Those who have written about William the Conqueror and the English Church have usually implied that in the beginning it was the king's wish to reform his conquest with the help of a Cluniac mission, and that it was the refusal of Hugh of Semur, abbot of Cluny (1049–1109), to supply a contingent of monks which forced William to look elsewhere for helpers.1 This diplomatic failure therefore determined the effect of the Norman Conquest on the English Church. It led to Lanfranc, and so Anselm. Indeed, the consequences could be regarded as so vast as to be incalculable. There has, however, been a good deal of erroneous reference and general uncertainty on this matter; and diere are, indeed, some grounds for thinking that the king's approaches to Cluny occurred in the second half of his reign. A re-examination of all the evidence is required.

The Hand-List of Bede Manuscripts by M. L. W. Laistner and H. H. King is not definitive, since it is based partly on the evidence of catalogues and other printed material and not on the manuscripts themselves. However, it provides a useful rough guide. It lists approximately 160 surviving manuscripts of the Historia Ecdesiastica. Laistner constructed a table showing the percentage of the total number copied in each century:

During the last hundred years our knowledge of the educational institutions of medieval England has steadily increased, both of schools and universities. We know a good deal about what they taught, how they were organised and where they were sited. The next stage is to identify their relationship with the society which they existed to serve. Whom did they train, to what standards and for what ends? These questions pose problems. They cannot be answered from the constitutional and curricular records which tell us about the structure of educational institutions. Instead, they require a knowledge of the people—the pupils and scholars—who went to the medieval schools and universities. We need to recover their names, to compile their biographies and thereby to establish their origins, careers and attainments. If this can be done on a large enough scale, the impact of education on society will become clearer. In the case of the universities, the materials for this task are available and well known. Thanks to the late Dr A. B. Emden, most of the surviving names of the alumni of Oxford and Cambridge have been collected and published, together with a great many biographical records about them. For the schools, on the other hand, where most boys had their literary education if they had one at all, such data are not available. Except for Winchester and Eton, we do not possess lists of the pupils of schools until the middle of the sixteenth century, and there is no way to remedy the deficiency.

References to apostates from the monastic life appear frequently in ecclesiastical and governmental records of the later Middle Ages, yet little attempt has been made to examine motives for flight or the measures which were adopted to recapture the fugitives. The problem of apostasy regularly attracted the attention of the legislators of the Orders, bishops were anxious both to restrain the culprits and to mitigate the severity of vengeful superiors, and the crown lent the weight of the secular arm to attempts at coercion, although an appeal to Rome might often avert the worst consequences of flight. The ecclesiastical authorities were, of course, concerned that no religious should prejudice his hopes of salvation by the rejection of his profession. Those who without the licence of their superior emigrated to another Order, accepted a secular benefice, or wandered off in search of carnal pleasure or spiritual benefits must be restrained, and those sinners and criminals who sought to evade the jurisdiction of their superiors must be punished. Most serious, however, were those cases in which apostasy was a symptom of dissension within the community and polarisation into factions, and where the fugitive sought from outside the walls to disrupt the life of the cloister until he might return to dominate his monastery.

At a time when the theology of the reformed English Church was in the process of formation, Richard Hooker was compelled by the pressure of puritan argument to come to terms with Calvin's theological legacy and the Genevan experiment in theocracy—upheld by English reformists as the perfect model of a reformed Church. Hooker himself had been schooled in Calvinist theology: his nineteenth-century editor, John Keble, suggested that his earliest work revealed him to be still under the spell of the puritan divines who looked to Calvin and his successor Beza for their inspiration. Another nineteenth-century commentator, F. D. Maurice, observed that Hooker not merely reverenced but trembled before the name of Calvin, pointing out that ‘the caution and hesitancy of Hooker in finding fault with the foreign Reformer, when he was most disposed to be severe upon his English imitators, show how much the metaphysics of the Institutes governed his mind.’

The rising in France in 1320 known as the Pastoureaux, or Shepherds' Crusade, receives little attention in most histories, and it is, indeed, a relatively small-scale event for which there are limited sources. Nevertheless, it has wider implications than have been generally recognised. The purpbse of this paper is therefore two fold: to describe these events through khe available sources and to offer some ideas concerning their historical! importance.

Nothing put the clergy and laity at odds so much as money. Quarrels over tithe provide the background against which all the hostility between Londoners and their parish priests must be seen. Since the thirteenth century the citizenry had engaged in periodic disputes with the city clergy over the assessment of tithe, but at the Reformation fervent new issues exacerbated the acrimony and the quarrel seemed to have become intractable. In the city, where individual disputes soon became common knowledge and might stir formidable partisanship, the citizens were often convinced that they were being robbed by their priests. Once the reforming ideas of Protestantism began to spread the London clergy were forced to defend themselves not only against criticism of clerical wealth and privilege but also against far profounder attacks upon their authority and faith. The London tithe controversy in many ways reflects the struggle between the lay and ecclesiastical orders at a national level. The conciliation which had marked the negotiations between the Church and city government in the later Middle Ages gave way to open conflict in the reign of Henry vm until, finally, the tithe issue could be settled only by Parliament, and the Church lost its traditional powers of judgement in tithe causes to the city.

The great expansion in monasticism in Normandy and England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is a commonplace of medieval history, as is the marked diminution in monastic grants after c. 1200. Far more attention, however, has been paid to the religious houses than to their founders, and it is only by looking at a baronial family over a long period that one can discern the fashions which undoubtedly existed in monastic benefaction and the changes in attitude of successive generations. The Clare family were both long-lasting and prolific, and, because of the numerous changes in the landed position of various members of the family, it is possible to see how closely in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the acquisition of new territories and the endowment of monasteries went together. Moreover, we are able to trace the changing preferences for different monastic orders and, to some extent, the reasons for this, and, in addition, to see this in the context not only of Normandy and England, but of Wales and Ireland as well. Whereas in the eleventh and early twelfth century, the Clares' gifts passed to Benedictine houses, many of them Norman or with Norman connections, they became more interested later in the new orders of the Augustinian canons and Cistercians which were spreading rapidly over Europe. At the same time they made grants to the military orders of the Hospitallers and Templars which, by giving knights the opportunity to combine fighting with a monastic life, fused two ideals of the twelfth-century world. In contrast to the variety and amount of these monastic benefactions, the Clares were content in the thirteenth century to make only the occasional grant, but they were insistent on maintaining their rights of patronage. In addition, their interest turned to the new orders of friars. There is, however, no indication here of continuous family interest from one generation to the next as would have been the case in the early twelfth century.

‘The right way, yea, and the only way, to understand the scripture unto salvation’, declared William Tyndale, is to seek in it, ‘chiefly J L and above all, the covenants made between God and us.’ For the Henrician heresiarch, the key to the reforming of England was the bible in translation, and the key to the bible was the idea of covenant. By the power of that idea he proposed to free England from the clutch of Rome: covenant would unlock scripture, cleanse it of popish corruptions and fit it to its work of reformation. Thus instructed, his countrymen would build their faith not on Roman sand but ‘on the rock of God's word, according to his covenants …’ Tyndale was not the first theologian to discover covenant in scripture, but he infused die concept with unprecedented energy: it became his cardinal principle of exegesis and the ruling element in his project of religious revolution.

One of the most important contributions of the Council of Trent (1545–63) to the Catholic or Counter-Reformation was its decree calling for the establishment of diocesan seminaries for the education of the secular clergy. To date, however, the role played by seminaries in the training of parish priests has not been the subject of detailed research. Most Italian diocesan histories, concerned more with the lives and decrees of reforming bishops than with the development of parish life, do not go beyond the institutional aspects of the problem, noting when seminaries were founded and what financial difficulties they faced. Little has been done to investigate the academic content of seminary training and the quality of seminary graduates. Among the few valuable points of reference are a study of clerical education at Rome by G. Pelliccia and brief comments on the seminary curriculum of Bologna by Paolo Prodi. While they have found that seminarians of both cities received practical instruction in the exercise of the cure of souls, they have not uncovered sources pertaining to the books used at seminaries or possessed by parish priests.

Tyranny is a recurrent preoccupation in the life and thought of Thomas More. It is among the first of the subjects which he takes for his own in his earliest examination of Greek prose. It is the theme of a significant number of his Latin poems. It provides the matter of his Richard III and the anti-matter of Utopia: it is among the evils which his imaginary commonwealth is designed to annihilate. ‘He always’, wrote Erasmus, ‘had a special loathing of tyranny.’

The question of Hooker's relationship to Calvin is an interesting one, but I wonder how far the evidence Dr Avis presents can really take us towards understanding it.

One aspect of the evidence which he has pointed out is the rather surprising paucity of Hooker's references to Calvin. In the Polity, outside the account of Calvin's proceeding at Geneva, Hooker cites Calvin only nine times, six times in his support and three times in order to disagree with him. In Hooker's works other than the Polity, there are six citations from Calvin, all in support of Hooker's argument. It should also be noticed that almost all of these references are polemical in intent, referring to Calvin because Calvin is an authority for Hooker's opponents. In most cases Hooker is trying to show that at some point even Calvin supports Hooker's case against the puritans. This material can, therefore, tell us little about Calvin's real theological influence on Hooker, which, if significant, must appear in ways other than explicit reference to Calvin.

Several historians have recently observed a dichotomy in early nineteenth-century British evangelicalism both within the establishment and outside it. One camp was increasingly traditional, concerned with moral and social improvement, preaching an individualistic gospel of salvation by faith, and decidedly fearful of emotion and enthusiasm; other more daring spirits proved to be more radical, millenarian and ‘apostolic’ emphasising the place of spiritual experience, the need for a ‘higher’ ecclesiology and the dangers of respectability, and in so doing were generally alarming their more staid contemporaries.

The years following the Peasants' Revolt posed difficult problems for the city of Strasburg. Always the ‘city of refuge’ of the Reformation, it attracted men of widely different temperaments and religious views. Especially difficult were the Anabaptists who constituted a threat not only to theological orthodoxy—however hard that might have been to define—but also to that civil order which rested on the validity of the authority of the magistrates. In these circumstances, one episode is of pre-eminent interest. In 1526 Martin Cellarius, a young man with a reputation for radicalism, came to Strasburg and found lodging in the house of one of its leading pastors, Wolfgang Capito. In July 1527 Cellarius published a theological work, De Operibus Dei, in which he disavowed his radical sympathies and for which Capito wrote a commendatory preface. The following March, however, Capito published a commentary on Hosea in the preface to which he expressed distinct Anabaptist leanings. This provided personal embarrassment if not public danger. Bucer was furious. Concern was expressed by all the leading reformers of the Rhineland. But an immediate scapegoat was found in the person of Martin Cellarius.

The French Church on the eve of the Reformation presents a varied and complex spectacle. Since the end of the Hundred Years War the number of clergy had grown significantly, much of the material damage caused by the war had been made good, and an army of administrators had placed the Church on what seemed to be a healthy financial base. In the diocese of Rouen under Guillaume d'Estouteville (1453–83) the archbishop's annual revenues rose from about 4,000 to about 10,000 livres; the Church was served by an excellent administration; and an abundance of priests ensured that there were few or no empty benefices. Yet neither a more numerous clergy nor sound finances could guarantee a religious revival or an active faith. The Church's aim never went beyond an attempt to turn the clock back, and it did not adapt to the expanding economy of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Ecclesiastical institutions failed to invest in anything other than land and, to a lesser extent, urban property, and too much capital was immobilised in land and ‘treasure’, while the expanding commercial sectors of the upper-Norman economy went ignored. Similarly, corruption, abuses and apathy existed alongside the first glimmerings of new attitudes, and without a lead from the top the forces of regeneration would be blocked by traditional attitudes and styles of administration, and the combined effects of the rise of Protestantism and the raging inflation of the sixteenth century could be temporarily disastrous.

The years 1864 and 1869 fall between what are generally recognised as two milestones in the career of Lord Acton. On the one hand, this period in his life began with the important decision to stop publishing the Home and Foreign Review; on the other hand, it drew to a close with the beginning of Vatican I. Both of these events have long been acknowledged as decisive steps in Acton's progressive alienation from his fellow Catholics, the one because it marked the unsatisfactory conclusion of six years of conflict in England, the other because it brought on the momentous struggle over the definition of the dogma of papal infallibility. What is not generally recognised, however, is that the years 1864 to 1869 constitute in their own right a crucial phase in Acton's career. The tendency has been to skip from the end of his endeavours as a journalist in England to the opening of the Vatican Council, as if the five years in between were little more than an interlude. Even recent studies of Acton's career have dealt with this period in a very incomplete fashion, leaving much wider gaps than are required by the evidence now available. For instance, the volume of essays and documents bearing the promising title of Lord Acton: the Decisive Decade, 1864–1874, though it brings to light some important material, contains not a single document dating from the period between October 1866 and September 1869.

It is well known that, during the nineteenth century in England, there was widespread criticism of the traditional professions. Their members, it was alleged, formed an excessively privileged group owing their position more to patronage than to personal merit or competence. It is equally well known that patronage was believed to be particularly rampant in the nineteenth-century Church of England. (The novels of Trollope have ensured this.) It has been suggested, all the same, that of all institutions providing professional services to the nineteenth-century public, the Church of England escaped the reforming spirit of the age most completely. I hope in the course of my argument here to illustrate that this was not so and to show that problems which beset other professional men during the century affected the clergy of the Church of England also. I hope to demonstrate that doubts about the appropriateness of patronage as a device for recruiting and promoting parish clergy were, at times, widespread among the clergy themselves, among practising members of the Church of England and among the general public. Indeed, it becomes clear that, at certain crises, Church patronage (and especially patronage in the hands of private individuals) was subject to vigorous attack. It also becomes clear that, by the end of the century, the experiences and arguments of the preceding years were having their effect—that shifts in attitudes towards patronage were taking place and being translated into practice either directly by legislation or more subtly by social convention.

Writing in Past and Present in 1964 Henry Pelling commented:

The influence of the churches on the working class in nineteenth century Britain is a subject which has long aroused sporadic interest among political and social historians, but which has apparently lent itself more readily to hasty generalisation than to detailed investigation for its own sake.