The reform of the Northumbrian Church constitutes a predominant theme in much that Bede wrote in his later years. Recent analyses of his later biblical commentaries have confirmed this, although a tendency remains to treat his historiographic masterpiece, theEcclesiastical history of the English people, completed in c. 731, as only aloofly reformist in outlook. This article contests such a view through an analysis of the narrative and characters of book iv, which when scrutinised can be seen to amplify some of the key reform-oriented issues voiced in Bede's last and most openly reformist work, theLetter to Egbert.

This article demonstrates that from the mid- to late fourteenth century the English clergy pursued a sustained campaign to protect episcopal temporalities from royal seizure by asserting the right of bishops to be judged by their peers in parliament. The most important stage of this movement came in the parliament of January 1352 when the clergy made a case for episcopal exceptionalism in English law. The legal identity of bishops in England underwent a seismic shift and it was conceded that in certain cases a bishop should be judged in accordance with his temporalities rather than his spiritual office.

One of the weaknesses of post-colonial theory has been a tendency to view colonialism in unitary and essentialist terms. This weakness is particularly evident in post-colonialism's treatment of missionary endeavour. This is the result of insufficient engagements with missionary texts. This article engages with one of the most remarkable missionary texts. Dan Crawford's Thinking black reveals an openness to Africa far in advance of prevailing ideas. While this enlightened attitude had its roots partially in the author's character, it was also an expression of the primitivism typical of the Brethren movement. We may therefore see Crawford as a paradigm of Brethren missions.

Professor L. A. Stone, writing on the ‘educational revolution’ of the period 1560–1640, came to the conclusion that one of the ‘most striking characteristics of the English Puritans was their belief in the value of education as a weapon against the three great evils of Ignorance, Prophaneness and Idleness’. He found that a significant number of puritan gentry and merchants supported the ‘teaching of the three R's and religion to the many, and Latin and religion to the few’ through the many scholarships and foundations that appear in this period. One may, however, question Stone's contention that the Puritans' educational motives were tied to the inculcation of obedience to the established social and political order. It is more than likely that, by spreading the Word of God, defeating what he calls the aesthetic and emotional attractions of the counter-reformation, and establishing a truly protestant nation, Puritans sought to educate a breed of reformed men dedicated to the coming of the Kingdom of God in their own lifetime. This, conceivably, was what was meant by a genuinely learned and protestant society.

The later 1550s in Sprain are remembered as the time of the discovery of ‘Lutheran’ groups in Valladolid and Seville and the ensuing reaction of the authorities: the autos de fe, as the Fernando de Valdés's Index librorum prohibitorum, the edict ordering all Spaniards (with few exceptions) studying or teaching abroad to return to Spain within four months. ‘Heresy’ was to be eradicated at home and Spain was to be preserved from contagion from beyond her frontiers. There was, however, a further subordinate aim: to capture and bring back to Spain those Spaniards who for reasons of religion had taken refuge in Northern Europe. When a dozen Hieronymite monks from San Isidro at Seville fled their monastery and their country in the late summer of 1557, one finds the Inquisitor General, in November of that year, sending a list of their names to the king in the Netherlands. Further lists of wanted heretics continued to be forwarded there when Philip had returned to Spain. Cardinal Granvelle, in a letter to the king of 18 October 1561, refers to ‘aquella escriptura que V. M. me embió venida de los inquisidores de Sevilla’. At the start of that year he had similarly referred to ‘un escripto venido de los inquisidores de Sevilla’ which the king had recently sent. In April 1562 the Margrave of Antwerp was replying to inquiries from Granvelle concerning persons named in the trials of Julian Hernandez (caught when in Seville, distributing Protestant literature, in 1557) and Fray Domingo de Guzmán.

In 1883 Osmund Airy published in the British Quarterly Review some ‘Notes on the reign of Charles II’, in which he stressed the fear of popery still felt by the average Englishman. He instanced this by describing the feelings aroused by the king's issue of an Indulgence in December 1662. ‘Charles’, he wrote, ‘was not long left in ignorance of the feelings he had roused … The meeting, as we should say, spoke at once through its chairman’. ‘We were fortunate enough some while ago’, Airy continues, ‘while searching in the British Museum on this subject, to find a letter which we believe has not anywhere been noticed, addressed to the King by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, who appears to represent completely the savage side of the Anglican Church’. Airy proceeded to quote the letter in full, noting ‘this is written within three months after the proposal for comprehension, probably in January’. The letter is violent in tone, referring, for instance, to ‘that most damnable and heretical doctrine of the Church of Rome, whore of Babylon’, and warning the king that by his action he may draw upon himself and the kingdom in general ‘God's heavy wrath and indignation’. A number of later historians have followed Airy in attributing the letter to Sheldon, though not without surprise at the unlikely language.