Under the leadership of James the Lord's brother the Christian Church at Jerusalem was probably the most influential of all existing Christian communities. It could boast a system of internal organisation under authoritative resident leaders; it was an important missionary centre, despatching apostles and recalling them, or sending advisors to them when they were in difficulties. Neither the prestige nor the destiny of the Jerusalem Church were the immediate concern of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and it is Hegesippus who keeps us informed of its progress. The stability of that Church was apparently shattered shortly after the death of James, when the Jews revolted against the Romans and ‘immediately Vespasian attacked them’. We hear no more about the Jerusalem Church directly from Hegesippus until he tells of a meeting convened to elect a successor to James, and Eusebius tells us that this meeting took place after Jerusalem had been taken in A.D. 70.

The appearance of the contemporary archbishop of Canterbury in the crises and conflicts of later medieval England has never surprised historians. For not only by tradition but in terms of real political weight the archbishop, unlike his brother of York, had a part to play in the affairs of the realm which he could scarcely hope to avoid, no matter how invidious. Appointed almost invariably with the close and usually decisive interest of the Crown in mind, the archbishop could anticipate repeated calls from the Crown for his support, counsel and service. However, thoughtful contemporaries and broadminded historians alike have for the most part been at pains to put this particular aspect into the wider context of the archiepiscopal function as a whole; the approaching cloud of the Reformation has not deceived historians into underestimating the considerable stature and merits of the metropolitans of this period. Whatever unsatisfactory reasons of state, ambition or faction lay behind their promotion, almost to a man they performed their arduous duties, with their diverse and often contradictory obligations, with good intent, frequent self-sacrifice and more often than not considerable success, at least in the eyes of the orthodox churchmen of their own time. If their political appearances alone have entered the textbooks, closer observers have been aware that the care of the Church was their first concern, and political involvement a distraction and a burden. At times the service of two masters posed its dilemmas, but usually the Crown preserved the archiepiscopal position by a fundamental respect for its other loyalties to God, the pope and the Church, and did not call for an irrevocable commitment fracturing these obligations.

Modern scholarship on John Knox has tended to ignore his development of the covenant concept and his place in the covenant tradition. This is especially surprising because of the significance of the covenant idea for seventeenth-century Scottish history. The covenant, moreover, became a basic theme of English and American Puritan thought in the century following Knox's death. During the early years of the formulation of the covenant concept in English Puritanism, Knox was a revered figure. Following his various preaching activities in Edwardian England and his association with English exiles on the Continent during Mary's reign, he continued to maintain his interest in and contact with English Protestants, even while playing a major role in the establishment of the Reformed faith in Scotland. In 1568–9, for example, he was called upon to give advice respecting the question of separation from the Church of England. It is, thus, quite possible that his views on the covenant influenced English Puritan thought, as well as the thought of the Scottish Protestants. A study of Knox's views on the covenant is also important because of the place of the covenant in the development of his position on the legitimacy of active rebellion against tyrannical, idolatrous sovereigns. Finally, an examination of Knox's covenant thought is significant because it reveals that he was not as dependent on John Calvin as has been commonly supposed.

The peculiar difficulty of contemporary or near contemporary history is less the privacy of archives than the excess. This is the more true concerning an age like that of Hitler, where the accidents of war, and the seizure of documents, followed by a consuming public interest, especially in Germany, have led some governments to open their archives before they would otherwise have considered it wise. The great collection of State (and other) papers in the Bundesarchiv at Coblenz already affords material for many enquirers for many years. The material for the Church struggle as it lies in archives was surveyed by John Conway, with a delightful description of the extraordinary confusion, and movement of papers hither-and-thither, caused by war and its aftermath. For obvious reasons the West managed to collect the most important papers. But no one should overlook the circumstances that documents and archives lie still inaccessible, or largely inaccessible, in the East. This is not peculiar to the documents of the age of Hitler, for students of the nineteenth century cannot yet gain access to the substantial Russian collections, even when these students hold chairs in the German Democratic Republic or in Poland and even when they work upon some ‘harmless’ and remote theme. The Polish archives are more available but are only beginning to be sorted and published. The Russian academy has much to do before it can make its resources more widely available.

Among the papers of Patrick Young preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a copy of a translation into Greek of a licence granted by Elizabeth I in 1597 for the collection of alms towards the ransom of the sons of the murdered metropolitan of Thessaloniki.

The document is remarkable for several reasons: it is an early example of English sympathy for Greeks suffering under Turkish oppression: it includes the only account, so far as one can tell, of the execution of the metropolitan, and it is also of interest as an example of an Elizabethan licence to collect alms for charitable purposes.