There have been of late two important books dealing with Theodosius and the Christian Church—one by W. Ensslin and the other by N. Q. King. To a large extent these two authors are agreed that the emperor from the time when he was called by Gratian, the senior Augustus, after the catastrophic defeat of Valens at Hadrianople in 378, where the Roman army of the Balkans together with its emperor was annihilated, gave most of his time and mind to the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in the East. King (op. cit., 18) makes the point that upon a man like Theodosius, brought up as a devout Western Catholic, the enormous change of fortune which took him from voluntary exile to the imperial throne, must have left a profound religious impression: Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.

Within the papacy's jurisdiction of Western Christendom, the general chapter of each religious order replaced the Curia Romana, as the central legislative and judicial assembly. The text of the Promulgatio Chartae Charitatis elaborates this right of self-government and compares the hierarchy of the Cistercian order with that of the Roman Church:

‘… sicut Christus Ecclesiam suam condidit sub Romano Pontifice, per quatuor Patriarchas, Archiepiscopos multos, sed plures ad hue Episcopos regendam; sic Cisterciensis ordo sub abbate Cistercii supremo capite, pro Episcopis abbates filios habeat, pro Archiepiscopis abbates quos patres vocant, pro Patriarchis primos illos quatuor, per quos in charitate radicatus, ac mutuis inter se officiis devinctus, sine alius interventu regeretur …’.

The search for royal councillors was one of the major difficulties which Henry V had to face once he had achieved the conquest of Normandy. Many local royal officials, having taken the oath of loyalty to the king, were confirmed in their posts; others were brought over from England—a system which proved satisfactory at first. But the finding of personnel for the higher offices presented Henry with a serious problem. Since he was unwilling to trust the native French at so early a stage he could, and did, begin by seeking the counsel of his fellow-countrymen. But this method could not continue indefinitely, since it did not correspond with the intentions lying behind the conquest, planned to be lasting and permanent. However, the alliance with Charles VI, cemented in 1420 by the Treaty of Troyes, meant that the English could now call upon a number of Frenchmen, many of Burgundian origin or sympathy, to serve in the royal council. It was soon realised, too, that the university of Paris was an admirable seed-ground for future royal councillors, especially lawyers, of whom there was need. By the end of Henry V's reign, a number of these graduates were already employed by the English: under the regency of the duke of Bedford they soon achieved a numerical superiority in the royal council in France. From now on, the English dominions were to be ruled by men of these two groups.

In his Introduction to The Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln 1517–1531, the late Professor Hamilton Thompson drew attention to the large number of pluralist and non-resident parish priests in the diocese in the early part of the sixteenth century. He could do no more than comment on a few cases, since the scribe did not bother to include in the comperta the names of all delinquents, their alleged reasons for non-residence nor the details about their licences. More recently attention has been drawn to the actual number of non-residents, but no attempt has been made to go behind the figures to the individual priests and parishes concerned.

The changing situation of the Church of England in the first half of the nineteenth century raised numerous questions, not least of which was the proper place of the laity in Church government. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts followed closely by the Roman Catholic Emancipation Bill were tacit admissions that no longer could Hooker's ideal of a co-terminous Church and State be regarded as a reality. But, whilst the majority within the Established Church was quite ready to acknowledge the justice of the 1828–9 parliamentary measures, they were not quite so ready to deal with the legal anomalies of Royal Supremacy over a Church of which not all the queen's subjects were members. If the question was asked before 1829, ‘Where are the laity of the Church represented in deliberations on its temporal welfare?’ it was theoretically possible to answer ‘in parliament, and in particular in the House of Commons’. After 1829 it was no longer possible to maintain this position, even from a theoretical point of view. The renewed and vigorous campaigns for the revival of Convocation which followed in the next thirty years sprang both from a recognition that no longer could parliament be regarded in any sense as a representative voice of the Church of England, and the recognition of the necessity to have a proper and representative expression of opinion on matters relating to the temporalities and spiritualities of the Church.

The history of the Parish Mission in England begins with a petition addressed to pope Gregory XVI by Monsignor Wiseman at the end of January 1840.

In this document, Mgr. Wiseman expressed his belief that the situation in England gave well-founded hopes for the rapid propagation of the Roman Catholic faith, so long as favourable circumstances were seconded by energetic measures. He said that his own journeys throughout England, the opinion of the Vicars Apostolic, of the clergy and of the people, had confirmed him in his conviction that an Institute of missionary priests would be most efficacious, even necessary, if this rapid growth of Catholicism was to become a reality.

Eriugena made a name for himself both by his outstanding scholarship and by the boldness, not to say the heterodoxy, of his opinions. As a natural consequence of this, there has been since the Middle Ages a tendency to attribute to him works displaying these characteristics for which no more likely author could be found. My ‘Bibliography’ of Eriugena was an attempt to give an account of his genuine writings purged of these accretions, and I made no reference to them in it. As, however, many of them have been published under his name in Migne's Patrologia and elsewhere, and as the literature in which their genuineness is questioned or refuted is not always easily accessible, it seemed that a supplement to the ‘Bibliography’ containing a list of the works that were excluded from it with, where possible, the reasons for their exclusion might be useful. This supplement breaks no new ground: particularly, my debt to Dom Maïeul Cappuyns is greater than in the ‘Bibliography’ for, whereas more Eriugena material has come to light since he wrote, I know of no work excluded by him from the Eriugena corpus which has since been proved to be genuine. Such value as this note has is that of convenience.