No original Anglo-Saxon charter bearing an AD date earlier than 736 is extant, which seems to suit the traditional view that dating by the Era of the Incarnation, as opposed to the indiction or regnal years, was due to its popularisation by Bede's treatise De temponim ratione and his Historia ecclesiastica. ‘Consequently,’ in R. L. Poole's words, ‘not a few Anglo-Saxon charters which contain the date from the Incarnation have been condemned as spurious or corrupt.’ He then added that ‘there seems, however, to be no reason to suppose that the adoption of this era was originated by the treatise of Bede’, maintaining that it is ‘much more likely’ that it was derived from the Easter Tables of Dionysius Exiguus, arguing on the basis of the accounts of St Wilfrid's instruction at Rome and his speech at the Synod of Whitby in 664, that the saint championed the use of the Dionysian computation. Kenneth Harrison has shown how likely this is on various grounds. These include a defence of four charters bearing AD dates in the seventh century and arguably connected with Wilfrid. Harrison's case has been accepted by Nicholas Brooks, though not by Anton Scharer, and Harrison later brought two more charters into the discussion. The earliest of Harrison's charters, the foundation charter of Bath, dated AD 676 and attested by Wilfrid, and a charter concerning Ripple, Worcestershire, dated AD 680, will be discussed in detail below. Three others, all attested by Wilfrid, belong to the group of charters which Anton Scharer and Patrick Wormald associate with Eorcenwald, bishop of London, who also attests: Casdwalla of Wessex's grant of Farnham, Surrey, dated (problematically)AD 688, Eorcenwald's grant of Battersea, Surrey, dated AD 693, and his charter for Barking monastery, in which his visit to Rome is dated (again problematically) to AD 677. It is entirely possible that Wilfrid was responsible for the inclusion of the annus Domini in these charters, even if their actual drafting was done by Eorcenwald or one of his circle; the absence of the annus Domini from the other credible ‘Eorcenwald’ charters is significant. (Eorcenwald attests the Bath foundation charter, but so does Wilfrid.) Harrison's remaining charter is Æthelred of Mercia's confirmation of a grant in Thanet to the Kentish abbess Æbbe, dated AD 691 in the best manuscript.6 Significantly, this is the only one of the thirteen charters between 675 and 737 in Elmham's Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis to bear an AD date. Wilfrid does not attest — the confirmation carries no witness list — but Brooks comments that, of the four charters originally discussed by Harrison (Birch, Cartularium Saxonicum, nos 42, 43, 51 and 72), only BCS 42 [the Thanet charter] has no evident connection with Wilfrid. Yet it shows Wilfrid's friend and protector, King Æthelred of Mercia, intervening in Kent by force in January 6gi (‘dum ille infirmaverat terram nostram’) at a time when the see of Canterbury was vacant. Wilfrid was by this time again running into difficulties with the Northumbrian king, and his biographer claims that he had been offered the succession to the see of Canterbury by Archbishop Theodore himself.

This essay is an attempt to find out what Winstanley meant by certain terms, using close textual analysis. Extensive work has already been done in locating Winstanley in political, theological and, as far as possible, intellectual terms. This will receive only cursory treatment here. A scholarly tradition can be traced from Bernstein, through Petergorsky and Margaret James to Christopher Hill, which places Winstanley at the beginning of the development of materialist socialism although, it is suggested, his ideas proved to be a false start and went underground for a century or more. This view derives from his later works, especially The Law of Freedom, with its practical design of tilling the land communally, and sees his mysticism either as a cloak for revolutionary aims or as an undeveloped stage in his thought which he later left behind and which is thus of secondary importance. Work has been done, sometimes by the same scholars, to map out the tenets of his religious beliefs in the context of contemporary radical Puritanism, considering whether he was, for instance, a mortalist, a universalist or a millenarian, and how far he was any of these. For such doctrinal identification one can look to W. S. Hudson, the co-operative study of L. Mulligan, J. K. Graham and J. Richards and to Christopher Hill, for all of these have compared and contrasted his beliefs with those of Seekers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. Hill himself, however, has pointed out the difficulties of placing Winstanley in a particular group because of the fluidity of the borders between one sect and another; sects sharing certain beliefs while differing in others and changing character internally with changing political circumstances.

The public controversy over ritualism in the Church of England reached its peak in the 1870s, with the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act and the attempts, eventually abandoned through use of the episcopal veto, to prosecute ritualist clergy for the use of technically illegal ceremonial ornaments or vestments. One other related subject that caused a similar degree of controversy at the time, though it has been less well remembered since, was the emphasis within ritualist circles on auricular or sacramental confession. The subject of auricular confession, made privately to a priest, was one of the most explosive religious issues, both morally and theologically, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The document presented here makes available a hitherto unknown version of an anonymous vernacular tract dating from the middle years of the sixteenth century. The only known version of the tract until now — extant in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge — was first published by Dr P. N. Brooks in an appendix to his monograph on Thomas Cranmer's eucharistic doctrine (1965).Beyond placing it in the ‘mid-sixteenth century’, Brooks did not attempt t 0 attribute it to an author or indicate its precise historical context beyond suggesting that it provided a ‘valuable period example of the Lutheran understanding of the eucharistic presence’ such as was favoured by Richard Cheyney (bishop of Gloucester, 1562-79) and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the period between abandoning transubstantiation and embracing a version of the Reformed doctrine. The longer version of the tract which has since come to light in the Bodleian would seem to call for some reassessment of that estimate. For while consistent with a Lutheran doctrine of the eucharistic presence, the Bodleian version concludes with sections on eucharistic adoration and oblation (not found in the Corpus MS). This suggests a closer affinity with the position championed by opponents of the religious changes in the reign of Edward VI, or at least an attempt at a doctrinal consensus between those of the ‘old’ persuasion and those of the ‘new’.