The early Anglo-Saxon Church felt that it possessed a special relationship with the papacy and Rome, going back (according to Bede) to the Gregorian mission of 597. Despite setbacks to this mission, unity with the Church of Rome triumphed over Irish traditions to become the keystone in the identity of the English Church. Imitation of Roman liturgical customs was a significant element in this union. In the early days of the Gregorian mission, liturgical uniformity had been unimportant, indeed Gregory specifically instructed Augustine to create a liturgy of mixed ancestry, taking the best from what he had experienced. But by the late seventh century, indifference had been overtaken by enthusiasm for the Roman chant: Bede tells us of the efforts of, for example, Benedict Biscop and Bishop Wilfrid to introduce Roman liturgical customs into their foundations. In 747, the Southumbrian Council of Clofesho decreed that the feasts of the Christian calendar and the monastic office should be performed in accordance with Roman texts and practices.

Their sense of national identity is not something that men have been in the habit of directly recording. Its strength or weakness, in relation to commitment to international causes or to localist sentiment, can often only be inferred by examining political and religious attitudes and personal behaviour. So far as the early modern period is concerned, the subject is hazardous because groups and individuals must have varied enormously in the extent to which national identity meant something to them or influenced their lives. The temptation to generalise must be resisted. It is all too easy to suppose that national identity became well established in England in the Tudor century, when a national culture, based on widespread literacy among gentry, yeomen and townsmen, flowered as it had never done before, when the bible was first generally available in English, when John Foxe produced his celebrated Acts and Monuments, better known as the Book of Martyrs. Recent work reassessing the significance of Foxe’s account of the English reformation and other Elizabethan polemical writings provdes a convenient starting point for this brief investigation of some of the connections between religious zeal and national consciousness between 1558 and 1642.

When Gladstone decided, some time in 1885, that the only way to achieve ‘social order’ in Ireland was to concede Home Rule, he was disappointed to find that among his most implacable and vociferous opponents were the Irish Presbyterians. In vain he was to remind them that their ancestors had been United Irishmen in the 1790s, the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. His appeal to them to ‘retain and maintain the tradition of their sires’ fell on deaf ears.

It seemed to Gladstone as it has seemed to Irish nationalists and to some historians that the Irish Presbyterians had turned their political coats, that the grandsons of the United Irishmen had repudiated the principles of their grandfathers. Lecky, in his monumental History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, writing in the context of the Home Rule crisis, expressed his magisterial opinion that ‘the defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments… are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination’.

The earliest Christian monasticism falls within the definition of voluntary religious societies since it was not the product of institutional reform in the Church directed by bishops or councils. The founders of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism undertook their task voluntarily and without episcopal constraint. As the founders of voluntary and at first unofficial associations, they deserve our attention. I shall examine some aspects of the sources for the life of one, Pachomios of Tabennesi (c.292–346).

Waldensians figure high among the protagonists in accounts of medieval pacifism. The two areas on which these accounts usually concentrate correspond to two broad areas in the sect’s history—the genesis of abhorrence of killing during the formative early years, and the perseverance (or decline) of this position during the later centuries of an underground and only slowly changing movement—and they are also the two themes of this paper. The first theme poses a question. Is the received account of the genesis of this position satisfactory?

The service of God in Church and State’: in medieval England these two usually separate activities were combined in the parliamentary attendance of the clergy. Two methods were employed in summoning the clergy: parliamentary abbots and the bishops were called by individual writs of summons; the lower clergy were called indirectly.

The writ of summons to each bishop of England and Wales included a mandate, called, from its opening word, the premunientes clause, ordering the bishop to cause to appear in parliament the head of his cathedral chapter, one proctor for the cathedral clergy, all the archdeacons, and two proctors for the diocesan clergy. After 1340, obedience to the premunientes clause was not enforced by the crown, so technically the command to the lower clergy to be present in parliament was episcopal, not royal. It is not the intention to discuss here the theoretical and constitutional issues involved but to describe the execution of the premunientes clause between 1340 and 1400 as far as the limitations of the sources allow.

With the possible exception of the ‘wireless’, the cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s, when attendances began to decline and cinemas to close because of the competing power of television. On the eve of the Second World War, television was still in struggling infancy, while the number of cinemas had grown from some 3,000 in 1914 to about 5,000 in 1939, some of the recent ones having been built on a palatial scale. The introduction of sound films in 1929 enhanced the cinema’s popularity, and by 1939 annual attendances exceeded 1,500 million. Still higher figures were reached for a few years from 1945.

In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.

The writer of the History of the Patriarchs preserves an interesting tradition concerning the attitude of the monks of the monastery of Metras towards the Monophysite patriarch Benjamin (619–661/5)’ during the reign of the emperor Heraclius. ‘The inmates,’ we are told, ‘were especially powerful.’ They were Egyptians (Miswrani) by race, all natives, and there was no stranger among them. Therefore, Heraclius could not make their hearts pliant, and therefore they received Apa Benjamin when he returned from Upper Egypt, because they kept the orthodox (that is, Monophysite) faith and did not deviate from it’. Other monasteries might bow to ‘Heraclius the heretic’, but not they.

Books for children have existed for centuries. Their contents range from instructional manuals to flights of fancy. In children’s literature, a variety of narrative forms have emerged, developed, flowered, and faded, but one genre, Bible stories for children’s use, has remained in existence as long as print itself.

The Church Fathers inherited from their social and intellectual environment a long tradition of debate about the physical, moral, and intellectual capacities of women. It would be an oversimplification to say that the uniform teaching of ancient philosophers and rhetoricians was that women were in every respect naturally inferior to men. Plato, for one, defended the view that moral goodness is the same for women as for men; the fact that they perform different tasks—the duties of a citizen in the case of a (free) man, and of a good wife, directing her household in obedience to her husband, in the case of a woman—does not mean that the same moral qualities of justice and temperance are not required of both. In his Republic, a radical programme for the restructuring of traditional society, Plato advocates equal access to education for women and an equality of opportunity for the intellectually able, regardless of sex, to rise to leading roles in the administration of the State. He continues to believe that most women will be inferior to most men at important tasks; but ‘it was something to have it said that sex is not relevant to natural ability and moral capacity’, and it is possible to detect the influence of subsequent philosophers who agreed with Plato in forming ‘an increasing belief in the competence and trustworthiness of women’ in financial and political affairs, even if the belief was to have little practical effect in changing socially-accepted roles.

In April 1799 Francis Wollaston, rector of Chislehurst, published a pamphlet warning his parishioners and the public at large of the activities of certain seditious societies whose purpose was that of disseminating Jacobin principles; ideas already responsible for plunging France into chaos. His enquiries, he announced, had confirmed his worst suspicions:

Wollaston’s message, an ecclesiastical variant of the more general concern to engage in active defence of the established order, received its definitive form the following year at the hands of Bishop Samuel Horsley. In an important passage in his second visitation charge to the clergy of Rochester diocese the bishop referred to the emergence of an ecclesiastical subculture consisting of religious conventicles, Sunday schools and itinerant preachers. In Horsley’s eyes these ecclesiastical excrescences were merely the outward manifestations of a more sinister and worrying development, the appearance of associations designed to defray the costs of the current spate of unauthorized ‘religious’ activity.

How should an ascetic die? Aaron the presbyter knew how. He had always led an exemplary life. Born in Armenia, probably during the first quarter of the sixth century, he entered a Monophysite Syrian monastery in early youth. He there distinguished himself for his humility, his unremitting labour in the monastery’s vineyard and guest-house, and his abundant zeal for the ascetic life. Frequently he would stand up all night. Only in old age did he consent to the luxury of a rug-covered plank as his bed.

Eighty years have gone by since F. E. Warren published his work on The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. Two years before that date Warren had published the full text of a very puzzling Irish missal which had been in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, probably for some three hundred years. Since Warren wrote, the manuscript has been transferred from the library of Corpus Christi College to the Bodleian Library, where it is kept in a box which contains the missal and its satchel of leather. Its class-number is C.C.C. 282. In 1892 an English Jesuit scholar, H. Lucas, made a careful collation of Warren’s readings with the manuscript text; a note in his handwriting, which records a few minor errors, is preserved in the box with the manuscript.

Catharism in the affected regions of Languedoc, especially the eastern Toulousain, Carcassès, part of the Albigeois, where the problem of heresy first reached crisis point for twelfth-century churchmen, affected all classes. This is admitted by Marxist as well as non-Marxist historians. A working hypothesis has been put foward by Griffe to explain why the heresy, which affected a whole series of localities in the twelfth century, built up support more strongly in these areas of Languedoc than anywhere else. Usurpation of tithes, he suggests, predisposed an impoverished rural nobility to support cathar preachers who confirmed them in their hostility to the church by suggesting religious reasons why they should not give up the detained tithes. Disputed allegiances, conflicts and war costs weakened the position of the lords who might otherwise have supported persecution at the early and vulnerable stage of the heresy’s development. So preachers were free to gain converts.

It is a truth widely recognized, though perhaps insufficiently emphasized, that late-medieval England contained large numbers of unbeneficed clergy. The difficulty of studying such men lies in their elusiveness; they made little impact on the obvious source for a study of the English Church during this period, the bishops’ registers (apart from their appearances in the ordinations lists), for these are essentially concerned with benefices and benefice-holders. There is, however, one class of material which tells us much about the unbeneficed, namely the assessments made in connection with clerical poll-taxes. Levied in the years 1377, 1379, 1380, and 1381, these poll-taxes demanded what was virtually a clerical census on each occasion. The resulting returns are a boon to church historians and provide an unparalleled amount of information about the unbeneficed clergy, described in these documents as ‘chaplains’ and ‘clerks’. If we are to have a realistic picture of the late-medieval Church, the unbeneficed should receive more attention. Moreover, it is suggested that an examination of this class can throw light on the relationship between the Church and wealth during this period.

The study of church history, in a degree perhaps unparalleled among the various branches of historical study, combines both the analysis of flux and change and also the continuities and constants that somehow remain through the vicissitudes and disasters of human history. Without needing to have any prefabricated pattern imposed upon it, in Marxist or other style, church history discloses startling continuities, so that to talk about Constantine or Origen or Augustine is somehow not to indulge in antiquarianism but to be talking about issues which (despite vast changes in the intellectual framework within which the debate proceeds) remain alive for the living community of the church now. The sweat drips from our brows as we make die effort to preserve impartiality and detachment. My subject is Constantine’s conversion and the shift that this brought to the intellectual and religious history of Europe. If we put the story back into its historical context and try to look at it with the eyes of a contemporary, the shift may not seem exactly the kind of shift that at first the modern historian thinks he sees.