In 561/2, a few years before the death of the Emperor Justinian, Roman envoys concluded a peace treaty with the Persian Empire. A detailed account of the negotiations and terms is preserved among the surviving portions of the sixth-century history by Menander Protector. For the immediate purposes of this paper, the most important features of this treaty were that it ended more than twenty years of intermittent warfare between the two empires, that the treaty was to remain in force for fifty years, and that the Romans were required to make substantial payments of gold to the Persians at a rate of 30,000 solidi per year.

It was a commonplace of the times, featured in royal letters despatched abroad, and of course in the chronicles, that during the reign of Edward II the ‘indiscretum regimen’ of bishops coupled with their ‘taciturnitas’ lay at the root of the manifest political troubles.

In 1944 Kathleen Edwards produced two articles on Edward II's bishops, relating respectively to their ‘learning’ and to their ‘political importance’. Fifteen years later, she treated another aspect of the topic, their ‘social origins and provenance’. These articles, based on her 1937 London MA thesis, provide the point of departure for further study, in particular for any prosopographical analysis. However, apart from transcripts of parliamentary proxies (PRO, SC 10) provided by Professor Johnstone and the brief Meditacio de Statu Prelati (BL, MS Royal 5 C. iii), ascribed to Simon de Ghent, printed sources only were used.

The orthodoxy which dismissed the pre-Reformation parish as the point where the many failings of the Church met to blight ordinary lives has exercised a tenacious grip on the historical imagination. Current opinion, on the other hand, perceives the parish as deserving of inquiry, not least because of a dawning realisation that it was a point where managerial expertise and a noteworthy buoyancy of spirit intersected. Ostentatious programmes of church rebuilding and embellishment testify both to competence and to a vitality bordering on exuberance in many parish communities. If more difficult to appraise, the liturgical life of many parishes seems to have flourished and was enhanced by the steady accumulation of vessels, vestments, lights, embroidered cloths and painted images. Many wealthier parishes also supported numerous auxiliary clergy and a sophisticated musical repertory and performance. But building and liturgical elaboration were not products merely of whim. In addition to an obligation to support the incumbent by regular payment of tithe, responsibility for maintaining church fabric and the wherewithal for worship within the church had been assigned to the parish community by canon law in the thirteenth century. Many parishes conspicuously exceeded their brief. In matters of securing revenues it seem at the very least safe to assume widespred competence. Historians, however, have by and large failed to respond to the laity's achievement and that in spite of abundant surviving documentation. Investigation of the financial regime of the late medieval parish is long overdue. If it has received any attention at all, parish finance has been charaterised in very general terms of corporate levy and ad hoc donation.

In the course of the 1690s and into the early eighteenth century a number of English divines and laymen became embroiled in a pamphlet war on the doctrine of the Trinity. It was a wide-ranging debate and its participants included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Socinians, deists and Arians. Until recently, however, this controversy had received scant attention from historians. It is only within the last few years that an interest in the trinitarian controversy has emerged: a number of works have appeared on the more notable of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century anti-trinitarian thinkers, and J. C. D. Clark has pointed out the political implications of anti-trinitarian views. There is, nevertheless, one aspect of the trinitarian controversy which has remained relatively untouched, and that is the debate on the Trinity which raged within the Established Church.

When asked why he objected to the preaching of George Whitefield, Parson Adams, Henry Fielding's paradigmatic parish priest in Joseph Andrews, replied that Whitefield ‘set up the detestable doctrine of faith against good works’. He went on to say that in his opinion ‘a virtuous and good Turk, or heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator than a vicious and wicked Christian, though his faith was as perfectly orthodox as St Paul's himself’. This literary anecdote illustrates the caricatures that developed in the wake of the Methodist revival: Methodists were portrayed as ‘solafideists’ and antinomians while traditional Anglicans were characterised as moralists. Both sides in the dispute felt obliged to attack the other, with the result that straw men were often set up in order to be knocked down. There were substantive differences between the Methodists and other Anglicans, but these were frequently exaggerated on both sides for the purpose of emphasising the severity of the opponent's error. And often these substantive differences were ignored altogether in favour of contrived and inflammatory charges.

Private correspondence between Rome and England in the fifteenth century is not unknown but is usually to be found among the business papers of proctors permanently resident at the Curia, such as William Swan and Thomas Hope. By contrast, the three letters printed below were written by an occasional visitor to Rome, charged with a specific errand. They tell us more about England than Italy, and more about the everyday concerns of a moderately successful clerical careerist than the procedures of the papal court, but they are unusual and valuable precisely for that reason. The author of these letters was Master Robert Thornton. A canon lawyer in the service of Archbishop Kempe, he began his career as an advocate in the prerogative court of York and, during the 1440s, established himself as one of the mainstays of the diocesan administration there: he acted as commissary-general to the court of York and official of the absentee archdeacon of York, besides serving on many ad hoc commissions. By the time these letters were written, Thornton's diligence in the archbishop's service had brought him several desirable benefices: already perpetual vicar of Silkstone (Yorkshire, West Riding), he became rector of Almondbury (Yorkshire, West Riding) in 1451 and was presented by William Bothe, Kempe'ssuccessor as archbishop, to a prebend at St. John's, Chester, in the following year. It was his membership of Kempe' familia that, indirectly, set him on the road to Rome. In May 1452 he was dispatched with a bundle of papers and sixteen marks in cash to pursue the claims of John Berningham, resident canon and treasurer of York, to the vacant deanery.

During the seven years between 1555 and 1562, a transformation took place in the character of early French Protestantism. Before 1555 reformed communities in the kingdom of France were relatively scarce, and only loosely affiliated; by 1562 they had become more numerous, and more centralised. Before 1555 a typical congregation would meet, without either a minister or a system of ecclesiastical discipline, for prayers, the singing of hymns and bible-reading; by 1562, the same group would probably have not only its own pastor to preach and administer the sacraments, but also a consistory to enforce church discipline. In the most recent secondary literature this development is commonly described as the transformation of églises plantées into églises dressées. It is said, for example by Prestwich, that ‘the consistory became the mark of a true church, termed an église dressée, in contrast to the amorphous Bible gatherings, known as églises plantées’. The purpose of this brief article is to question whether these terms were ever contrasted in this way in the mid-sixteenth century, and to suggest that other phrases express the development more accurately.