‘Sobriety and restraint are not fashionable today.’ So Claire Cross chose to introduce her first major work, The Puritan Earl: the Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536-1595, completed in the King’s Manor at York in September 1965. Over thirty years, and many, many publications later, the relevance of that sentiment for her own distinctive qualities as a historian of the sixteenth-century Church seems more obvious than ever. Claire’s many admirers are, of course, well aware of how prepared she can be to abandon restraint herself when confronted with either blatant scholarly inaccuracy or serious injustice to the academic causes she holds most dear. Nevertheless, Claire Cross’s exceptional influence as a historian throughout her many years at the University of York has probably owed more than anything else to the value she sets upon the exercise of what she once called the ‘deliberately unexciting’ virtues. As she herself suggested, Hastings and his fellow godly peers may well have had a more enduring effect upon English life and English moral standards than did their more obviously dazzling Elizabethan contemporaries. If so - and who would find it altogether easy to deny the force of that argument? - how hard it is to resist the thought that Claire’s own contributions to English Reformation Church history may well outlast those of many of her own contemporaries. In a field of scholarship noted for the brilliance and iconoclasm of its recent practitioners, Claire has long been the mistress of those who know.