Archbishop Matthew Parker's claim to a place of respect in the estimation of posterity is as nearly secure as could be hoped for by any historical figure. This secure position is based primarily upon his implementation of the Elizabethan Settlement, his scholarship, his conveyance of an impression of mildness in an age not especially notable for its tolerance, and, finally, his efficiency as an administrator. As archbishop of Canterbury he had many functions and duties of national importance. He was royal advisor, president of the Convocation of the Clergy, visitor of Oxford Colleges, gaoler of deprived bishops, host to foreign dignitaries, sede vacante ordinary (i.e. temporary acting bishop in sees which fell vacant), one of the Queen's Commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical, etc.

Until comparatively recently the origins of the movement known as the devotio moderna attracted curiously little attention in this country. It was judged too medieval and too orthodox in character to have had much influence upon the course of reform, and the Anglican habit of relating all reforming movements to the Reformation did not allow it its rightful place in the history of the Christian spiritual life; from another angle, the sarcasms of Erasmus in his Compendium Vitae cast doubts about the disinterestedness of its teaching, and raised among humanists suspicions that its aims and methods were ultimately obscurantist. Its reforming activities were mainly associated with the efforts of a single wing of, or group within, the movement that aimed at reforming the religious houses along the lines of the Augustinian convents of Agnetenburg and Windesheim, and small attention was paid to its appeal to the laity and its attempt to combat self-satisfied materialism among the prosperous middle classes in the towns. And the fact that it was, at any rate in its beginning, essentially a local movement, confined in the main to the western part of the ecclesiastical province of Cologne, still further confined its appeal.

The chronicle of Robert the Monk is a well-known source for the First Crusade and the most copied First Crusade narrative in the Middle Ages. Though the number of copies decreased after the twelfth century, it increased in the fifteenth, with most of these later copies either being preserved in German-speaking lands or originating from there. It is possible that a First Crusade narrative was needed in fifteenth-century German-speaking lands because of their proximity to the struggle against the Ottomans, and the chronicle of Robert the Monk was the only one widely available for copying.

The appearance of the contemporary archbishop of Canterbury in the crises and conflicts of later medieval England has never surprised historians. For not only by tradition but in terms of real political weight the archbishop, unlike his brother of York, had a part to play in the affairs of the realm which he could scarcely hope to avoid, no matter how invidious. Appointed almost invariably with the close and usually decisive interest of the Crown in mind, the archbishop could anticipate repeated calls from the Crown for his support, counsel and service. However, thoughtful contemporaries and broadminded historians alike have for the most part been at pains to put this particular aspect into the wider context of the archiepiscopal function as a whole; the approaching cloud of the Reformation has not deceived historians into underestimating the considerable stature and merits of the metropolitans of this period. Whatever unsatisfactory reasons of state, ambition or faction lay behind their promotion, almost to a man they performed their arduous duties, with their diverse and often contradictory obligations, with good intent, frequent self-sacrifice and more often than not considerable success, at least in the eyes of the orthodox churchmen of their own time. If their political appearances alone have entered the textbooks, closer observers have been aware that the care of the Church was their first concern, and political involvement a distraction and a burden. At times the service of two masters posed its dilemmas, but usually the Crown preserved the archiepiscopal position by a fundamental respect for its other loyalties to God, the pope and the Church, and did not call for an irrevocable commitment fracturing these obligations.

This article examines the development of Protestant thought in early Elizabethan England by analysing James Pilkington's 1560 commentary on the Old Testament book of Aggeus (Haggai). Pilkington's commentary contained ideas about the Church and its reform that had deep affinities with radical Marian Protestant thought about purity, separation and resistance to ungodly monarchs. The way in which Pilkington transformed these ideas in a time of Protestant political ascendancy provides valuable insights into the nature and development of English Puritanism.

Among the Puritan ‘martyrs’ celebrated by Samuel Clarke and Daniel Neal, few have been more frequently mentioned and less carefully considered than Richard Sibbes (1577–1635). Sibbes, primarily remembered as Preacher of Gray's Inn and author of The Bruised Reede, has been presented as one of a number of early Stuart preachers who neither approved nor practised bending the knee in communion, nor wearing the surplice, nor signing the cross in baptism, and yet who somehow remained within the Established Church. He was, it is reported, constantly troubled by Laud. Doubly deprived, censured and silenced, Sibbes became a model for his numerous disciples – among them Thomas Goodwin, John Davenport, John Cotton – who would later find their way into dissent. It is supposed that only the power of his lawyer-friends and noble patrons allowed him to retain his ministry at Gray's Inn for almost two decades. After his death, his writings became almost entirely the possession of Nonconformists and Sibbes came to be read through separatist spectacles. And yet, although remembered as espousing a robustly reformed theology, his moderation was particularly admired by those who followed him. Sibbes seemed to stand above the tumult of the times, ‘to preserve the vitals and essentials of religion, that the souls of his hearers, being captivated with the inward beauty and glory of Christ, and being led into an experimental knowledge of heavenly truths, theirspirits might not evaporate and discharge themselves in endless, gainless, soul-unedifying, and conscience-perplexing questions’.

In 1541 the new bishopric of Chester was compounded of the archdeaconries of Richmond and Chester, severed respectively from the vast sees of York and Lichfield. The annexing of Chester to Richmond, though not originally intended, seemed reasonable on geographical grounds, since they had a common boundary, the Ribble, in Lancashire. It may have been prompted also by the fact that since 1529 Dr. William Knight had held both archdeaconries in plurality, so that their surrender (for which he received the see of Bath and Wells) presented no great difficulties. As for the head of the diocese, Chester was the obvious place, having from 1075 to 1102 housed the cathedra which Lanfranc had moved from Lichfield; this brief elevation of Chester in the eleventh century was tenaciously commemorated long after the bishops had ceased to style themselves by that title in the 1140s, and as late as 1522 a royal minister in an official record could write of ‘the bishop of Chester’, meaning Blythe, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Furthermore, Chester was the most substantial town in the proposed diocese and in it there was an institution fit to be a cathedral: St. Werburgh's abbey, of great antiquity and wealth, and lately dissolved. In Richmond archdeaconry the claims of Fountains abbey, at first seriously entertained, were jeopardised by its remote and sparsely inhabited location. Another factor, too, may have operated in the separation of Chester archdeaconry from the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, in its union with Richmond, and in its selection for the bishop's seat, for in some ways it had fitted as uncomfortably into that diocese as Richmond had into York.