It has been argued that the handbooks of penance known as the ‘Frankish’ penitentials, though ‘an important and necessary stage in the development of medieval church and society’, were an ‘ephemeral and ultimately despised intrusion’ into the Frankish Church of the eighth and ninth centuries. The importation of these books by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries and the adverse reaction of the Frankish bishops to the Irish system of private penance which they introduced is a story too well known to require rehearsal here; after spreading rapidly in the eighth century the penitentials were challenged and condemned by several synods in the century which followed. This reaction had important consequences for the penitentials, to be sure, but to my knowledge it has not previously been asserted that the Frankish penitentials were merely transitional or that their impact on the Frankish Church was either peripheral or minimal. On the contrary, Fournier, Watkins and McNeill and Gamer, among others, believe the Carolin-gian era to have been heavily influenced by these texts and, in turn, to have been decisive in their development.

It was in broken health that Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester (1205–38), returned for the last time to England, about Michaelmas 1236. On 31 October 1236, at Rochester, he made his last testament; this was given royal acceptance and confirmation at Windsor on 4 November, in the presence of some of the executors: Ralph de Nevill, bishop of Chichester (1222–44) and chancellor (1226–44), P. archdeacon of Winchester, Luke des Roches, archdeacon (by 1228–44) of Surrey, and the versatile architect and administrator Mr. Elias de Derham (c. 1167–d. 1245). Bishop Peter rallied, to take some part in national affairs, as well as in his diocese, during die next two years. He died at his episcopal castle of Farnham on 9 June 1238 and his body was buried in his cathedral; but his heart was buried at die Cistercian abbey of Waverley, a few miles soudi-west of Farnham. In 1237 he had petitioned the Cistercian chapter general for leave to have a Cistercian monk and two lay brodiers living with him. This, the heart burial, and the notices accorded him by Waverley's annalist, reflect die private preoccupations of his last years: die founding of Cistercian houses in his native country and in his English diocese. The arrangements, unfinished at his deadi, were left to be completed by his executors, who notified die Order's chapter general at its usual mid-September meeting in 1238, when die investigating commissioners for die new foundations were appointed.

When Augustine and his monks landed at Thanet in 597, they were confronted with a situation rare even in the Völkerivanderung. What was to become the church of the English people had to be built up from scratch. In his despatches to Pope Gregory during the first years of his mission, Augustine gives no hint of an existing native Christian population, survivors of Roman Britain under Jutish rule, who might form the nucleus of a Church. There was Ethelbert's Frankish Queen Bertha and her retainers for whose use a church dedicated to St Martin outside the royal city of Canterbury, had been restored, and Bede mentions that this had been ‘built of old while the Romans yet inhabited Britain’. But despite Canterbury providing evidence for Christianity in the late fourth century and being relatively near sites such as Lullingstone, Richborough and Faversham, where there had been Christian worship in Roman times, Augustine's problems were concerned entirely with how to deal with Germanic paganism. What had happened? How was it that the ecclesia Britannorum failed to provide foundations for the ecclesia Anglicana even in Kent?

Of all the churches affected by the Gregorian reform movement few were more notable than the monastery of Montecassino. Not only the latter's own writers but even Pope Gregory vii himself described it as famous throughout Christendom. In southern Italy it was undoubtedly the most important single institution of the Latin Church. Founded by St Benedict in 529, by the eleventh century it was exempt from normal ecclesiastical jurisdiction and was the centre of a franchise free from the obligations of lay society. Under the abbacy of Desiderius of Benevento (1058–87) it enjoyed its golden age of political, intellectual and artistic influence. Its monks filled many south Italian bishoprics, and a number of them were promoted to be cardinals. Three times in sixty years, in 1057, 1087 and 1118, a Cassinese monk attained the see of St Peter. Desiderius himself was elected to succeed Gregory vii in 1087, with the title of Victor iii.

The question of why the Reformation failed to win any significant number of adherents from among the native population in Ireland has, since the nineteenth century, been posed frequently by historians and, until very recently, the question has been accepted as valid and the answers provided have generally been considered plausible. That the problem of the Reformation in Ireland should be approached in this way is at least a concession by scholars that Irish history is a part of European history and that Irish society has always been influenced to some degree by general European movements. Historical practice has unfortunately not conformed with appearance, and historians have lost sight of the broad comparative perspective implied in the question and, as a consequence, have shirked the fundamental issue of whether or not a reform movement developed within Ireland, or whether the necessary conditions for such a development existed. Instead, the problem has been pondered almost exclusively within the context of the Reformation in England with die result that historians, while appearing to be embarked upon a general discussion of the pre-conditions for reformation, have in fact confined their attention to the much more specific issue of why measures which in a relatively short time produced a solidly Protestant society in England failed to achieve anything like the same result in Ireland.

The apparent suddenness of the reformation in Scotland has sometimes been considered difficult to understand, but more difficul has been the abandonment, seemingly at the eleventh hour, of the old Church by some of those who held key positions in it. The desertion to die reform movement of John Wynram, sub-prior of the St. Andrews Augustinians and dean of die Faculty of Divinity, has recendy called forth this caustic comment from Dr McRoberts, ‘One would very much like to know what religious convictions he really held, if any’. In a footnote McRoberts adds ‘He is reminiscent of his contemporary, Hermann von Wied, archbishop of Cologne, who was described by the Emperor Charles V as “neither a Protestant nor a Catholic but a proper headien’”. The linking of Wynram's name widi rfiat of the archbishop elector, as we shall see, is not widiout foundation, although not necessarily on account of the judgments of the emperor or the monseigneur. No doubt similar comments could be passed on John Douglas, principal of St. Mary's College and rector of die University, who shared widi Wynram, Knox, and odiers in drawing up in 1560 die Scots Confession and the First Book of Discipline.

No doubt the metropolitan church of St Peter of York, which celebrated its 1350th anniversary two years ago, has always been a difficult institution for the outsider to comprehend; but in the later middle ages its organisation was at its most formidably complex. The reasons for that complexity need no particular urging nor indeed explanation. Even more than other major medieval cathedrals York. Minster fulfilled a wide variety of very different and at times conflicting purposes. As the single largest church within the pre-Reformation ecclesia Anglicana it was inevitably committed to an especially elaborate series of acts of worship in choir, in nave and at the many subsidiary altars with which the cathedral literally abounded. As a house of God deliberately rebuilt and refurnished as magnificently as possible during the later middle ages, it provided a focus of spiritual allegiance for the inhabitants of York and Yorkshire as well as courting the attention of pilgrims and visitors from other parts of England. As the largest religious corporation in the region, York Minster was especially familiar to popes and kings as the most important agency through which the surplus wealth of northern churches and their parishes could be diverted to the professional ‘permanent civil service’ which administered the detailed operations of the English church and state. Most important of all, and despite the personal absence of the archbishop himself, the cathedral of York was still performing its original function as the administrative and judicial head-quarters of thenorthernprovinceinanage when ‘if wecome, therefore, to a general conclusion with regard to the organization of English dioceses in the fifteenth century, we find that it has become highly centralized’.

Current historical opinion inclines to the view that the reign of Charles i was a time of increased stringency for the English Catholic community. There may have been a relaxation for upper-class Catholics with court connexions, but there was also a great increase in the number of those sequestered for recusancy and a higher level of recusancy fining. Dr K. J. Lindley suggests that this policy of increased severity in fining may even have been an important factor in inclining the recusant population towards neutrality during the English Civil War. The significance of financial persecution is seen in a rather different light in analyses of the Interregnum, however. Here, despite the fact that pecuniary mulcts were higher than they had ever been before or were to be again, the treatment of Catholics has been portrayed as a continuous movement towards greater toleration only brought to an end with the fall of the Protectorate.

‘There were about ten million Catholics in the British dominions, and, properly considered, Queen Victoria was one of die great Catholic powers of Europe. She reigned over more Cadiolics man some Catholic Sovereigns’. This was the claim of an Irish member of parliament in advocating equality of Catholic education with Protestant at the great meeting held by Cardinal Cullen in the Marlborough Street ‘Cathedral’ in Dublin in January 1872. The meeting was intended to demonstrate the unanimity of laity and clergy in the demand for denominationalism in the National Schools system and the rejection of mixed schools. On the same day the opposition to Cullen's policy was expressed by die Radical John Roebuck in an address given in Sheffield, in the course of which he argued that the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 had merely been a dissembling attempt by the Liberals to dupe Dissenters and Radicals and bind diem to Mr Gladstone. It had not brought religious peace to Ireland. ‘Were not the whole body of the Cadiolics, headed by Cardinal Cullen, still determined upon attaining their old end, which was supremacy of the Cadiolic Church in Ireland?’ At the Dublin gathering Cullen quoted J. S. Mill on die danger of a state monopoly in education and roundly condemned the government's policy of mixed education as a scheme which die Protestant Archbishop Whately had admitted was the only way of weaning the Irish from the abuses of popery. The organ of Irish nationalist opinion, The Freeman's Journal, rallied support by denouncing Lord Hartington for resisting the logic of die argument that Irish education of Cadiolic children should be handed over to ‘the priests and people of Ireland’: English Protestants were insincere in favouring a denominational system for Scotland while treating Catholic education for the Irish as subversive of civil and religious liberty.

The later 1550s in Sprain are remembered as the time of the discovery of ‘Lutheran’ groups in Valladolid and Seville and the ensuing reaction of the authorities: the autos de fe, as the Fernando de Valdés's Index librorum prohibitorum, the edict ordering all Spaniards (with few exceptions) studying or teaching abroad to return to Spain within four months. ‘Heresy’ was to be eradicated at home and Spain was to be preserved from contagion from beyond her frontiers. There was, however, a further subordinate aim: to capture and bring back to Spain those Spaniards who for reasons of religion had taken refuge in Northern Europe. When a dozen Hieronymite monks from San Isidro at Seville fled their monastery and their country in the late summer of 1557, one finds the Inquisitor General, in November of that year, sending a list of their names to the king in the Netherlands. Further lists of wanted heretics continued to be forwarded there when Philip had returned to Spain. Cardinal Granvelle, in a letter to the king of 18 October 1561, refers to ‘aquella escriptura que V. M. me embió venida de los inquisidores de Sevilla’. At the start of that year he had similarly referred to ‘un escripto venido de los inquisidores de Sevilla’ which the king had recently sent. In April 1562 the Margrave of Antwerp was replying to inquiries from Granvelle concerning persons named in the trials of Julian Hernandez (caught when in Seville, distributing Protestant literature, in 1557) and Fray Domingo de Guzmán.

History has not been kind to Alexander Nicoll, a brilliant oriental scholar who is now a forgotten figure, partly because he died before he could achieve the fame he deserved, and partly because his work in the 1820s was soon to be overshadowed by the turmoil of the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Even Dr E. B. Pusey, a pupil of Nicoll's, and his successor as Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, seems to have forgotten the quiet but scholarly way in which Nicholl had worked to combat the liberalism of the German biblical critics. Furthermore, much of what Nicoll said about written Aramaic sources underlying the Synoptic Gospels would be considered by many present day New Testament scholars to have been mistaken; most modern biblical scholars favour the view that Mark's Gospel was written first and used as a source by Matthew and Luke, although there is still considerable disagreement about the explanation of those passages which occur in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark. Even though he may have been mistaken, however, Nicoll was an important figure in the Oxford of the 1820s in so far as he was grappling with the problems posed by the biblical critics at a time when hardly anyone in Oxford—even the Oriel Noetics like Whately and Davison—was doing so, and it is perhaps time to question the commonly held assumption that the Oriel Noetics, together with Newman, Keble and Pusey, held the monopoly of the best theological scholarship in the Oxford of the early nineteenth century.

Few phrases in an English Statute can have left such an indelible imprint as the opening words of the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533: they have evoked a literature of their own. If on this occasion a mere medievalist has the temerity to enter the precincts of the Henrician Reformation measures it is not because he is unaware of the pitfalls that may be in store for him, but because he believes that an exegesis which sets these famous words in their strictly confined historical context may possibly contribute to a better comprehension of the matrix of what came to be the Ecclesia Anglicana of the Reformation era. In offering the jubiland a modest essay on this topic, I hope he will accept it in the spirit in which it is submitted to him: as a token of gratitude for the services he has conspicuously rendered to ecclesiastical history. Specifically, this brief sketch is to pay respect to Clifford Dugmore as the parent and editor of the JEH which for long will remain a monument to his initiative, courage and perseverance: he has tended his own creation in an exemplary way for 30 years and saw the Journal grow to an internationally acknowledged organ of ecclesiastical history. It is a self-evident duty to pay tribute, however inadequate it may be, to his single-minded devotion to historical scholarship and dedicated editorship. Rarely can an occasion so clearly have offered a three-fold cause for rejoicing: the celebration of his seventieth birthday, the celebration of the thirtieth birthday of the JEH, and the conclusion of thirty years of his editorship. Quid plura?

The proud boast of Bishop John Jewel in Apologia Ecdesiae Anglicanae that ‘we lean unto knowledge, they unto ignorance’ a swift retort from his catholic opponent: ‘Ye lean to the favour of secular princes.’ To which Jewel replied: ‘We flatter our princes, M. Harding, as Nathan flattered King David; as John Baptist flattered Herod; as St Ambrose flattered Theodosius; and as salt flattereth the green sore.’ How much credibility was there in this resounding riposte when it was made in 1567, and how much would survive three more decades of Tudor royal supremacy? Not many Nathans in bishops' clothing were prepared to confront monarchy itself with a bold ‘Thou art the man’, and it was scarcely in the Tudor character to confess with King David: ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ Nor were the sins of Henry VIII's children of the kind to provide many occasions to play Nathan or John the Baptist. But the integrity of the Church and its faith are always in need of defence, even against misguided Christian princes. Or, to put the case less prejudicially, the possibility of a difference of opinion between Christian princes and Christian bishops can never be excluded. For all such occasions the appropriate model was the third of Jewel's exempla, that notable father of the Church, St Ambrose. In the words of Jewel: ‘We say to the prince as St Ambrose sometime said to the emperor Valentinian: “Noli te gravare, imperator, ut putes te in ea quae divina sunt imperiale aliquodjus habere: Trouble not yourself, my lord, to think that you have any princely power over those things that pertain to God.”’

In St Mary's Church, Barbados, there is a monument to a curate who died in 1851, and ‘whose labours as a clergyman of the Church of England for fifty years were distinguished by talent, energy & faithfulness. His efforts were unceasing to make known the truths of the Gospel to all classes in this island. At an early period in his ministry he led the way in rescuing the then slave population from spiritual bondage and darkness. In this work of Christian love he was ever resolute, singlemin-ded, Sc uncompromising’. Mr Harte's claim to our interest is further increased when we learn that he was once prosecuted by the vestry of his parish for, among other things, teaching slaves ‘doctrines of equality inconsistent with their obedience to their masters’ and for comparing the white inhabitants of his parish to those of Sodom and Gomorrah, somewhat to the advantage of the latter.

The clergy who with a good conscience were unable to conform to the requirements of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 have been the subject of much attention—too much, Professor Dugmore may think. But among them is a group not yet examined, consisting of those who were not affected by one major requirement of the Act: they were already episcopally ordained. ‘At least 420 of the ministers’, i.e. not far short of a quarter of the 1,760 known to have been deprived of their livings, ‘were in full episcopal orders before the Civil War’. Richard Baxter figures among them, and it might be expected that the group as a whole would be like Baxter in being only ‘moderate’ Nonconformists, not opposed to episcopacy in principle; but this was not the case. Their number comprised men of many shades of opinion and practice, including some who had gone so far as to renounce their episcopal ordination for ordination of another kind.