It has long been recognized that medieval representations of the Holy Innocents are much concerned with the horrendous cruelty of their passion. They are often cited as evidence that the Church, putting a high priority on loving parenthood, attempted to raise the standard of Christian child-care, and it is indeed clear that their rhetoric depends upon a degree of sympathy for suffering children. This paper aims to suggest, however, that the history of this theme shows how the construction of their sanctity was influenced by the changing place of childhood in matters of theology and spirituality. It will show, I hope, that the emphasis on the Innocents’ suffering needs to be seen in the context of the Origenist controversy, that there was an erosion of this theme’s importance in later representations of the infants, and that this shift reflected a desire on the part of monastic authors to adapt the now established cult of the Innocents to new-found spiritual needs.

The controversy which concerns us now, as it once concerned the thirteenth-century participants, centres upon the king’s right to demand corrodies in monastic establishments for his own nominees. Thus it is necessary to begin by defining the term ‘corrody’ in the present context. In describing a corrody as ‘nothing more than an allowance consisting of a share in a common fund’, Professor Hamilton Thompson neatly encapsulated the multifarious forms which it could take; he also drew attention to its potentially disastrous effects when he noted that at least one person, who should have known better, believed that corrodies were so called because they were corrosive. The allowances or provisions were specified in a written agreement between the monastic chapter and the prospective recipient and might include board, lodging, items of clothing, and cash payments, or any one of these, or a combination of them; and so they were often entered on monastic officials’ expense accounts as annuities, pensions, or liveries (liherationes). Acting on their own initiative and often against episcopal injunctions, religious houses in financial straits made such grants to laymen, whose wives were sometimes included, in return for a lump sum or a donation of property. The corrodian who paid cash or bequeathed part of his estate provided an immediate and welcome boost in income for the community which received him, and he and his family gained security and comfort in their declining years. But the financial relief for the monastery which had guaranteed hospitality for life could, and did, turn into a liability when the beneficiaries lived longer than had been anticipated. In addition, outsiders, by virtue of their rights as founders and benefactors, made certain claims on religious houses, among which was the requisition of corrodies on behalf of relatives or retainers. It was this form of exploitation in which the King himself was the chief offender, and Henry III, in financial straits, would argue that he was in principle the patron of all religious establishments in the country.

Amongst the manuscripts bequeathed to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, by Matthew Parker in 1575 is one of the most important surviving collections of sources for the history of the north of England in the twelfth century. Manuscript 139, as it now is, contains, amongst other items, unique, or almost unique, copies of the so-called Historia Regum, which had been ascribed to Symeon of Durham before the end of the twelfth century, its continuation by John of Hexham, and the History of Richard of Hexham. It was a prime, and in part a unique, source of Twysden’s pioneering edition of 1652, and its value is in no way diminished today. This apart, the manuscript is of great interest as a manuscript, and the problems of its date, provenance and composition are still the subject of debate. The most recent and definitive account of the manuscript was given by Peter Hunter Blair in a fifty-five page article contributed to the volume of essays edited by Nora Chadwick under the title Celt and Saxon. His conclusions, which supersede all earlier views, were that the manuscript was compiled in the period c 1165–70 at the cistercian house of Sawley in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and the subsequent discovery of an erased Sawley ex libris, now visible only in ultra-violet light, and dated by Ker to the late twelfth/early thirteenth century, reinforced his view. Yet there still remain problems and uncertainties, and my purpose here is first to sketch in a little of the history of the manuscript in its present form, and secondly, by further examination of particular aspects of its to supplement and qualify Blair’s conclusions.

The question posed in this paper is the extent and nature of the medical practice of the medieval waldensian brothers. What lies behind this is in part a historiographical development which gained impetus in the 1960s, principally in the works of Mollat. In these the the period of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries has been identified as crucial in several areas: a prise de conscience by many of the problems of material need, whether poverty or physical sickness or other disabilities, and the development of new ideas in some of these areas; a peaking of foundations of institutions of assistance, in particular hospitals for the sick, the outlines of which have become clear in Belgian and French work; the embodiment of the spiritual ideal of poverty in the apostolic religious movements which grew at this time. Mollat has juxtaposed these phenomena in order to suggest that one should look for interconnections between them, and it is in the spirit of his enquiry that the present question is raised. If we look at one of the two major evangelical heresies nurtured in the late twelfth cenury matrix described by Mollat, namely the movement of the waldensian brothers, shall we find an element which should be related to the wider interests and developments in assistance and, in particular, medical care which were displayed elsewhere at this time?

The Glorious Revolution encouraged Presbyterians to hope for comprehension within the Church of England. The failure of those hopes led them to co-operate more closely with their Congregational brethren. In London the earliest practical outcome of this increased co-operation was the Common Fund, which held its first meeting in June 1690. Controlled by managers drawn from both denominations, the Fund was established to offer financial help to poor ministers, congregations, and students who lived in the provinces. A scheme for uniting the two ministries, the Happy Union, set out in the ‘Heads of Agreement’, was adopted a year later on 6 April 1691, but within months this union had dissolved amidst bitter dissension. In less than four years all the schemes for co-operation between Presbyterians and Congregationals had collapsed in London. Nevertheless, co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents, and even the ideals of the Happy Union, continued in the provinces long after the failure in London. In part this was because the desire for a union between the two denominations was widely held throughout the country; indeed the earliest agreement was made by an Assembly of West Country ministers at Bristol in June 1690, nearly a year before the ‘Heads of Agreement’ were adopted in London. Moreover, in many localities following toleration, Presbyterians and Independents still came together in one meeting as a result of the earlier persecution and because of their loyalty to a particular minister. Where dissent was strong, such as in London and the major towns, separate congregations for Presbyterians and Congregational were likely; but where dissent was weaker, particularly in the countryside, congregations included members from both denominations. In these circumstances, members had to accept a minister who did not necessarily share their own denominational preferences. During the first two decades of the eighteenth century the majority of these joint congregations were to divide, as (in most cases) the smaller body of Congregational supporters withdrew to establish their own meetings. There had, however, been more than twenty years of co-operation in many areas in the period following the collapse of the Happy Union in London, and in a few cases such arrangements even continued until the early nineteenth century. There is evidence from at least two congregations, at Leicester and Chesterfield, of a formal agreement to settle the differences between the two denominations. The Happy Union and its failure in London has been the subject of a number of studies, but by contrast the continuing co-operation between Presbyterians and Independents in the provinces has received little detailed attention.

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.

The picture drawn by Chaucer in the Friar’s Tale is a little journalistic, not to say sensational, and it deals with only some aspects of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of his day, yet it leaves us in no doubt as to the importance of the courts, and of the way in which they were regarded in some quarters. Perhaps the picture was overdrawn, and true only of the half century or so within Chaucer’s own knowledge. On the other hand it has recently been demonstrated that these same courts furnished some at least of the excuses for royal and parliamentary action at the outset of the reformation, and there seems to be good reason for a closer look at them in this context. Most of all, however, for those whose principal interest is the quality of medieval life, it is desirable to consider the institution during the whole period for which there is some sort of continuous record of its working, that is, for the years covered by my title. There is no doubt that such a study should reveal a considerable section of the public and private life of the time, and while in the limits of this paper I can do no more than skim the surface of my material I hope that I shall persuade others to make further and deeper studies.

The first brief writing of Calvin to appear in print was the epistle to the French jurisconsult François de Connan, which preceded the short treatise Antapologia issued by Calvin’s fellow student Nicholas Duchemin against the Italian jurisconsult Alciati. In this epistle, headed Ioannes Calvinus Francisco Connano iuris studiosissimo, Calvin wrote ‘. . .our friend Duchemin who, as you know, is a man most careful in his studies, of perspicacious mind, and what is of the first importance, of the most penetrating judgement; and who is abundantly learned in the best literature has now become engaged upon, and has already been engaged upon, legal studies. . .’: every word here could have been applied to himself. The occasion of this dedication, written in March 1531, when Calvin was a young law student of twenty-two at Orléans, was the eagerness of Duchemin and Calvin to support their admired master, Pierre de l’Estoile, against the devious method of attack by Alciati at Bourges, who had published a criticism, under the name of a pupil or under a pseudonym, of l’Estoile’s interpretation of a point of civil law wherein he had shown that Alciati on this point had borrowed from the greatest of French classical scholars, Guillaume Budé, without acknowledgment.

When leading churchmen and statesmen cast around for ways of restoring the health of English society at the end of the eighteenth century, the theme to which they constantly returned was the renewal of the parish. The parish was the basic social unit in church and state, small enough to be conceived in terms of personal relationships. On the principle that, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves, it seemed obvious that if you could make the parish a healthy harmonious unit, then die life of the nation as a whole would become healthy and harmonious. Ideally the parish was a large family, with the squire as its father and the incumbent as its spiritual father. Southey wrote in the Quarterly Review in 1820:

John le neve is alive and well and is living in the university of London. Indeed, letters are still addressed to him: he received one quite recently from his present publisher, the Athlone Press. It was in 1716 that this petulant, not to say paranoid, cleric confounded his enemies and his creditors by publishing his Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae. The volume represented years of tiresome research, and it could be argued that Le Neve made a better job with the materials at his disposal than did his nineteenth-century reviser and continuator, T. Duffus Hardy, whose edition appeared in three volumes in 1854.

Dangers to the cohesion of the Anglo-Norman regnum correlate to a marked extent with the fluctuating patronage extended by the Anglo-Norman kings towards Westminster Abbey, and other religious houses, in their search for one which would symbolize and enhance the stability of their dynasty.

Westminster itself had royal connections from the outset. The original church of St Peter, on Thorney Island in the Thames, to the west of London, was founded by Saebert, king of the East Saxons, and his wife Ethelgoda.’ The couple were allegedly buried there early in the seventh century, but it was some four hundred and fifty years before further royal burials took place in St Peter’s The church was restored by Offa of Essex in the early years of the eighth century, and c959 king Edgar sold it to Dunstan, who founded a monastery on the site. Edgar gave several manors to this abbey, and Aethelred II gave or confirmed others. Less exalted donors followed suit, and the house was already fairly prosperous when Harold I Harefoot was buried there in 1040. His successor and half-brother Harthacnut, is said to have had his body thrown out.

In 1852 an American medium, Maria Hayden, crossed the Atlantic, landed in London and began offering séances in fashionable salons. From this point on, and certainly well into the twentieth century, spiritualism proved attractive to many. What spiritualism offered was, primarily, an extravagant claim: that it was possible for the living to communicate with the departed. By various means, people from all classes, religious traditions and geographical locations ‘tried’ the spirits, seeking to make contact with famous characters from history or departed family members. Spiritualism offered, sometimes, spectacular signs and wonders: flying furniture, levitating mediums and ghostly presences, all of which attracted the attention of journalists. Fashions for such signs came and went; the claim to communicate with the dead, however, remained at the heart of spiritualism.

Tensions between public and private forms of religiosity have been endemic to Christianity since its institutionalization during the first four centuries AD. That process was in part characterized by the clerical curtailment of alternative routes of divine access which bypassed the structures of the Church and the controls which it operated: most notably, Scripture and sacrament. Acts had imagined the last Christian days as a spiritual age of prophecy, visions and dreams, but the rapid association of such phenomena with rigorist, schismatic or heretical groups – particularly the Gnostics, Montanists and Manichaeans – rendered them suspect if scripturally unassailable. Dreaming – ‘the paradigm of the open frontier’, ‘epiphany’s most open level’ – became strictly delineated by episcopally defined typologies which restricted access to the divine and necessitated arbitration, thus protecting the centrality and authority of the Church. Those typologies not only emphasized the relative rarity of divinely inspired dreams (as opposed to the physiological or demonic), they also stressed the special status of the recipient. They thus partook of a late antique professionalization of the holy by which an emergent spiritual elite attempted to exercise an unprecedented monopoly on the supernatural.

At a great protest meeting in Glasgow against Ultramontanism in 1874, the Jesuits, those wily chameleons, were acccused of masquerading as members of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. That body was

The curious career of ‘Martin Marprelate, gentleman’ is one of the most notorious and at the same time elusive episodes in the history of English puritanism, inspiring endless if largely futile speculation into the identity of its author. Part literary canard, part political scandal, part detective story, for around a calendar year between October 1588 and September 1589, Martin and his associates kept one step ahead of the pursuivants and produced seven scurrilous tracts aimed at the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Adding spice to the story, their main targets, John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, and John Aylmer, bishop of London, were also the officers empowered by the Star Chamber in 1586 both to examine religious dissidents and to supervise the press. To keep up his cottage industry of satire and vilification, Marprelate moved his printing press from county to county (from Surrey to Northamptonshire to Warwickshire to Lancashire), from private dwelling to private dwelling, and turned the failure of his pursuers into further occasion for ridicule, insult, and his own popular triumph over adversity. Like a will o’ the wisp, he could disappear into the bushes and then emerge in a printed book whenever he wanted. Even after the main part of the operation was broken up and the typeface destroyed, he managed to get out one final tractlet as a last snook at the authorities. And then, whereas the printmen were examined and tortured, and Whitgift went after the more serious elements of the presbyterian cause with relentless violence, Martin himself escaped entirely.

Polydore Vergil (c.1470–1555) was a controversial critic of the church of his day. As this essay will show, his radical solution to its problems was based upon his reading of the church’s history. An Italian cleric on English soil for much of his life, Vergil is most famous for his Anglica Historia (1533), the first Tudor history of England. However, he was also responsible for another great (although now neglected) work, De Inventoribus Rerum (‘on the inventors, or discoverers, of all things’). Consisting of eight volumes, it is an example of early encyclopaedic technique from original Latin and Greek sources, including the Bible, Josephus and Eusebius, as well as observation from contemporary life, in which ‘invention’ is depicted as a category of historiography and a means of examining scientific and cultural history. The first three books were published in 1499 in Venice and deal mainly with scientific phenomena. The other five books, with which we are concerned here, consider the origins of Christian institutions (initia institutorum rei Christianae) and were published much later, in 1521, although Vergil continuously revised the entire De Inventoribus Rerum until his death. The topics covered range from early church history, baptism, clerical and religious orders, penance, prayers and simony, to heresies and schisms, martyrs and the triumph of Christianity. An extremely popular work, with over forty editions in Vergil’s lifetime, it was, nonetheless, censured for its criticisms of the church. Indeed, the purpose of Books IV–VIII was to demonstrate what was initiated by Christ and what the true nature of the church was, not by examining its doctrine but by seeking the origins of its practice.

The National Mission of Repentance and Hope, launched by the archbishops of Canterbury and York and led by the bishop of London in the autumn of 1916, has not been regarded as one of the more successful episodes in the history of the Church of England. Hensley Henson, who can always be relied upon for a suitable comment, called it ‘a grave, practical blunder’, whilst a very different type of churchman, Conrad Noel, called it ‘the Mission of Funk and Despair’. Its treatment in the secondary sources is curious. Bell has a chapter on it in his life of Randall Davidson, but it says much about Davidson and little about the Mission. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of Iremonger’s treatment in the life of Temple. S. C. Carpenter chose to omit the chapter on the National Mission from his life of Winnington-Ingram. Lloyd depends heavily on Bell; Wilkinson is more rounded, but the fullest account by Mews remains unpublished.

In the early nineteenth century, many in Britain believed that their conquests in India had a providential purpose, and that imperial Britain had been called by God to Christianize India through an alliance of Church and empire. In 1813, parliament not only opened India to missionary activity, but also provided India with an established Church, which was largely supported by Indian taxation and formed part of the established Church of England. Many hoped that this union of Church and empire would communicate to India the benefits of England's diocesan and parochial structures, with a settled pastorate, parish churches and schools, and a Christian gentry. As the century progressed, the established Church was steadily enlarged, with a growing number of bishoprics, churches, schools, colleges, missionaries and clergy. But it had only limited success in gaining converts, and many Indians viewed it as a form of colonization. From the 1870s, it was increasingly clear that imperial India would not become Christian. Some began reconceptualizing the providential purpose behind the Indian empire, suggesting that the purpose might be to promote dialogue and understanding between the religions of the East and West, or, through the selfless service of missionaries, to promote moral reform movements in Hinduism and Islam.