The motives of individuals are necessarily conditioned by the expectations of society. Some walks of life are recognised as demanding a high degree of self-sacrifice and noble motivation, as being (in modern terms) vocations. Others are careers worthy of esteem, and yet others are condemned, so that it is supposed that no ethically minded person would engage in them. As the social structure changes there is an adaptation in the pattern of esteem, and an interesting example of this process is provided by the new thinking about knighthood which emerged in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. So much has been written about chivalry that a broad review of the subject is out of the question in this paper, but it may be of interest to re-examine it in the light of this theme. An appropriate starting-point is provided by a passage from the history of the first crusade written about 1110 by Guibert of Nogent:

It is written in the Koran:
Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with the
army of the Elephant?
Did he not cause their strategem to miscarry?

Historically the Elephant was the Christian king of Ethiopia who attacked Mecca in 570, but some twelfth-century Moslems considered that this sura was a prophetic reference to Reynald of Châtillon, who was singled out as the chief enemy of Islam.

It is sometimes both necessary and useful to go backwards in history, to disentangle an earlier development not by the usual method of piecing together the contemporary evidence but by approaching it through the eyes of later generations. This is certainly true of the present subject. We can say with confidence that late antiquity, especially the period from the fifth century onwards, marked the formative stage in the growth of cult and veneration offered to Mary. Yet one of the most striking experiences in any attempt to disentangle this development is the gradual recognition of exactly how much of our understanding has been shaped by later ideas, wishes, and religious agendas. Investigation of this subject entails the attempt to deal with many texts which are in themselves extremely hard to date; and indeed some of the ‘evidence’ itself, at least the written evidence, turns out to consist of a tangle of later legend passing for history - so much so in fact that I am considerably less certain about the subject now than when I originally wrote about it over twenty years ago.

When, in modern ecumenical converse, it is suggested that a non-episcopal church may do well to take episcopacy into its system, there is bound to be discussion of the theology of episcopacy, of whether or not the bishop is of the esse of the Church, is necessary to its being, necessary for the perpetuation of orders and sacraments, and of the nature and significance of apostolic succession. But that is not all. Besides these high doctrinal problems, there will be questions about bishops as facts of history. Fear of prelacy may cast doubt upon their being even of the bene esse of the Church. Frequently, however, there is a genuine interest in the pastoral potentialities of episcopacy. While it is claimed that the ministers of non-episcopal churches do in fact exercise episkope over their parishes or congregations, it is freely allowed that, for good pastoral and evangelistic reasons (and not solely for the sake of what is sometimes called mere administration), the modern trend has been strongly towards the appointment of ministers to an office involving supervision of larger areas and of other ministers, whether the former are called moderators, superintendents, chairmen, general secretaries, what you will—even bishops. But if such men are meant to exercise a pastoral office, how can it be secured that they do not degenerate into ‘mere administrators’?

A New tale entered the circle of commonplace narratives about Jews which were known to men and women in the thirteenth century: the tale of Host desecration. This new narrative habitually unfolded (i) an attempt by a Jewish man to procure (buy, steal, exchange) a consecrated Host in order to (2) abuse it (in re-enactment of the Passion, in ridicule of bread claimed to be God), (3) only to be found out through a miraculous manifestation of the abused Host, which leads to (4) punishment (arrest and torture unto death, lynching by a crowd). The tale was a robust morality story about transgression and its punishment, and it always ended with the annihilation of the abusing Jew and often of his family, neighbours, or the whole local Jewish community. It was a bloody story, both in the cruelty inflicted on the Host/God and in the tragic end of the accused abuser and those related to him. This basic narrative was open to myriad interpretations and combinations, elaborations at every stage of its telling. It is a particularly interesting narrative inasmuch as it was often removed from the context of preaching and teaching, of exemplification, into the world of action and choice. The Host-desecration tale was not only a poignant story about Jews, it was also a blueprint for action whenever the circumstances of abuse suggested themselves in the lives of those who were reared on the tale. The story’s fictionality was masked from the very beginning of its life: it was always told as a report about a real event, with no irony or explicit elaboration. It was a concrete, new tale, which provided tangible knowledge about Jews, and through the actions of Jews, about the Eucharist.

Wales and Scotland were in the nineteenth century, as they have remained in the twentieth, nations within a multinational state. Where boundaries of nation and state did not coincide in nineteenth-century Europe there was commonly a surge of feeling in favour of achieving a remedy. This was equally true of nations like Italy and Germany that were divided internally by political frontiers and of nations like the Serbs and the Rumanians who were lumped together with other peoples under the rule of greater powers. There was an efflorescence of nationalism, that is, of the political assertion of nationhood. The British Isles were not immune, for Ireland was deeply affected by the new mood. Yet Wales and Scotland were largely untouched by the nationalist spirit. Only from the 188os, with the example of the Irish Home Rulers to imitate, was there any significant stirring of aspirations after self-government, and then the vanguard in both nations gave no thought to the possibility of taking independence as its goal. Wales and Scotland were remarkably quiescent when viewed in a European context.

It is a characteristic merit of Richard Southern—recently voted the historians’ historian in The Observer—that as long ago as 1970, in Western Society and the Church, he devoted some luminous pages to ‘the influence of women in religious life’. Though these pages nestle in a chapter called ‘Fringe orders and anti-orders’, twenty years ago such labels were not pejorative. Southern made women emblematic of what could be called a pendulum-swing theory of medieval religious history. First came a primitive, earlier medieval age of improvization and individual effort, of spiritual warriors and local initiatives; the central medieval period saw ‘a drive towards increasingly well-defined and universal forms of organization’ in an age of hierarchy and order; then, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, back swung the pendulum towards complexity and confusion, individual experiment, and ‘small, humble, shadowy organizations’.

The period from the beginning of the seventh century to the middle of the ninth was decisive for the history of the Byzantine empire. At the beginning of the seventh century, the idea of the Roman, or Byzantine, empire as the political configuration of the Mediterranean world - something that the Emperor Justinian had done his best to restore - still seemed valid, though there were already significant cracks in the edifice. By the end of the seventh century - let alone the middle of the ninth - that was a dream, though a dream to which the Byzantines obstinately clung. For the early years of the seventh century had seen the temporary Persian conquest of the eastern provinces of the Byzantine empire, soon followed by the Arab conquest which the Byzantines were to prove unable to overturn. The impact on the Byzantine empire of these events and the infiltration into the Balkan peninsula by the Slavs, was profound - politically, economically, culturally, and theologically. But the story of this impact is generally presented, both in the sources and in scholarly accounts, from the point of view of the centre, the Queen City, Constantinople. Central to the Byzantine world view, as it emerged with renewed confidence in the middle of the ninth century, was the idea of the empire, and the Emperor, as the guardian of Christian Orthodoxy, which was symbolized in the proclamation of the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’ with the final overthrow of iconoclasm in 843, a proclamation that became part of the normal ecclesiastical calendar, celebrated thereafter each year on the first Sunday of Lent. But that Orthodoxy, in its final form, had not been nurtured in Constantinople, nor had the wealth of liturgical poetry that came to celebrate it. Constantinople had reacted to the catastrophe of the early seventh century by plunging into heresy: first, the Christological heresy of monenergism, with its refinement, monothelitism, and then the heresy of iconoclasm, also believed - by both iconoclasts and their opponents - to be ultimately a matter of Christology. The Orthodoxy whose triumph was celebrated from 843 onwards had been defined, and celebrated, in Palestine, the province that had been lost for good to the Byzantines in the 630s. Orthodoxy, in fact, achieved its final definition at the periphery - and defeated periphery at that - and from there took over the centre. In this paper, we are not concerned with Christians who visited the Holy Land as pilgrims, but rather with those who belonged there: mainly monks, both natives and those who came to the Holy Land to live in the complex of monasteries in and around Jerusalem. How and why did these Palestinian monks come to play this role in the wider history of the Christian œcumene?

For the king, after the fashion of tyrants, had reduced the church in his kingdom to slavery’. So John of Salisbury stigmatized king Roger II of Sicily. He continued that ‘instead of allowing any freedom of elections [Roger] named in advance the candidate to be elected, so disposing of all ecclesiastical offices like palace appointments’. This picture has been accepted by modern historians with very few reservations. To quote the standard history of the Norman kingdom of Sicily of Ferdinand Chalandon, still unrivalled after more than seventy years, ce qui caractérise la situation des évêques a l’époque normande, c’est la dépendance absolue où ils se trouvent vis-à-vis du roi.

Unity and diversity form a theme which Gregory the Great addressed in his famous set of answers to Augustine of Canterbury. Augustine had asked the Pope:

To this, the Pope replied:

Henry VII, wrote Knowles, ‘was not personally interested in religion in its theological or devotional aspects, still less in its spiritual depth, but neither was he a critic or libertine. His actions and policies, as we see them, were earthbound’. However, Storey has written that ‘Henry’s piety must be emphasised . . . [his] devotions went far beyond those of his contemporaries’. The king’s most recent biographer, Chrimes, remarks on his meticulous religious observances, his contemporary reputation as a sound churchman, and his discriminating religious patronage. Chrimes’s verdict on Henry’s relations with papacy and church is that they were ‘in no way remarkable’, and on his patronage of learning that it is ‘far from clear’ whether ‘much in the way of humanistic influences were at work in his court’. Speculating on whether the king possessed ‘genuine religious feeling’ he inclines to Knowles’s steely verdict.

Jean Mabillon’s incidental treatment in his De re diplomatica of the lead bulla of an emperor Charles with the reverse legend Renovatio Roman. Imp. gives no inkling of the reputation it was to acquire in later historiography of the Carolingian empire. Mabillon himself favoured an attribution to Charles the Fat, although between the publication of the first and supplementary volumes of his epoch-making work it had been correctly attributed to the first Charles by the numismatist François Le Blanc. Without these early publications, modern discussion of early Carolingian imperial and renaissance ideology might have been deprived of one of its key texts: for the bull was already in a much damaged condition in the late-nineteenth century and both sides are now almost completely illegible. Its uniqueness, and the great rarity of the ‘imperial bust’ coins which are icono-graphically linked with it, invite us to consider whether the slogans and images of a ‘renewed Roman empire’ were known to more than a privileged few in Charlemagne’s lifetime: even so, if the Annales Mettenses, completed in 805, have been rightly interpreted, someone in the court circle had felt the need to appease critics by emphasising the strictly-Frankish roots of his imperial authority at the same time as the dies of the new coins were being prepared.

Two themes which figure repeatedly in the history of the Western Church are the contrasting ones of tradition and renewal. To emphasize tradition, or continuity, is to stress the divine element in the continuous collective teaching and witness of the Church. To call periodically for renewal and reform is to acknowledge that any institution composed of people will, with time, lose its pristine vigour or deviate from its original purpose. At certain periods in church history the tension between these two themes has broken out into open conflict, as happened with such dramatic results in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers seem to present one of the most extreme cases where the desire for renewal triumphed over the instinct to preserve continuity of witness. A fundamentally novel analysis of the process by which human souls were saved was formulated by Martin Luther in the course of debate, and soon adopted or reinvented by others. This analysis was then used as a touchstone against which to test and to attack the most prominent features of contemporary teaching, worship, and church polity. In so far as any appeal was made to Christian antiquity, it was to the scriptural texts and to the early Fathers; though even the latter could be selected and criticized if they deviated from the primary articles of faith. There was, then, no reason why any of the Reformers should have sought to justify their actions by reference to any forbears or ‘forerunners’ in the Middle Ages, whether real or spurious. On the contrary, Martin Luther’s instinctive response towards those condemned by the medieval Church as heretics was to echo the conventional and prejudiced hostility felt by the religious intelligentsia towards those outside their pale.

Charters, Chronicles and letters which record the foundation of religious houses in the period 1050–1250 abound in the images of both war and peace. Whereas king Henry I of England, a military leader of renown, founded an abbey at Cirencester for the repose of his soul and the stability of his realm, Bernard of Clairvaux, that celebrated man of religion, wrote of the new Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx as an outpost of his lord which he proposed to occupy. The juxtaposition of such conflicting ideas is epitomised by the military orders, formed to fight holy wars against the infidel; and a logical symbol of the triumph of Christianity is the foundation of a monastery such as Louis IX’s Franciscan friary at Jaffa, created in 1252 after the capture of this Moslem stronghold, or the building of Alcobaça by Alphonso I of Portugal (c1153) after his great victory over the Moors at Santaren.

A Theban once came to abba Sisoes, wanting to become a monk. The old man asked him whether he had anyone in the world. He said, ‘I have a son.’ The old man said to him, ‘Go, throw him into the river, and then you shall be a monk.’ When he went off to throw him in, the old man sent a brother to stop him. The brother said, ‘Stop: what are you doing?’ He said, ‘The abba told me to throw him in.’ So the brother said, ‘But now he has told you not to.’ He left him and went to the old man, and he became a proven monk because of his obedience.

In the generation before the first world war, Scottish national identity was found not in the church, established or free, but in the town hall; in an ethical Christian community faith rather than ‘churchianity’. For Scotland was a working model of the civic church of W. T. Stead. In particular in Glasgow, that faith of the ‘new’ professional layman proved itself flexible, responsive to urban social problems and readily exportable. Civic patriotism was at once national and international.

The Church always demanded that the two partners to a marriage should be not only of the Christian faith but also of the same creed and dogma. Marriage with infidels and Jews was declared illegal; but so also was marriage with heretics and, in Byzantine law, with ‘gentiles,’ or those not within the orbit of the Byzantine Church and Empire. The fourteenth canon of the Council of Chalcedon forbade an Orthodox Christian to contract ‘a marriage with a heretic woman’; the seventy-second canon of the Council in Trullo repeated this prohibition, adding that such a marriage, if contracted, should be dissolved; and in the twelfth century the Byzantine canonist Theodore Balsamon ruled that the female partners in such marriages should be excommunicated. These warnings were solemnly reiterated in the imperial legislation of Byzantium from the time of Justinian onwards.

The century of the Reformation, in England as elsewhere, sharpened all conflicts and augmented persecution. As the unity of Christendom broke up, the rival parties acquired that sort of confidence in their own righteousness that encourages men to put one another to death for conscience sake; an era of moderation and tolerance gave way to one of ever more savage repression. To the openminded willingness which characterized the humanism of Erasmus and More as well as the Rome of Leo X there succeeded the bigotry typical of Carafa, Calvin, Knox and the English puritans; only the gradual evaporation of such passions, produced by each side’s inability to triumph totally, produced a weariness with religious strife which made the return of mutual sufferance possible. That, at least, is the received story. Historians of toleration, as for instance Jordan and Lecler, firmly described the history of persecution in this way. Jordan identified six developments which led to its decline in sixteenth-century England: a growing political strength among dissident sects, the impossibility of preventing splintering and preserving uniformity, the needs of trade which overrode religious hostility, experience of travel, the failure to suppress dissident publications, and finally a growing scepticism which denied the claims to exclusive truth advanced by this or that faction. In other words, only two things moved men, once they had fallen away from the generosity of the pre-Reformation era, to substitute an uneasy toleration for a vigorous persecution: the external pressures of experience and the decline of religious fervour. By implication, men of power called for repression and only those who could not hope to win favoured toleration, until general exhaustion set in. It is a convincing enough picture, and much evidence no doubt supports it. But it is a picture—a general and rather schematic panorama which makes little allowance for the real opinions of individuals. On this occasion I should like to test it by looking at the attitudes of two highly articulate sixteenth-century Englishmen—Thomas More, humanist and loyal son of the universal Church, and John Foxe, humanist and faithful protestant. Both, we know, were men of sensitivity and sense. How did they stand to the problem of persecution?

I shall not be presenting in this communication the fruits of any original research: my aim will be simply to put together some of the results of recent work by others, and on that basis to offer a little contribution to ‘the great seven-storey library’ which professor Le Bras hopes will one day ‘be devoted to studies of the structure and whole life of every religion at every moment of its history’.

It is best to begin with some explanation of my title: much of the debate on the origins of heresy has centred on the question of whether or not it represented a ‘social problem’. Thus when Grundmann asks if social questions were at the root of heresy, he means, was heresy the expression of material deprivation on the part of the unprivileged? This sort of connection has of course been made by historians usually stigmatised as Marxist (though Marx himself would, I think, have disowned some of their crude anachronisms); Werner, for example, explains heresy as a protest movement against the economic and social exploitation of the feudal system.

In an article published over a decade ago, Olive Anderson demonstrated the major contribution made by the Indian mutiny to the growth of Christian militarism in Victorian Britain. The Crimean war had accustomed the British public to the view that Britain’s soldiery had spiritual needs which could and should be met by the exertions of voluntary subscription, but it was the mutiny which established the more ambitious claim that Christian soldiers were the best ones. The military exploits of Henry Havelock and others of similar piety in stemming the tide of the sepoy rebellion enshrined Christian faith of an evangelical stamp as an almost indispensable ingredient in the constitution of the Victorian hero. The intention of this paper is to endorse and amplify Anderson’s conclusions by examining the responses of Christian opinion in Britain to the mutiny at its most alarming stage in the later months of 1857. Specific attention will be given to the reactions of nonconformists, in the light of the generally accepted view that early Victorian nonconformist attitudes to foreign affairs were characterised by a firm commitment to pacific principles and a disinclination for imperial entanglements.