During the war, many learned books published on the continent missed notice in England, among them one which advanced the study of the Responsiones supposedly sent by pope Gregory I in answer to the queries of St. Augustine: Responsiones included by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica (i. xxvii). This unnoticed book, entitled Die Quellen zur Angelsachsenmission Gregors des Grossen: eine historiographische Studie, by Suso Brechter, Münster, 1941 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des altem Mönchtums und des Benediktinerordens, Heft 22), was not reviewed in the English Historical Review nor (so far as the present writers know) in other periodicals. There is no copy of it in the British Museum nor the Cambridge University Library, and, though the Bodleian has a copy, it was, up till August 1956, uncut.

The Appendices to the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, published in the great reforming era of the eighteen-thirties, provide rich fields for the exploration of fossil-hunters. There, enrolled and briefly described, are the Church courts of the country. Their practice had, by that time, shrunk considerably; but few, or none, of the old courts had disappeared entirely.

As in other spheres of historical activity, the modern ecclesiastical historian has tended to examine traditional interpretations of the state of the Elizabethan Church in the light of detailed studies of clerical conditions within limited areas. The local approach has cast into the melting pot many well-established historical assumptions. No longer is it reasonable to condemn the intellectual attainments of the Elizabethan clergy in the terms employed by W. P. M. Kennedy as recently as 1914. The wide fluctuations in standards between dioceses—and even between different archdeaconries within the same diocese—have shown the decisive factors to be essentially local: the distribution of patronage, the proportion of impropriated livings, proximity to London or to a university. A definitive picture of clerical standards and qualifications will not be forthcoming until a representative number of dioceses have undergone this type of analysis.

On 22 April 1646 the House of Commons formally questioned the jure divino claims put forward by the ministers in the Westminster Assembly. Ostensibly this action represents the climax to one of the most puzzling developments in the Civil War: the triumphant assertion of Erastianism by men who had acquiesced in the passing of theocratic measures in the early part of the Civil War. W. A. Shaw's reading of the situation typifies the general attitude of historians of the period: the resolution of the problem by denying that it is one. His main thesis is that English Puritanism in the period 1641–6 was never really divorced from its historic Erastian associations.