Nothing put the clergy and laity at odds so much as money. Quarrels over tithe provide the background against which all the hostility between Londoners and their parish priests must be seen. Since the thirteenth century the citizenry had engaged in periodic disputes with the city clergy over the assessment of tithe, but at the Reformation fervent new issues exacerbated the acrimony and the quarrel seemed to have become intractable. In the city, where individual disputes soon became common knowledge and might stir formidable partisanship, the citizens were often convinced that they were being robbed by their priests. Once the reforming ideas of Protestantism began to spread the London clergy were forced to defend themselves not only against criticism of clerical wealth and privilege but also against far profounder attacks upon their authority and faith. The London tithe controversy in many ways reflects the struggle between the lay and ecclesiastical orders at a national level. The conciliation which had marked the negotiations between the Church and city government in the later Middle Ages gave way to open conflict in the reign of Henry vm until, finally, the tithe issue could be settled only by Parliament, and the Church lost its traditional powers of judgement in tithe causes to the city.

It is notoriously difficult for biographers of late-medieval people to recapture the personalities of their subjects, and consequently motives often have to be deduced from actions. This fundamental difficulty prompted the great Professor Jacob Burckhardt to date the emergence of the individual from the Renaissance and to assert that, rulers apart, there were few developed personalities in the Middle Ages. Medieval people saw their world through a sort of ‘religious mist’, perceiving things distorted rather than as they really were. In spite of some recent support, Burckhardt's theory is not really tenable, but historians still find the prevalent religious aura difficult to penetrate. We may know the official doctrine and moral teaching of the Church, but we cannot safely assume that they were understood by the laity, when both contemporary sermons and literature proclaim the contrary. Even were the Church's teaching understood, historians would still not know in what ways and to what extent religion influenced other fields of individual activity – economic, social or political. Burckhardt's problem remains of more than purely religious importance.

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.

This article rejects the approach that treats the Gunpowder Plot as a discrete historical episode. The plot is better understood when examined in parallel with the period after November 1605; the surprising leniency shown by the Jacobean government towards English Catholics destroys the motives upon which conspiracy theories are based. This article demonstrates that Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, supported King James's toleration since both wished to preserve domestic stability and peace with Spain. The assassination of King Henri IV of France in 1610 did more to jeopardise toleration than did the Gunpowder Plot, despite the latter's profound impact on the English popular consciousness.

The rigorous enforcement of religious discipline was a hallmark of Calvinist Churches in Reformation-era Europe. Wherever Calvinism took hold, ministers and elders went to extraordinary lengths to inculcate a Reformed morality among the members of local congregations. Since Calvinists identified the eucharistic community as the pure assembly of saints, it was necessary for Reformed consistories to defend the sanctity of the Lord's Table from all human corruption.

That many divines during the middle decades of the seventeenth century were filled with high hopes for the Church's future, and that many of these high hopes were expressed in millenarian terms is by now a commonplace. That, furthermore, this phenomenon did not appear out of the blue and must have had a prehistory would be evident to most. But how far back should one go to find its roots? More than twenty years ago William Lamont argued in his controversial study Godly rule that Elizabethan reformers shared with their more radical brethren of the revolutionary years the hope of ‘godly rule’, a term he never clearly defined but which he nevertheless called millenarian. He singled out John Foxe as the chief spokesman of the ‘godly rule’ idea, and moreover claimed that Foxe was the one who above all ‘made the pursuit of the millennium respectable and orthodox’ in England. The idea that Foxe was a millenarian, even the chief spokesman of millenarianism in Elizabethan England, has not found general approval. In well-documented studies on Foxe, the British apocalyptic tradition, or the English Reformation, scholars such as Bernard Capp, Viggo Norskov Olsen, Richard Bauckham, Katharine R. Firth and Patrick Collinson have all denied that Foxe believed in a this-worldly and future period of peace and ecclesiastical felicity; they have instead drawn attention to his view of end-time persecution, and to his belief in the imminent end of the world.

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

One dinnertime in the early 1540s Thomas Seymour, brother to the future Lord Protector, arrived at Lambeth Palace with an urgent message from the king to the archbishop of Canterbury. He found Cranmer's household at their meal in the great hall, the company sitting in due order under the watchful eyes of the senior officials of the establishment. Seymour was warmly received by the archbishop in his chamber and a meal was pressed upon him; then he was sent on his way with the appropriate response for the monarch. The occasion was more than a routine one for an exchange of messages: indeed it may have been deliberately contrived by Henry vm, with or without the connivance of the archbishop, to force the courtier literally to eat his words. Seymour had been busy denouncing Cranmer for keeping no hospitality ‘or house correspondent with his revenues and dignities’, but, instead, for wasting his income on the purchase of lands for the benefit of his family. When the king enquired of him about the adequacy of the Canterbury household he was, grudgingly, forced to admit ‘he be not in the realm of none estate or degree that hath such a hall furnished, or that fareth more honourably at his own table’. Henry seized the opportunity to lecture the assembled company on the dangers of seeking after episcopal wealth. So long as the prelates continued to dispense hospitality he would not, he asserted, allow them to be despoiled by laymen who had already dispersed the wealth of the monasteries. As for the archbishop he was above reproach and a model to all his fellows ‘for he spendeth (ah, good man) all that he hath in housekeeping’.

The statistical analysis of religion in England and Wales usually commences with the mid-nineteenth century. This article synthesises relevant primary and secondary sources to produce initial quantitative estimates of the religious composition of the population in 1680, 1720, 1760, 1800 and 1840. The Church of England is shown to have lost almost one-fifth of its affiliation market share during this period, with an ever increasing number of nominal Anglicans also ceasing to practise. Nonconformity more than quadrupled, mainly from 1760 and especially after 1800. Roman Catholicism kept pace with demographic growth, but, even reinforced by Irish immigration, remained a limited force in 1840. Judaism and overt irreligion were both negligible.

The library of John Blacman represents the largest and most comprehensive collection of devotional and mystical writings known to have been owned by any individual in late medieval England. On that ground alone it would merit attention. Buthis library repays study for other reasons. Firstly it is possible to place it within a detailed context. We know a considerable amount about Blacman himself and this knowledge of the man is paralleled by our knowledge of his books. Our perception of the private libraries of late medieval England is normally based on bald lists of books, occasionally supplemented by a handful of surviving manuscripts. These lists are usually derived from wills, which can all too frequently be shown to be seriously defective as a complete record of the libraries concerned. And, in particular, such lists can give only a static and skeletal picture of the relationship between the books and their owners. However, in the case of Blacman's library, while our major source is indeed a list of his books, it is a list which is exceptionally revealing. To some extent this is because part of the list is more informative than usual in providing the complete contents, insteadof a single portmanteau title, for about a third of the books. Hence we can reconstruct the precise nature of a number of the composite volumes in the library. More important is the fact that we have, properly speaking, not This article began life, in very different form, as a paper given to the Exeter Conference on ‘The medieval mystical tradition in England’. I am much indebted to the kindness and forbearance of the editor of the conference proceedings, Miss Marion Glasscoe.

Much recent commentary on Henry viii and Thomas Cromwell emphasises their use of propaganda against ‘papacy’ during the initial stages of the schism from Rome. G. R. Elton, for example, considers this genre to be well conceived and mature in technique, all the more remarkable since Cromwell's project was the ‘…first such campaign ever mounted by any government in any state of Europe’. Notwithstanding its sophisticated presentation during the years after the schism, such polemic has been described by Elton and others as having started ‘rather late’, i.e. when definite political action had already commenced. Its purpose, therefore, was to explain specific official enterprises, commencing with the legislation on Appeals in 1532–3. But was this an after-the-fact endeavour? Might not a creation so well-wrought in fact antedate Henry's use of parliament against Rome? At least two MS documents describing a new sort of ‘christian’ kingship survive to suggest that Henry's propaganda efforts commenced in early

During the late Tudor and early Stuart age, England's parish ministries were increasingly occupied by energetic Puritan preachers who sought to convert souls and build ‘godly’ communities. Together with ‘godly’ magistrates and lay supporters, these preachers laboured to replace a culture rooted in traditional festivals, ales, dances and games with a culture sustained by frequent sermons, Scripture-reading and a strict observance of the Sabbath. Not everyone, however, heeded the call of the preachers. Many people, in most places probably a significant majority, were unable or unwilling to embrace the Puritan theology of grace and were opposed to Puritans' interference in their lives. Resistance to Puritans surfaced in different forms and degrees, ranging from indifference and passivity to organised demonstrations and protests, to street fighting and violence. Verbal abuse seems to have been common; the preferred term of abuse, ‘Puritan’, remained a potent and wounding accusation in spite of its common currency. From about the 1570s and 80s, when Puritan evangelism emerged as a significant movement in England, to the period of the Civil War, tensions between Puritans and anti-Puritans periodically surfaced in towns and villages across the kingdom, with divisions in communities cutting across class lines.

In most English minds, episcopal succession from the apostles is associated with the unbroken series of impositions of episcopal hands, stretching right back to certain layings-on of hands by apostles whereby the first bishops were set apart for an office that perpetuated something of apostolic authority. That this notion is thus prevalent is due to the Tractarians. Characteristic is their emphasis upon a particular action, the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Einar Molland doubtless had this in his thought when, in the first issue of this Journal, he showed that Irenaeus, when upholding the importance of a regular and continuous succession from the apostles, laid no such emphasis on the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Molland went on to indicate that Irenaeus himself cannot have received episcopal consecration at the hands of bishops. Only his fellow-presbyters of the Rhône valley can have solemnized his succession to the office of the martyred Pothinus. Professor Molland says, ‘Irenaeus may have been consecrated in the same way as the bishops of Alexandria’. It is probable that a majority of scholars hold the opinion that the early bishops of Alexandria received their episcopal office at the hands of their fellow-presbyters. Nevertheless Bishop Gore claimed that the opinion had not become a certainty, even after the discovery of the support it receives from Severus of Antioch. Gore saw clearly what were the consequences as touching the nature of valid episcopal succession, and endeavoured to maintain doubt concerning the fact of presbyteral ‘consecration’ at Alexandria.

Significant exceptions to the pervasive latitudinarianism of the Georgian Church have lately been found in the domain of public worship. With respect to theology however the traditional view canonised by Sir Leslie Stephen (‘Oxford was then at the very nadir of intellectual activity’: at Cambridge ‘the intellectual party of the Church was Socinian in all but name’) remains undisturbed. It is my object in this article to reappraise the performance of ‘the intellectual party’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

In June 1432 Gerardo Landriani, the bishop of Lodi, visited England as an ambassador of the Council of Basel to address the king and parliament. The assembly in Basel, despite a late start, poor attendance and the threat of war in its immediate neighbourhood, had rebelled against Eugenius IV at the beginning of the year by continuing to meet in defiance of the papal bulls of dissolution. It persisted in its negotiations with the excommunicated Hussites and showed determination to achieve its other declared aims, the reform of the Church and the pacification of Christendom. Landriani found that a papal envoy bearing copies of the bulls of dissolution was also in London; he, nevertheless, succeeded in obtaining promises of English support and a delegation composed partly of Henry VI's ambassadors, partly of delegates of the English clergy, set out for Basel before the close of the year.

In this Journal Dr. G. F. Nuttall has reviewed the records which he re-discovered of the Baptist Western Association 1653–8. Meanwhile, unknown to him, a MS. had come into the hands of Dr. E. A. Payne which reported the proceedings of a similar association centred in Berkshire for the period 1652–60 and which he deposited in the Angus Library at Regent's Park College, Oxford, where it has lain unused for some years past. Since, either in MS. or in print, there are now known to exist the records for five similar organisations during the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, namely, the two already mentioned, together with those in Wales, the English Midlands and Ireland, the time seems appropriate for a study of the organisation of the Particular Baptists during this period in Britain as a whole. Whilst there are no similar records extant for the London congregations there is clear evidence, as it is hoped to show in this paper, that the churches of the capital did associate and that they initiated and fostered closer relations between themselves and those of the provinces.

In 1852 a Roman Catholic procession at Stockport, held in spite of the warning given by a recent royal proclamation, had caused widespread rioting, physical damage and the loss of a life. This was at the height of popular reaction to the main wave of Irish Catholic immigration and in the aftermath of popular Protestant upheaval over the restoration of a Catholic hierarchy. Other anti-Irish riots had subsequently occurred in industrial towns, for example at Liverpool frequently and at Tredegar, Monmouthshire, in 1882. Despite this, it may seem somewhat surprising that a serious crisis over a Catholic procession should have occurred as late as 1908. But the procession was intended to be a notable and explicit vindication of Roman Catholic sacramental beliefs, and there was a considerable and active residue of anti-Catholic feeling in Edwardian England.

This paper interprets late medieval religious culture by considering lay expectations of and attitudes towards the clergy. The analysis is prompted by and framed around a convent controversy, which was extensively documented in the course of an ecclesiastical trial. Contemporary ‘convent reform’ is not conceived as an ecclesiastical event, but rather as a symptom of the changing relationship between town and convent. The description of religious provision in the town shows that there was a strong lay demand for the clergy and the rituals performed by them, and that parishioners were ready to invest financially in maintaining local priests, even if it involved considerable additional expenses. The conflict between town and convent can therefore be considered as a result of a liturgical deficit in the spiritual market of the town. The parishioners' behaviour is interpreted as a symptom of the eucharistic and penitential devotional culture of the time, which was regulated in practice by the principle of intercession and the institution of good works. The paper argues that the divergent strands of late medieval religious culture generated a ‘consumption’ of the sacred. The mendicant friars had a special role in the late medieval religious market as they provided opportunities for religious experiences which differed in kind from parish observances.

Modern scholarship on John Knox has tended to ignore his development of the covenant concept and his place in the covenant tradition. This is especially surprising because of the significance of the covenant idea for seventeenth-century Scottish history. The covenant, moreover, became a basic theme of English and American Puritan thought in the century following Knox's death. During the early years of the formulation of the covenant concept in English Puritanism, Knox was a revered figure. Following his various preaching activities in Edwardian England and his association with English exiles on the Continent during Mary's reign, he continued to maintain his interest in and contact with English Protestants, even while playing a major role in the establishment of the Reformed faith in Scotland. In 1568–9, for example, he was called upon to give advice respecting the question of separation from the Church of England. It is, thus, quite possible that his views on the covenant influenced English Puritan thought, as well as the thought of the Scottish Protestants. A study of Knox's views on the covenant is also important because of the place of the covenant in the development of his position on the legitimacy of active rebellion against tyrannical, idolatrous sovereigns. Finally, an examination of Knox's covenant thought is significant because it reveals that he was not as dependent on John Calvin as has been commonly supposed.

Derek Holmes, proposing a fresh investigation of the history of Catholics in nineteenth-century England, largely by reference to a tiny group of national clerical leaders, has justified his approach by arguing that it is impossible to imagine the development of English Catholicism without them. This seems a strange apology with which to introduce the history of so numerous and diverse a community. Is it to be assumed that that same community has little or no life apart, or that it had little significance except as backdrop to the drama of episcopal politics? This objection is particularly apropos of nineteenth-century Catholicism, which came to enjoy an enormous following in circumstances that appear to bear but a marginal relationship to the activity of the elite. In short, there is surely a popular dimension here, independent of figurehead biography, which is possibly best captured in the nineteenth-century legend of English Catholic history.