In his biography of Archbishop William Courtenay published in 1966, Joseph Dahmus wrote that ‘until documented evidence to the contrary is provided, one may assume that the connection between Wycliffitism at Oxford and Lollardy was hardly more than accidental. Although the work of Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks has since shown that the link was anything but accidental, Dahmus’ scepticism is I am grateful to the participants in the three seminars at which this paper was read for their comments, and especially to Dr J. R. L. Highfield and Dr Paul Brand, both of whom offered helpful suggestions for its improvement. All remaining errors are my own. I thank also the Warden and fellows of Merton College, for allowing me access to their splendid archive, and Mr John Burgass, former assistant librarian, his successor Mrs Fiona Wilkes, Dr S. J. Gunn, and Dr Sarah Bendall for their assistance.

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.

Current historical opinion inclines to the view that the reign of Charles i was a time of increased stringency for the English Catholic community. There may have been a relaxation for upper-class Catholics with court connexions, but there was also a great increase in the number of those sequestered for recusancy and a higher level of recusancy fining. Dr K. J. Lindley suggests that this policy of increased severity in fining may even have been an important factor in inclining the recusant population towards neutrality during the English Civil War. The significance of financial persecution is seen in a rather different light in analyses of the Interregnum, however. Here, despite the fact that pecuniary mulcts were higher than they had ever been before or were to be again, the treatment of Catholics has been portrayed as a continuous movement towards greater toleration only brought to an end with the fall of the Protectorate.

The general opinion of historians has been that the East India Company was opposed to the presence of Christian missionaries in India. It is generally held also that when the Charter Act of 813 left the Company with no option but to admit them, its governments in India maintained a fairly consistent posture of religious neutrality. These notions have recently been reinforced by Penelope Carson. But thisignores the Company's policies towards Roman Catholic missionaries. In the eighteenth century the Company welcomed Roman Catholic missionaries. It was at the nvitation of the Bombay government that Italian Carmelite missionaries settled there in 1718. It was at the invitation of the authorities of Fort St George that a French Capuchin mission was established in Madras in 1742. When the Company came into Kerala towards the end of the eighteenth century an Italian Carmelite mission was already established there, with a bishop and two priests. The mission was soon receiving material support from the Company.

Within the papacy's jurisdiction of Western Christendom, the general chapter of each religious order replaced the Curia Romana, as the central legislative and judicial assembly. The text of the Promulgatio Chartae Charitatis elaborates this right of self-government and compares the hierarchy of the Cistercian order with that of the Roman Church:

‘… sicut Christus Ecclesiam suam condidit sub Romano Pontifice, per quatuor Patriarchas, Archiepiscopos multos, sed plures ad hue Episcopos regendam; sic Cisterciensis ordo sub abbate Cistercii supremo capite, pro Episcopis abbates filios habeat, pro Archiepiscopis abbates quos patres vocant, pro Patriarchis primos illos quatuor, per quos in charitate radicatus, ac mutuis inter se officiis devinctus, sine alius interventu regeretur …’.

While working on a more general assessment of William Gray's tenure of the see of Ely, I was struck by the amount of incidental information in his register relating to his associates, the officers of his spiritual and temporal administrations and the men who benefited from his patronage.

Two generations of lawyers and historians of the early Church have worked over the scanty evidence bearing on the legal and political relations between the first Christian communities and the Roman Empire. It is not the intention of the present writer to add to the enormous volume of work on the subject. The results of their battles have been ably summarised by A. N. Sherwin-White, and with his conclusions the legal problem may be allowed to rest until new evidence is forthcoming. The object of this paper is to look at the question from another point of view, and to ask who were the sufferers, and in particular, who were martyred in the period before the first general persecution under Decius. Were Polycarp, Justin, Blandina and the rest chance victims of private denunciation and the fury of the mob, or did they represent a tradition of belief in which martyrdom became the climax of earthly life? And what of those who obeyed the precept to flee during persecution? Was their action due to cowardice, or was it the belief that martyrdom was not the will of God? Can we see in the controversy over martyrdom which engaged so much of Tertullian's energies, one more phase in the strife between the orthodox and gnostic concepts of Christianity, on the outcome of which so much in the future of the Church depended? What, in fact, was the relationship between the Gnostics and the Roman authorities?

It was as a breath of fresh air that the first news of the debates at Salters' Hall came to a young minister in a remote country village in Somerset, where he had found asylum because he had deviated slightly from the received Calvinism of his day and been made to feel the oppressiveness of the orthodox atmosphere of Dissenting congregations in the neighbouring county of Devon. When the news came he had recently seen two of the four Exeter ministers, James Peirce and Joseph Hallett ejected by the Trustees from the city meeting houses as the result of what seemed to him a vendetta led by a certain John Ball, minister at Honiton. It is with evident exhilaration, therefore, that on the first news of the Salters' Hall debates he wrote to a friend:

‘Mr. [Ball]'s conduct with respect to Mr. Peirce and Mr. Hallet, will render him infamous throughout the kingdom. … Blessed be God, that he has stirred up such a noble spirit of Christian liberty in London: where it was carried in a meeting of above an hundred ministers, at Salters-Hall, that no human tests, articles, or interpretations should be urged as the trial of a man's orthodoxy; and that no minister should be condemned as heterodox, or an heretick, unless he taught, &c. contrary to express scripture. This was the substance of one part of their determination.’

The episcopate of Cuthbert as bishop of Lindisfarne was a product of a time of great change in the Northumbrian Church in the late seventh century. Bede's Ecclesiastical history and Stephen's Life of Wilfrid make it clear that the expulsion of Wilfrid, bishop of York and sole bishop of the Northumbrians, in 678 (HE v. 19; VW 24) opened up the Northumbrian diocese to large-scale ecclesiastical reorganisation. Wilfrid's vast see was divided and new bishops appointed. In 664, as a young man, Wilfrid had played a significant part at the Council of Whitby in bringing about the expulsion of Colmán, Aidán's successor as bishop of Lindisfarne, the termination of the Columban mission and the replacement of the see of Lindisfarne by that of York; but the bishops who replaced Wilfrid were prepared to deal sensitively with the legacy of Aidán's mission in a post-Council of Whitby era. Bosa, trained at Whitby under Abbess Hild who had been instructed in the religious life by Aidán, became bishop of Deira at York; Eata, abbot of Lindisfarne, one of Aidán's Northumbrian disciples and formerly abbot of the monastery of Melrose which had been founded in the time of the Columban mission, became bishop of Bernicia with his episcopal seat variously at Hexham and Lindisfarne; and Eadhæsd, a former companion of Aidán's disciple Chad (HE iii. 28), was made bishop of Lindsey (HE iv. 12). When Lindsey was lost to the Mercians in 679 Eadhæd was made bishop of the short-lived see of Ripon [HE iv. 12), and in 681 Trumwine, whose antecedents are unknown but who later retired to Whitby, became bishop of Abercorn on the Forth [HE iv. 12, 26).

The numerous surviving formulary volumes compiled by ecclesiastical administrators and lawyers in pre-Reformation England are valuable but neglected adjuncts to the period's surviving church court records. Using material in a fifteenth-century volume originally compiled by a lawyer of the courts at York, this article demonstrates the utility of such volumes to supplement and complement the surviving court books and papers. In particular it draws attention to two cases taken to the Council of Constance. These add to evidence of England's acceptance of that assembly's jurisdictional claims, and illustrate England's integration into the court structures of the broader Catholic Church.

This article deals with the practice and theory of penances imposed on heretics by inquisitors in southern France before 1250. At first inquisitors offered a simple choice between penance as proof of conversion or death by burning. Lay resistance forced a subtler approach whereby penitents were removed from the local community in order to be gradually reintegrated into the wider Catholic one. The construction of prisons and the imposition of crosses helped turn inquisitors into an institution. From being a means to the destruction of organised heresy, they became a permanent police force of doctrinal orthodoxy.

The Clergy of the Church of England Database, a project funded by the AHRB, began work in 1999 with the aim of constructing a relational database covering all clerical careers in the Church of England between 1540 and 1835. This article outlines the methodology and scope of the project before discussing some of the intellectual problems posed by the task of constructing a database that reflects the complexities of an irrational, pre-bureaucratic organisation. It also offers an insight into the potential of the completed database as a tool for investigating the largest profession of the early modern period.

During the final months of the First World War, the General Assemblies of the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland - the established Church of Scotland and the voluntary United Free Church - committed themselves to work for the thorough re- construction of Scottish society. Church leaders promised to work for a new Christian commonwealth, ending the social divisions and class hatred that had plagued pre-war Scottish industrial society. Bound together through the shared sacrifice of the war, the Scottish people would be brought back to the social teachings of Christianity and strive together to realise the Kingdom of God. The Churches would end their deference to the laws of nineteenth-century political economy, with their emphasis on individualism, self-interest and competition, and embrace new impera- tives of collective responsibility and co-operation. Along with the healing of social divisions, church leaders also pledged to end the ecclesiastical divisions in Scottish Presbyterianism. The final months of the war brought a revival of the pre-war movement to unite the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church into a single National Church, and Scottish ecclesiastical leaders held forth to a weary nation the vision of a united National Church leading a covenanted Christian commonwealth in pursuit of social justice and harmony.

It is notable that, in contrast to Ireland, there was no religious question in the decennial censuses of Great Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Parliament debated and determined the contents of the enumeration and the inclusion of religion was keenly disputed until 1914. The debates raised issues of religious liberty, church establishment and practical applicability. However, census-taking required broad public cooperation and the possibility of widespread opposition to the question led to its repeated exclusion. Only in the twenty-first century was the religious question reconsidered and included, as a result of changes in British society.

This article explores the political theology of Athanasius' ‘Life of Antony’. It argues that the work is profoundly concerned with the relationship between the Church and the empire, which it treats as a component of the relationship between the Church and the fallen world order. Athanasius explores this issue through Antony, striving to live as a citizen of heaven within the fallen world. Athanasius sees allegiance to earthly authority as problematising allegiance to the heavenly kingdom, which is bound up with a concern for the Christian's identity: the Christian must understand himself and the world in relation to the kingdom of heaven, rather than the earthly kingdom.

This essay explores the evolving significance of a famous fourteenth-century Paul's Cross sermon by Thomas Wimbledon in late medieval and early modern England and its transmission from manuscript to print. It highlights the ideological ambiguity of the text against the backdrop of the academic Wycliffite challenge and shows how it illuminates the permeability of the boundary between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century. It then examines how the sermon was revived and published in the mid-Tudor period as a Lollard tract as part of an effort to supply the new Protestant religion with an historical pedigree and how it subsequently entered into the popular stock of commercial publishers. The afterlife of Wimbledon's celebrated sermon sheds fresh light on the ongoing process of inventing and re-inventing the pre-Reformation past.

This article contributes to the debates about nineteenth- and twentieth-century working-class religiosity and about the nature, timing and extent of secularisation. After defining ‘popular religion’ and identifying its key components in the context of the Black Country from 1914 to 1965, its decline during the last thirty years of the period is analysed, using extensive oral evidence, in terms of four principal factors: the effects of war; an increasing emphasis on the private nuclear family and changing attitudes to children; the disappearance of older working-class neighbourhoods and communities; and greater prosperity and the availability of secular leisure facilities.

The work of the English Deist Thomas Morgan (d. 1743), a Marcion in his time, received much negative criticism in England and abroad, especially in Germany. His views aroused comments in books, dissertations and journals. Only in the first half of the twentieth century was he to be praised by theologians such as Adolf von Harnack and Emanuel Hirsch, who likewise disparaged the Old Testament.

The Norman Church has sometimes been depicted as welcoming the Capetian conquest of Normandy in 1204. Its relations with the last Angevin dukes of Normandy, Richard the Lionheart and King John, certainly showed signs of serious tension, especially the election dispute at Sées (1201–3), but there is also ample evidence of continuing co-operation between the dukes and the Norman Church. Prior to 1204, moreover, Philip Augustus of France had done very little to win over the Norman Church. It is demonstrated here that he was far less generous to the religious houses of south-east Normandy, which he had annexed in 1200, than has hitherto been believed. Most of the alms recorded in fiscal accounts for the Évrecin testify to the patronage of the local aristocracy, not the kings of England and France.