Whatever are you doing here?’ Professor Dugmore asked his daughter Ismayne when he bumped into her quite unexpectedly on Cambridge station in May 1979. It was the year in which Clifford Dugmore handed over the editorship of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History to Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Linehan. There was a benevolent conspiracy. A meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal, which its chairman, Walter Ullmann, had arranged at Trinity College, was to assume the character of a festive occasion: lunch and the presentation to Clifford of the April number of vol. xxx designed as a Festschrift. There was, exceptionally, a title, Ecclesia Anglicana, and all the articles were contributed by members of the Board. Apparently it had not occurred to the honorand that the coincidence of a seventieth birthday and his relinquishment of the editorial chair after thirty years should require any special celebration.

The Viking invasions of the ninth and early tenth centuries were referred to in a large number of contemporary Frankish texts, including not only annals and chronicles, but also saints’ lives, miracle texts, capitularies, royal and private charters, letters, sermons, biblical commentaries, hymns, poems and prayers. The great majority of these texts were written by clerics, either religious or secular, and as a result the raids are frequently described in religious terms and set within a religious framework. For example, the Vikings are often denoted as ‘pagani’ and the Franks as’ christiani’; towns are burned ‘divino iuditio’ and battles won ‘adiuvante Domino’,1 and the invasions are represented as a punishment for the Franks’ sins in fulfilment of biblical prophecy.

From 408 to 420 two men dominated the political landscape of southern Gaul: Constantine III and Constantius. They found there a region that was rife with centrifugal forces - fierce city rivalries, a squabbling priesthood, and an opportunistic nobility. But they also found a region whose unique resources made it indispensable to the stability of their regimes; southern Gaul was then both highly urbanised and rich in commerce, a prime source for taxes and educated bureaucratic officers. Not surprisingly, both Constantine and Constantius focused a great deal of energy on ensuring the continued loyalty and stability of the region. Both men were soldiers, and thus occasionally brutal in pursuit of their objectives, but their Gallic policies also reflected intelligent statecraft and an acute awareness of the changing world in which they lived. It was a world in which the border between Christianity and politics was rapidly fading, and the work of these two men both anticipated and epitomized the mixture of religion and realpolitik so characteristic of the medieval world.

The great Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe in 1241–2 has received a fair degree of attention from historians.1 The same cannot be said of the crusade it provoked: at least from a crusading vantage-point this paper could be subtitled ‘a neglected category‘. The general histories of the crusades are content, at most, to mention the invasion and the proclamation of the crusade against the Mongols by Pope Gregory ix; some omit any reference to the episode. And if the Mongols receive more notice in Maureen Purcell's investigation of papal crusading policy in the thirteenth century, it is nevertheless in rather general terms; there is no mention of the crusade of 1241. The only author to examine that crusade at all qua crusade seems to have been Paulus in his history of the Indulgence.

The Church of post-Conquest England experienced a number of ecclesiastical and administrative changes brought on, in part, by the Normans’ implementation of Gregorian reform. Despite the growing fervour for non-lay intervention in ecclesiastical matters, many of the Norman innovations actually increased the king’s involvement with the Church. For example, a new practice emerged whereby the king appropriated a church's revenues upon the death of its abbot or bishop. Before this time, vacant houses were apparently cared for by their priors or other ecclesiastics and the king played little or no role in their administration. William the Conqueror altered forever this custom when he took direct control of vacant churches and placed their administration, although generally not their revenue, in the hands of royal officials.

The tracts which John Knox wrote in 1558 are regarded as the core of his political writings and the key to his entire political thought.1 The most famous - and infamous - of his works, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, was published in the spring and was followed in July by The Letter to the Regent [Augmente], The Appellation and The Letter to the Commonalty of Scotland These tracts have suffered from two serious misconceptions. The first is the natural tendency to link all the 1558 material together and in particular to treat the First Blast and the July tracts .as a unified whole. This has distorted the meaning of all the pamphlets and led to vain efforts to mould them into a composite unit which can then be labelled ‘Knox's political thought’. In fact, it is extremely important to separate them and to make a sharp distinction between their intended audiences and purposes. Crucially, the First Blast was written primarily for an English audience and the July tracts intended for a Scottish one.

Andrew Holes, a canon lawyer working in the papal court, was one of the few foreigners really admired by Vespasiano da Bisticci. Roberto Weiss directed attention to him, but in 1944 Josephine Bennett for the first time thoroughly discussed his career, trying also to discover the titles of some of the books he bought in Florence. These were said by Vespasiano to be so numerous that he had to have them specially shipped home. In 1944 only about three were discoverable. Nor, of course, during the war was Bennett able to examine the sermon (known only in a Vienna manuscript) that Holes delivered at the English Hospice probably on Tuesday 7 July, 1433 for the Feast of the Translation of Thomas Becket, which would have been one way to investigate his attitudes. Weiss had examined the sermon and Bennett knew of it from him. However, to someone such as Weiss, primarily interested in the Renaissance viewed narrowly as the revival of the pagan classics, there was nothing in it of importance.

The bishops of Roman Africa vacillated in their relations with the papacy in the three decades preceding the Vandal invasion and, more specifically, during the papacies of Innocent, Zosimus, Boniface, and Coelestine. Theyseemed grossly inconsistent, first praising papal authority, then curbing its ability to influence African jurisdiction. In synodal letters of 416 associated with the Pelagian controversy, the bishops exalted Roman authority, even ascribing to the pope a ‘greate dignity’ and a ‘special gift of grace’. An additional private letter of five African bishops contrasted the African ‘brook’ with the Roman ‘spring’. Augustine also acknowledged the special authority of Rome. These were no mere effusions of polite speech. The Africans intended to sway a papal hand in their campaign against Pelagius and his supporters by seeking papal approbation of their condemnations of Pelagianism. The Council of Sardica and Roman law had earlier granted the papacy the authority to function as a ‘court of appeals’ in the Western Church. Accordingly, Innocent responded to the African bishops with a condemnation of the heresy, however equivocal in points of doctrine, dramatically clothed in the style of imperial rescript. Boniface and Coelestine soon provided official approbation of African canons issued in 418 at the Council of Carthage, and Augustine and subsequent popes regarded this as the proof of a consistent papal position in support of African doctrine, leaving Zosimus' temporary exoneration of Pelagius and Caelestius the unsuccessful exception to the rule.

Exiled from his see in the year 356, Hilary of Poitiers suddenly emerges on the historical scene out of a shroud of undocumented silence. It is well known by students of Hilary and his times how few facts are available about the saint's early life and his first years as bishop. The existence of such lacunae in the career of a person who would eventually become one of the West's major theologians and apologists created a vacuum too tempting not to fill. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find later hagiographic accounts eager to trace Hilary's virtus and undefiled orthodoxy back to the earliest stages of his life. This is well exemplified by Hilary's sixth-century biographer Venantius Fortunatus, who locates signs of future fidelities in the very beginning. Despite the implications in the first book of De Trinitate that Hilary had been a pagan prior to becoming a Christian, Venantius confidently tells us how the saint took in Christian doctrine and true religion with his mother's milk.

Historians of education have deepened our understanding of the development of American boarding schools by challenging he popular view of them as straightforward continuations of New England academies or as imitations of British public schools and by tracing their actual roots back to a distinctive series of institutions that began in the United States in the 1820s, ‘30s, and ’40s. Sociologists have increased our awareness of the social and economic conditions that contributed to the flourishing of these schools as upper-class domains during the Gilded Age.1 It remains for the student of religious history to point out the close connection that existed between the prototypical American boarding schools and representatives of the Episcopal High Church tradition, and to attempt to demonstrate that this association was no coincidence but that the schools were themselves concrete expressions of the High Church outlook.

When the first clerical marriage took place in defiance of church law, the Reformation embarked on a course which involved far more than mere tinkering with the moral regulation of the priesthood. Clerical marriage necessitated a reconsideration of one of the oldest Christian conundrums, the relationship between the holy and the body. Now that a life of celibacy was no longer mandatory for the clergy, and sexual abstinence was no longer considered to be the estate most pleasing to God, reformers had to build a new accommodation between sexuality and the sacred. Sexual renunciation and holiness, once indivisible, had been riven apart.

The prominence of religious issues in eighteenth-century British politics has received growing, and gratifying, recognition in recent years. In particular, attacks upon, and defences of, the doctrine of the Trinity have been seen as central to theological, and hence to political, debate. For many, the term ‘orthodoxy’ without qualification referred to one's position on this question. Although there is perhaps still insufficient emphasis upon trinitarian orthodoxy as a central feature of what is fashionably termed the state's self-image, Unitarianism is rightly perceived as important to critiques of the existing regime, especially after 1750. Historians of the Wilkites, of later eighteenth-century radicalism and of peace campaigns in the Napoleonic period, have cast Unitarians in at least a supporting, and sometimes a leading, role. Yet too often Unitarianism has appeared elusive and difficult to pin down, manyheaded and half-concealed under the vague label of ‘heterodoxy’.

In a general history of modern England A. J. P. Taylor stated that by the 1920s England ‘had ceased to be, in any real sense, a Christian nation’. He was no doubt referring to declining membership and attendance figures in most Protestant Churches (not the Roman Catholic Church), and may have been implying that there had been substantial abandonment of traditional belief. In regard to traditional morality, based on Christian precepts, he found greater laxity but no very noticeable decline; and this conclusion seems to be generally supported by Church experience in trying to uphold established morality in the inter-war years. Church assembly records and church newspapers show constant concern with familiar moral enemies such as drunkenness and gambling, and possible new dangers in the shape of films, broadcasting and information about birth control. Gambling was increasing because of the popularity of football pools and greyhound racing, but drunkenness appeared less common than before 1914, and the cinema was reasonably harmless (a Cinema Christian Council and other bodies striving to keep it so), as also was television when its broadcasts began in 1936. None the less, the general decline in church attendance was an indication of an increasingly secularised society in which the Churches, taken as a whole, had diminishing influence, and arguably this had a weakening effect on traditional morality.

Significant exceptions to the pervasive latitudinarianism of the Georgian Church have lately been found in the domain of public worship. With respect to theology however the traditional view canonised by Sir Leslie Stephen (‘Oxford was then at the very nadir of intellectual activity’: at Cambridge ‘the intellectual party of the Church was Socinian in all but name’) remains undisturbed. It is my object in this article to reappraise the performance of ‘the intellectual party’ in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

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.

Salimbene called the Franciscan Adam Marsh ‘one of the greatest clerks of the world’, an accolade he reserved for a small group of men whom he regarded as the master minds of his time. A glance at Adam's letters suggests that Salimbene's opinion was widely shared by Adam's contemporaries. Few men without official position can have had their advice so eagerly sought by so many different people in high places. He was the counsellor of Henry III and the queen, the confidant of Simon de Montfort and his wife, the mentor of bishops and consultant to the rulers of his order. He enjoyed the trust of men as different as Archbishop Boniface of Savoy, who tried to recruit him to his familia, and Grosseteste, a lifelong friend, with whom he collaborated in the study and transmission of Greek texts. He moved with equal assurance in the world of ecclesiastical politics and the scholastic world of the university. The nature of his political influence has been the subject of frequent surmise, but the importance of his part in directing the Franciscan school at Oxford and creating the scholastic organisation of the English province has long been recognised. Yet several phases of his career and life remain obscure or at best enigmatic. My object here is to elucidate some of the more opaque points of his career and to re-examine his place in the history of the early Franciscan school.

Much of the history of the late nineteenth-century Church of England is dominated by the phenomenon of Anglo-Catholicism. In the period between 1890 and 1939 Anglo-Catholics formed the most vigorous and successful party in the Church. Membership of the English Church Union, which represented a broad spectrum of Anglo-Catholic opinion, grew steadily in these years; advanced ceremonial was introduced in an increasing number of parish churches and, from 1920 onwards, a series of congresses was held which filled the Royal Albert Hall for a celebration of the strength of the ‘Catholic’ movement in the Established Church. In the Church Times the Anglo-Catholics possessed a weekly newspaper which outsold all its rivals put together and which reinforced the impression that theirs was the party with the Church's future in its hands. Furthermore, Anglo-Catholicism could claim to be supplying the Church of England with many of its saints and with a fair proportion of its scholars. Slum priests like R. R. Dolling and Arthur Stanton gave their lives to the task of urban mission; Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, was hailed as a spiritual leader by churchmen of all parties; Charles Gore, Walter Frere and Darwell Stone were scholars of renown, while Frank Weston, bishop of Zanzibar, combined academic achievements and missionary zeal with personal qualities which brought him an unexpected pre-eminence at the 1920 Lambeth Conference. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, therefore, Anglo-Catholicism was the party of advance, offering leadership and vision and presenting the Church of England with a concept of Catholicity which many found attractive.

The history of the Established Church from the 1740s to the 1830s is viewed as a period of inertia and complacency. Failure to respond to the exigencies of the economic and demographic revolutions resulted in the increasing weakness of the National Church when compared with extra-establishment religion. In the face of increasing pastoral responsibilities, the Church was slow to augment its existing accommodation, or to respond to the challenge of modifying the ancient parochial structure in the face of patron and incumbent interest, and increasing Nonconformist hostility. The resulting decline of the Church from its near monopoly position in 1800, to that of a minority Establishment by 1851, is well documented. Yet while the general pattern of Church extension is known, there have been few studies of the Anglican decline at the diocesan level. Of the twenty-seven dioceses in existence in 1800 one is of particular importance – the diocese of Durham, ‘where the Church was endowed with a splendour and a power unknown in monkish times and in Popish countries’. Here the Church possessed its greatest concentration of resources; here also it was to suffer its greatest reverses.