The Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts by M. L. W. Laistner and H. H. King is not definitive, since it is based partly on the evidence of catalogues and other printed material and not on the manuscripts themselves. However, it provides a useful rough guide. It lists approximately 160 surviving manuscripts of the Historia Ecdesiastica. Laistner constructed a table showing the percentage of the total number copied in each century:

The great expansion in monasticism in Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a commonplace of medieval history, as is the marked diminution in monastic grants after c. 1200. Far more attention, however, has been paid to the religious houses than to their founders, and it is only by looking at a baronial family over a long period that one can discern the fashions which undoubtedly existed in monastic benefaction and the changes in attitude of successive generations. The Clare family were both long-lasting and prolific, and, because of the numerous changes in the landed position of various members of the family, it is possible to see how closely in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the acquisition of new territories and the endowment of monasteries went together. Moreover, we are able to trace the changing preferences for different monastic orders and, to some extent, the reasons for this, and, in addition, to see this in the context not only of Normandy and England, but of Wales and Ireland as well. Whereas in the eleventh and early twelfth century, the Clares' gifts passed to Benedictine houses, many of them Norman or with Norman connections, they became more interested later in the new orders of the Augustinian canons and Cistercians which were spreading rapidly over Europe. At the same time they made grants to the military orders of the Hospitallers and Templars which, by giving knights the opportunity to combine fighting with a monastic life, fused two ideals of the twelfth-century world. In contrast to the variety and amount of these monastic benefactions, the Clares were content in the thirteenth century to make only the occasional grant, but they were insistent on maintaining their rights of patronage. In addition, their interest turned to the new orders of friars. There is, however, no indication here of continuous family interest from one generation to the next as would have been the case in the early twelfth century.

Tyranny is a recurrent preoccupation in the life and thought of Thomas More. It is among the first of the subjects which he takes for his own in his earliest examination of Greek prose. It is the theme of a significant number of his Latin poems. It provides the matter of his Richard III and the anti-matter of Utopia: it is among the evils which his imaginary commonwealth is designed to annihilate. ‘He always’, wrote Erasmus, ‘had a special loathing of tyranny.’

The years following the Peasants' Revolt posed difficult problems for the city of Strasburg. Always the ‘city of refuge’ of the Reformation, it attracted men of widely different temperaments and religious views. Especially difficult were the Anabaptists who constituted a threat not only to theological orthodoxy—however hard that might have been to define—but also to that civil order which rested on the validity of the authority of the magistrates. In these circumstances, one episode is of pre-eminent interest. In 1526 Martin Cellarius, a young man with a reputation for radicalism, came to Strasburg and found lodging in the house of one of its leading pastors, Wolfgang Capito. In July 1527 Cellarius published a theological work, De Operibus Dei, in which he disavowed his radical sympathies and for which Capito wrote a commendatory preface. The following March, however, Capito published a commentary on Hosea in the preface to which he expressed distinct Anabaptist leanings. This provided personal embarrassment if not public danger. Bucer was furious. Concern was expressed by all the leading reformers of the Rhineland. But an immediate scapegoat was found in the person of Martin Cellarius.