Chapter 1 sets out the growth of the Province from 1221 to 1348, the different patterns of development in different parts of the British Isles, and what explains them. The first part of the chapter examines who supported the new foundations, how the English and Scottish kings in particular aided them, but also the role played by nobles and townsfolk. The second part of the chapter considers what lay behind this support, by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, how they met them directly, and how their religious life and training within the cloister enabled them to do this.

Irenaeus as the mastermind of the canonicl collection, later known as the New Testament, creates the foundation for the later picture of a chronological development from Jesus and his disciples through the first bishops and the institutionalization of the Church. However, he himself hardly relates to these writings as historical evidence, but rather engages in an anti-heretical use of some of them to endorse church orthodoxy. It is this apostolic foundation that provides the rule of truth against which he sees the heretics struggeling, driven by evil forces in an apocalyptic scenario.

Irenaeus’ view is condensed in the collection that he brought together, combining the Book of Acts with the so-called Catholic Letters (= the Praxapostolos). Placed after the four Gospels, it endorses a neatless development from Jesus and his early followers through the early days of growth of the church in its emancipation from its Jewish beginnings. With Paul’s letters in a revised version that was made to fit the Gospels and the Praxapostolos this fiction of a continuous, rapid and Spirit-guided growth was linked to the success-story of the Church in contra-distinction to the miseries and decline of the Jewish community and the vain attempts at undermining the Church by the develish heretics.

The Roman imperial entourage was central to Roman rule. It changed over time. Certain roles became more defined, and certain types of behaviour less contested. It is doubtful whether this was an ‘institutionalisation’ of the Roman court. The entourage of Roman emperors never quite grew into a stable structure. Even the composition of the supposedly formalised administration of the late-Roman eastern empire fluctuated from one reign to the next. Over time, a wider range of types of behaviour became acceptable. Changes in society altered the composition of the people who had the emperor’s ear. The increased militarisation of Roman society in the third century and the emperor’s absence from Rome, had an impact on the emperor’s entourage. Noticeable was the way imperial women wielded independent power in a Christianised empire. The move away from Rome as imperial capital changed the position of senators at court. When comparing the composition and behaviour of people who were regularly in the emperor’s proximity at the beginning of the principate and in the middle of the sixth century, there were substantial differences.

This chapter addresses the question of why prominent nobles were so interested in being church advocates by examining the legitimate financial benefits that came with the position. Using sources from the period 1050 to 1250, it argues that advocates typically received one-third of the fines when they held court on ecclesiastical estates, and also received food and lodging in return for fulfilling their role as judge. It also demonstrates that many advocates received separate income for their responsibilities in providing protection. While all of these payments were initially in kind, by the thirteenth century it was increasingly common for advocates to receive a single lump-sum money payment for fulfilling all their advocatial responsibilities, which is evidence of the increasing commodification of local positions of authority in this period. This chapter also investigates the numismatic evidence for church advocates as additional source material for the economic dimensions of the role.

This chapter argues that, especially in the East Frankish Kingdom, Carolingian advocates were operating as key local agents for churches on their estates by the mid-ninth century at the latest. While the sources from the West Frankish and Italian parts of the Carolingian empire suggest different trends, the East Frankish sources (especially royal grants of immunity) demonstrate that advocates acquired important policing powers and judicial authority on ecclesiastical properties during this period. This undermines the typical scholarly argument that Carolingian advocates were a different phenomenon than subsequent types of advocates, as these East Frankish advocates already had responsibilities that most later advocates would continue to have into the eighteenth century.

In the period from 1050–1150 we see law and life ricocheting off each other, and rapid changes in both. Early fifth-century canon law provided a basis for imperial intervention in doubtful papal elections, legitimating Leo IX, who initiated the papal turn. In a number of areas the earliest papal jurisprudence provoked reform. The mismatch between law and life was a long-term result – in an age of urbanization! - of the post-Roman ruralization of Christianity. Ancient canon law was designed for city Christian communities concentrated around the bishop. It was ill-adapted to a world of isolated parish priests who could not be expected to maintain celibacy within marriage. Similarly, election of bishops by the ‘clergy and people’ was less practicable in a large rural diocese than in a concentrated urban community. The papal turn found expression in new legislation, notably about celibacy, which now meant something different from the celibacy required by late Antique papal law. But the new rules proved too simplistic, and further legal evolution followed. ‘Gratian’ expanded by his own commentary the meaning of canons – including papal decretals from late Antiquity – for his own age.

Challenging the assumption that the Elizabethan religious settlement was clear in its content and meaning to contemporaries, Chapter 1 explores the many areas of confusion and ambiguity surrounding the settlement’s formularies. It emphasizes the contested authority of a range of official and semi-official formularies and commentaries, and of past doctrinal and liturgical forms, which potentially pointed in very different theological and ecclesiastical directions. A number of unresolved issues are highlighted relating to church government, liturgy and ceremonies, doctrine, ministerial maintenance, and ecclesiastical law. As a result, the Church of England’s position was inevitably subject to continual negotiation and debate, and to countless proposals for further reform and clarification. It is argued that, as a result, a very broad range of English religious thinkers and activists – from militant high-churchmen to staunchly Calvinist and incipiently Presbyterian puritans – could in the ensuing years seize on some of these threads and claim with some legitimacy to be accomplishing the final clarification and consummation – and indeed the apotheosis – of the earlier Reformations. The Laudian movement would thus constitute just one contested reading of this haphazard corpus of ambiguous ecclesiastical and doctrinal formulations.

This chapter sets the social and ecclesiastical scene. It introduces the place of ecclesiastical law in the law of England. It explores the changing place of the Church of England in the life of the nation from the early nineteenth century, the role of the universities in educating future clergy and the significant place of the bishops in political as well as pastoral and spiritual leadership. It describes the need for more churches as the Industrial Revolution took a growing proportion of the population from the country into the towns. It introduces the challenge of the Dissenters with their rival chapels and the complexities of applying ecclesiastical law when there were controversies.

The processes launched at the start of Roman rule continued to support the development of cities and their elites. The 150 years from Hadrian to Diocletian saw enough violence to do severe damage to some of those cities, particularly Alexandria, and occasional revolts disturbed the peace, including one in the Delta at the time of the great plague (smallpox) under Antoninus Pius, which led to the depopulation of many villages. A loss of workers to the plague may have intensified the concentration of landholding in the hands of the wealthy, who could invest in both machinery and capital-intensive crops such as wine. This period also saw the decline of the temples and the beginning of Christianity as a visible (and occasionally persecuted) movement, with the emergence of bishops of Alexandria and the countryside. The Egyptian language acquired a new means of expression in the Coptic alphabet, largely derived from Greek.

The decades after the death of Louis II has been traditionally intended as the first great crisis of the Carolingian politics in Italy, in which war paved the way to the break-down sealed by the year 888. The aim of this chapter is to study royal diplomas addressed to two italian recipients through a time of political turmoil: the sees of Arezzo and Parma in order to study the ways in which political communication was built by the different kings and emperors between 875 and 924. Moreover, the study of royal praecepta will consent the interpretation of the local responses to the challenges of politics and the ways in which memory was constructed by two of the most significant italian bishoprics during the Carolingian period.

Successive Carolingian rulers found managing the relationship with their adult sons challenging. The father-son relationship between Lothar I and his oldest son, Louis II, offers a valuable perspective on the forces at work in the relationships between senior and junior rulers more widely, as well as the specific challenges involved in ruling Italy from Francia. While our sources generally emphasize obedience to the father, successful father-son partnerships also had reciprocal elements, and involved effort on both sides. Lothar I and Louis II seem to have maintained a stable and productive relationship between 840 and Lothar’s death in 855. Public affirmation of the partnership between father and son, Lothar’s gradual delegation of power to Louis II, and the absence of key triggers for rebellion, such as a direct threat to Louis II’s position, help account for this success. A tight-knit lay and ecclesiastical elite that spanned both courts also helped stabilize the relationship. When positive factors assisting the father’s control were absent, and negative factors prompting rebellion on the part of the son were present, Carolingian father-son relationships could and did go awry, as in Louis the Pious’s case.

Vatican II was the catalyst for a significant realignment of ministerial life in the Catholic Church. Although the council did not undertake a thoroughgoing revision of episcopal or presbyteral ministry, the repercussions of its stress on the primacy of baptism and on the ecclesial dimension of all ordained ministries have altered the landscape of ministry.

This chapter deals with the bishops and archbishops of the Church in Wales within the framework of the thirteen archiepiscopates across the century. It seeks to blend biographical sketches with landmark developments in episcopal and archiepiscopal ministry. Following the enthronement of Edwards as Archbishop of Wales in 1920, the archiepiscopates of Green, Prosser and Morgan saw the readjustment of the Church in Wales to its new status after disestablishment. Those of Morris, Simon and Williams represent what some see as the golden age of episcopal leadership. Those of Childs, Noakes and Rice Jones followed, facing the first serious signs of the decline in church membership and debate on the ordination of women. Those of Williams, Morgan and Davies bring us to the present, over a period of enormous change. The chapter also deals with episcopal polity, the styles of episcopal leadership, the theological positions of the bishops, and changes in their election and ministry over the century.

Hobbes’s On the Citizen discussed religion and church-state relations less fully than his later Leviathan. In Leviathan, he trenchantly attacked theories which granted the clergy power that was independent from that of the state and its sovereign. In On the Citizen, he expressed his views with greater moderation and circumspection. Modern scholars debate whether Hobbes changed his ideas or just his tone between the two books. This chapter discusses the evidence for and against the claim that On the Citizen put forward relatively conventional views on the relationship between the powers of the state and the church, and that it was only in Leviathan that he abandoned a theory that was close to orthodox Anglicanism, and characteristic of royalists at the time of the English Civil War. The chapter examines what Hobbes said in On the Citizen, and also discusses the ideas of some of his contemporaries. It notes that the book soon encountered criticism for its contentions concerning religion and church-state relations, and especially for granting the sovereign too great power over the church and the clergy. It argues that the theory presented in On the Citizen is not so very distant from that which Hobbes espoused in Leviathan.

Accounts of miracles and visions feature prominently in each of Flodoard’s histories. Notably, he recorded a huge number of wonders that occurred during his own lifetime. This constitutes a striking contrast with contemporary authors of history and hagiography, many of whom doubted whether miracles still happened or whether they were necessary. This chapter examines Flodoard’s attitude to the supernatural, asking in particular how it evolved over the course of his lifetime. I argue that Flodoard came to perceive miracles as validation of the work carried out by monks, clerics and bishops, and that he heeded seriously reports of visions and other phenomena as divinely inspired responses to moral failings. Flodoard contrasted the earthly vices of the leaders of the West Frankish kingdom with the greatness of spiritual power, thus providing a rationale for episcopal authority in a time of political upheaval.

This chapter examines the West Frankish political controversies that defined Flodoard’s career and reassesses the nature of the historian’s involvement in them. Between 925 and 961, the see of Rheims was contested by two archbishops in a dispute that was intrinsically linked with wider political struggles in West Francia. Even though Flodoard tells us about his own participation in the archiepiscopal dispute, previous scholars have downplayed this involvement, considering it to have had little impact on his historical works. This chapter scrutinises Flodoard’s autobiographical remarks and portraits of the two rival archbishops, Hugh and Artold, arguing that his role in the dispute did have a significant bearing on the content and tone of his Annals and History of the Church of Rheims. The History, moreover, has tended to be viewed as a passive work of ‘local history’ primarily of benefit for the clergy of Rheims. Yet Flodoard composed it immediately following the resolution of the Rheims schism. By reappraising the nature of this settlement and Flodoard’s impetuses for writing, this chapter advances a broader interpretation of the purpose and audience of his History.