The members of some newly formed academic societies peer forward into the future with a nice mixture of enthusiasm and uncertainty: enthusiasm for a subject in which they are so fanatically interested that they have dared to found yet another society; uncertainty whether the world at large will admit that the subject exists, whether it will be accorded proper academic respectability. We share, I hope, this enthusiasm; but we have no grounds for uncertainty. It was the study of the Church’s history, from within, which did more than anything else to lay the foundations for the critical study of historical sources, most notably in the work of Mabillon and the Maurists. The study of the Church’s history, and most particularly the history of its founder, rocked the world in the nineteenth century, and played a large part in providing the intellectual grounds both for modern belief and for modern disbelief. The Church’s history has, in the past, provided the locus classicus of the problem of historical bias: is it possible, the question has been asked times out of number, for historians of different persuasions to agree in the study of the early Church, or of the Reformation? The question is a real one; we cannot confidently say more than that they can, without much difficulty, talk the same language; that true scholars nowadays will not think of not talking the same language. And this fact reveals the extraordinary power of reconciliation which the study of the Church’s history has had. It does not always reconcile; the common pursuit of truth did little to foster good relations between Coulton and Gasquet. But this spirit of reconciliation is clearly a feature of our age. It is part of a much larger movement, of which we are all witnesses. I have seen with my own eyes a Jesuit father give a public lecture in Winchester College; I have not seen, but millions of my fellow-countrymen have, Catholic and Anglican metropolitans sitting side by side in cosy amity in a television studio. We all know how limited, in terms of visible reunion, is the significance of these events; but the movement towards reunion among Protestant churches and towards better relations among all the sane branches of the Christian family is one of the striking historical phenomena of our age; and a movement (if I may strike a personal note) of hope and joy. Beyond doubt the study of the Church’s history and the dominance of the historical outlook over the last century and a half have much to do with this.

It is, I suppose, an indication of the general bewilderment caused by the apparently abrupt appearance of a new and strangely named religious party in the England of James I, the Arminian, which makes one’s pupils occasionally describe the High Churchmen of those days as ‘Armenians’. It is a pardonable mistake. They are vaguely aware that many have regarded Arminianism as a theological heresy. They have no doubt also heard rumours that the Armenians are regarded by most of the rest of Christendom as heretical. Hence the natural confusion.

Thirty years ago a phase of monastic historical scholarship was drawing towards its close. For some forty years previously a group of scholars, who may fitly be considered the founders of critical monastic history of our century, had been actively at work. Almost all belonged to, or were connected with, three Benedictine abbeys: Maredsous in Belgium, Farnborough and Downside in England, belonging respectively to the Congregations of Beuron, France and England. Among them stood out Ursmer Berlière of Maredsous, creator and for long editor of the Revue Bénédictine and historian of medieval monasticism; his colleague Germain Morin, equally distinguished in the patristic and monastic fields; André Wilmart of Farnborough, unrivalled in our age in his knowledge of monastic literature and spirituality, and his colleagues Ferdinand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq; and at Downside Edmund Bishop and Cuthbert Butler. To these may be added John Chapman, originally of Maredsous and later of Downside who, though primarily a patristic and New Testament scholar, turned in his last years to the age of St Benedict; and Abbot Delatte of Solesmes who, though not an historian, distilled and presented to modern monks the wisdom of innumerable commentators of the past on the Rule of St Benedict. Taken as a group, these men had surveyed the history and literature of the Benedictine order between 540 and 1350, while Butler had produced a sound critical edition of the Rule and, together with others, had analysed the legislation and spiritual doctrine of Benedictine monasticism with a fulness that had not been achieved for any other medieval order, save perhaps that of St Francis.

Eighty years have gone by since F. E. Warren published his work on The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. Two years before that date Warren had published the full text of a very puzzling Irish missal which had been in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, probably for some three hundred years. Since Warren wrote, the manuscript has been transferred from the library of Corpus Christi College to the Bodleian Library, where it is kept in a box which contains the missal and its satchel of leather. Its class-number is C.C.C. 282. In 1892 an English Jesuit scholar, H. Lucas, made a careful collation of Warren’s readings with the manuscript text; a note in his handwriting, which records a few minor errors, is preserved in the box with the manuscript.

The fourth century introduced no new features into the Christian opinion of Jews and Judaism. Yet it is extremely important because it standardised an existing attitude at the earliest moment when the Church had the power to express its view in law and practice, and not merely in the pulpit or in theological argument. It thus set the tone which determined future relations for more than a millenium; and, as Christendom became more and more the total environment of life in the western world, so the attitude towards the Jews adopted by the Church in the early centuries came to determine the whole condition of Jewish life over the whole realm of Christendom. The Church became the arbiter of life and death, of the permission to carry on even the most meagre and restricted existence under a Christian prince.

The twentieth General Council of the Roman Church may provide a sufficient excuse for reflecting on some earlier assemblies of this kind, particularly those of the fifteenth century. One may well enquire what the twin-headed Church of 1409 has to do with the unified body of today. Historical parallels and analyses may be stretched too far, and the Church has indeed turned its back upon the events of the period 1378–1449; but there is always a connection between unity and reform, and we have been reminded recently that they go hand in hand. If the present Council has no longer the task of reconciling a divided body, it has in front of it, just as in those fifteenth-century councils, the problem of internal reorganization and of presenting the result to the outside world.

The document with which this paper is concerned was discovered in 1945 or 1946 in the Gnostic library of Nag Hammadi, in the same codex as the more famous Gospel of Thomas. Unlike Thomas, however, it has so far attracted comparatively little attention—largely because it affords no scope for the seekers after sensation. It has been held by reputable scholars that Thomas goes back at least in part to a tradition independent of our canonical Gospels, but Philip has never been regarded as anything but a Gnostic work. Yet it is not thereby devoid of interest or of significance.

In discussing the reason for Augustine’s visit to Caesarea in 418, a clear distinction should be made between what we know for a fact and what we can deduce by inference. Furthermore, we should not regard incidents which were a consequence of the visit as constituting its pretext. The episode for which it is best remembered is Augustine’s encounter with the Donatist Bishop Emeritus, and the saint’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade him to return to Catholic unity. But the meeting between the two protagonists of Catholicism and Donatism seems to have been fortuitous. Again, Augustine was able, while at Caesarea, to prevail on the citizens to discontinue the Caterva, the organised local brawl, hallowed by tradition though by nothing else, which came to resemble a miniature civil war. But Augustine had not made a special journey to Caesarea to speak against the Caterva. His own explanation of the visit is that he went to Caesarea on the orders of Pope Zosimus to settle some ‘ecclesiastical necessity’ which had arisen there, and this assertion is echoed by his biographer, Possidius.

Mediana is a term peculiar to Roman liturgy and is applied to the fifth Sunday in Lent, to the Wednesday and Saturday which precede this Sunday, and to the week embracing these three days. The term first occurs in a letter of Pope Gelasius, written in 494, in which he says that ordinations of priests and deacons should only be performed at certain seasons on Saturday evening, namely the fasts of the fourth, seventh and tenth months, which are the original Embertides, on the first Saturday in Lent, which is in the fourth and later Embertide, and on the Saturday medianae quadragesimae. The term occurs again in the next century when Pope Pelagius I (556–561) appointed this mediana septimana paschae as a season for ordinations. The text of Gelasius is quoted in the Liber Diurnus, of which the earliest manuscript dates from the seventh to the eighth century; in a letter of Gregory II of 715; and in the eleventh Canon of the Roman Council of 743.

The purpose of this paper is to question some generally held assumptions concerning the character of Donatism, and its relations with the Catholic Church, during the later period of Byzantine rule in North Africa. The features of the Donatist Church during its classical period, in the fourth and fifth centuries, are now well known. They are conveniently surveyed by Dr Frend in his magisterial study of the movement. He has established, definitively in my view, that the schism in the African Church had roots far deeper than historians had previously discerned. The theological divergence between Catholicism and Dissent, as he put it, ‘was interwoven with other differences, such as geography, culture and economic circumstance.’ ‘The two churches were in fact two societies, differing fundamentally in outlook on both religious and social questions.’

The recent archaeological revelation that the pre-Conquest church of Wing in Buckinghamshire, on the confines of Wessex and Mercia, dates from the seventh century, has prompted an inquiry into the missionary activities of St Birinus. The archaeological evidence has established that the church of All Saints, Wing, was of basilican pattern, with a shallow apse above a crypt containing a ‘confessio,’ or chamber for relics, immediately under the altar. As in the arrangement of the church plans associated with the Canterbury mission of St Augustine, a small square altar at Wing was built on the chord of the apse, and not at the eastern end of the church. The construction of the crypt indicates that, following Roman tradition, there were passages descending from the nave to the crypt, and an aperture low down at the eastern side of the ‘confessio,’ enabling worshippers in a kneeling position to revere the shrine.

Ecclesiastical historians are already aware of the richness of the British Museum in canonical manuscripts of all kinds. The Royal Library alone preserves at least one copy of the greater number of major canonical collections, as well as an imposing range of the works of leading commentators, decretists and decretalists alike, glosses and summae, together with the fascinating, if minor, canonistic exercises known as distinctiones, abbreviations, casus, quaestiones, transformationes and notabilia. A history of the canon law of the medieval Church could in most essentials be written on the basis of these considerable and varied sources. What is perhaps rather less familiar is the particular value of these manuscripts to the historian of the medieval English Church, both in a positive and a negative way: negative in the sense of the ample evidence provided of a rapid and wide-spread reception of ecclesiastical common law in England; and positive in the sense of the record preserved of the initiative and originality revealed by English canonists, and of the contribution which they made in turn to the law of the Universal Church.

It must have been exceedingly galling to Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, greatest of eighth-century English rulers, one comparable in terms of personal ascendancy with Charlemagne, that his midland kingdom, though politically the master, was ecclesiastically the servant of Kent. The archbishop of Canterbury, he would be well aware, kept princely state and coined his own money, and with the decline of the Kentish kings held an increasing political power. A hostile archbishop could be a serious obstacle to the overlordship of the Mercian king in Kent, and indeed Jaenbert, archbishop during the greater part of Offa’s reign, was a supporter of the Kentish king, Egbert II, a ruler distinctly shaky in the matter of loyalty to Offa. It seems to have been about 765 that Offa’s overlordship was recognised in the south-eastern kingdom, and from this time onwards he would be increasingly restive under the commanding position of the archbishop of Canterbury. It seems clear that Offa decided to reduce this power, and this could best be done by the establishment of an archbishopric for Mercia, able to rival or even outdo Canterbury. A precedent had already been set in 735, when the bishop of York, Egbert, secured the pallium, and Offa doubtless thought that his dignity deserved what the much inferior kingdom of Northumbria had obtained. So much was possibly in his mind; all he wanted was a favourable opportunity to implement his plan.

The purpose of this short communication is to call attention to an attempt to establish a definitive calendar of Pope Innocent III’s letters to Ireland, and also to indicate very briefly the value of those letters. The two chief ways in which papal letters have been transmitted are through originals or through copies. Copies of letters have survived in a variety of ways: in monastic or episcopal cartularies, in the rolls of royal chancery, in collections of canon law, but for this period mainly in the official papal registers.

The dispersal of monastic archives during the Reformation period, together with the deliberate destruction of papal letters after 1536, partly explains why comparatively few original papal letters of medieval popes to the British Isles have survived. For Ireland, only five original letters of Innocent III are at present known to exist. Two of these are confirmations of property: one to the monastery of St Andrew of Stokes of its possessions in Ireland; and the other to the convent of Graney. The three remaining letters are connected with the peace settlement between Pope Innocent III and King John.

The Church always demanded that the two partners to a marriage should be not only of the Christian faith but also of the same creed and dogma. Marriage with infidels and Jews was declared illegal; but so also was marriage with heretics and, in Byzantine law, with ‘gentiles,’ or those not within the orbit of the Byzantine Church and Empire. The fourteenth canon of the Council of Chalcedon forbade an Orthodox Christian to contract ‘a marriage with a heretic woman’; the seventy-second canon of the Council in Trullo repeated this prohibition, adding that such a marriage, if contracted, should be dissolved; and in the twelfth century the Byzantine canonist Theodore Balsamon ruled that the female partners in such marriages should be excommunicated. These warnings were solemnly reiterated in the imperial legislation of Byzantium from the time of Justinian onwards.

Archbishop Pecham’s register is not only interesting as the first surviving Canterbury register, but also because an attempt has been made in it to abandon the older chronological arrangement for some sort of classification of documents in order to facilitate rapid consultation. The scheme adopted is unique among English registers, being that used by the Curia, for the letters are divided into ‘littere directe pape et cardinalibus,’ ‘littere regi,’ ‘littere episcopis’ and ‘littere communes.’ This order, however, is not rigidly followed, for there is a special section of’littere directe domino pape,’ and many letters to bishops are included among the ‘littere communes.’ Nevertheless, the arrangement was probably due to John of Bologna, the Italian notary brought by Pecham to England. To make consultation even easier, each leaf on which they occur has the heading ‘littere communes’ followed by the year of the archiepiscopate. There is also a rough sub-classification, not very systematically followed.

Augustus Jessopp, reporting in 1891 for the Historical Manuscripts Commission on the records of the bishop of Ely, found three stores of documents: Ely House, Dover Street; the consistory court in Great St Mary’s church at Cambridge; and the palace at Ely. This division seems to have been customary since the sixteenth century and ended only when the bishop of Ely, Bishop Lord Alwyne Compton, had the contents of all three repositories moved, first into Bishop Alcock’s tower in the palace at Ely where Alfred Gibbons saw and listed them, and then into the ‘old prison,’ now 4 Lynn Road, Ely, where they remained until their transfer, in June 1962, to the Cambridge University Library. The consistory court had been a store of current records as long as the registrars or their deputies had their office in Cambridge; but about 1790 the diocesan registry seems to have been transferred to Ely, at which time began the long connection with the diocese of the firm of Evans and Son, solicitors, members of which firm acted as registrars almost without interruption from then until 1959. In Messrs. Evans’s office, and also since 1902 in the ‘old prison,’ the registrars had accumulated a considerable store of documents. These, too, have come to the University Library, where the Church Commissioners have also deposited the records of the Ely episcopal estates which they have held since the mid-nineteenth century.

The problem with which this paper is concerned is the present poverty of material to illustrate the policies which the English delegates to the Council of Constance were intended to carry out. The problem is one of particular interest in the case of the most important group among these delegates, the ambassadors of Henry V. There is no great difficulty in tracing their activity in the Council between the autumn of 1414 and the spring of 1418 since this is recorded in the official and unofficial records of its proceedings, but it is not always possible to identify and then establish with documents the motives behind their actions. Partly this is due to the absence of reports of the discussions within the separate nations into which the Council was divided; partly it is due to the large gaps in the correspondence between principals in England and their representatives at Constance.