Whatever are you doing here?’ Professor Dugmore asked his daughter Ismayne when he bumped into her quite unexpectedly on Cambridge station in May 1979. It was the year in which Clifford Dugmore handed over the editorship of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History to Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Linehan. There was a benevolent conspiracy. A meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal, which its chairman, Walter Ullmann, had arranged at Trinity College, was to assume the character of a festive occasion: lunch and the presentation to Clifford of the April number of vol. xxx designed as a Festschrift. There was, exceptionally, a title, Ecclesia Anglicana, and all the articles were contributed by members of the Board. Apparently it had not occurred to the honorand that the coincidence of a seventieth birthday and his relinquishment of the editorial chair after thirty years should require any special celebration.

The bishops of Roman Africa vacillated in their relations with the papacy in the three decades preceding the Vandal invasion and, more specifically, during the papacies of Innocent, Zosimus, Boniface, and Coelestine. Theyseemed grossly inconsistent, first praising papal authority, then curbing its ability to influence African jurisdiction. In synodal letters of 416 associated with the Pelagian controversy, the bishops exalted Roman authority, even ascribing to the pope a ‘greate dignity’ and a ‘special gift of grace’. An additional private letter of five African bishops contrasted the African ‘brook’ with the Roman ‘spring’. Augustine also acknowledged the special authority of Rome. These were no mere effusions of polite speech. The Africans intended to sway a papal hand in their campaign against Pelagius and his supporters by seeking papal approbation of their condemnations of Pelagianism. The Council of Sardica and Roman law had earlier granted the papacy the authority to function as a ‘court of appeals’ in the Western Church. Accordingly, Innocent responded to the African bishops with a condemnation of the heresy, however equivocal in points of doctrine, dramatically clothed in the style of imperial rescript. Boniface and Coelestine soon provided official approbation of African canons issued in 418 at the Council of Carthage, and Augustine and subsequent popes regarded this as the proof of a consistent papal position in support of African doctrine, leaving Zosimus' temporary exoneration of Pelagius and Caelestius the unsuccessful exception to the rule.

Exiled from his see in the year 356, Hilary of Poitiers suddenly emerges on the historical scene out of a shroud of undocumented silence. It is well known by students of Hilary and his times how few facts are available about the saint's early life and his first years as bishop. The existence of such lacunae in the career of a person who would eventually become one of the West's major theologians and apologists created a vacuum too tempting not to fill. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find later hagiographic accounts eager to trace Hilary's virtus and undefiled orthodoxy back to the earliest stages of his life. This is well exemplified by Hilary's sixth-century biographer Venantius Fortunatus, who locates signs of future fidelities in the very beginning. Despite the implications in the first book of De Trinitate that Hilary had been a pagan prior to becoming a Christian, Venantius confidently tells us how the saint took in Christian doctrine and true religion with his mother's milk.

Salimbene called the Franciscan Adam Marsh ‘one of the greatest clerks of the world’, an accolade he reserved for a small group of men whom he regarded as the master minds of his time. A glance at Adam's letters suggests that Salimbene's opinion was widely shared by Adam's contemporaries. Few men without official position can have had their advice so eagerly sought by so many different people in high places. He was the counsellor of Henry III and the queen, the confidant of Simon de Montfort and his wife, the mentor of bishops and consultant to the rulers of his order. He enjoyed the trust of men as different as Archbishop Boniface of Savoy, who tried to recruit him to his familia, and Grosseteste, a lifelong friend, with whom he collaborated in the study and transmission of Greek texts. He moved with equal assurance in the world of ecclesiastical politics and the scholastic world of the university. The nature of his political influence has been the subject of frequent surmise, but the importance of his part in directing the Franciscan school at Oxford and creating the scholastic organisation of the English province has long been recognised. Yet several phases of his career and life remain obscure or at best enigmatic. My object here is to elucidate some of the more opaque points of his career and to re-examine his place in the history of the early Franciscan school.

Much of the history of the late nineteenth-century Church of England is dominated by the phenomenon of Anglo-Catholicism. In the period between 1890 and 1939 Anglo-Catholics formed the most vigorous and successful party in the Church. Membership of the English Church Union, which represented a broad spectrum of Anglo-Catholic opinion, grew steadily in these years; advanced ceremonial was introduced in an increasing number of parish churches and, from 1920 onwards, a series of congresses was held which filled the Royal Albert Hall for a celebration of the strength of the ‘Catholic’ movement in the Established Church. In the Church Times the Anglo-Catholics possessed a weekly newspaper which outsold all its rivals put together and which reinforced the impression that theirs was the party with the Church's future in its hands. Furthermore, Anglo-Catholicism could claim to be supplying the Church of England with many of its saints and with a fair proportion of its scholars. Slum priests like R. R. Dolling and Arthur Stanton gave their lives to the task of urban mission; Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, was hailed as a spiritual leader by churchmen of all parties; Charles Gore, Walter Frere and Darwell Stone were scholars of renown, while Frank Weston, bishop of Zanzibar, combined academic achievements and missionary zeal with personal qualities which brought him an unexpected pre-eminence at the 1920 Lambeth Conference. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, therefore, Anglo-Catholicism was the party of advance, offering leadership and vision and presenting the Church of England with a concept of Catholicity which many found attractive.