A comparison of the literature printed before, with that printed after this period, shows the impact of a single decade on both the form and content of evangelical literature. In particular, the revival was responsible for launching a new literary genre—the evangelical newspaper and magazine. Where there had been no specifically evangelical periodical publication in the first forty years of the century, by the last forty years such literature had become a normal means of communication and propagation for several denominations.

In an earlier article I discussed the general status of Anglican chaplaincies in continental Europe after the defeat of Napoleon and attempted to show how feeble this aspect of the pax britannica really was. Peter Hinchliff s expression ‘The One-Sided Reciprocity’ indeed fits perfectly the position of the Anglican Church abroad in those years. Despite the Royal Patents obtained by bishop Edmund Gibson of London in 1727 and 1728, the authority of the bishop of London was far from being strengthened by the Royal Supremacy: if anything, the Royal Supremacy neutralised episcopal authority. In a situation where some chaplains were appointed by the Foreign Office and others engaged by private bodies (the most notable at this time being the Colonial and Continental Church Society), the bishop of London, as nominal ordinary of Anglican congregations in Europe, could only exercise authority over those clergy who had received their appointments directly from Government, the operation of Government patronage having emasculated all independent episcopal initiative; and these clergy often refused to defer to the bishop unless specifically directed to do so by the Foreign Secretary. ‘As I have no jurisdiction at Ostend’, wrote bishop Charles James Blomfield of a priest who owed his appointment to a private body, ‘my licence holds good only so long as the Congregation, who pay their chaplain, think fit to respect it’.

Among the sources that Strype used for his Life of Whitgift was a group of MSS., relating to the activities of the Puritans between c. 1588 and 1591, which he was lent in 1711 by the Rev. Thomas Brett, LL.D., of Spring Grove, Kent, the future Non-Juror bishop. The papers had originally belonged to a maternal ancestor of Brett's, Sir John Boys of St. Gregory's, Canterbury, a successful Elizabethan lawyer who had been M.P. successively for Sandwich, Midhurst and Canterbury, and Recorder of Canterbury and Sandwich, and who had held the office of steward of the Liberty of the see of Canterbury for almost forty years under archbishops Parker, Grindal, Whitgift, Bancroft and Abbot. Sir John Boys left no direct issue, but numerous collateral relations and the papers appear to have descended through the family of his nephew Edward Boys, who inherited the manor of Betshanger from his uncle, until the beginning of the eighteenth century when they came into Brett's possession after the death of his mother's brother, Jeffray Boys of Betshanger, in 1703.