Among the many forms which were used by the early Church to accompany the baptismal washing we may certainly count those forms which are at present in use in the eastern and western Church. At a later stage in this study we shall examine their origin and ancestry. First it is necessary to draw attention to certain other forms which are attested by the Fathers in their writings and liturgical remains, and which appear to have been invested at one time with the same importance and to have fulfilled the same purpose as the formula which is universally used to-day.

The New Testament writers, we are constantly being reminded, were not in the stricter sense of the word theologians. We all know what that reminder means and it is one of no small value. It would be disastrous, however, were we to allow it to suggest to us that the Christian writers of the ensuing centuries were men of an entirely different species, whose natural habitat was the study and whose primary characteristic was disinterested reflexion on theological topics. Their teaching, too, can only be rightly understood in the light of the particular concerns and pressures of the moment, which impinged upon them. The importance of this approach to the study of the Fathers is particularly well exemplified by the early history of the question whether or not Christ possessed a human soul.

It is not at first sight easy to explain the ever-growing appeal which Cluny had during the tenth and eleventh centuries for clergy and still more for laymen, particularly in Burgundy, France, Christian Spain and North Italy. The basis of Cluniac life was the choir service of the monks and the silence and ordered round of the cloister. By and large the Cluniacs did not seek to work outside the cloister or to become involved in wider pastoral care. They were, indeed, concerned for the Church and for the world at large, but with a view to winning individuals to share spiritually and to support materially the other-worldly ends of the monastic order. Yet, especially under abbots Odilo and Hugh, there was a rapid rise in the number of houses subject to Cluny or otherwise influenced by it; a Cluniac house formed part of the neighbourhood of a large part of the people who lived to the south and west of Lorraine. Cluny itself was well situated to attract travellers, and its dependencies were especially important on the pilgrimage routes. Together with the increasing number of Cluniac houses the long series of charters which record its endowment with monasteries, churches, lands and other wealth testify to its impact upon Church and Society in western Europe.

The reign of Theodosius II, from 408 to 450, coincided with a crucial era in early Christianity. The doctrinal aspects of this era have been exhaustively studied. The following pages have been written in the hope of further clarifying this period by a review of the policies of Theodosius II in relation to real or imagined deviations from Christian orthodoxy.

Lanfranc was born at Pavia early in the eleventh century, became a monk of Bee in Normandy about 1041, was promoted prior three years later, and was appointed abbot of Caen in 1063 and archbishop of Canterbury in 1070. He died in William Rufus's reign in 1089. He had three distinct careers, first as a wandering scholar, second as a cloistered monk, and finally as a prelate. One obstacle to viewing Lanfranc as a whole is the nature and form of the sources for his life. And I propose in this paper first to look briefly at the sources, then to comment on the various phases of his curriculum vitae and, in conclusion, to make a few rash observations on his character and manners.

‘Who won the Becket controversy?’ is not an unusual kind of question to appear in examination papers. The general idea of the answer has been, and still is in many quarters, to assign Thomas Becket to that large elysium for historical figures who by their death have won the victory for which they struggled in life. Those scholars, however, who have studied closely how some of the issues raised in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) worked themselves out in practice after Becket's martyrdom, have show that things were not so simple. In the day-to-day relations of the secular and ecclesiastical courts a spirit of compromise and co-operation is constantly evident, and the developing complexity of legal problems and procedures favoured now one jurisdiction, now the other. In the relations of the English Church and the papacy ‘ecclesia Anglicana libera sit’ might sound very well as a battle-cry, but the English Church was far from agreed about how much it wanted to be free from the king in order to obey the pope. There were men in the decades after 1170 who would even have considered ‘compromise’ the wrong word to use about the situation. Gerald of Wales tells us that as Richard of Ilchester, bishop of Winchester, sat talking one day, he declared that the pusillanimity of the martyr's successor, Richard of Dover, had lost for the Church every point for which Becket had fought. This is an unlikely story for various reasons, but Gerald's anecdotal style often serves to reflect the thoughts of some of his contemporaries.

The recent work of Professor W. K. Jordan on charitable benefactions in the period between 1480 and 1660 has focused the attention of historians on this aspect of social history, and there is no doubt that his studies have made a significant contribution to the understanding of these years. Certain aspects of the work have, however, been criticised by reviewers, and. the purpose of the present paper is to examine the subject from the viewpoint of the medievalist to see if this throws light on general problems of the study of charity as well as on the more specific topic of late medieval charity.

The religious settlement of 1553–4 rested no less upon the royal authority than its predecessor, or that which followed in 1559. Like the Elizabethan establishment it was the result of political compromise. To base a persecuting regime upon compromise was, as Elizabeth realised, both illogical and dangerous, but Mary's convictions did not allow her to acknowledge, or enable her to understand the foundations upon which her Church was built.

John Bird Sumner (1780–1862) established his reputation as an author whilst he was still a young Fellow at Eton, and it was as a reward for his writings that he was appointed in 1820 to a canonry at Durham by bishop Shute Barrington. In 1826 his younger brother, Charles Sumner, was appointed to the bishopric of Llandaff, together with the deanery of St. Paul's, and in the following year was translated to the more lucrative and socially desirable see of Winchester, where he remained until 1869. Charles Sumner's sudden rise from being assistant curate of Highclere, near Newbury, to private chaplain at Carlton House and Royal Librarian, was due to the favourable impression he made on George IV when he was introduced by the Conyngham family, then prominent at Court. In 1828 John Sumner was given the arduous diocese of Chester by the duke of Wellington. It is doubtful whether he would have been thought of for a bishopric without the advocacy of his brother, but he proved to be a vigorous pastoral bishop.

When students of early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical history come to compile a religious ‘map’ of England, their attention will be drawn to a matter commented upon often enough by contemporaries, but almost entirely neglected now—the catastrophic decline in the influence of the Church in much of the countryside. The greatest triumphs of Nonconformity were won in the rural areas of Wales, and by the time of the religious census in 1851 English Dissenters had established a long lead over the Church in the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, were ahead in Huntingdonshire, and were within striking distance of drawing level in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk. In the southern and south-eastern counties the Church preserved its formal ascendancy, but often attracted a smaller proportion of the people to its services on census Sunday than in counties which were overrun by Dissent. The real tragedy for the Church in this period, it may be argued, was not that industrialisation concentrated people where her. endowments, manpower and accommodation were thinly spread, but that things went so badly where her resources were concentrated. It is the object of this paper to draw attention to this major question of ecclesiastical history and geography, and to suggest that part of the answer to it lies in the tithe question.

It is well known that the role of public opinion in England before and during the Crimean War was almost uniquely important. It is probably equally well known that in the middle of the nineteenth century church-going and clerical prestige both reached a remarkably high level, except among the working classes. There is, thus, a strong prima facie case for supposing that the churches played a significant part in forming opinion at this critical time, offering as they did to their members interpretations of public events in accordance with their own theological outlook. Certainly such interpretations were far more in demand during the Crimean War than during the wars of either the eighteenth or the twentieth century. It is a striking fact that this was the last English war to be begun with the proclamation of a General Fast, and probably the only modern war in which military disasters prompted another General Fast. The clergy's public was remarkably large and remarkably attentive. The circulation of the religious weekly press almost approached that of the serious secular weeklies (the Athenaeum apart), while the long life of the Penny Pulpit, made up exclusively of the recent sermons of the most popular preachers of the day, reveals a substantial sermon-buying public well below the social levels which the familiar bound volumes of a single preacher's sermons suggest.