The consistory court of the bishops of Ely by the fourteenth century regularly held its sessions in Cambridge, the largest and most prosperous city of the diocese. Ely itself was small, little more than a hamlet, and physically isolated. Recurrent flooding in the fens often cut off the roads leading into the Isle of Ely, and even at the best of times Ely tended to be rather out of the way. Although Cambridge was flat and lowlying, it rose just far enough above the level of the fenlands to be secure from all but the worst flooding, while the River Cam gave the city ready access to the commercial networks of eastern and southern England.

Under the leadership of James the Lord's brother the Christian Church at Jerusalem was probably the most influential of all existing Christian communities. It could boast a system of internal organisation under authoritative resident leaders; it was an important missionary centre, despatching apostles and recalling them, or sending advisors to them when they were in difficulties. Neither the prestige nor the destiny of the Jerusalem Church were the immediate concern of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and it is Hegesippus who keeps us informed of its progress. The stability of that Church was apparently shattered shortly after the death of James, when the Jews revolted against the Romans and ‘immediately Vespasian attacked them’. We hear no more about the Jerusalem Church directly from Hegesippus until he tells of a meeting convened to elect a successor to James, and Eusebius tells us that this meeting took place after Jerusalem had been taken in A.D. 70.

In the course of his work a medieval bishop was bound to collect a great number of archives. In the thirteenth century these included his register (the official record of his out-going letters and institutions), his visitation-rolls and lists of the persons whom he had ordained, as well as incoming letters which ranged in importance from papal bulls to complaints about the depredations of poachers. In the see of Lincoln it was the custom to classify the institutions and memoranda separately. Oliver Sutton is the first bishop whose memoranda survive, but we have the institution-rolls of the bishops from Hugh of Wells to Richard of Gravesend. Moreover Canon Foster has shown, from MSS. now in the munimentroom of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln, that records of institutions were kept for the periods between the death of St. Hugh and the consecration of William of Blois, and between the death of Hugh of Wells and the consecration of Robert Grosseteste. The MSS. now existing, which Canon Foster dated about 1240, are not the original records made at the time of the institutions, but it appears probable, to judge by the care generally taken of the official rolls of the see, that such originals still survived in the time of Oliver Sutton. It is quite certain, from a reference in Sutton's register, that he possessed the memoranda of Bishop Gravesend, a MS. which is now lost.

C'est en pleine guerre,—en août 1941—que fut trouvé à Toura, aux environs du Caire, l'intéressant document que j'ai l'honneur de présenter ici. C'est même la guerre qui en a provoqué la découverte. L'armée anglaise faisait aménager d'anciennes carrières de pierre pour y abriter des munitions. En l'une d'elles on découvrit, déposée dans un coin, sans aucune protection, une assez forte liasse de papyrus anciens. Comme il fallait s'y attendre, les ouvriers cherchèrent aussitôt les moyens de vendre à leur profit la trouvaille inespérée, mais le gouvernement égyptien, assez tôt alerté, finit par en récupérer la majeure partie, qui figure maintenant au musée du Caire. M. Octave Guéraud et M. Jean Scherer firent un premier inventaire du trésor. Après la guerre, M. Guéraud en a donné un signalement détaillé.

Church is not the first place we should think of looking for ‘the historian of the Roman Empire’. He is more usually thought of as the opponent of organised Christianity and of the established church whether under Constantine or the Hanoverians. Yet we know that he dutifully sat in the family pew at Buriton, occasionally attended services elsewhere and was indeed something of a connoisseur of sermons. Our aim is to seek him out during times of worship and, by an imaginative interpretation of certain known facts, to enter as far as possible into his mind. Such informed reading between the lines, using the documents which reveal to complement those which leave things unsaid, is hardly going beyond what the historian does when he deduces probable causes or demonstrable effects from a set of well-documented facts.

As founder of ‘the first continuing Congregational church on English soil’ in the London suburb of Southwark in 1616, Henry Jacob has figured prominently in denominational hagiography. His place in the wider circle of puritan scholarship has also been secured by virtue of this radically new ecclesiological experiment in puritan Congregationalism which, by most historical accounts, signalled a drastic departure from the prevailing presbyterianism of the Cartwright generation of left-wing puritanism. While his shift into a more progressive, democratic ecclesiological mode has appeared self-evident to many historians, those scholars intrigued by Jacob's churchmanship have often puzzled over the source of his new polity. Among an earlier generation of historians, the obvious solution seemed to be that Jacob had at some point borrowed from the Separatists, adopting their ecclesiology while declining their practice of separatism. This conclusion arose primarily from the assumption (which persists today) that before Jacob's Southwark church formed, Congregationalism was alone the preserve of late Tudor and early Stuart separatism. Daniel Neal became one of the first to suggest this, explaining that Jacob probably derived his Congregationalism from the Separatists by way of John Robinson at Leyden, where the two had met in 1610.

Modern accounts of the Wycliffite movement and of the beliefs of its adherents have been based for the most part upon records compiled by opponents. Most obviously hostile are the episcopal registers and documents, though these have the advantage of being relatively prolific and almost always dated and localised; inevitably, secular records about the movement become more ample as Lollardy was identified with sedition. The surviving chronicles, such as those of Knighton or Walsingham, were largely written by members of those orders that Wyclif castigated throughout his teaching. The picture constructed from these records has sometimes been filled out with details from overtly hostile and polemical texts such as Netter's Doctrinale. Given such sources, it is hardly surprising that the accounts appear incomplete, even at times incoherent and contradictory. Episcopal registers, as has been suggested elsewhere, present only fragmentary records of the views they condemned; polemical authors, and even chroniclers, often wrote with hindsight, an advantage to their own argument, but a disqualification to their usefulness as historical sources. Particularly in the case of Lollardy, where increasing opposition from the ecclesiastical hierarchy was reinforced after about 1400 by suspicion of treason so amply confirmed in the Oldcastle revolt, late texts are peculiarly unreliable. McFarlane, in his posthumously published lectures, suggested that many aspects of the movement ‘are irremediably hidden from us’, unless ‘new material is found of a kind and quantity so far unsuspected’.