Gerald of Wales is primarily responsible for the generally accepted view of Henry II as a founder of monasteries. In his De Principis Instructione Liber he gives an account of the penance imposed on the king at Avranches in 1172 for his part in Becket's murder, and its commutation. Gerald reveals that instead of leading a Crusade to the Holy Land in person, and, we learn from other sources, maintaining two hundred knights there for a year at his own expense, Henry delayed for three years. He thus eventually gained from the pope a commutation to encompass the founding of three monasteries. These were, says Gerald, Waltham, where a group of holy secular canons were replaced with canons regular, Amesbury, where he violenter intrusit nuns from Fontevrault, and the third was probably Witham where a group of patient and holy men humbly bore hardship and the lack of a roof over their heads. ‘Sed quid attinet humana versutia contra divina consilia?’ asks Gerald. In a long passage he elaborates his theme that the Almighty will not be deceived by such a shamming, paltry, effort.

From 1378 to 1418, the Roman Church was faced with a situation hitherto unprecedented. For the first time in its history, it experienced a schism for which its constitution, as accepted in 1378, could provide no solution: there were two popes, both of whom could claim to have been legally elected. The dissident cardinals who rebelled against Urban vi in July 1378, only three months after they had elected him pope, discovered some legal (although admittedly rather spurious) grounds for denouncing the election and declaring the papacy vacant; a step followed in September by the election of the cardinal Robert of Geneva as rival pope, taking the name of Clement VII.

In the spring of the year 1160 archbishop Martin of Santiago de Compostela was expelled from his see by his king, Fernando II of León. Except for a brief period of about six months in the winter of 1164–65 he remained excluded from his church and sometimes from the kingdom until shortly before his death in 1167. For some of this period of seven years he sought to exert pressure upon the king through the papal curia of Alexander III in order to bring about his reinstatement; usually in vain. This cause célèbre in the relations between Church and State in the most westerly of the Spanish kingdoms has attracted little attention from Spanish ecclesiastical historians, and none at all from others. What makes it of more than parochial interest is its timing. Fernando II was not the only western European ruler to be at loggerheads with his archbishop in the 1160s; neither is the spectacle of a pope unwilling decisively to intervene in a quarrel of this kind an unfamiliar one to students of the ecclesiastical affairs of that troubled decade. Only fragments of evidence have survived to shed light on the tortuous diplomacy of those years. To disinter and to attempt to fit together the dead bones of this forgotten dispute may, it is hoped, be to provide a further fragment, which, in its turn, may be of interest to those whose concern is with the larger affairs of empire and of papacy, of Angevins and of Capetians. To historians of Spain its interest will (we hope) be sufficiently obvious to need no commendation.

According to the Byzantine sources, the reign of the iconoclastic emperor Constantine v (741–775) was characterised by an attack on the very institution of monasticism, and the brunt of the persecution directed against the ‘orthodox’ was borne by the monastic order. This anti-monastic phase of iconoclasm has not passed unnoticed in modern attempts to clarify the origins and motive forces of the iconoclastic movement as a whole. The gamut of explanations ranges from an extreme position which maintains that die iconoclastic movement itself was merely a pretext for attacking parasitic monasteries and to confiscate their land holdings, through more balanced views which claim that the enthusiastic and determined propagation and defence of image-worship by monks was an obstacle which had to be removed by breaking the power of monasticism if the official iconoclastic policies were to be effective, to a recent more sophisticated approach which claims to recognise in both monasticism and icon-worship illegitimate, unlicensed forms of spirituality, signs of separatist tendencies which die State battling against Islam for survival could not afford to tolerate.

In the England of 1840, as Professor Chadwick observes, the idea of mission pertained to the lapsed at home as well as the heathen overseas. This article, in discussing connexions between the English Churches and the Australian colonies, deals with a third meaning: colonial mission. The seventeenth-century association of religion and colonisation is well known. The bearing of religion (heathen missions excepted) on the imperialism of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and the response of English Christianity to settlement colonies in this period, have occasioned less discussion. Most familiar are the points where religion was drawn into imperial policy, as in British North America after the Revolution. Promotion of the Church of England was part of an overhaul of imperial administration in New South Wales as well. But in the new century this method of achieving political and social stability ran into difficulties at home. In Australia it was ineffective and little more popular than in the Canadas. By 1830 religion was ceasing to be an instrument of imperial policy. The new bearers of British Christianity overseas, the evangelical missionary societies, had been founded with the heathen in view and generally avoided other engagements. The missionary fervour of the post-Napoleonic period thus coincided with indifference to the religious needs of emigrants and colonists. A response came in the 1830s in the form of colonial missionary societies and a quickening of the older Church societies. Though never a match for the home and heathen enterprises of Victorian Christianity, the colonial missions had roots in the nation's past. They expressed the various aspirations of the home Churches and were part of the phenomenon of empire.

Whatever his personal failings and those of his Order, the prior of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, more than any other man in England in the late Middle Ages, stood for the political standards that were most respected, if not most often acted upon, by his fellow-countrymen. He was also one of die great magnates of the kingdom, given power, money, and access to the king by his rich priory based at Clerkenwell, the five preceptories his office entitled him to, and his places in the upper house of parliament and die royal council. What use the priors made of their office and how they lived up to the ideals they were supposed to embody were, therefore, matters of consequence at the time. The surviving records, though not abundant, seem sufficient to provide partial answers to these questions for at least some priors; but no such attempt has yet been published.

One of the more interesting personalities in the puritan party of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the Kentish minister Josias Nicholls (1553–1639). In The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967) Professor P. Collinson notes Nicholls's importance on a number of occasions, paying particular attention to his tract The Plea of the Innocent (1602), which Collinson sees as exemplifying many of the attitudes and aspirations of the moderate wing of the party. A number of other works also mention Nicholls briefly and record the bare bones of his career, including his opposition to Whitgift in 1584 and his deprivation in 1602. But Nicholls remains a shadowy figure and the full significance of his contribution to the godly cause unclear.

Laurence Tomson is, perhaps, best known for his translation of L'Oiseleur's edition of Beza's Latin New Testament into English. He was also secretary to Walsingham from 1574 and a member of the English ‘Presbyterian’ party.

In general the term ‘Pietist’ signifies a type of dedicated, personal faith in which deep devotion to Christ and strict morality were prominent. Emphasising the emotions, rebirth, a changed life and religious experience, it often generated a sense of separation from the unredeemed world in its adherents, who typically made use of sermon, Scripture, devotional works and small gatherings of the devout to obtain spiritual edification, often also espousing missionary work. For them experience counted for more than knowledge of doctrine, dedication for more than ecclesiastical status and the personal for more than the institutional. The word was first used of the followers of the Lutheran churchman Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), who, as is well known, formed an important reform movement in Germany late in the seventeenth century and whose successors were influential there until well into the next.

The colloque of Poissy, September–October 1561, was an important incident in the history of the Reformation, and a dramatic incident in the career of the cardinal of Lorraine. This subject was first studied in detail by H. O. Evennett in his book The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Council of Trent, published in 1930. More recently, Evennett provided the inspiration for Donald Nugent in his study Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloque of Poissy. It is upon these two important works that any reassessment must necessarily be based. In a concluding chapter on ‘the case of the cardinal of Lorraine’, Nugent wrote: ‘while the sources would seem to argue for a better view of Lorraine and his conduct at Poissy, an element of ambiguity remains’. This cautious comment refers to the introduction by Lorraine of the confession of Augsburg and a Lutheran formula on the eucharist. For Nugent, the ‘critical role of the enigmatic cardinal of Lorraine has never been resolved’. In order to concentrate on his subject, the colloque itself, Nugent skipped briefly over its historical background. This he believed to have been fully treated by others—doubtless Evennett in particular. It is, however, still necessary to study this historical background more precisely in order to clarify how and why the colloque arose. Only then does it become possible to interpret the all-important role of Lorraine.

The religion of the people is the foundation of the Church and basic to the study of church history. It is in this belief and in the recognition that where direct expression of religious ideas is lacking any material which may shed light on them must be used, that the following study is offered. The evidence on which it is based is drawn from the archives of Eton College and consists largely of wills drawn up before 1500. They number seventy-three, and they fall into two main groups. The first comprises fourteen wills found among the deeds which came to the college as the result of its acquisition of land and property by the gift either of the founder, Henry VI, or of local benefactors in the early sixteenth century. Three of these wills are of the fourteenth century; the remainder are spread throughout the fifteenth century from 1401 to 1497. Six were made in the diocese of Salisbury: five in New Windsor, one in Cookham (Berks.). The other eight wills in this group are those of residents in Lincoln diocese, three living in Eton and five in Buckinghamshire villages to the north—Iver, Langley, Farnham, Burnham, and High Wycombe. The second group, comprising the remaining fifty-nine wills are contained in the first of the college registers, and were proved before the provosts, who had been granted archidiaconal rights of jurisdiction in the parish of Eton by Thomas Bekynton, archdeacon of Buckingham, in 1443.

It may confidently be surmised that at all times in history many men and women have sighed for the abatement of systematic and organised violence between or within tribes, empires and states, particularly when personal involvement has seemed likely. Such sentiments must have been common in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even though the combatants in war were relatively few; famine and pestilence, the indirect consequences of conflict, were severe enough to guarantee that. It has been estimated that in the seventeenth century, there were only seven years in which wars were not being fought somewhere in Europe. Calculations for the eighteenth century could be expected to yield similar results. Yet it was only towards the end of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (known to contemporary Englishmen as the Great War) that determined action was taken to establish organised movements for peace. The result was the establishment in 1815 and 1816 of two peace societies in the United States, and of the Society for the Promotion of Permanent and Universal Peace (commonly described as the Peace Society) in Great Britain. These remained virtually alone until other bodies were formed in Britain and on the Continent in the period after 1867. These in turn contributed to the movements which led to inter-governmental conferences for peace and disarmament in the first decade of the twentieth century and to the formation of the League of Nations after the First World War.

The year 1688 was for England a religious as well as a political turning-point, and nowhere more so than among the English Roman Catholics. The post-Revolution Church was maintained and led by the same clergy who had flourished under James 11, but in very different circumstances. The hectic triumphalism of the years before 1688 gave way to a period of slow, cautious, and self-consciously a-political consolidation. The change can be seen in the careers of two men, Bonaventure Giffard and John Gother. Giffard had been provocatively consecrated bishop of Madura in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall in 1688. In the same year he had gone to Oxford, to preside over twelve catholic dons at Magdalen College, intruded in the place of the evicted protestant Fellows. There he had confirmed and sung the mass, while protestant undergraduates stormed and howled outside the chapel windows. The Revolution brought a fourteen-month prison sentence in Newgate, from which he emerged, a chastened man, to oversee the formation and consolidation of congregations and clergy funds and organisations in the Midland District and, after 1702, to take charge of the London District with its mission to the London poor and unchurched.

Until after World War II there were three principal series of translations by which the Fathers were known to those in the English-speaking world whose ancient languages were inadequate or non-existent: the Library of the Fathers (LF), the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (ANCL), and the Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (NPNF). The LF was the product of the Oxford Movement, with Pusey its guiding spirit; because of the literary importance of some of those involved in it, especially Newman, it has seemed worth a separate study. The other two series, which in a somewhat involved way complement each other, are of primarily historical interest, and may sensibly be considered together.

The publication of Christopher Hill's Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings was an exciting event for students of mid-seventeenth-century England. It provides a readily available edition of Winstanley's most important writings. To these Hill offers a compelling introduction which has much to stimulate and interest, but in his interpretation of Winstanley there are also invitations to misunderstanding. Ultimately, Hill's interest in Winstanley arises from his perception of the seventeenth-century writer as ‘modern’ and, if another recent article is any guide, this continues to be the common factor for studies of Winstanley. It is the purpose of this article to argue that this ‘modern’ view of Winstanley misconstrues his intellectual sources and historical significance by minimising the part theology played in his theories of social and moral change. The result of such a view is to misrepresent Winstanley's meaning, and his relationship to his contemporary world.