In 1927, when Beryl Smalley began to study the Bible in the Middle Ages, I think it would be true to say that the Bible had almost no place in the minds of medieval historians. The strongly constitutional emphasis of the Oxford historical school of Stubbs and the tutors in Oxford, and the elaboration of this tradition by his pupils Tout and Tait in Manchester, was distinctly hostile to the intrusion of unsubstantial intellectual distractions into the business of the historian. It was generally understood of course that the Bible became important as a moving force in politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but it could be left out of account, so it seemed, during the preceding thousand years. And this was not just an English phenomenon.