‘I know’, says St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, ‘that if this earthly I tent of mine is taken down, I get a home from God made by no human hands, eternal in the heavens. It makes me sigh, indeed, this longing to be under cover of my heavenly habitation … to have my mortal element absorbed by life…. I know that while I reside in the body I am away from the Lord….’ St. Paul is considering the body as a flimsy tent, which may at any moment be taken down, and St. Columbanus takes up this passage in his eighth sermon on the essential instability, the transitory nature of earthly life. Here and elsewhere he speaks of life as a roadway, where Christians must travel in perpetual pilgrimage as guests of the world (hospites mundi), content with a sort of travelling allowance. The same spirit of detachment and urgency infuses much of the hagiographical literature: “Leave thy fatherland for my sake, and get thee out’, ‘This is not the place of thy resurrection’, or the wandering scholar to Brigid when she asks him to stay a while with her, ‘O nun, I have no leisure, for the gates of heaven are open now, and I fear they may be shut against me’.

In his Ford lectures of 1955, Professor Cheney remarked that ‘Stubbs saw the church history of Richard I's reign as the record of a few great disputes at law’. One of the most notorious of these concerned the status of St. David's, whose bishop-elect, Gerald of Wales, spared no effort to acquire for his see the position of metropolitan in a separate Welsh province. It is to his lively, though partisan, account of his endeavours that we are indebted for much of our information regarding the Church in Wales at the close of the twelfth century.

‘On my side are St. Benedict and the whole of antiquity’, wrote Rancé to Mabillon in February 1693, ‘and what is called study has only been instituted when discipline has been lax’. However one may sympathise with his great adversary, it can hardly be denied that, at least so far as the Cistercian order was concerned, Rancé was historically justified. The transmission of new ideas depended on freedom of movement and this was not compatible with the monastic vow of stability. It was this, rather than any ingrained conservatism, that made the monastic orders so slow to adapt themselves to the new learning of the cathedral schools and the rising universities. The Cistercians in particular were seemingly committed by their founders to being, Like St. Benedict, scienter nescius et sapienter indoctus. It was the vocation of Cîteaux to recall men to the primitive observance of the Rule in which the essential tasks of the monk were liturgical prayer and manual labour. There was to be no school in the cloister. The only instruction provided for in the early consuetudines was training in the chant. The making of books, save by permission of the general chapter, was expressly forbidden.

The efficiency of the visitatorial machinery of the Elizabethan Church has long been a subject of speculation among ecclesiastical historians. The establishment of a permanent High Commission court suggested to Professor Usher the failure of the existing system. B. L. Woodcock, on the other hand, compared it favourably with what he called the ‘comparative insignificance’ of late-medieval visitations. Professor Kennedy, a specialist in episcopal articles and injunctions, concluded that ‘… visitations were carried out with something approaching efficiency’. These varying assessments can be tested by regional studies of the actual operations of diocesan visitations. Sufficient material appertaining to the London area survives to allow an examination of the system in the light of various tests of efficiency.

When the three royal commissioners, doctors Thomas Bentham, William Fleetwood and Stephen Nevinson, visited Lincoln cathedral in September 1559 their injunctions, which were largely copied from those of the Edwardine visitors in April 1548, marked the permanent establishment of reform within the mother church of the diocese. It is well known that at this time they and other commissioners deprived many of the higher clergy who refused to conform to the new settlement; in the diocese of Lincoln only one of the six archdeacons retained office throughout these troubled years and out of the 54 cathedral prebends either 11 or 12 changed hands. Five canons were displaced to allow the restoration of married clerks and another five or six were deprived. In contrast to this all the cathedral dignitaries and canons residentiary remained, although there is strong reason to suspect their secret hostility to protestant reform. Since Matthew Parker had no wish to recover his deanery, Francis Mallet the faithful chaplain of queen Mary whom she and cardinal Pole just before their deaths had intended to elevate to the see of Salisbury, was permitted to retain his office. Previously he had lived at Court and scarcely visited his church but on 17 August 1560 he protested major residence at Lincoln. His conservatism may be inferred from a sermon which he preached in the cathedral, in 1561 or 1562, wherein he declared in favour of there being seven sacraments. Unfortunately only a month previously the cathedral divinity lecturer, the reformer Thomas Godwin, had preached very vehemently in favour of there being two, and no more than two, sacraments. Thereupon William Todd, who was the only strongly protestant residentiary at the time, had appealed to two local gentry, of whom one was Sir. Francis Ayscough, the brother of the martyred Anne Askew, to raise a complaint against Mallet in the Privy Council. But nothing came of this and Mallet was not dislodged.

The internal politics of the Counter-Reformation varied in accordance with the individual circumstances of each European country. Nevertheless, many of the problems raised were common to all. The reception of the Tridentine decrees, the clash of regular and secular clergy, the pressure of local, ecclesiastical, and secular interests, the influence of the Spanish monarchy, and the part played by changing conditions in the structure of the Curia itself, especially the foundation of the Congregation of Propaganda in 1622—these affected societies as disparate as the Holy Roman Empire and Ireland. Against this background, Irish ecclesiastical history is of more than parochial or diocesan interest, and its disputes during the early seventeenth century throw light, by analogy, upon wider European developments. Indeed, so far as the British Isles are concerned, the Counter-Reformation was mainly an ‘Irish question’, much as Catholic Emancipation was to be later, although it was to throw up no figures of the same calibre as Campion or Parsons.

The identification of a tract without title-page or caption title in the Library of the Society of Friends in London, together with the location in the Library of the Baptist College, Bristol, of another tract of which no copy was known to exist, makes it possible for the first time to summarise fully the beginnings of the Baptist Western Association. The Association's activity, apart from days spent in waiting upon God in fasting and prayer, was twofold: the resolution of queries submitted by the churches represented; and the issuing of circular letters of exhortation to the churches. Circular letters issued from nine of the Association's first ten meetings are printed in the first of the tracts mentioned, queries submitted and resolved at nine of the meetings in the second. From other sources we know that in 1655 the Association ordained as its superintendent Thomas Collier, the editor of both tracts; and that in 1656 it issued a Confession of the Faith. An assembly of ‘messengers’ or representatives of churches in the South-Western counties of England, meeting normally once in the spring and once in the autumn, the Western Association was a pioneer among those regional associations of churches which have ‘always been a feature of Baptist life’. Correct information concerning its meetings and leaders, and the churches represented, is thus desirable. The fifty-seven queries, moreover, with the answers they received, throw light upon issues then the concern of many beyond Baptist circles.

Ever since the final years of the seventeenth century one of the most important sources for the history of the second period of the Council of Trent—still the least well documented of the three—has been the correspondence of Francisco Vargas, Pedro Malvenda, Manrique de Lara, bishop of Orense and other Spaniards at the Council, with the emperor Charles V's chief minister Antoine Perrenot, bishop of Arras, the future cardinal Granvelle. Vargas was one of the most distinguished Spanish lawyers and diplomatists of his day, combining a hatred of Protestantism with a highly critical attitude towards the Papacy. He attended the Council in 1551–2 as legal adviser to Charles's three ambassadors, of whom the chief was Don Francisco de Toledo, and being a procurator fiscal was usually referred to as ‘the fiscal’. Malvenda was a theologian of eminence sent by the emperor. Vargas, Malvenda and the bishop of Orense kept up a correspondence with Granvelle which was not shown to Toledo. The letters of all three correspondents were highly critical—to put it at its lowest—of the way in which the Council was conducted by the Papal Legate presiding, cardinal Marcello Crescentius. The legate is represented as a narrow-minded and intransigent ecclesiastic, a puppet of Rome, infuriating everyone with whom he had to deal by blocking all attempts at serious reform, denying freedom of speech to the bishops, sabotaging the attendance of German protestant representatives and attempting to insert into the doctrinal decrees passages containing inflated concepts of papal supremacy over bishops and councils.