One day early in the sixth century a house by the convent of nuns in the city of Arles caught fire. As the flames drew nearer, the cloistered ladies, forbidden to go outside, flung books and treasures and finally themselves into cisterns which were mercifully empty (one might think some water useful). The praepositi ran to Bishop Caesarius, warning him that the fire was getting close to his cell. Quickly he came out, went along the wall to the spot where the flames burned brightest, shouted encouragement from the wall, and brought the fire under control by his prayers.

This story from the near-contemporary life of Caesarius throws an uncertain light upon the Christian topography of Arles. From the Vita and from the Rule which Caesarius gave to his nuns we know that he had brought the convent within the walls after the Franco-Burgundian siege of A.D. 508. The Rule speaks of turris juxta pomoerium, and there it is still, Tour des Mourgues, turrsi monacharum, at the south-west corner of the Roman walls. In that corner was the Abbaye de S. Césaire until the Revolution; and recently a cistern has been uncovered which may well be that in which the nuns took refuge. So far, so good. But where was the bishop? Any well-instructed schoolboy will convict me of a howler. If the praepositi told Caesarius that the fire was near cellae suae, it was their cell, not his. But few schoolboys are encouraged to read late Latin or even colloquial Latin of classical times. I shall continue to trust that they were not so pusillanimous as to leave the ladies to their fate and run trembling to the bishop in fear for their own rooms. They feared for him.

Do you remember the Very Reverend Dr Brownside in Newman’s Loss and Gain?

As a divine, he seemed never to have had any difficulty on any subject; he was so clear or so shallow that he saw to the bottom of all his thoughts. ... He was a popular preacher; that is, though he had few followers, he had numerous hearers.

We may grant that Newman did not intentionally malign his former friends and enemies. To hint as much would be, as he himself assured James Stephen, ‘to act the part of the good lady in the Spectator, who turned The Whole Duty of Man into a manual of personal slander’. And if the image of Samuel Wilberforce flashed through Newman’s mind as he drew this caricature—though it is mere surmise that it did—then undoubtedly he covered up the mischievous thought by endowing Dr Brown-side with a physical frame and a particular brand of theological ineptitude as far removed as possible from the actual appearance and acknowledged teaching of the celebrated bishop of Oxford.

In March 1851, both archbishops and twenty bishops of the Anglican Church issued a public statement in which they asserted the ‘undoubted identity of the English Church before and after the Reformation’—and we do not have to look far for an explanation of this manifesto; in 1850 the steady trickle of Anglican recruits to Roman Catholicism had been complemented by the so-called ‘Papal Agression’ which re-established Roman Catholic titular sees in England. Undoubtedly, historical conscience played a large part in secessions to Rome, as more and more Anglicans came to feel that the whole constitution of the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana had been fundamentally changed by the abrogation of papal authority in the sixteenth century, and in these circumstances all shades of Anglican opinion were bound to welcome any historical argument which tended to show that the pre-Reformation Church had not been unconditionally subject to Rome, and that its acceptance of the canonical ius commune and papal authority had been free, selective, and discriminating.

In 1838 Frederick Denison Maurice introduced himself to the English public through his great work, The Kingdom of Christ; or, Hints on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitution of the Catholic Church. In this book he attempted to show that all men’s searchings, yearnings, and longings would be satisfied in the Church of England, by its ordinances, worship, and doctrinal standards. The Established Church represented the solution to all the enigmas of human existence.

In many ways The Kingdom of Christ was a difficult book to master. To all appearances there was an indistinctness in the argument and an obscurity of language. But it had the touch of originality. Above all, whether Maurice could be clearly understood or not, it was evident that he spoke with passion and authority, as a man entrusted with a message from God to the contemporary world. He was convinced that he had been given the task to call back to the truth the religious world, which had not grasped it.

On the second day of the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604, King James I rebuked Dr John Reynolds of Oxford in words which are almost painfully familiar. A Scottish presbytery, pronounced the royal theologian, ‘as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil,’ and there followed what a Scot later remembered as ‘that unkoth motto,’‘no bishop, no king.’ The king’s bon mot so perfectly epitomises an important principle of Stuart policy that it may seem an act of pedantry to ask whether in fact the proposals which provoked it included the extirpation of bishops. But Dr Barlow, author of the Summe and substance of the conference, seems to have appreciated that Reynolds had spoken of no such thing. The king was ‘somewhat stirred,’ he explains, ‘thinking that they aymed at a Scotish presbytery.’

When Augustine came to Kent in 597, bringing to its inhabitants the good news of the Gospel, he came as the emissary of St Gregory the Great for the conversion of England. Within four years of his arrival, and probably as soon as the news of Æthelbert’s baptism had reached Rome, St Gregory had despatched a carefully worked-out scheme for the ordering of the Church among the English. Augustine was to set up a metropolitan see at London with authority over twelve dioceses, and, wrote St Gregory, ‘we wish you to send to the city of York a bishop, the choice of whom we leave to you, on the understanding that if this city and the surrounding lands shall receive the word of God, he also shall establish twelve bishops and enjoy metropolitan authority.’

There are good reasons for historians’ preferring to write history proceeding from the earlier in time to the later. Why, after all, should they ignore time’s one-way arrow? On occasion, however, it is useful to reverse the normal procedure.

The history of North African Christianity, and especially the history of the tradition of dissent in it, is a case in point. The literature of the Donatist schism of the fourth and fifth centuries is comparatively rich. It is tempting, having crystallized an image of Donatism on the strength of it, to find the same image displayed again during the Vandal or the Byzantine period, periods for which our information is very much more fragmentary. The assumption that there is such a continuity may work in either or both of two ways. It may distort the real bearings of scanty material by the concern to fit it into the pattern; also, or alternatively, it may prevent the historian from noticing affinities with movements which seem at first sight to lack the features singled out as a qualification for entry into the pattern.

This footnote to the eucharistic debate of the ninth century is perhaps worth attempting for two reasons. In the first place, Erigena the philosopher occupies a highly individual stand-point. As a layman, nullis ecclesiasticæ dignitatis gradibus insignitum, he avoided the influence of the Gallican liturgical tradition in which, as nowhere else at the time, Christ’s real presence was stressed together with an actual change in the consecrated elements. In the second place, the only adequate account of his ideas is that provided by Geiselmann; and even this suffers from a failure to apprehend the full significance of the philosophical background to Erigena’s thought.

In recent years there have been several obvious places where an enquirer might learn about the interdict laid by Pope Innocent III on England and Wales. Powicke in the Cambridge Medieval History, Poole in the Oxford History, and Painter in The Reign of King John all described this episode in the history of the English Church and discussed its bearing on political affairs. People who wanted more detail could go to two papers, published in 1948 and 1949, and would find additions to their knowledge in fragmentary documents discovered recently in the Public Record Office and the Canterbury archives, and edited by Dr Powell and Dr Barnes for the Pipe Roll Society in I960. From all these places they would receive roughly the same impression. But last year Messrs Richardson and Sayles published the first volume of The Governance of Mediaeval England.

On the death of Nicholas of Ely on 12 February 1280 attempts were made to secure the rich see of Winchester for the royal chancellor, Robert Burnell. Nicholas Hamme, sub-prior of the convent, and two other monks were assigned to seek licence to elect on 17 February and received it on the following day. Four days later prior Adam of Winchester wrote to Burnell about the election. He had originally intended to seek the king’s advice on the matter immediately after the death of the former bishop, but on the chancellor’s advice he had postponed his visit until the licence elect had been granted. Now he was prevented by the pressure of other business from coming in person to consult the king or Burnell, and he therefore requested the latter to send a reply in writing giving his views on how ‘status noster . . . melius valeat reformari.’

None will be surprised that there were English clergy in France and Normandy during the period of the Lancastrian occupation in the fifteenth century. What is perhaps surprising is that there were so few of them. Writing on Henry V, Professor Waugh noted that only about twenty of their names were to be found in the Norman Rolls for the last two years of the reign. While it is not always possible to agree with Waugh over the names of clergy whom he considered to be English, his estimate was on the whole correct. It is difficult to question it, since it is sometimes impossible to distinguish French from English names when given in Latin versions. Even Waugh’s contention that few Englishmen were appointed to ecclesiastical positions before 1421 can only be modified in detail: it cannot be gainsaid completely.

There is nothing new in the observation that cloth workers are frequently to be found in heterodox movements. The participation of weavers and other textile artisans in popular heresy on the continent has been amply demonstrated, extending from the popular response to Gregory VII’s denunciation of simony and married clergy, and the first stirrings of the heresy of the Free Spirit in the Rhineland, to Flagellants, Taborites, Storchites, and the militant Anabaptism of the sixteenth century. In England, Professor Dickens has noted the local Lollard tradition existing in the textile villages of south-west Kent where Edward III had settled John Kemp and his Flemish artisans in 1331, Cranbrook, Tenterden, and Benenden becoming notable centres of dyed broadcloth manufacture. In explaining the connection between textiles and the survival of Lollardy, Professor Dickens has stressed the mobility of the textile worker, while centres of rural industry had a relatively independent status in the medieval scene, which may well have led to relatively in dependent thinking. Regular mobility is best typified by the middleman who usually operated on a fairly local level, regional self-sufficiency in wool supply not really being broken down until the mid-sixteenth century.

The first brief writing of Calvin to appear in print was the epistle to the French jurisconsult François de Connan, which preceded the short treatise Antapologia issued by Calvin’s fellow student Nicholas Duchemin against the Italian jurisconsult Alciati. In this epistle, headed Ioannes Calvinus Francisco Connano iuris studiosissimo, Calvin wrote ‘. . .our friend Duchemin who, as you know, is a man most careful in his studies, of perspicacious mind, and what is of the first importance, of the most penetrating judgement; and who is abundantly learned in the best literature has now become engaged upon, and has already been engaged upon, legal studies. . .’: every word here could have been applied to himself. The occasion of this dedication, written in March 1531, when Calvin was a young law student of twenty-two at Orléans, was the eagerness of Duchemin and Calvin to support their admired master, Pierre de l’Estoile, against the devious method of attack by Alciati at Bourges, who had published a criticism, under the name of a pupil or under a pseudonym, of l’Estoile’s interpretation of a point of civil law wherein he had shown that Alciati on this point had borrowed from the greatest of French classical scholars, Guillaume Budé, without acknowledgment.

The immediate occasion of this paper was my discovery, when I began to catalogue the sixteenth-century visitation books of the diocese, that what Gibbons and some of the eighteenth-century registry clerks had thought of as libri cleri for visitations were in fact lists of those summoned to diocesan synods. Professor Cheney has pointed out that there is an unusual quantity of evidence for the existence and working of the Ely synod in the fourteenth century, but I do not think that he would have expected, certainly I did not, to find it surviving and working in the sixteenth century. When this fact emerged, it seemed worth while to look again at the medieval evidence of the synod’s working, to see whether the continous existence of the institution could be traced, and to discover how it was being used. The sources quoted are almost entirely the diocesan records in my own care: I have not yet explored even the capitular records, and this is therefore no more than an interim report.

I preface this essay by saying that it owes the form of its title to an article by Dr D. H. Willson, of Minnesota, entitled ‘James I’s Literary Assistants,’ published in The Huntington Library Quarterly, VIII (1944–5), 35-57. In this article Dr Willson argues interestingly, though not entirely conclusively, that all but some six of the writings commonly attributed to James I are in whole or in part the work of his literary assistants. Impressive as Dr Willson’s arguments frequently are, they do not demolish the existence of at least a ‘Jacobean school of theology’ within which such men as Montague, Casaubon, Andrewes, and even du Moulin (in favour of whose authorship of A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings Dr Willson’s argument has much to commend it) do, in fact, reflect the views of the King himself. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Dr Willson has over-stated his case, and that the divines he lists as part authors, at least, were really scholarly research workers: royal servants producing evidence to support their master’s theories. On such an assumption we can continue to refer to what ‘James’ says.

Whilst the English Separatists and Non-Separating Independents, the forerunners of the congregationalists as delineated by Dexter, Arber, Powicke, Burrage, and more lately by Miller and Stearns, were conducting their internecine warfare in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch Reformed Church was also going through difficult times. John Robinson, who came to the Netherlands in 1606, and whose ‘broadly tolerant mind’ and ‘undying spirit’ ‘dominate the consciences of a mighty nation in the land beyond the seas,’ as is stated on the plaque to his memory inside the mighty Pieterskerk in Leiden, was truly ecumenical. For not only did he deplore the disputes of the Congregationalists among themselves, but also their hostility to the Dutch Reformed Church and its English branches, such as that at Amsterdam.

It would seem appropriate that this Conference assembled in this ancient cathedral and university city of Oxford should pay some brief tribute to the distinguished High Church prelate Dr Robert Skinner, the disciple and collaborator of Archbishop Laud. Especially is this so at the present time when overtures are being made to various nonconformist bodies with a view to their future reunion with the Anglican Church, for it is inevitable that the question of the significance of episcopal ordination and the episcopal system of church government will, in the course of these discussions, receive increasing and critical attention.

When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1661, almost the last item to be added was the General Thanksgiving. ‘On Saturday, 14 December’ (only a week before the Book was signed), ‘between the hours of 8 and 10 a.m., the Reverend Father the Lord Bishop of Norwich [Edward Reynolds] introduced and delivered into the hands of the Lord President a form of a certain prayer conceived by him at another time concerning thanks to God for general mercies to be used publicly.’ So the Proceedings of the Upper House of Convocation, which then tail off with the tantalizing words: ‘After this prayer had been read aloud and some discussion held thereon, the Reverend Father, etc.’ The normal procedure in 1661 for additions to the Prayer Book, as opposed to alterations, was to entrust their compilation to a committee whose chairman duly introduced the new form, when completed, into the House of Bishops. There is, however, no trace of such a committee’s being appointed to devise a general thanksgiving. By 14 December the section of the manuscript text headed Thanksgivings was already written out in full, and no space was left for further additions. Reynolds would seem to have acted on his own initiative.