At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantine empire was at the height of its glory. The emperor Basil II, who died in 1025 after a reign of nearly fifty years, completed and consolidated the work of the two great soldier emperors before him, and deserves to rank with Justinian and Heraclius as among the greatest of all the rulers of Byzantium. In the East the Arabs had been beaten back and humiliated; on the North the Bulgars were savagely defeated by Basil himself and their territory reduced to a province of the empire; Armenia and parts of the Caucasus were conquered; and the Mediterranean was cleared of pirates and policed by the Byzantine fleet. The internal security of the empire seemed unshakable, its riches inexhaustible, and its prestige extended far beyond its boundaries. It was in 989, in the reign of Basil II, that the largest of the Slav states came within the Byzantine sphere of influence, when Vladimir of Kiev married the emperor's own sister and was converted to Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine culture. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantines were justly proud of themselves, of their empire, its civilisation, stability and prosperity, and equally of their Church. They were more convinced than they had ever been of the truth, cherished since the days of Constantine, that the Roman empire was God's plan for the order of the world, or, as Eusebius had said, the terrestrial image of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that its ruler, the one true emperor in the ‘Queen of Cities’, was divinely ordained as God's regent on earth.

The year 1048 is generally recognised as a decisive date in the history of the medieval papacy. In that year the emperor Henry III appointed Bruno, bishop of Toul, to succeed to the papal throne, who accepted only on condition that his election be confirmed by the people and clergy of Rome. The significance of this act depends on seeing it against previous elections. Despite often re-iterated claims to spiritual supremacy the papacy had for long been the tool of political factions, so much so that the period 801–1049 is regarded as the era of Caesaropapism. Reacting against this temporal domination the new pope Leo IX and his successors, especially Gregory VII (1073–85), laid the foundations of a different relationship (called by Ullman ‘the hierocratic system’) in which the temporal powers, under the leadership of the emperor, were subservient to the spiritual under the leadership of the papacy, a unity, so it was argued, for the commonweal of Christendom. By the fourteenth century the system had repeatedly proved itself unworkable, and the concept received its final blow from Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor pads. But, until that time, the concept with all its ramifications constituted both the object and the context of medieval political thought. The outlines of this thesis are by no means new, but what is only now becoming realised is the part played by the canonists in both determining the theory and advancing the arguments for its support.

The movement which we call the twelfth century Renaissance included a revival of Latin classics and Roman Law, the rediscovery of much Greek and Arabic science and philosophy, the development of Romanesque architecture into Gothic, and the writing of history of greater quantity and improved quality. John of Salisbury, archbishop Theobald's curial clerk, who died in 1180 as bishop of Chartres, is generally regarded as England's most finished product of this movement, but a generation before him William, monk of Malmesbury, already displayed many of its characteristics. A polymath whose interests included history and hagiography, law and the classics, archeology and architecture, he had however none of John's cosmopolitanism or contact with the great men of his day, he had little acquaintance with science or philosophy and contributed nothing to the development of theology. A monk all his life, he was representative of the scholarly Benedìctine researcher (he was almost halfway in time between St. Bede and Mabillon), but he was also outstanding because he had the genius and the wide range of interests which were shared by few.

The medieval cartulary usually gives the impression of a long series of donations made by pious benefactors. There can be no doubt that the religious wished it to have this appearance, for, in writing up their charters within the volume, unimportant business items were omitted. That this is far from being the whole story has long been common knowledge and we are frequently being reminded of it. Many a deed of grant covers a money loan that could not be repaid, or a purchase of some kind, and, even if the charter makes this clear, calendars of deeds too frequently fail to indicate that a grant is in fact a purchase.

Included in the considerable corpus of records of the archdeaconry of St. Albans, hitherto almost entirely neglected by historians, are 106 letters relating to the years 1580–1625 written by the bishop of London (within whose diocese the archdeaconry lay) or, in the case of six of them, his chancellor, to the archdeacon or his official. The letters contain instructions to be put into effect within the archdeaconry, which, at this time, consisted of 26 parishes—22 in Hertfordshire and a group of four parishes in the neighbouring county of Buckinghamshire. Doubtless, similar letters were addressed to other archdeacons of the diocese at the same time, but it is believed that those relating to this archdeaconry are the only copies still extant. Eighty-nine of these letters were written between 1580 and 1608; the remainder cover the years 1609–1625. As some of the draft replies of the archdeacon or his official have also survived, it is possible in these instances to trace from them, and from the unusually complete sequence of Act Books of the archdeacon's court and other records, the action which was taken in response to the instructions contained in these letters and, thus, to some extent, to reconstruct a picture of the administration of the archdeaconry which complements that revealed by the visitation records. In addition, some of these letters throw a revealing light on the wider aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean administration, of Canterbury, then through the bishop of the diocese, to the archdeacon and from him and his officers through the apparitor to the incumbents and laity of the archdeaconry.

Time supposedly heals all wounds, but the religious strife between Puritans and Anglicans in the seventeenth century had left a bitter legacy in the minds of the New England Congregationalist ministers. Even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 had in time brought the principle of religious toleration for the protestant sects in the mother country, the animosities of the Stuart regime still evoked suspicion and distrust in the minds of those in New England whose ancestors had left England to found their Zion in the wilderness. But many years had passed since the days of archbishop William Laud, the Clarendon code and the policy of conformity. Although Anglicanism was dominant in England, by the middle of the eighteenth century it was tempered by the principle of toleration for dissenting protestants. But in New England those professing the Anglican faith were a minority among the Congregationalist offspring of the founding puritan fathers. Even in those provinces to the south where it represented the majority of the colonists the Anglican Church suffered from one great defect. There were no resident bishops in America; consequently, those colonists who wished to be ordained as ministers must make the long, expensive, and often hazardous journey to England. Few could undertake such a trip so that most of the Anglican clergy in the colonies came from the mother country.