Those who have written about William the Conqueror and the English Church have usually implied that in the beginning it was the king's wish to reform his conquest with the help of a Cluniac mission, and that it was the refusal of Hugh of Semur, abbot of Cluny (1049–1109), to supply a contingent of monks which forced William to look elsewhere for helpers.1 This diplomatic failure therefore determined the effect of the Norman Conquest on the English Church. It led to Lanfranc, and so Anselm. Indeed, the consequences could be regarded as so vast as to be incalculable. There has, however, been a good deal of erroneous reference and general uncertainty on this matter; and diere are, indeed, some grounds for thinking that the king's approaches to Cluny occurred in the second half of his reign. A re-examination of all the evidence is required.

The rising in France in 1320 known as the Pastoureaux, or Shepherds' Crusade, receives little attention in most histories, and it is, indeed, a relatively small-scale event for which there are limited sources. Nevertheless, it has wider implications than have been generally recognised. The purpbse of this paper is therefore two fold: to describe these events through khe available sources and to offer some ideas concerning their historical! importance.

‘The right way, yea, and the only way, to understand the scripture unto salvation’, declared William Tyndale, is to seek in it, ‘chiefly J L and above all, the covenants made between God and us.’ For the Henrician heresiarch, the key to the reforming of England was the bible in translation, and the key to the bible was the idea of covenant. By the power of that idea he proposed to free England from the clutch of Rome: covenant would unlock scripture, cleanse it of popish corruptions and fit it to its work of reformation. Thus instructed, his countrymen would build their faith not on Roman sand but ‘on the rock of God's word, according to his covenants …’ Tyndale was not the first theologian to discover covenant in scripture, but he infused die concept with unprecedented energy: it became his cardinal principle of exegesis and the ruling element in his project of religious revolution.

The French Church on the eve of the Reformation presents a varied and complex spectacle. Since the end of the Hundred Years War the number of clergy had grown significantly, much of the material damage caused by the war had been made good, and an army of administrators had placed the Church on what seemed to be a healthy financial base. In the diocese of Rouen under Guillaume d'Estouteville (1453–83) the archbishop's annual revenues rose from about 4,000 to about 10,000 livres; the Church was served by an excellent administration; and an abundance of priests ensured that there were few or no empty benefices. Yet neither a more numerous clergy nor sound finances could guarantee a religious revival or an active faith. The Church's aim never went beyond an attempt to turn the clock back, and it did not adapt to the expanding economy of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Ecclesiastical institutions failed to invest in anything other than land and, to a lesser extent, urban property, and too much capital was immobilised in land and ‘treasure’, while the expanding commercial sectors of the upper-Norman economy went ignored. Similarly, corruption, abuses and apathy existed alongside the first glimmerings of new attitudes, and without a lead from the top the forces of regeneration would be blocked by traditional attitudes and styles of administration, and the combined effects of the rise of Protestantism and the raging inflation of the sixteenth century could be temporarily disastrous.

It is well known that, during the nineteenth century in England, there was widespread criticism of the traditional professions. Their members, it was alleged, formed an excessively privileged group owing their position more to patronage than to personal merit or competence. It is equally well known that patronage was believed to be particularly rampant in the nineteenth-century Church of England. (The novels of Trollope have ensured this.) It has been suggested, all the same, that of all institutions providing professional services to the nineteenth-century public, the Church of England escaped the reforming spirit of the age most completely. I hope in the course of my argument here to illustrate that this was not so and to show that problems which beset other professional men during the century affected the clergy of the Church of England also. I hope to demonstrate that doubts about the appropriateness of patronage as a device for recruiting and promoting parish clergy were, at times, widespread among the clergy themselves, among practising members of the Church of England and among the general public. Indeed, it becomes clear that, at certain crises, Church patronage (and especially patronage in the hands of private individuals) was subject to vigorous attack. It also becomes clear that, by the end of the century, the experiences and arguments of the preceding years were having their effect—that shifts in attitudes towards patronage were taking place and being translated into practice either directly by legislation or more subtly by social convention.