The rule which Benedict Biscop had laid down for the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at Wearmouth and Jarrow is twice mentioned in some detail in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Unfortunately both passages are rather vague in that no clear indication is given of which particular rule Biscop introduced at Wearmouth–Jarrow. It is certain, however, that Biscop did not compose a totally new rule, but accepted for his own houses the monastic institutes which he had learned abroad.

They [the Puritans] drew in a sea of matter, by applying all things unto their own company, which are any where spoken concerning divine favours and benefits bestowed upon the old commonwealth of Israel: concluding that as Israel was delivered out of Egypt, so they spiritually out of the Egypt of this world's servile thraldom unto sin and superstition; as Israel was to root out the idolatrous nations, and to plant instead of them a people which feared God; so the same Lord's good will and pleasure was now, that these new Israelites should under the conduct of other Joshuas, Samsons and Gideons, perform a work no less miraculous in casting out violently the wicked from the earth, and establishing the kingdom of Christ with perfect liberty.

Walter Stapledon, bishop of Exeter 1308-26, treasurer of England and victim of the downfall of Edward 11, was a notable benefactor of the Church. As well as giving generously to the rebuilding of Exeter Cathedral (where he was buried in a splendid tomb beside the high altar), he founded or planned three institutions for the clergy of his diocese: a school foundation for a tutor and twelve pupils in the hospital of St John at Exeter; a college for a chaplain and twelve scholars at Oxford (now Exeter College); and a hospital for two chaplains and twelve infirm priests at Clyst Gabriel in Bishop's Clyst, four miles east of Exeter. Unlike the college, the hospital has long since disappeared, but its records survive in unusual profusion for such a small foundation. Not only do they reveal the constitutional and financial history of the house, they also preserve the names of many of its inmates, the dates of their entry and of their deaths or departures. Clyst Gabriel possesses, in effect, one of the oldest registers of patients in an English hospital, commencing as early as 1312.

Hitherto we have depended on the State, i.e. on the ruling powers in the country—the King and the aristocracy … But these recollec-tions of the past must not engross our minds, or hinder us in looking at things as they are, and as they will be soon, and inquiring what is intended by Providence to take the place of the time-honoured instrument which he has broken (if it is yet to be broken) the regal and aristocratic power, I shall disgust many men when I say, we must look to the people’. (J. H. Newman, British Magazine, 1833).

None of the episcopal appointments in the reign of Edward III was more difficult for the king to secure than that of William of Wickham to the see of Winchester. Edward III was never keener for the promotion of a favourite clerk. The pope rarely agreed with more reluctance to a royal choice.

This article investigates the financial arrangements put in place by Pope Urban V to pay for his household on his journey from Avignon to Rome in 1367. It shows that the curia's move had a disruptive effect, since its normal routine of paying expenses at the end of each month could not be continued while the court was in transit. In order to deal with these exceptional circumstances, household officials were given a special advance payment in anticipation of the costs that would be incurred on the journey, which in effect set a budget for the pope's domestic expenditure.

While Bede did not know the year of Augustine's death, he possessed papal letters which provide sufficient information to deduce it with some confidence. The early epistles from popes which Bede quoted or referred to in the ‘Historia ecclesiastica’ associated journeys by delegations sent by the early Church in Kent to Rome with the request for, and collection of, the pallium for the new bishop of Canterbury. In this light the likely purpose for the otherwise unexplained visit of Mellitus to Rome in 610 becomes clear: he had come to ask Pope Boniface IV for the pallium for Laurence, following the death of Augustine on 26 May 609.

On 4 May 1897 more than a hundred Parisians – mostly women of high society – perished in the Charity Bazaar fire. The records of this terrible accident reveal much about the charitable practices of the nobility in France of the Third Republic. This article explores the place of religion in upper-class charity within the context of republican anticlericalism. It focuses especially on issues of inter-faith collaboration and the role of aristocratic women in supporting the work of the Catholic Church.

This article examines the political thought of the twelfth-century papacy, considering how popes of this era responded to the establishment of the kingdoms of Jerusalem, Sicily and Portugal. It compares the intellectual strategies used by popes to justify why these three polities were kingdoms rather than any other type of political unit. It is suggested that, to make their cases, popes advanced a range of arguments, many of which echoed the political ideas of Gregory VII. The article concludes by linking its findings to the wider question of how the twelfth-century papacy responded to the expansion of Latin Christendom.

The arrival of Robert Morrison in Macau on 4 September 1807 marked the beginning of the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary movement in China. The most familiar and important legacy of Morrison is his translation of the Bible into Chinese and the compilation of A dictionary of the Chinese language. When Morrison concluded his work in 1832, only ten Chinese had been baptised. However, the true measure of his accomplishment is not to be sought in the harvest of souls, but in the foundations that laid for future work. As a pioneer missionary in the nineteenth century, Morrison lived in an alien ‘heathen’ world for twenty-five years. How did he hold on to his evangelistic vision and passion in such an adverse and unfavourable environment? This essay aims to sketch Robert Morrison's views on mission, focusing on the way in which he responded to traditional Chinese culture and religion and the huge political obstacles in early nineteenth-century China.

The struggle of the Confessing Church', wrote Otto Dibelius, ‘was a struggle of theologians, backed by a very small group of courageous laymen’. The importance of Karl Barth among these theologians was soon recognised. Even today in England and Germany many write almost as if Barth had been the sole theological resource of Hitler's protestant opponents: ‘It was he who nerved the Confessing Church in Germany to resist the attempts of the Nazis to corrupt the Christian witness, and who was driven into exile for doing so’. This is an exaggeration. My purpose here is to draw attention to the Catholic or high church movement in this same struggle. The theological ideas of this movement can be shown to have influenced, directly or indirectly, a considerable number of the protestants who opposed Hitler.

The Established Church in the eighteenth century, although not monolithic in its structure, had evolved a delicate counterpoise in its attitude to the fraught question of the relationship between Church and State. The Church was the protector of public religion and morality and as such was protected by the State with a test law and endowment. William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, was the chief theoretician of the idea of a mutually satisfactory alliance of ‘the two swords’. The ecclesiastical policy of Georgian England, however, owed less to ideology than to the natural development of the English Church after the break with Rome and under the influence of emerging nationalism. The French Church had developed along similar lines to the English – without losing its Roman connections – and there has been a tendency to blur the distinctions between ‘Anglican’ and ‘Gallican’.

Was there a second session of the Council of Nicaea? To that question – first posed and affirmatively answered by Otto Seeck – there have been numerous responses, mostly in the form of bald assertions of one kind or another. Occasionally there have been lengthier discussions of the matter, but with no emerging consensus, and it is still the case that opposite views continue to surface in discussions of the aftermath of the first ecumenical council. Furthermore, among the statements accepting or rejecting the fact of a second session, it is regularly unclear whether the problem at issue is that of a reassembly at Nicaea of all the bishops who had gathered there in 325, a reassembly of these same bishops at some other unspecified place, or a reunion somewhere of only some of those who had participated at the major gathering.

Fourteenth-century records give a depressing picture of the finances of the Cistercian Order. In 1338, for instance, the Chapter General stated that the Order was heavily in debt at the papal curia and in the fairs of Champagne, and that its income was not sufficient to meet all its obligations. Its immunity from papal and royal taxation had been largely eroded in the thirteenth century. During the Avignon period the popes levied frequent property taxes from the Church in France, and by an arrangement with the French monarchy, the lion's share of the profits went to the king. In this way Philip VI obtained money from the Church during the Hundred Years’ War. The premier abbeys of the Cistercian Order, and its other houses within the kingdom, were not exempt from these exactions, and no doubt shared the distress of the French clergy. In 1362 Urban V refused to levy another property tax from the Church in France, on the grounds that it had paid more than enough.