John Bramhall is perhaps best known today for his attempt to catch Hobbes's Leviathan: critical analysis of the work of the philosopher of Malmesbury was, however, but one field of literary endeavour for Bramhall. As befitted an Anglican bishop he also exchanged doctrinal buffets with both puritans and papists, and ardently embraced the royalist cause during the period of the Great Rebellion, suffering arraignment and exile in consequence. His most notable publication in this last connexion was The Serpent-Salve; or a Remedy for the biting of an Asp, which was published in 1643 with the aim of restoring to Englishmen that proper sense of the allegiance of a subject which some of them had so irrationally cast away, thereby plunging themselves (along with their fellow subjects) into what Bramhall called a ‘bottomless gulf of mischief'. An account of his royalism can thus appropriately centre itself upon this document while drawing also upon his other writings (in particular his Fair Warning to Take Heed of the Scottish Discipline of 1649) for additional illustrative material.

An important feature of the ecclesiastical history of the Church of England since the Reformation has been the unique and precious tradition of a choir of men and boys singing daily choral services in the cathedrals of this country. There have been several studies of this tradition and the music written for cathedral services, but there has not yet been a full account of cathedral choirs in the last century. There have been useful brief surveys by Owen Chadwick and Bernarr Rainbow, but these have been only parts of larger works whose main emphasis is elsewhere. Plenty of material exists, however, and the contemporary conditions which led S. S. Wesley to write his polemical pamphlet A Few Words on Cathedral Music in 1849 demand detailed investigation.

The ‘Act for Registering Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England’ of 1836 was a significant Act in at least four respects. First, it may be regarded as marking the foundation of the modern era in vital statistics in England and Wales. By it the General Register Office was created which ever since has proved a major source of both data and analysis concerning the demographic structure of England and Wales. Secondly, the Act was of importance in the process of the growth of government in nineteenth-century Britain. Thirdly, it remedied one of the major grievances of Dissenters by providing a civil, not ecclesiastical, registration of births, deaths, and marriages. Finally, the story of its passage casts much light on the fragility of the unity amongst the Dissenters in the period from 1829 to 1836.

While a number of historians have focused attention on the development of Protestant missionary thought and activity in India during the nineteenth century, comparatively little is known about the social background, education and motives of the missionary candidates eventually selected for service in that part of ‘the mission field’. Who were these men and why did they go? What pressures and motives lay behind the continued expansion of missionary activity in India during this period?

In the well-known passage in Book VII of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, where Hooker admits to having changed his mind on the subject of the origins of episcopacy, he cites the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua among a list of marginal references to late-medieval and sixteenthcentury writers who maintained the view, which he states he had once considered ‘a great deal more probable than now I do’, that bishops were not introduced into the Church until after the death of the Apostles. Since the 1930s, when A. P. d'Entrèves, Gottfried Michaelis and C. W. Previté-Orton drew attention to the resemblances between some of Hooker's arguments and those of Marsilius, this passage has frequently been quoted as evidence that Hooker was familiar with the writings of Marsilius and it has been used to support the theory, which has come to be widely held in recent years, that his political ideas were directly influenced by the Defensor Pacis. D'Entrèves, for example, stated on the strength of this reference that ‘Hooker certainly knew the works of Marsilius’ and most subsequent writers on Hooker's political ideas have tended to follow d'Entrèves's lead in assuming that Hooker must have been acquainted with the Defensor Pacis at first hand.