Paul Tagaris was a Byzantine Greek, born perhaps in the 1320s. Only in quite recent years has his name been unearthed from the documents in which it had for long been lurking unobserved. Fr. R.-J. Loenertz, O.P., and Fr. Joseph Gill, S.J., have both, though independently, assembled most of the evidence for his remarkable career. This article can add only a few details to that evidence. But it has been thought worth-while to present the whole story as a connected narrative worthy of the attention of ecclesiastical historians.

The dissolution of the monasteries in England was a dramatic action which both at the time and since has captured popular imagination. A persisting myth pictures the monks turned out by the agents of Henry VIII departing, slowly chanting, into the snow-bound countryside which shrouded their later fate from human eyes. Historians, who have been equally drawn to the subject, have given the picture a different slant. The story of the suppression has been fitted into a wider background of fast-moving religious and secular change in the decade 1530 to 1540, and can be seen as one of a number of moves which were designed at once to strengthen the king's control over the Church and to improve his finances. By 1536, indeed, the religious were already accustomed to the passage of royal commissioners and had had the power of the crown brought forcibly home to them by a number of direct royal interventions in matters of internal monastic discipline.

There are several reasons why the study of the works of Sidonius Apollinaris should be of particular interest to ecclesiastical historians. He represents in a peculiar way the end of the old régime, under which Christianity had taken root and had begun to spread, and the beginning of the new period which we call the Middle Ages. He was a devoted admirer of the Roman imperial system, a devotee of the Muses of Roman poetry and prose, but also, in the second part of his life, a bishop of the Christian Church. He was born about 430, when the emperor Valentinian III, who could be reasonably represented as the scion of a legitimate dynasty, was apparently in secure possession of the imperial throne. He died about 480, bishop of a see in a barbarian kingdom, a few years after the last Roman puppet-emperor had been dethroned. He has left us not only poems and panegyrics but also letters dealing, among other things, with the day-to-day problems of his see. His contribution to our knowledge of the Gallic Church of the mid-fifth-century—a dark period by any standard of measurement—must be of great value, and perhaps a fresh survey of certain aspects of it may not be unfruitful.

Dr. Philip McNair of Cambridge has written the definitive account of Pietro Martire Vermigli in Italy. After fleeing from Lucca (1542), Vermigli began his exile at Strasburg (1542–7), continued on to Oxford (1547–56) and ended a brilliant theological career at Zürich (1556–62). This scholar who so deeply impressed John Calvin merits serious attention. Recent articles point to Vermigli's influence on the Book of Common Prayer. It is time to add a preliminary study of his biblical exegesis to the scant secondary literature on Vermigli's theology. Here lies the fascination Vermigli held for both Calvin and Cranmer.

The great bay of the Sierra Leone estuary is a show-piece of tropical scenic beauty, and the nineteenth-century hymn-writer may well have been alluding to it when he spoke wistfully of the land where ‘every prospect pleases…’ Four centuries before that, the first visitors from Europe compared the wild peaked hills on the south side of the estuary, as they crackled with thunder in the summer storms, to the proud mane of a roaring African lion; and they gave Sierra Leone (originally Serra Lyoa, ‘The Leonine Hills’) its name. On the north side of the estuary, long golden beaches are still today backed only by mop-headed palms and by slow-rising smoke from hut- or bush-fires. The estuary runs from the Atlantic to the east, and its throat closes round a score of islets: seen from the entrance channel, they reminded a seventeenth-century French captain of ‘hay-stacks on a distant field’.

In order to understand the crusading movement it has always been necessary to define what was understood by the ‘crusade’ as a religious exercise within the Christian tradition. This attempt to identify the ‘crusade idea’ goes back to the earliest commentators on the First Crusade, but has gained increasing vitality during the last thirty years. It is not a matter of weighing the relative importance of, on the one hand, the religious and, on the other, the secular or political motives, but of describing the content of the nova religio as such. In this sense Erdmann, who first set up the subject as capable of disciplined study, traced the antecedents in socio-religious forms of behaviour without which the Kreuzzugsidee could not have been conceived, regarding it as in its essentials formulated at the launching of the First Crusade, with Jerusalem as only a minor and ancillary target. Alphandéry, to single out another notable contributor to this type of study, diagnosed the dramatic emergence of a distinctive idée de croisade during the very course of the First Crusade, concentrated on the deliverance of the Holy Places, a unique experience never to be wholly repeated. Another notion of the ‘crusade’ was developed by Rousset—an institution de salut with its characteristic ideology, entertained generally during the first half of the twelfth century.5 There are studies also of the ideas associated with crusading in the crusade appeals, preaching, justification and criticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the forms of procedure, and in Latin and vernacular poetry.

Within a decade after the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy to England and Wales in 1850, cardinal Nicholas Wiseman found himself engaged in a significant struggle with the archdiocesan chapter of Westminster. The fundamental issue involved the right of the chapter to interfere in matters which, as they appeared to Wiseman, were clearly within the sole jurisdiction of the bishop. A number of other controversial matters became almost inextricably tied to the dispute, so that litigation, in England and in Rome, plagued the cardinal to the end of his life.

An eminent reformation historian of the present day has complained that histories of the Tudor period have concentrated on ‘too few and too untypical figures’. The observation is most apposite with regard to the opening phases of the English reformation. Reformation figures of more ordinary metal have been neglected as a result of a preoccupation with the few whose lives, and deaths also in some cases, were more spectacular. Furthermore, and for the same reason, even those who were not consigned to oblivion have been frequently misrepresented. To some extent the subject of this study, George Browne, claims the attention of the modern research worker on both counts.

During the period of Laudian supremacy in the 1630's many of the bishops pursued a rigorous policy of enforcing the Book of Common Prayer ‘w[i]thout addition, alteration or diminution’. They found that ‘the Divine Service in ye forenoones is neither performed w[i]th that solemnity of time, manner, and ord[e]r, w[hi]ch of right it ought, nor frequented and attended by those that belong to the severall parishes’. Bishop Wren of Norwich, who was, perhaps, Laud's most forthright supporter deliberately went to stay in Ipswich, the main Puritan centre in his diocese, and in June 1636 celebrated divine service in full ‘which had never been there observed before’. Wren, in common with other Laudian bishops, maintained that the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer required him to decide the precise form which services should take in the diocese, because it stated that ‘for the resolution of all doubts, concerning the manner how to understand, do, and execute, the things contained in this Book; the parties…shall always resort to the bishop of the diocese, who by his discretion shall take order for the quieting and appeasing of the same’. Archbishop Laud expressed himself well satisfied with Wren's work in this matter, and told Charles I in his annual report to the king at the end of 1637 that ‘divine service…is diligently frequented; and that beyond what could suddenly be hoped for in such a diocese, and in the midst of the humourousness of this age’. Charles I told Wren ‘not to desist from enforcing all canonical observance’ in the diocese.

One of the features in common in sixteenth-century episcopal visitations in England, whether Catholic or Reformed, is enquiry after usurers. Bonner's Articles for London in 1554 may be compared in this respect with Grindal's Injunctions for York 17 years later: ‘…Whether in the City of London or diocese of the same name there be any person that is a notorious and common usurer, which lendeth his money for unlawful and excessive gain and lucre, contrary to the manifest words of scripture, to the evil example of other Christian people, to the danger of his own soul, and to the utter undoing and hindrance of many, especially if poor and young beginners, borrowing for their necessity?’ ‘…the churchwardens and sworn men of every parish shall half yearly from time to time present unto the Ordinary the names of all such persons of their parish…as be usurers, that is to say, all those who lend money, corn, ware, or other thing, and receive gain thereof over and above that which they lend’.

The Gestapo arrived at Martin Niemöller's rectory in Berlin-Dahlem on the morning of 1 July 1937. He was taken away for questioning and remained a prisoner for nearly eight years. His detention came as no personal surprise since he had been aware of his perilous existence. Ever since Hitler's accession to power in January 1933, the uneasy relations between Church and State had received a certain amount of attention abroad. The precise issues at stake were, however, difficult to grasp. This complexity remained, but as the struggle appeared to centre on the fate of one man—Niemöller—interest became more widespread. Thirty years later, in England, whenever the Church Struggle is mentioned, the name of Niemöller most readily comes to mind.

Commencing with the Waldensian movement in the twelfth century and continuing with the Lollard and Hussite movements in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, critical thinkers in the Christian tradition began to stress the basic equality of all believers. The ideology of Protestantism embraced that principle in its doctrine of ‘the priesthood of all believers’, though the interpretation of the doctrine varied considerably. A century and a quarter after the inception of the Protestant Reformation, English writers engaged in a full-fledged debate on the right to preach. Before the debate had concluded, the original, strictly religious question had given rise to issues of much greater import, and in so doing had helped to create the spirit of reform which was the hallmark of Puritan England.

If it is true that the built-in principle of radical self-criticism is one of the marks of the Reformation tradition, contemporary students of Reformation thought have a valid claim upon their place in its authentic succession. Though more slowly and with occasional relapses into an earlier stance of confessional apologetics, this applies increasingly also to studies dealing with the relation of the theology of Luther and Calvin.

‘No portion of our annals’, Macaulay wrote in 1828, ‘has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation’. In the early years of the nineteenth century, when polemicists turned to history more often than to philosophy or theology, the Reformation was the subject most littered with the pamphlets of partisan debate. Macaulay could have cited numerous examples. Joseph Milner's popular History of the Church of Christ (1794–1809) set the Reformation in sharp contrast to the ‘Dark Ages’ when only occasional gleams of evangelical light could be detected, thus providing the Evangelical party with a historic lineage; Robert Sou they, in his Book of the Church (1824), presented a lightly-veiled argument for the retention of the existing order of Church and State as established in the sixteenth century; and in 1824 William Cobbett began the first of his sixteen weekly instalments on a history of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland, in order to call attention to the plight of labourers in the British Isles. In the history of the Reformation, duly manipulated (‘rightly interpreted’), men found precedents for their own positions and refutation of their opponents' arguments.

Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries the Church of England and the Nordic Churches had by no means uncommon contacts, which extended, on at least one occasion, in the correspondence between the Reverend Edward Lye and Carl Jasper Benzelius, to matters specifically ecumenical. From the Restoration period there was a Scandinavian presence in London, which was graced with a remarkable degree of religious freedom virtually amounting to ‘most favoured nation’ treatment, and the contemporaneous English commercial colonies at Elsinor and Gothenburg enabled some members, at least, of the Anglican Church to observe their Scandinavian counterparts in their native habitat. Yet, notwithstanding these apparent advantages, Anglicans, on the whole, remained more ignorant of the Episcopal Churches of Northern Europe than of the Dutch, French and Swiss Reformed Churches, and the one cross-influence which there was in this period, through bishop Jacob Serenius of Strängäs, was apparently so superficial that nothing of significance could be built upon it. Part of the reason was, no doubt, that Scandinavia and Iceland were outside the normal itinerary of the Grand Tour and also outside the main channels of eighteenth-century British diplomacy. This being so, the peculiar external characteristics of Lutheranism, particularly its northerly variety, were likely to baffle and deter those rare Englishmen who came face to face with it.

In the numerous studies of the life of Cardinal Newman, there has frequently been too much attention paid to his own personal development while the circle in which he moved has been ignored. This is particularly true of some of his early associations at Oxford.