‘As one that honoureth and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart’, wrote Archbishop Hutton to Cecil from Bishop-thorpe in December 1604, ‘I wish less wasting of the Trasure of the Realm, and more Moderation in the lawful exercise of Hunting; both that poor Men's Corn may be less spoiled, and other his Majesty's subjects more spared.’ At the time James I was again in the field, as he had been for much of 1604, complementing his natural propensity for settling the principles of a policy and leaving its working out to his ministers with an addiction to strenuous exercise for his health's sake. He had already allowed delay among his more reluctant bishops in carrying through the series of concessions granted to the puritan clergy at the Hampton Court conference; and as the expiry of the period of grace before the full enforcement of the new canons drew nearer, he made it clear that he did not expect to be troubled with whatever detailed problems might arise. They were his bishops’ responsibility. In Bancroft he seemed to have found the primate he need to succeed Whitgift. Not only would Bancroft enhance the prospects of stability within the state by bringing a sense of discipline and order to the Church, but he had the energy and determination to take charge of ecclesiastical administration for months at a time. For these reasons above all the Calvinist James had overcome his reservations about Bancroft's views on iure divino episcopacy. As the guiding hand in convocation behind the revised and more fully explained canons, Bancroft was undoubtedly best fitted, by experience as well as temperament, to take charge of the efforts to enforce them. By the time he died late in 1610, after a hard struggle to ‘reconstruct’ the English Church, only a minority of its dioceses had not lost clergy through deprivation from their livings, mostly for inconformity and most of them in the southern province; countless others had been suspended. So closely has Bancroft been associated with the efforts to obtain obedience to the new canons, especially to the articles in canon 36 referring to the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty Nine Articles, that debate about his impact on the Church, both in the parliamentary skirmishing at the time and among commentators since, has commonly used as a measure the number of clergy he is supposed to have dispossessed, whether the 300 his puritan critics claimed, the 60 or so he himself once asserted and which R. G. Usher subsequently endorsed, or the 80 to 90 finally established by S. B. Babbage. The case for or against him has always tended to be built on numbers rather than on any assessment of the degree of responsibility he had for what happened. James, although clearly not open to direct attack in parliament, has in any case seemed a peripheral figure, expressing anger and alarm when signs of opposition to conformity came his way, but in no sense providing continuous direction of his bishops’ efforts. Before he departed once more for the countryside in mid-November, he had settled with Bancroft the manner in which the new canons were to be introduced, quietly permitting additional time beyond the deadline at the end of November for all but the most notoriously inconformable clergy in the hope of edging the rest fairly quickly towards full conformity and, where appropriate, subscription to the new terms ‘willingly and ex animo’.

On 9 April 1514 Tamás Bakócz, archbishop of Esztergom and cardinal-legate of Pope Leo X, initiated the preaching of a crusade against the Turks in Hungary. On 24 April György Dózsa Székely, a minor nobleman serving with the garrison of Belgrade who had experience of fighting the Turks, was appointed as commander of the crusading army. Dózsa marched southwards from Pest on 10 May with the main body of crusaders, some 15,000 strong, for the most part peasants. Five days later Archbishop Bakócz and the Hungarian royal council called a halt to the preaching. Their cancellation was provoked by the fact that the crusade preaching had generated alarming social unrest, and on 22 May an encounter occurred at Várad in which an army of crusaders defeated a force of nobles. The crusade was now showing all the features of an uprising, and two days after the battle of Várad, coincidentally on the same day that György Dózsa inflicted another defeat on the nobles at Nagylak, the king called off the crusade and ordered the peasant crusaders to return home. His command was ignored and attempts to organise local resistance against the various crusade armies met with only partial success. It proved necessary to recall János Zápolyai and the troops who were engaged against the Turks in the east. At the end of June Zápolyai marched in relief of Temesvár (Timisoara), the fortress which Dózsa was besieging, evidently with the plan to establish a strategic base between the Maros and the Danube. Here, on 15 July, the vojvoda smashed the crusading army and turned the tide of the revolt, which lasted for just a few more weeks.

The efficiency of the visitatorial machinery of the Elizabethan Church has long been a subject of speculation among ecclesiastical historians. The establishment of a permanent High Commission court suggested to Professor Usher the failure of the existing system. B. L. Woodcock, on the other hand, compared it favourably with what he called the ‘comparative insignificance’ of late-medieval visitations. Professor Kennedy, a specialist in episcopal articles and injunctions, concluded that ‘… visitations were carried out with something approaching efficiency’. These varying assessments can be tested by regional studies of the actual operations of diocesan visitations. Sufficient material appertaining to the London area survives to allow an examination of the system in the light of various tests of efficiency.

The parliament which met in April 1640 was the first to meet in eleven years. Men hoped that this parliament might be more successful than its predecessors. Mingled with hopes for success of the parliament was anxiety about failure. The disorderly dissolution of the last parliament had not been forgotten. Reactions to the levying of ship money and to the active ecclesiastical leadership of Laud and others of the bishops had shown that Englishmen would not be silent if they felt their liberties threatened. Royal requests for aid against the Scots in the spring of 1639 had met with protests. Men feared that attempts to obtain redress of grievances in parliament would lead to disputes with the king and a quick dissolution.

Recent research has rendered untenable the glib characterisation of the Henrician Reformation as ‘Catholicism without the Pope’, but the essential nature of the motives and achievements of Henry vra and his ministers in the 1530s and 1540s remains a controversial issue. To J. K. McConica, the polity created in the 1530s was an ‘Erasmian’ one, with the views of the great humanist on such matters as vernacular Scripture, superstitious pilgrimage and religious instruction providing a consensual nexus to bind together all but the most extreme shades of religious opinion. More recently, Glyn Redworth has similarly argued that the Henrician Reform was from the first ‘an intellectually coherent and satisfying movement’, and that it had positive and distinctive religious aspirations, seeking to use the techniques of ‘Protestant’ evangelism to transmit a purged but none the less essentially Catholic doctrine. G. W. Bernard has, by contrast, characterised the direction of religious policy after the break with Rome as ‘deliberately ambiguous’, and sees Henry as a ruler who held together an unwieldy coalition of interests by employing the rhetoric of continental Protestantism while inhibiting the implementation of any fundamental change.

The Catholic Church in Korea dates its foundation from 1784 when Yi Sŭng-hun returned from Beijing where he had been baptised by a member of the resident Catholic mission. He had sought out the Catholic priests at the instigation of Yi Pyok who, in the winter of 1777, had been a member of a meeting of young, reform-minded Shirhak (‘New Learning’) scholars. This meeting had been called to examine scientific, mathematical and religious treatises written by the Jesuits in China. On his return, Yi Sung-hun brought with him books and religious articles which he shared with Yi Pyok, and together they began to evangelise among their friends and neighbours. It was not very long, however, before their activities began to meet with opposition from other Confucian scholars and to arouse the suspicions of the authorities. In 1785 Yi Pyok and other Christians were arrested at a meeting in the house of Kim Pom-u, a member of the chungin class of technical specialists. Those present were given a lecture on proper Confucian conduct and released, apart from Kim Pom-u who was severely beaten and sent into exile where he died from his injuries. Worse was to follow in 1791 with the execution of Yun Chi-ch'ung and his cousin, Kwon Sang-yon, for their refusal to perform the chesa ancestral rites for Yun's dead mother. Nevertheless the Church continued to grow during the 1790s, and its members pressed the bishop of Beijing to send a resident priest. This was achieved in 1795 when a Chinese priest, Fr Chou Wên-mu, arrived in Seoul. Under his ministry, and with the assistance of members of the laity, the Church grew from around 4,000 believers to nearly 10,000 at the outbreak of the Shinyu persecution in 1801. This persecution cost the lives of Fr Chou and at least 300 of the laity, but the Church survived.

The corrodies described in this article are the only corrodies granted by a house of mendicant friars in England that have yet come to light. It is natural to suppose that the mendicant friaries provided in this way for some of their regular lay servants, just as houses of the endowed Orders did. But the nearest approach to an example of this kind that I have noted is the lease of a house over the gateway at the Grey Friars of London in 1440 to William ‘conciliarius’ of the convent and Elizabeth his wife in return for services, rent free for their lives; but this did not involve provision of food and drink, which was an essential part of a full corrody. There is frequent mention of seculars living in friaries whose status is not specified. Thus at Oxford we find incidental references to William Kemp, tanner, ‘living within the Austin Friars’ in 1501, and ‘Katherine Newcome, widow, living within the house of the Carmelites’ in 1527. They were probably lodgers like John Martin, who lived with his wife and son at the Grey Friars of Canterbury till his death in 1496; he perhaps had special privileges through the influence of his brother, bishop Richard Martin, O.F.M., who lived at the friary in considerable state. A good many seculars were living in friaries at the time of the Dissolution, but these were tenants who had acquired leases of houses or chambers within the precincts, not corrodiers.

The compulsory church parade was one of the oldest traditions in the British army, dating back to the seventeenth century. In 1946, shortly after the end of the Second World War, the practice was abolished. This was a significant moment in Army–Church relations since the compulsory attendance of soldiers at divine worship had been an official acknowledgement of the importance of religion as a guiding force in the corporate life of the army. This article explores the background to this historic decision and the unsuccessful efforts of senior officers in the late 1940s to restore the ritual.

This article explores the cult of St Nicholas in later eleventh-century Bari, focusing on its importance to the new Norman rulers in the region as well as to their subjects. While acknowledging the influence of earlier expressions of the cult in Normandy and in Byzantine southern Italy, it argues that for numerous reasons Nicholas was, for Bari, an especially important – and appropriate – intercessor. During these years, which witnessed the translation of the saint from Myra, economic developments, church politics and the demands of the First Crusade merged to render Nicholas an ideal patron for the city.

Inscribed on the wall of the expiatory Basilica of Sacré Coeur, at Montmartre, the 1873 ‘national vow’ of France interprets the nation's recent misfortunes as divine chastisement of an errant and irreligious people. Since it was Napoleon III's withdrawal of French troops from Rome that had made it possible for the Italian forces to capture the papal city in September 1870, the ‘national vow’ reflects a strong sense of French responsibility for the pope's loss of his temporal power. The Catholic Right interpreted France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and her subsequent loss of Alsace and Lorraine, as God's punishment on ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ for her desertion of the Vicar of Christ, and the ‘national vow’ pledged prayer for the Roman pontiff's deliverance from his enemies. This study analyses the devotion of French Catholics to ‘the prisoner of the Vatican’ during the Third Republic through an exploration of some of the religious and political meanings of pilgrimage to visit ‘Peter in chains’. It also charts the process by which promotion in the Catholic press, rapid train transportation and cheaper package fares opened an era of mass pilgrimage to Rome and paved the way for a new popular papal style.

Traditionally scholars distinguish English Anglican cathedrals of ‘old’ foundation and those of ‘new’, but since Henry VIII a further category has arisen comprising those established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve newly created dioceses. These are often referred to as parish-church cathedrals because they mostly remained parish churches even after their elevation. Their new status raised various architectual and organisational problems, and this essay concentrates on the latter, illustrating them with select examples. These problems deserve examination because there is little recent literature on them and some passing references may tend to mislead.

Two events define the period. In 1836 the first modern parish-church cathedral was created at Ripon. In 1931 the Cathedrals Measure provided for revision of all cathedral statutes within general guidelines, the outcome of a commission of enquiry which Church Assembly had launched in 1924 and which had reported in 1927. Moreover by 1931, albeit then unperceived, an era had ended in another respect because after a surge of creations in the 1920s, no more new bishoprics have been erected in England by the Anglican Church (despite various plans), though some territorial adjustments have been made between dioceses, notably the transfer of Croydon from Canterbury to Southwark. Throughout much of this period popular odium surrounded cathedral establishments, a residue from radical attack in the 1830s and 1840s upon all ecclesiastical corporations whose wealth, admittedly often maladministered, critics had hoped to appropriate to other uses, whose neglect of duties had become scandalous, and whose quirky and outmoded ways Trollope gently satirised in his Barchester novels. The period saw a piecemeal and relatively unco-ordinated response to the problems which creation of these cathedrals involved, and that Church Assembly commission explicitly deplored the ‘anomalous and confused’ situation which had arisen.

This article questions the traditional perception of early Christianisation in Scandinavia and Northern Rus' as processes separated by established confessional and institutional boundaries. Surviving narrative sources mention a number of clerical peregrinators crossing confessional borders in northern Europe in the post-conversion period, and some contemporaneous baptismal rites from Scandinavia and northern Rus' testify to their ability to influence the basic Christian rituals in both regions. These phenomena suggest that differences between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches were in no way preventing contacts across the early Christian north in the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth century.

One night in the early 1520s, probably in the first half of 1522, the church of St Mary's, Rickmansworth, was badly damaged by arson. Iconoclasts deliberately set fire to all the images, to the reserved sacrament on the high altar, to the ornaments and jewels in the vestry, and to the rood and organs in the rood loft. The incendiaries made sure of their blaze by wrapping tow around the rood and pushing tow and banner staves through the bars of the chancel to act as fire-lighters. Their conflagration was also assisted by the large amount (280 pounds) of candle wax in the rood loft. At the same time, the offenders broke open the font and scattered the holy water. As a result of these actions, the chancel and vestry of the church were either severely damaged or destroyed.

The religious revival during the 1740s, in Britain and the American colonies, resulted in a vast output of printed matter. A comparison of the literature printed before, with that printed after this period, shows the impact of a single decade on both the form and content of evangelical literature. In particular, the revival was responsible for launching a new literary genre—the evangelical newspaper and magazine. Where there had been no specifically evangelical periodical publication in the first forty years of the century, by the last forty years such literature had become a normal means of communication and propagation for several denominations.

It is well known that the role of public opinion in England before and during the Crimean War was almost uniquely important. It is probably equally well known that in the middle of the nineteenth century church-going and clerical prestige both reached a remarkably high level, except among the working classes. There is, thus, a strong prima facie case for supposing that the churches played a significant part in forming opinion at this critical time, offering as they did to their members interpretations of public events in accordance with their own theological outlook. Certainly such interpretations were far more in demand during the Crimean War than during the wars of either the eighteenth or the twentieth century. It is a striking fact that this was the last English war to be begun with the proclamation of a General Fast, and probably the only modern war in which military disasters prompted another General Fast. The clergy's public was remarkably large and remarkably attentive. The circulation of the religious weekly press almost approached that of the serious secular weeklies (the Athenaeum apart), while the long life of the Penny Pulpit, made up exclusively of the recent sermons of the most popular preachers of the day, reveals a substantial sermon-buying public well below the social levels which the familiar bound volumes of a single preacher's sermons suggest.

Since the 1980s the British scholar Francis Clark has challenged the traditional attribution of the Dialogues on the miracles of the Italian Fathers to Pope Gregory the Great (590–604). While Clark's thesis has generally been rejected by experts, it retains considerable persuasive force for those new to the field. This paper focuses on the misplaced intuitive foundation of Clark's thesis and points to the enthusiasm exhibited by Gregory the Great for the miracles of the saints in several understudied letters from his Registrum epistolarum. It particularly highlights Gregory's discussion of four miracles performed by St Andrew the Apostle at Rome in ep. 11.xxvi written to the patrician Rusticiana at Constantinople in 601. It concludes that there is no discrepancy in mentalité between Gregory as author of the Dialogues and his other recognised works.

Much work that is absolutely essential for the continuance and progress of an ordered society has a severely limited attraction for those who perform it. How, nevertheless, men and women were persuaded to work regularly or at all in the Middle Ages has provided one of the central themes in the study of the period, for this is what we study in the institutions of slavery, serfdom and villeinage—all three were ways and means of persuading reluctant workers to work. But these were also means of escape from toil, and it is with one of these, the custom of abstaining from many habitual forms of work on church festivals, that this essay is concerned.

No one can read Richard Baxter without perceiving that he was an intensely bookish man, widely read and living close to his books. In most of his writings he turns aside to comment or to animadvert on others' books. His unpublished correspondence shows similar characteristics: one correspondent, writing in 1652, mentions five of the latest books; to another, who writes, ‘Though I have the use of a library at Westminster, yet there is in it neither Du Plessis, Grotius or Camero,’ Baxter replies, ‘I ans:[wer] they are comon bookes as most in ye shops’.

References to apostates from the monastic life appear frequently in ecclesiastical and governmental records of the later Middle Ages, yet little attempt has been made to examine motives for flight or the measures which were adopted to recapture the fugitives. The problem of apostasy regularly attracted the attention of the legislators of the Orders, bishops were anxious both to restrain the culprits and to mitigate the severity of vengeful superiors, and the crown lent the weight of the secular arm to attempts at coercion, although an appeal to Rome might often avert the worst consequences of flight. The ecclesiastical authorities were, of course, concerned that no religious should prejudice his hopes of salvation by the rejection of his profession. Those who without the licence of their superior emigrated to another Order, accepted a secular benefice, or wandered off in search of carnal pleasure or spiritual benefits must be restrained, and those sinners and criminals who sought to evade the jurisdiction of their superiors must be punished. Most serious, however, were those cases in which apostasy was a symptom of dissension within the community and polarisation into factions, and where the fugitive sought from outside the walls to disrupt the life of the cloister until he might return to dominate his monastery.