Even after Constantine, at the beginning of the fourth century, had laid upon the Church, henceforth no longer a cult suspected of disloyalty and liable to persecution, the duty of acting as the cement which should bind together the threatened Empire, the verities of the Faith were customarily declared in Christian art as much by symbolic allusion as by representations of a fully descriptive character.

The political situation in Ireland during the pontificate of Innocent III was highly complicated and, if we are to understand the relationship between the pope and the native Irish kings, it is necessary to make a short historical retrogression.

Among the many ‘unions’ between the Roman Church and the various Eastern Churches, none, perhaps, has been more unknown than the Union of Suzdal, 1222–1252. How important this union really was, outside the ecclesiastical questions involved, will appear immediately upon reflexion that its span coincides with the Tartar conquest of Russia and the consolidation of Tartar power. All the more startling, therefore, is the neglect of this union by Russian and non-Russian historians.

Though well known to specialists in the history of early Polish literature, the figure of Andreas (Andrzej) Galka of Dobczyn, an ardent admirer of John Wycliff, is probably not familiar to English students of Middle English. This fifteenth-century professor at the University of Cracow is notable for several reasons. Not only is his eulogy of Wycliff a precious monument of medieval Polish, but his Latin letters also have great interest, revealing as they do a colourful and pugnacious individual whose meteoric career is linked with some profound social changes occurring in his age and country. Both his literary activity and his personal adventures relate him to the movement for Church reform then sweeping over central and eastern Europe, as a precursor of the more decisive movement which was to occur in the early sixteenth century.

The convening of the Assembly of Notables and the prolonged conflict between the government and the Parlement of Paris gave rise to a ferment of discussion throughout France during 1787 and 1788. This increased after the publication of the arrêt du conseil on 8 August 1788 which gave 1 May 1789 as the date for the opening of an Estates-General. The public debate was greatly encouraged by, and indeed largely carried on in, the innumerable pamphlets which appeared after the king had, in July, invited informed persons to submit memoranda on the proper form and functions of such an assembly. Amid this ‘avalanche of proposals, complaints, protests and far-fetched schemes’ there were a considerable number of pamphlets written by members of the lower clergy. Although the great majority of these are anonymous, the form of the titles and, more important, internal evidence indicate that they are almost certainly the work of clerical writers. The nature and content of these pamphlets are a valuable indication of the attitude of at least a considerable section—and this an influential section—of the lower clergy on the eve of the Revolution. In these pamphlets are expressed in their clearest form the ideas which formed the content of many of the speeches made by curé agitators in the electoral assemblies which met in the spring of 1789, and which, modified in more sober committees, dictated many of the clauses which clerical cahiers devoted to Church affairs.

The elder James Raine published in 1839 as appendix no. CCCXXXII to his edition of Historiae Dunelmensis Scriptores Tres a document entitled ‘Consuetudo et lex sancti patris Cuthberti’. Attention was subsequently drawn to it, in 1905, by Professor Lapsley. As Lapsley was only concerned in his article with the status of drengs, he forbore to enter into what he called ‘the quellenkritik of this curious document’, and, as we shall see, he mistook its date. It is therefore worth while carrying investigation further.

The principal source for the history of the Order of Prémontré in England is the three volumes of Collectanea Anglo-Premonstratensia edited by cardinal Gasquet and published by the Royal Historical Society in 1904–06 (Camden 3rd Series, vols. vi, x, xii). The documents which make up this collection were derived from two sources:

1. The register of Richard Redman, abbot of Shap, and visitor of the order in England during the second half of the fifteenth century. (Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS. 1519).

2. Transcripts of a Registrum Premonstratense made by the antiquary Francis Peck early in the eighteenth century, and now in the British Museum (Additional MSS. 4934–5).