The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius employs a variety of expressions in describing the episcopal successions of the important churches. Some of these are theologically colourless, as the forms of λαμβάνειν to declare that one has ‘received’ the episcopate, or often the ‘ministry’ (λειτουργία), of a given church. Other formulae are related to the most important motifs associated with ordination in the ancient Church.

At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantine empire was at the height of its glory. The emperor Basil II, who died in 1025 after a reign of nearly fifty years, completed and consolidated the work of the two great soldier emperors before him, and deserves to rank with Justinian and Heraclius as among the greatest of all the rulers of Byzantium. In the East the Arabs had been beaten back and humiliated; on the North the Bulgars were savagely defeated by Basil himself and their territory reduced to a province of the empire; Armenia and parts of the Caucasus were conquered; and the Mediterranean was cleared of pirates and policed by the Byzantine fleet. The internal security of the empire seemed unshakable, its riches inexhaustible, and its prestige extended far beyond its boundaries. It was in 989, in the reign of Basil II, that the largest of the Slav states came within the Byzantine sphere of influence, when Vladimir of Kiev married the emperor's own sister and was converted to Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine culture. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantines were justly proud of themselves, of their empire, its civilisation, stability and prosperity, and equally of their Church. They were more convinced than they had ever been of the truth, cherished since the days of Constantine, that the Roman empire was God's plan for the order of the world, or, as Eusebius had said, the terrestrial image of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that its ruler, the one true emperor in the ‘Queen of Cities’, was divinely ordained as God's regent on earth.

A round 960 king Harald Bluetooth ‘made the Danes Christians’. But for another hundred years outsiders would have found the Danish Church provincial and backward. Until the end of the eleventh century Denmark had no cathedral schools and few of its native clergy were learned men. There were no influential monasteries until 1089 and, therefore, no party in the Church to counteract the influence of the married clergy and champion the ideas of reform favoured by the Roman Curia. It was not until 1054 that king Sven Estridsøn divided his kingdom into nine bishoprics and the ecclesiastical map of the kingdom began to assume its medieval shape. It took even longer for these bishoprics to acquire adequate endowments. The churches of Denmark were so poor that simony was often a necessity. Finally, Denmark had no metropolitan authority of its own until the beginning of the twelfth century. Throughout the eleventh century its bishops owed obedience to the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen and the efforts of Sven Estridsøn to establish a native archbishopric were unsuccessful.

The year 1048 is generally recognised as a decisive date in the history of the medieval papacy. In that year the emperor Henry III appointed Bruno, bishop of Toul, to succeed to the papal throne, who accepted only on condition that his election be confirmed by the people and clergy of Rome. The significance of this act depends on seeing it against previous elections. Despite often re-iterated claims to spiritual supremacy the papacy had for long been the tool of political factions, so much so that the period 801–1049 is regarded as the era of Caesaropapism. Reacting against this temporal domination the new pope Leo IX and his successors, especially Gregory VII (1073–85), laid the foundations of a different relationship (called by Ullman ‘the hierocratic system’) in which the temporal powers, under the leadership of the emperor, were subservient to the spiritual under the leadership of the papacy, a unity, so it was argued, for the commonweal of Christendom. By the fourteenth century the system had repeatedly proved itself unworkable, and the concept received its final blow from Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor pads. But, until that time, the concept with all its ramifications constituted both the object and the context of medieval political thought. The outlines of this thesis are by no means new, but what is only now becoming realised is the part played by the canonists in both determining the theory and advancing the arguments for its support.

The claim of the archbishops of Canterbury, by virtue of their metropolitical power, to administer the spiritualities of vacant sees within their province, culminated during Boniface's archiepiscopate (1245–70) in compositions between the archbishop and the chapters of Lincoln, London, Salisbury and Worcester. These permitted the members of the chapters to administer their respective sees at times of vacancy, but it was at Worcester alone that the head of the chapter, the prior, or failing him the sub-prior, secured the right to automatic appointment as official sede vacante. We are concerned here with the events which led up to the Worcester composition of 1268, the composition itself, and its implementation during the first half of the fourteenth century.

The movement which we call the twelfth century Renaissance included a revival of Latin classics and Roman Law, the rediscovery of much Greek and Arabic science and philosophy, the development of Romanesque architecture into Gothic, and the writing of history of greater quantity and improved quality. John of Salisbury, archbishop Theobald's curial clerk, who died in 1180 as bishop of Chartres, is generally regarded as England's most finished product of this movement, but a generation before him William, monk of Malmesbury, already displayed many of its characteristics. A polymath whose interests included history and hagiography, law and the classics, archeology and architecture, he had however none of John's cosmopolitanism or contact with the great men of his day, he had little acquaintance with science or philosophy and contributed nothing to the development of theology. A monk all his life, he was representative of the scholarly Benedìctine researcher (he was almost halfway in time between St. Bede and Mabillon), but he was also outstanding because he had the genius and the wide range of interests which were shared by few.

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.

The medieval cartulary usually gives the impression of a long series of donations made by pious benefactors. There can be no doubt that the religious wished it to have this appearance, for, in writing up their charters within the volume, unimportant business items were omitted. That this is far from being the whole story has long been common knowledge and we are frequently being reminded of it. Many a deed of grant covers a money loan that could not be repaid, or a purchase of some kind, and, even if the charter makes this clear, calendars of deeds too frequently fail to indicate that a grant is in fact a purchase.

Included in the considerable corpus of records of the archdeaconry of St. Albans, hitherto almost entirely neglected by historians, are 106 letters relating to the years 1580–1625 written by the bishop of London (within whose diocese the archdeaconry lay) or, in the case of six of them, his chancellor, to the archdeacon or his official. The letters contain instructions to be put into effect within the archdeaconry, which, at this time, consisted of 26 parishes—22 in Hertfordshire and a group of four parishes in the neighbouring county of Buckinghamshire. Doubtless, similar letters were addressed to other archdeacons of the diocese at the same time, but it is believed that those relating to this archdeaconry are the only copies still extant. Eighty-nine of these letters were written between 1580 and 1608; the remainder cover the years 1609–1625. As some of the draft replies of the archdeacon or his official have also survived, it is possible in these instances to trace from them, and from the unusually complete sequence of Act Books of the archdeacon's court and other records, the action which was taken in response to the instructions contained in these letters and, thus, to some extent, to reconstruct a picture of the administration of the archdeaconry which complements that revealed by the visitation records. In addition, some of these letters throw a revealing light on the wider aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean administration, of Canterbury, then through the bishop of the diocese, to the archdeacon and from him and his officers through the apparitor to the incumbents and laity of the archdeaconry.

Amongst those who have devoted their studies to the registers of archbishops and bishops, there has been a natural tendency to select for notice or publication those registers which will be most amply useful to scholars in the provision of historical evidence, and to set aside those volumes which are imperfect or in any way defective. The reasons for this are obviously cogent, yet complete neglect of the less satisfactory registers would be unfortunate. There is much to be learned even from the omissions and defects due to a decadent registry or a period of institutional confusion. In the hope, therefore, not only of indicating the nature of some of these less satisfactory registers, but also of showing in what directions they may include matters of interest, the registers chosen for notice in this paper are not those of Melton or Thoresby, not even that of Wolsey, which although late in date is a volume of great regularity, showing a well-conducted registry; the selected registers are those of Edward Lee (1531–44) and of his successor Robert Holgate (1544–53). They are volumes which cover the early part of the changes in ecclesiastical constitution in Tudor times, and may therefore be expected to show some reflexion, perhaps many reflexions, of the effects of those religious changes.

Time supposedly heals all wounds, but the religious strife between Puritans and Anglicans in the seventeenth century had left a bitter legacy in the minds of the New England Congregationalist ministers. Even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 had in time brought the principle of religious toleration for the protestant sects in the mother country, the animosities of the Stuart regime still evoked suspicion and distrust in the minds of those in New England whose ancestors had left England to found their Zion in the wilderness. But many years had passed since the days of archbishop William Laud, the Clarendon code and the policy of conformity. Although Anglicanism was dominant in England, by the middle of the eighteenth century it was tempered by the principle of toleration for dissenting protestants. But in New England those professing the Anglican faith were a minority among the Congregationalist offspring of the founding puritan fathers. Even in those provinces to the south where it represented the majority of the colonists the Anglican Church suffered from one great defect. There were no resident bishops in America; consequently, those colonists who wished to be ordained as ministers must make the long, expensive, and often hazardous journey to England. Few could undertake such a trip so that most of the Anglican clergy in the colonies came from the mother country.

The first Register of the Faculty Office, in Lambeth Palace Library, is a document which throws much light upon those who left religion before 1538. These ex-religious were, in the main, unpensioned. Although the late E. H. W. Dunkin made an almost complete transcript of the register in 1890, these early records of the Court of the Faculties were at one time thought to be lost. So much has been written about the treatment of the ex-religious, their pensions and benefices, that only the appearance, or more correctly the re-appearance, of fresh evidence justifies further consideration of this subject. Views as to whether the ex-religious were well treated or ill treated have been widely expressed, and of those who applied for capacities in 1536, Professor Knowles has recently written ‘whatever the numbers concerned, they were certainly not very large, and as they were the first religious to appear in the market in search of employment they were probably absorbed without great difficulty’. Any material which increases our knowledge of the unpensioned religious should be brought before scholars for, as the late Geoffrey Baskerville wrote in 1937, ‘the after-careers of the religious who were dispersed in 1536 are more difficult to trace than those of their companions whose sense of vocation led them to accept transference to the larger monasteries, and who were eventually able to claim a pension.’

It is probably no one's fault that general histories of the Church in the nineteenth century are so misleading about bishop Colenso. Unless one gets down to the primary source material, which is almost all in South Africa, there is no way of escaping from the distortions of controversy. Almost all the books about Colenso are unreliable. His own biography was written by an ardent admirer who hoped to succeed him as bishop of Natal. The lives of his principal opponents, Robert Gray and James Green, are just as unsatisfactory. Gray's life was written by his son. Green's was written by Dr. Wirgman, a frank and open controversialist. Histories of the Province of South Africa are either missionary propaganda, or else become so immersed in the constitutional and legal issues connected with Colenso, that the character of the man himself is lost. In consequence, the bishop of Natal appears in history as a kind of religious schizophrenic—on the one hand a great missionary who loved the Zulu people with an infinite tenderness and, on the other, a wilful and spiteful heretic for whom no action was too base and mean. Or, worse still, he is represented as a brilliant but misunderstood fore-runner of modern biblical scholars who was also by accident a South African missionary.

I have to thank Mr. Peter Walne, County Archivist at Reading, for kindly drawing my attention to the following letter in the Trumbull papers deposited in the Berkshire Record Office and for providing me with a photostat. It adds some small points of interest to my previous Bibliographical Note on ‘The Manuscripts of the Vargas-Granvelle Correspondence, 1551–2’ in this Journal (xi. 219–24). I print the text first and comment on it afterwards.