The history of English Roman Catholicism from the end of the sixteenth century right through to the nineteenth has as one of its main features the rivalries between seculars and regulars, especially between the seculars and the Jesuits. As this dispute primarily, but not exclusively, concerns the clergy it is most clearly seen in the history of those colleges which provided clergy for the English mission. The early history of the English College in Rome is not only the story of English and Welsh rivalry, but of frequent objections to the Jesuit administration and accusations by the seculars of the enticement of students to join the Society. Similar cases are to be found in the history of Saint Alban’s College Valladolid, but in this college there is an added dimension. Not only did the seculars complain about the Jesuits but the Jesuits complained of students being enticed away to the Benedictines. Later, a certain amount of bitterness arose out of the establishment of a college directed by the seculars in Lisbon. The Jesuits considered that they should have been placed in charge. What is more, there were even quarrels among the catholics detained in Wisbech castle. The ‘stirs’ there bore a remarkable resemblance to those at the college in Rome. As Aveling remarks about English Roman Catholicism ‘Historians have been defeated by its immense complexities of ecclesiastical intrigue and embarrassed by its sheer ferocity’. The quarrels not only provoke a feeling of distaste in the modern mind — why couldn’t these people resolve their differences and get on with their spiritual mission? They also instil puzzlement – are these disputes to be explained solely as political intrigue and in-fighting within the Catholic party? If so, how could such a cause appear attractive or plausible? How could such a house divided against itself, stand? I want to suggest that there is an element often overlooked which, although not explaining fully these intrigues and dissensions, nevertheless might help us to understand better what was going on. This can be called the positive attraction of the ascetic ideal. Bossy has stated in reference to the history of the English Catholic community ‘martyrology pointed this subject historiographically speaking up a cul-de-sac’. I want to suggest that cul-de-sac or no, the consideration of martyrdom and of life as a preparation for martyrdom is a path that can lead to a vantage point from which one can view this clerical back biting and contentiousness in a clearer light. Evenett in his Birbeck Lectures in 1951 pleaded for a better integration of the history of spirituality into ecclesiastical history and in particular devoted some space to a consideration of the origins of the Catholic revival in Spain. He pointed out the overlap of those who abandoned the world with those who remained in it, reforming its practice. Speaking of the Carthusians of the sixteenth century he said ‘A larger interest and practical usefulness in the external affairs of the Church were manifest by them at this period than we are accustomed to associate with modern Parkminster or Miraflores’. Following these lines let us turn to certain aspects of Spanish spirituality and its relationship to England.

Martyrs were the heroes of the Early Church. For a long period after the reign of Constantine until Benedictine monasticism took over their mantle, their lives and exploits provided a focus for the idealism of Christians in Western Europe. They represented the victory of human steadfastness and loyalty in defence of the faith triumphing over irreligious tyranny and the powers of evil. In the East, however, where Constantine had emphasized as early as 324 his complete rejection of the persecutions of his pagan predecessors, it was not long before memories of the past were transformed to meet other pressing needs of the day. Threatened first by Germanic and Slav invaders and then by the armies of Islam, Byzantine cities sought the protection of martyrs and the heavenly hierarchy that led from them through the Archangel Michael to the Virgin herself. In Nobatia, the northernmost of the three Nubian kingdoms that straddled the Nile valley between Aswan and a point south of Khartoum, the military martyrs, George, Mercurius, Theodore, and Demetrius seconded the endeavours of Michael and the Virgin to preserve the kingdoms and their Christian religion.

Much has been written of the Marian devotions of King Louis IX of France. Louis, so we are told, would mortify his flesh on the vigils of the four principal feasts of the Virgin. Regular pilgrimages were made by the King to the great Marian shrines of France, most notably those of Chartres and Rocamadour. Day by day, in his own chapel, the King listened to matins, tierce and compline sung with the appropriate offices of Our Lady, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays the Mass itself was dedicated to the Virgin. When the King took communion, which he did on six principal feast-days each year, two of these feasts, the Assumption and the Purification, were those of the Virgin. Rather than listen to ribald or secular songs, Louis preferred the singing of the Ave Maria stella.

In the drama of English church history in the nineteenth century, the reverend Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1861 to 1884, has hitherto been accorded a minor and somewhat transient role. He has appeared in two guises: first, as an Oxford Tractarian who, compelled by Newman’s secession in 1845 to choose between the Church of England and of Rome, opted for the former, but found his faith so unsettled by the process that he eventually lost it altogether; and secondly, as one of the contributors to that landmark—and landmine—of Anglican theology, Essays and Reviews. The argument of this paper is that his role was in fact both more constant and more considerable: an exploration of conflict between learning and religion, reason and faith; a conflict which in one way or another spanned his life, and in which reason did not merely criticise and challenge religion, but also aspired to replace it. In these two forms the conflict of learning and belief was, it need hardly be said, a key element in the so-called ‘Victorian crisis of faith’; insofar as Pattison’s career embodied it, he becomes a representative figure of the experience of his time, and so takes his stand, if not at the centre, then certainly in the foreground of the ecclesiastical stage.

In, a book of 1567 on the lives and actions of past popes and cardinals written by Girolamo Garimberto, in the section on avarice, is to be found this judgement on Cardinal Francesco Armellini (1470–1528). ‘He truly is to be considered rich who is content to live with what he has, while he who is unhappy with what he has accumulated may be considered poor; and measured in these terms one can say that Francesco Armellini was very poor indeed.’ Given his posthumous, and indeed his contemporary reputation, of which this passage is entirely typical, Francesco Armellini would appear to be an ideal figure through which to approach the general subject of the Church and wealth in this period.

The traditional reputations of Hoadly and Law could hardly be more sharply contrasted. Hoadly’s latitudinarianism, his promotion on the bench for political reasons, his neglect of diocesan duties have long made him a favourite example for castigating the hanoverian episcopate. Law has been much more fortunate. Almost universally cited as a happy exception to the lax theology of his age; credited with a religious appeal to men of all parties; and praised for his literary style and powers of argument, Law has enjoyed a generally uncritical press, despite the difficulties of reconciling the early, orthodox controversial and devotional writings with his later and mystical works. Of the confrontation between Hoadly and Law over the Bangorian sermon, the prevailing opinion has been that of dean Hook: ‘Law’s “Letters” have never been answered, – may indeed be regarded as unanswerable’. Some, indeed, have suggested that Hoadly failed to reply directly to Law either through fear or inability to do so. Overton, however, with his customary fairness, allowed that Hoadly ‘was a very able controversialist and not afraid of any antagonist’. Hoadly claimed that others had replied to Law (who had not attempted to answer them), and that all of Law’s most important points had been answered in Hoadly’s Answer to the Representation.

On 20 January 1574, at about 7.00 p.m., Alexander Nyndge, one of the sons of William Nyndge, a gentleman of Herringwell, Suffolk, suddenly went into violent paroxysms. Edward Nyndge, Alexander’s brother, intervened. Edward was a Cambridge graduate and a former fellow of Gonville and Caius, and his University education had apparently prepared him for just such an emergency. He immediately declared that Alexander was possessed by an evil spirit and summoned the villagers to come and pray for his brother’s recovery. As the praying continued, Alexander’s convulsions grew worse; a half dozen men had to hold him in his chair. Meanwhile the onlookers were praying extemporaneously. Suddenly someone invoked both God and the Virgin Mary. Edward pounced on this remark and admonished the crowd that such prayers offended God. The evil spirit, in a voice ‘much like Alexanders voice’, chimed in, endorsing the propriety of the prayer. But ‘Edward made answere and said thou lyest, for ther is no other name under Heaven, wherby we may challenge Salvacion, but thonly name of Ihesus Christe’. This point settled, Edward proceeded to organize his brother’s exorcism.

The epidemic of bubonic plague that spread in Russia between 1770 and 1772, claiming about 100,000 lives, was perceived as a divine punishment by many ordinary Russians. In 1771, Moscow witnessed popular riots, which were partly caused by the unwillingness of ecclesiastical authorities to allow Muscovites to venerate the icon of the Mother of God placed above the St Barbara Gates in the Kremlin and which was believed to have miraculous powers against epidemic. In order to stop the spread of the infection, the Moscow authorities established sanitary cordons around the city. In such an atmosphere of social crisis the Old Believers, a conservative current of Russian religious dissent, articulated popular fears and proposed a solution to these. The Old Believer merchants had received permission from the government to set up quarantine hospitals and cemeteries on the borders of the city. This led to the emergence of two Old Believer centres in Moscow in the suburb of Lefortovo: Rogozhskoe, that belonged to the priestly Old Believers, and Preobrazhenskoe, belonging to a branch of the priestless Old Believers, the Theodosians (fedoseevtsy).

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ The carrying out of this injunction has been interpreted differently in different ages. Professor Rupp reminded us in an early book that sixteenth-century Puritans and Protestants were not Victorian Christians in period costume. Calvin and Knox would have been hounded by the Lord’s Day Observance Society if their views on Sunday games had been known to Victorian evangelicals. During the years 1770–1870 there was an increasing strictness and rigidity with regard to ‘the world’. First of all there was the question did the world belong to God or the devil. Most evangelicals in 1770 would have said that it belonged to God, but by Victorian times they were not so certain. Abner Brown, speaking of one parson’s wife, says: ‘When her fine manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “ Satan’s earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ On the other hand Lord Mount Temple when censured by friends for attending the Queen’s fancy-dress ball replied: ‘This is God’s world by right, and not the devil’s. Our business is to subdue it to its lawful king, and not to abandon it to the enemy.’ With regard to pleasures and amusements there was a growing strictness; I was able to give an example of this with regard to the Venn family in John Venn and the Clapham Sect.

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, however impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could.. .The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

Of the many problems confronting post-reformation English catholics, that of national identity was among the most acute. For the nation at large, to be English was to be protestant, and to be papist was to be an alien.’ That catholics owed primary allegiance to the pope, to Spain, to France, was an axiom throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the exile of the catholic Stuarts at the revolution of 1688 merely varied the form in which the national tradition expressed itself. In his last public utterance William III equated ‘a Popish Prince, and a French Government’, judicial proclamations spoke of ‘papists and disaffected persons’, and George I’s first parliament declared that catholics

Everyone has his favourite squibs to illuminate the animosity of the devotees of the Christian application of modern knowledge towards the partisans of religious revival. R. B. Aspland, the unitarian, summed them all up succinctly in the early nineteenth century in his case against Wesleyanism. ‘Wine’, he declared, ‘is the beverage of the gentleman, spirits of the herd. So with religion’. Something of this edge had been there from the beginning, long before attitudes had been struck and the French Revolution had become a divider of spirits everywhere. Much of the fascination of the Turretini correspondence is provided by the conscious sense of intellectual superiority of the Swiss fathers of rational orthodoxy. ‘We are here much occupied with the scandalous affairs of Toggenburg’, writes Jean Gaspard Escher with an almost audible turn of the nose. ‘These are mountain people rather like Vaudois, Miquelets or Camisards’, and their murderous politics were of the Ulster variety. Neither the Toggenburgers, nor the Vaudois or Camisards were part of the history of religious revival, but they were very like Protestant minorities from Central Europe who were; the Salzburgers, for example. ‘The majority of these men’, writes Escher of the latter, ‘can neither read nor write; their fundamental doctrine is that worship is due to God alone and that salvation is by Jesus Christ. This doctrine fills them with a horror of popery: . . . they are ill-instructed in the other articles of religion. They know by heart some fine passages of scripture and some Lutheran hymns to which they hold’. Pastorally, if not confessionally, the mountain men were a different cup of tea from the practitioners of polite learning; but as late as 1800 it was possible to turn American methodists and baptists out in droves to vote for the deist Jefferson, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the fate of the revivalist and that of the men of enlightenment was more closely linked at an early stage than the text-book categories usually suggest.

On his way to one of the early meetings of the church service society, Story met Charteris on the street, who asked what were their aims. He replied, ‘To restore the ring in marriage, the cross in baptism, and the denial of the cup to the laity’. Charteris fled in horror.

Before discussing the renaissance of public worship in the church of Scotland it is necessary to look at the background. The lineage of reformed worship can be traced from Diebold Schwarz’s translation of the Hagenau Missal into German in 1524 through Bucer and Calvin, both of whom desired weekly communion, to the Scottish Book of Common Order (1564). When the civil authorities forbade weekly communion, Bucer and Calvin did not prepare an order of service for Sunday morning, but rubricated the order for communion as to how it should end when there was no celebration of the supper: that is, the eucharist was the norm for public worship.

Although there were both urban and rural monastic communities in the Frankish kingdoms in the Carolingian period, far more is known about the landed monasteries in the countryside regarding both their internal organisation and the relationship between them and the rural community in which they lived and over which they were the lords. The statutes of Adalhard of Corbie for example provide information concerning the monastery both within the monastic community and on its estates, and show us the abbey as the centre of an agricultural region. The monasteries in the towns on the other hand are much less well-documented and the evidence for Carolingian towns themselves is both sparse and difficult to interpret. If a town is understood to be ‘a concentration of population larger than the neighbouring agricultural settlements in which there is a substantial non-agricultural population which may be concerned with defence, administration, religion, commerce or industry’, there are not very many Carolingian centres for which enough evidence survives to justify their being called towns. Valenciennes for example, described recently as une ville carolingienne, is mentioned in the sources occasionally as a portus and seems to have succeeded Farrars in importance in the region sometime in the eighth century. In the time of Charles the Bald it had a mint, and Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Lothar I and Lothar II are all known to have issued charters from a royal palatium at Valenciennes. There were several churches and the abbey of St Salvius in the settlement, and it is likely that some trading activity went on. But other than that Valenciennes was a settlement which carried on some sort of economic activity, very little is known. The abbey of St Amand, a rural monastery nine miles from Valenciennes, achieved a far more influential and important position in the kingdom than the town of Valenciennes ever did.

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Randolph Churchill may never have uttered these emotive words during his visit to Ulster in 1886—they appeared in a public letter to a Glasgow Liberal unionist—but they undoubtedly expressed the belligerence and self-righteousness of the Ulster protestant resistance to the prospect of home rule for Ireland. Joseph Lee has observed correctly that ‘Orangemen did not need to be told that they were right or that they would fight’, but after 1886 it was not only Orangemen who made such claims, nor even opportunist tory politicians like Churchill, but protestant churchmen and solid middle class citizens and farmers who would previously have distanced themselves fastidiously from Orangeism. In this paper we shall examine the encouragement and support given by protestant churches and churchmen—Presbyterians in particular—to the movement to resist home rule by force in the period 1912–14.

If you were a religious of the i ith or 12th centuries choosing the order in which you were to find your vocation, how did you distinguish order from order, monk from canon? How did you determine gradations of the ascetic life? If you were a founder or benefactor, planning to found a new religious house, how did you determine which order to favour? At a time when asceticism and the religious orders flourished as never before, choice must have been bewildering. There is a copious contemporary literature arguing the relative merits of this mode and that; and modern scholars have offered a remarkably wide variety of advice. Some have proceeded on the assumption that there must have been a fundamental difference and have pursued it as best they might; others, disappointed in the chase, have doubted if any true difference existed. Some have seen all such differences engulfed in the deeper stream of new impulses and modes which affected every approach to the religious life in this age; others have said that to lose track of such differences is to take a very superficial view of the meaning of the rules of St Augustine and St Benedict. It is very easy indeed to take an entirely sceptical view; and I propose to start by stating the case for saying there was no difference visible to all in every part of Europe – that no general statement of the difference stands up to close inspection. But to rest the matter there, I am sure, would be superficial and mistaken – and so in the second part of this paper I embark on the much more hazardous path of determining where the difference lay. I shall try not to add another definition to the scrap heap, but to show by looking at a number of local situations how it might have appeared both externally to a founder and at a deeper level to an educated man with some discernment of different approaches to the ascetic life and religious spirituality. Yet the ultimate abiding impression is of the strangeness of the central fact: at a time when men were seeking their own religious vocation in numbers never before approached in medieval Europe – and patrons lavishing resources on an unparalleled variety of new religious houses – it is especially difficult for us to observe in many cases where the differences lay.

George Fox, chief among the founders of Quakerism, died in 1691, leaving a huge mass of papers for publication together with funds to support the project. In the event, some of his papers were never published and were lost, and little was known about them until the discovery in 1932 of an annotated list of all Fox’s papers, which had been compiled in the 1690s, and which included references to two unknown books, a ‘Book of Miracles’ and a ‘Book of Examples of God’s Judgements on Evildoers’. The finder was Henry J. Cadbury (1883–1974), who is best known in non-Quaker circles as a New Testament scholar, and the skills he needed for the analysis of New Testament documents were invaluable in handling the Fox corpus. He was able to gain an idea of the contents of these lost books, particularly the ‘Book of Miracles’, and his partial reconstruction of it, published in 1948 with a comprehensive introduction, is still an important source for any study of the miraculous element in early Quakerism.

[He] is in the line of the great souls of the Middle Ages who spanned the whole compass of current knowledge. Bishop and doctor, William of Auvergne is one of the noble figures of the thirteenth century (F. Vernet).

William was chaplain to Queen Blanche, King Louis’ mother, and in an age of great bigotry he excelled in excessive bigotry (Ch. Merchavia).

In 1240 William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, was present at a form of hearing, trial, disputation, or inquisition between Christians and Jews to determine whether or not the Parisian Jews should have their copies of the Talmud destroyed. The Talmud was condemned. Some two years later the large quantity—probably twenty-four cartloads—of Jewish books which had been confiscated in 1240, and locked since then in the Dominican convent, was publicly burned. The consigning of the books to the flames is reminiscent of the burning of heretics and is one of the circumstances of the whole event which has led some commentators to see the trial as a form of Inquisition.