From the beginning the Christian group took an interest in its own past. Ecclesiastical history is a specialised form of this corporate self-awareness. The fourth and fifth centuries were the period in the Christian church’s history when this form of self-awareness crystallised. The father of church history, Eusebius, was the fountainhead of a tradition of historiography which came to dominate the work of his successors. His Ecclesiastical History straddles the constantinian revolution. Eusebius began working on it before the end of the last persecution, that under Diocletian and his colleagues; by the time he came to add the last touches to his final edition, twenty or more years later, the social conditions of the church’s existence had come to differ profoundly from those which obtained at the time he began writing. The age of the martyrs and of a persecuted church in a hostile empire were becoming a heroic age recollected in tranquillity. The following century was to take the church very much further along the road away from the situation of the church that Eusebius had been writing about.

Chance discoveries have been among the ‘uncovenanted blessings’ that have fallen to the study of new testament times and the early church. The finding of the Isaiah scroll by a shepherd boy in the judaean desert in 1947 led to the greatest discovery in biblical studies of all time, that of the Dead Sea scrolls and the essene monastery of Kharbet Q’mran. Similarly, the recovery of the gnostic library of 48 separate books from a Christian cemetery at Nag-Hammadi, not far from Luxor, in 1946, has thrown a wholly unexpected light on the complex of beliefs and attitudes of orthodox Christianity’s great rival during the second and early third centuries, gnosticism. Recently, professor Morton Smith has made the boldest claims on behalf of a ‘secret Gospel of Mark’ used apparently in Alexandria in the second century AD. An extract from this gospel he found in the library of the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, quoted in a letter which may be attributed correctly to Clement of Alexandria circa 190 AD.

The penitentials in use in the frankish lands in the eighth and ninth centuries were designed as handbooks to aid the priest in the administration of private or secret penance, being at their most simple, tabulations of various misdemeanours associated with particular vices stipulating the penances to be performed.

In the early centuries of the Christian church however, penance seems to have been performed in public, involving both confession and an act of contrition before the assembled congregation. It was, moreover, then undergone only in cases of severe crimes, usually one of three capital sins of homicide, perjury and adultery. The ritual of penance is described fully by Basil the Great, from whom we also learn that the physical act of the laying on of hands by the bishop was the outward sign of reconciliation. This severe form of penance was gradually mitigated and its rarity lessened as it became associated with the increasingly more common practice of death-bed confession and penance, as well as with the lenten period of fasting and contrition, both of which practices are particularly evident in the church in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries. Both the bishop and, in the case of the absence of the bishop, the priest, were now empowered to reconcile the penitent.

To know what was generally believed in all ages, the way is to consult the liturgies, not any private man’s writings.’ John Selden’s maxim, which surely owed much to his own pioneering work as a liturgist, shows a shrewd appreciation of the significance of the medieval ordines for the consecration of kings. Thanks to the more recent efforts of Waitz, Eichmann, Schramm and others, this material now forms part of the medievalist’s stock in trade; and much has been written on the evidence which the ordines provide concerning the nature of kingship, and the interaction of church and state, in the middle ages. The usefulness of the ordines to the historian might therefore seem to need no further demonstration or qualification. But there is another side to the coin. The value of the early medieval ordines can be, not perhaps overestimated, but misconstrued. ‘The liturgies’ may indeed tell us ‘what was generally believed’—but we must first be sure that we know how they were perceived and understood by their participants, as well as by their designers. They need to be correlated with other sources, and as often as possible with ‘private writings’ too, before the full picture becomes intelligible.

John le neve is alive and well and is living in the university of London. Indeed, letters are still addressed to him: he received one quite recently from his present publisher, the Athlone Press. It was in 1716 that this petulant, not to say paranoid, cleric confounded his enemies and his creditors by publishing his Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae. The volume represented years of tiresome research, and it could be argued that Le Neve made a better job with the materials at his disposal than did his nineteenth-century reviser and continuator, T. Duffus Hardy, whose edition appeared in three volumes in 1854.

The text with which this study is concerned is not the text of the canons of the council of Westminster of 1175. It is the text printed long ago by Wilkins from the single manuscript source, Cotton Claudius A IV folios 191v–92, where it has the heading Concilium Ricardi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi. Wilkins gave it the heading Canones condlii . . . and assigned it to 1173, an impossible date, since Richard was not then archbishop. This part of Claudius A IV is a decretal collection, put together from various sources not before, and probably not long after, 1185. Our text, copied as one item in the collection, consists of thirty-seven imperative propositions, all quite short and almost all negative; they all condemn something or forbid something: ‘Christians shall not be usurers’, ‘Lepers shall not in future live among the healthy’, and so on. There is little sign of any attempt at arrangement; related topics may appear more or less widely separated.

These sentences are taken from an anonymous sermon ‘On the Priesthood’, based on Genesis i, 16–20. The author of the sermon showed the priests their place in society: even though they did not belong to the intellectual elite, their profession and knowledge separated them clearly from the darkness of night in which the laity was imprisoned. In the course of the twelfth century, this passage from Genesis underwent an exegetical change and was used, from then onwards, to explain the political relationship between regnum and sacerdotium. What did remain was the notion of a fundamental difference between clergy and laity, and nowhere was this notion better expressed than in our sermon to the priests: quodcunque lumen estis, lumen estis tamen. In true medieval fashion, our author equated knowledge with the knowledge of the Word of God. He also stressed the fundamental difference between light and darkness, between the clergy and the laity. While theology emphasises that ordination makes the clergy by virtue of its office into the mediator between God and man, this was not the main concern of our author. Instead, he voiced the belief, widely shared by the clergy generally, that knowledge as such was the prerogative of the clergy. Such an attitude raises the question of how the clergy was able to achieve monopoly of knowledge, and how it reacted to attempts by the laity to challenge this monopoly. In what follows I propose to enquire into this phenomenon by looking at the linguistic scene in the medieval west.

Amongst the manuscripts bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, by Matthew Parker in 1575 is one of the most important surviving collections of sources for the history of the north of England in the twelfth century. Manuscript 139, as it now is, contains, amongst other items, unique, or almost unique, copies of the so-called Historia Regum, which had been ascribed to Symeon of Durham before the end of the twelfth century, its continuation by John of Hexham, and the History of Richard of Hexham. It was a prime, and in part a unique, source of Twysden’s pioneering edition of 1652, and its value is in no way diminished today. This apart, the manuscript is of great interest as a manuscript, and the problems of its date, provenance and composition are still the subject of debate. The most recent and definitive account of the manuscript was given by Peter Hunter Blair in a fifty-five page article contributed to the volume of essays edited by Nora Chadwick under the title Celt and Saxon. His conclusions, which supersede all earlier views, were that the manuscript was compiled in the period c 1165–70 at the cistercian house of Sawley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the subsequent discovery of an erased Sawley ex libris, now visible only in ultra-violet light, and dated by Ker to the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, reinforced his view. Yet there still remain problems and uncertainties, and my purpose here is first to sketch in a little of the history of the manuscript in its present form, and secondly, by further examination of particular aspects of its to supplement and qualify Blair’s conclusions.

The task of understanding the significance of any religious movement in its historical context normally depends upon documents being available for description and analysis. In the case of the humiliati this is almost impossible. Such documentary evidence as exists for the period 1179 to 1216 comes not from the humiliati themselves but from others whose reasons for mentioning them varied considerably - suggestions as to why this is so will be made as the paper develops. Analysing these sources for information about the humiliati will thus be difficult. Nevertheless, as these documents cover certain aspects peculiar to the movement, they can be used to indicate such information as the humiliati might themselves have given. Indeed, if carefully pieced together, an even more coherent whole can appear on the principle that onlookers see more of the game than the players. The scope of this paper therefore is to examine the sources available in an attempt to show something of the early history of the humiliati; bearing in mind all the time, the limitations involved; the inevitable omissions in such accidental or incidental evidence; and the demonstrable bias which will be found to exist. That these documents are few in number and only rarely rich in detail increases the difficulty.

The theme of this volume has been defined as ‘the sources, materials and methods of ecclesiastical history’. After the illuminating, fruitful and often racy subjects which have been discussed in earlier volumes in this series, a theme such as this may at first sight appear to be sober to the point of dullness. I hope to show that it is not, and I make no excuse for presenting it. We are historians, knowing that the study of history is a complex affair, demanding a high degree of imaginative understanding and at the same time a great deal of patient, accurate and often very exacting craftsmanship. Before we can understand what ecclesiastical history is about, either we must go back to its sources, with all the problems of time, language and palaeography which that process entails, or we must at least possess sufficient knowledge to enable us to form some reasonable opinion about the validity of the methods used by those who have cleared the ground for us. Not all historians have the time, or indeed the inclination, to edit texts, but all of us are to an increasing extent dependent upon the work of those who do edit them. A medieval scholar might perhaps have compared the two sides of the historian’s work, the interpretation of ideas and the transcription or calendering of records, to those two great ‘types’ of the contemplative and the practical life, the sisters Mary and Martha. The two were interdependent, and they lived in one house. True, it was the spiritually-minded Mary who chose the good part, while Martha’s obsession with the practical problems of housekeeping earned her a gentle but unmistakable reproof which historians would do well to take to heart.

The precise nature of Wyclif’s connection with the production of the first English bible is shrouded in mystery, a subject for the fierce controversy and debate that is possible only where ignorance and uncertainty prevail. To begin with, there is an almost total absence of reliable contemporary evidence. The first statements explicitly attributing authorship to Wyclif do not occur until the generation after his death. Of these, the earliest is that of the chronicler Henry Knighton, whose contacts with early lollardy might make him appear to be a more reliable source than most. Writing perhaps in the mid-1390s, Knighton referred back to the year 1382 as the time when Wyclif translated the gospel, which Christ had given to the clergy and doctors of the church, into the tongue, not of the angels, but of the Angles.

Maximus sermocinator verbi Dei is the description of pope Clement VI, formerly Pierre Roger, given by a fourteenth-century French chronicler. Others of the pope’s compatriots were equally fulsome in their adulation. An Italian chronicler, perhaps an ex-student at the university of Paris, where Pierre Roger had been a master in theology, records:

In Prague, Clement’s ex-pupil, the emperor Charles IV, remembered the grace with which he had been infused through listening to one of his master’s sermons over twenty years before. Even the English joined this chorus of praise. Thomas Walsingham paid tribute to Clement as a man of singular culture, while Walter Burley lauded his teaching skill, his oratory, and his legendary memory. By the early fifteenth century Clement’s sermons were regarded as models. Several of them appear, abbreviated and anonymous, as part of a treatise on preaching by Paul Koëlner, canon of Ratisbon, written some time before 1420.

Among the episcopal registers housed at the county record office in St Helen’s, Worcester, is a neatly written paper book, which though it bears no medieval title, has often been described as the second volume of bishop Brian’s register. As has been pointed out recently, it was taken to be such by the county historian, Treadway Nash, and also by Reginald Lane Poole when he examined the Worcester records for the Historical Manuscripts Commission. On the other hand, it is now common knowledge among those acquainted with the registers that this is a misnomer. My intention here is to examine me manuscript in more detail and to suggest the manner of its composition and the sources from which it is derived.

In this paper I shall discuss two letters apparently sent in 1399 by the University of Oxford to Richard II, in answer to the king’s request for advice on whether to withdraw obedience from pope Boniface IX in an endeavour to end the great schism. There has been a controversy about which letter represents the official view of the university, and this argument has largely arisen, I suspect, because hitherto one of the letters has been studied in its printed form which is incomplete and does not give a true idea of its arguments. I will also consider how these letters are to be seen in the context of the final stages of Richard II’s policy on the schism.

The picture drawn by Chaucer in the Friar’s Tale is a little journalistic, not to say sensational, and it deals with only some aspects of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of his day, yet it leaves us in no doubt as to the importance of the courts, and of the way in which they were regarded in some quarters. Perhaps the picture was overdrawn, and true only of the half century or so within Chaucer’s own knowledge. On the other hand it has recently been demonstrated that these same courts furnished some at least of the excuses for royal and parliamentary action at the outset of the reformation, and there seems to be good reason for a closer look at them in this context. Most of all, however, for those whose principal interest is the quality of medieval life, it is desirable to consider the institution during the whole period for which there is some sort of continuous record of its working, that is, for the years covered by my title. There is no doubt that such a study should reveal a considerable section of the public and private life of the time, and while in the limits of this paper I can do no more than skim the surface of my material I hope that I shall persuade others to make further and deeper studies.

Historical research is full of surprises and shocks. It may produce the blessings of which professor Hill has so eloquently reminded us; but it can also leave the student thwarted and disappointed. We cannot know when we embark on a subject what uncharted reefs and contrary currents are going to impede our course. A few years ago I rashly set out to work on the subject that the late professor Iorga called Byzance après Byzance. I hoped to tell of the fate of the Greeks and their neighbours in the orthodox Christian world when they passed under the absolute rule of the infidel ottoman sultan, during the centuries when they were tended by the orthodox patriarchate of Constantinople: to which one could apply, far more accurately than to the papacy, Hobbes’s description of ‘the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the ruins thereof’ – but the ruins were miserably dilapidated and the crown did not fit. I decided not to attempt a full history of the social life of the Christian minorities nor a detailed discussion of theological developments but to concentrate my study on the central organisation of the patriarchate itself. Even so it proved to be a daunting task.