In that much discussed panegyric, the Life of Constantine, Eusebius tells how the emperor, having heard that there were ‘many churches of God in Persia and that large numbers were gathered into the fold of Christ, resolved to extend his concern for the general welfare to that country also, as one whose aim it was to care for all alike in every nation.’ He goes on to give what purports to be a letter from Constantine to the Sasanid shah, Shapur II; in this, not only does the emperor neatly explain away his predecessor Valerian’s humiliating capture by the Persians in 260 as divine punishment for his persecution of Christians but he presumes to draw a lesson from this for Shapur as well: by protecting his own Christian population Shapur will experience the beneficence of Constantine’s Deity.

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.

In the year 619 the forces of Sassanid Persia crossed the Eyptian border, and a long-lasting conquest, like that of the Achaemenids of old, was to be feared. The bishop of Keft, Pisentios, though an ascetic detached from worldly interests, did not fail to take note of this critical development. He put the affairs of his diocese in order and set out with a faithful disciple, John, to the mountain of Gimi to pray. Although Keft (better known perhaps as Coptos) had not yet been captured, we may wonder why he did not stay with his flock at such an anxious moment and pray with them.

A passing comment from a visitor from Fulda to the thirteen hundredth anniversary celebrations for the birth of Boniface at Crediton on 5 June 1980 aptly sums up the purpose of this paper. He observed that without the work of Boniface there could have been no Bismarck. Thus in a sense the Wessex missionary who was so much more a papal legate than an evengelist laid the foundation for the third as well as the second Reich when he consecrated Pepin III king of the Franks in 751. Whether like John Foxe ‘we find of him in stories, that he was a great setter-up and upholder of such blind superstition, and of all popery’ or like his latest biographer we consider that ‘a devotion and a perseverence equal to that which he so nobly exhibited will be needed if our fragmented Church is to become that one true family which the Saviour himself desired it to be’, there is no doubt that he worked for a supranational rather than an intertribal ideal. He has as much claim as Benedict to be the patron saint of a united Europe since it was his work which inspired the imperial decrees of 743, 754 and 757 which made the Rule obligatory. Christopher Dawson’s judgement that he was ‘the greatest Englishman’ is based more on his subtle blending of Frankish with papal influence over the Saxons and his diplomatic regularisation of the Frankish church. As a missionary he is one of a noble line of Celts, Angles and Saxons who converted the heathen. This tradition inspired his original visit to Radbod of Frisia in 716 and his work with Willibrord 719-21.

In the history of the invasions which marked the end of the Roman empire in the west, the Armorican peninsula of northwestern Gaul holds a distinctive place. It witnessed the only substantial settlements by people whose homeland lay within the Roman empire, and who had been subject to Roman civil government for several centuries. These settlers crossed the English Channel probably between the late fourth and early seventh centuries. Establishing new communities in the sparsely populated areas of western Armorica, they brought with them their own language, social patterns and Christian organisation, and a strong sense of affinity with the Celts of Wales and Cornwall from whom they derived.’ Whilst the Britons were establishing themselves as Bretons, the Franks were asserting their hold over the remainder of northern Gaul. A few of them settled in the eastern approaches to the peninsula, in the Roman civitates of Rennes and Nantes. Culturally and politically, only this part of Armorica was attached to Merovingian Gaul, having as its kings the descendants of Clovis, and as its bishops members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy.

A single kingdom of England was created in the tenth century. While the military successes of king Alfred and his son king Edward the Elder had established some authority over all the English kingdoms for the West Saxon kings, their claims could be only tentative. Both kings had governed Wessex during the lifetimes of Aethelred and Aethelflaed, the rulers of Mercia, and Athelstan was probably the first West Saxon king to be crowned king of Mercia at his accession. He had been separately acclaimed king of Mercia and of Wessex, and in a contemporary text he is recorded as Rex Angulsaxonum et Mercianorum. The coronation rite used by the early tenth century kings appears to have endowed them with the government of three peoples, the Saxons, the Mercians, and the Northumbrians. A charter of King Eadred at his accession in 946 describes his kingship as a fourfold office representing the Anglo-Saxons, the Northumbrians, the Danes and the Britons.’ Eadwig was separately chosen king in Mercia and in Wessex in 955, and during his reign his brother Edgar ruled Mercia, firstly as regulus, and then as full king.

The midland houses of Winchcombe and Evesham restored monasticism to the north in a fervent and wholly English form. No one can read the history of this migration and the subsequent history of Durham without feeling that here, at least, English monastic life was sound.’

In these words, Knowles summed up his view of the type of monastic observance which was instituted in the houses of the northern renovatio after the Norman Conquest. Certainly there were important Anglo-Saxon elements present in the revival of Benedictine monasticism in the north of England; Durham, Whitby and St Mary’s, York, owed much to the Anglo-Saxon monastic life as retained at Worcester and Evesham after the Norman Conquest.

Dangers to the cohesion of the Anglo-Norman regnum correlate to a marked extent with the fluctuating patronage extended by the Anglo-Norman kings towards Westminster Abbey, and other religious houses, in their search for one which would symbolize and enhance the stability of their dynasty.

Westminster itself had royal connections from the outset. The original church of St Peter, on Thorney Island in the Thames, to the west of London, was founded by Saebert, king of the East Saxons, and his wife Ethelgoda.’ The couple were allegedly buried there early in the seventh century, but it was some four hundred and fifty years before further royal burials took place in St Peter’s The church was restored by Offa of Essex in the early years of the eighth century, and c959 king Edgar sold it to Dunstan, who founded a monastery on the site. Edgar gave several manors to this abbey, and Aethelred II gave or confirmed others. Less exalted donors followed suit, and the house was already fairly prosperous when Harold I Harefoot was buried there in 1040. His successor and half-brother Harthacnut, is said to have had his body thrown out.

The twelfth century was a period of both political and ecclesiastical settlement in the north-west of England, when the conquerors were seeking to establish Anglo-Norman institutions in an area as much Celtic and Norse as Anglo-Saxon. The church was re-vitalised, monasticism re-established, and parish churches were built and re-built to an extent previously unknown. The response of Cumbrian’ society was favourable, but a ‘national’ flavour of the diverse elements making up that society was retained. When in 1092 William Rufus marched into the north-west, seized Carlisle, and drove out the ‘ruler’, Dolfin son of earl Gospatric of Dunbar, he was enacting the final phase of the Norman conquest of England. The border between England and Scotland was established, and this only deviated when David I brought the district back under Scottish control during the reign of Stephen. At one time part of the kingdom of Northumbria and then of the kingdom of Strathclyde, by the eleventh century the north-west had become a political no-man’s-land, the kings of England and Scotland each regarding it as belonging to his respective realm. Church life had been greatly eroded, and monastic communities, as in the rest of northern England, had totally disappeared, due as much to the unstable political situation over the previous two centuries as to the lack of any strong spiritual control. The region itself was in a depressed condition, depopulated and devastated by the invasions of king Edmund in 945, Ethelred in 1000, and most recently by early Gospatric in 1070.

Aelred of Rievaulx was born of English parents at Hexham in about 1110, that is only thirty years after the final Norman punitive harrying of the north and thirty-four years after the execution of earl Waltheof, grandfather of Aelred’s lifelong friend, Waldef. Aelred’s father was the last of a long line of English ‘hereditary’ priests of Hexham, a foundation of Saint Wilfred which lay within the patrimony of Saint Cuthbert; Cuthbert and Wilfred were kept alive in Northumbria by the writings of Bede whose bones Aelred’s great-grandfather had stolen in a dawn raid on Jarrow and brought to Durham, where Aelred’s father ended his days as one of Cuthbert’s monks. Such a background could be expected to have given Aelred a strong sense of the difference between Norman and Englishman and of his own Englishness. But national identity in Northumbria in the first half of the twelfth century was a complex affair.

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.

A no ser por el Clero, y en especial por el Episcopado español’, declared Vicente de Lafuente a century ago, ‘España sería un pais sin historia, pues la historia sin escribir no es historia’. Lafuente himself was a layman—though it did not always show—with conventional views regarding the ‘democratic tyranny’ of his age which a spell as rector of Madrid university during the student and other troubles of the mid-1870s served only to reinforce. He found it odd that he rather than an ecclesiastic should have written the first ecclesiastical history of Spain. A committee of churchmen had been formed in Rome for the purpose in 1747, but it is too soon to report on the outcome of that venture. Lafuente’s history, though more than a century old, is still the only full-scale work of its kind by a Spaniard—’and since that time there is not a single chronicle that I can discover; though (like John of Salisbury in his day) I have found in church archives notes of memorable events which could be of help to any future writers who may appear’. In presenting some of these notes here, in the context of the theme of this conference, I find myself altogether less daunted by the notion of nationalism, which a self–respecting medievalist is expected fastidiously to eschew, than by the problem of how to evaluate the testimony of so many witnesses, clerical and lay, medieval and modern.

The bishop of Pamiers, Bernard Saisset, said that Philip IV of France was like ‘an owl, the most beautiful of birds, but worth absolutely nothing ... He is the most handsome of beings but he knows only how to stare fixedly at men’. Philip the Fair gave away little about himself to contemporaries, and he remains a controversial and enigmatic figure, whose personal involvement with the events of his reign remains a matter of dispute. For a long time, many scholars followed contemporary critics of the king like Geoffrey of Paris in blaming Philip for allowing himself to be duped and misled by evil councillors. More recently, however, analyses of the copious administrative records of the reign have suggested that Philip, while not often in the forefront of negotiations, retained control over his advisers, and that, while he delegated power, he was not dominated by his councillors. Philip has thus become the moving force behind the events of his reign, if not the director of all the details of policy; but this in its turn makes his character and convictions a matter of great importance.

8 February 1782. This day being appointed as a Fast on the present Troubles and Wars abroad, I went to Weston church this morning at 11 O’clock and there read Prayers proper on the occasion—but there was no sermon after.

8 March 1789. I read prayers and preached this afternoon at Weston Church. Also read with the greatest pleasure a Prayer composed on the occasion on the restoration of his Majesty’s Health, which I received this morning.

In offering special prayers upon occasions of national importance Parson Woodforde was following an old tradition. One earlier phase of this tradition which is worth close scrutiny is the Hundred Years War, which affected all sections of the English population, civilian as well as military, clerical as well as lay.

Why, at the Reformation in England, did the king rather than the archbishop of Canterbury become head of the church? Why, with so little distress, did the English accept an autonomous national church? To a medievalist such a development seems startling. Though late medieval kings might manipulate the appointment of bishops or regulate provisions they did not dictate to their subjects what constitutes Christian faith or practice. Late medieval churchmen did not believe in autonomous national churches but in a body whose visible institutional unity is linked with obedience to the pope, and in theory it was scandalous when in the Great Schism individual rulers decided for their subjects which pope was to be obeyed or became neutral. In late fourteenth century England only a tiny minority of lollards would have dispensed with the papacy and all other solutions to the schism intended to restore the system, not to abandon it.

In his excellent study of medieval Italian society, Hyde makes a thought-provoking comparison of ‘the Italians of the age of Dante’ with the humanists of a later generation. The former he sees as distinguished by ‘a sense of continuity with the past and with other parts of the Catholic world’ from the humanists who ‘concentrated on what was close at hand, digging deep rather than spreading wide, so that their world revolved around central Italy.’ It is not my intention here to dispute this assertion, but to use it to stimulate reflection on the nature of Italian self-awareness in the early renaissance period, in the light of a further contrast between Hyde’s two ages which he does not himself emphasise.

Such is the opening sentence of the tract known in the only surviving manuscript as Tractatus de Regibus. The text owes much of its material to Wyclif’s De Officio Regis, though the prologue does not derive from this source, and is undoubtedly of lollard origin; its date cannot be later than the early fifteenth century. The sentiments of the first part of the sentence are typically Wycliffite, though not exclusively so. The interesting part of it is the last clause, and particularly the word herfore. I want in this paper to investigate the implications and validity of this word. The meaning of the word is superficially clear: ‘for this reason are men considered heretics’—most modern writers would use ‘therefore’.