In the spring of the year 1160 archbishop Martin of Santiago de Compostela was expelled from his see by his king, Fernando II of León. Except for a brief period of about six months in the winter of 1164–65 he remained excluded from his church and sometimes from the kingdom until shortly before his death in 1167. For some of this period of seven years he sought to exert pressure upon the king through the papal curia of Alexander III in order to bring about his reinstatement; usually in vain. This cause célèbre in the relations between Church and State in the most westerly of the Spanish kingdoms has attracted little attention from Spanish ecclesiastical historians, and none at all from others. What makes it of more than parochial interest is its timing. Fernando II was not the only western European ruler to be at loggerheads with his archbishop in the 1160s; neither is the spectacle of a pope unwilling decisively to intervene in a quarrel of this kind an unfamiliar one to students of the ecclesiastical affairs of that troubled decade. Only fragments of evidence have survived to shed light on the tortuous diplomacy of those years. To disinter and to attempt to fit together the dead bones of this forgotten dispute may, it is hoped, be to provide a further fragment, which, in its turn, may be of interest to those whose concern is with the larger affairs of empire and of papacy, of Angevins and of Capetians. To historians of Spain its interest will (we hope) be sufficiently obvious to need no commendation.

In the England of 1840, as Professor Chadwick observes, the idea of mission pertained to the lapsed at home as well as the heathen overseas. This article, in discussing connexions between the English Churches and the Australian colonies, deals with a third meaning: colonial mission. The seventeenth-century association of religion and colonisation is well known. The bearing of religion (heathen missions excepted) on the imperialism of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and the response of English Christianity to settlement colonies in this period, have occasioned less discussion. Most familiar are the points where religion was drawn into imperial policy, as in British North America after the Revolution. Promotion of the Church of England was part of an overhaul of imperial administration in New South Wales as well. But in the new century this method of achieving political and social stability ran into difficulties at home. In Australia it was ineffective and little more popular than in the Canadas. By 1830 religion was ceasing to be an instrument of imperial policy. The new bearers of British Christianity overseas, the evangelical missionary societies, had been founded with the heathen in view and generally avoided other engagements. The missionary fervour of the post-Napoleonic period thus coincided with indifference to the religious needs of emigrants and colonists. A response came in the 1830s in the form of colonial missionary societies and a quickening of the older Church societies. Though never a match for the home and heathen enterprises of Victorian Christianity, the colonial missions had roots in the nation's past. They expressed the various aspirations of the home Churches and were part of the phenomenon of empire.

The religion of the people is the foundation of the Church and basic to the study of church history. It is in this belief and in the recognition that where direct expression of religious ideas is lacking any material which may shed light on them must be used, that the following study is offered. The evidence on which it is based is drawn from the archives of Eton College and consists largely of wills drawn up before 1500. They number seventy-three, and they fall into two main groups. The first comprises fourteen wills found among the deeds which came to the college as the result of its acquisition of land and property by the gift either of the founder, Henry VI, or of local benefactors in the early sixteenth century. Three of these wills are of the fourteenth century; the remainder are spread throughout the fifteenth century from 1401 to 1497. Six were made in the diocese of Salisbury: five in New Windsor, one in Cookham (Berks.). The other eight wills in this group are those of residents in Lincoln diocese, three living in Eton and five in Buckinghamshire villages to the north—Iver, Langley, Farnham, Burnham, and High Wycombe. The second group, comprising the remaining fifty-nine wills are contained in the first of the college registers, and were proved before the provosts, who had been granted archidiaconal rights of jurisdiction in the parish of Eton by Thomas Bekynton, archdeacon of Buckingham, in 1443.