Most scholars, one imagines, of sixteenth-century Scotland will think that Giovanni Ferrerio was a fairly marginal figure at the remote edge of Scottish life, his interest confined to his brief sojourn as tutor to the Cistercian monks at Kinloss and his work as continuator of Hector Boece’s history covering the reign of James III. Whether he might have had any say in Scottish ecclesiastical or educational policies or any wider contact with the court or leading Scots of the time and whether indeed he may have acted as a vehicle for the entry of Italian ideas, are questions that so far have scarcely been broached.

On a mild spring evening in late April 1537 a group of men from the Wiltshire villages of Mere and Bledney sat drinking ‘without the door’ of a neighbour, William Brownyng. It was St Mark’s Day, traditionally a holy-day on which labour was forbidden, but recently demoted by royal command. Thomas Poole had accordingly gone about his normal work that day, but was denounced by John Tutton as a heretic ‘because he wrought on St Mark’s day’. Poole defended himself by invoking the new law, tempers flared, and Tutton imprudently aired his opinion that the moving spirit behind the new reforms, Thomas Cromwell, was, like all his ‘witholders’ a ‘stark heretic’; ‘Shall I obey the King’s commandment and it be naught?’ he asked. ‘Marry I will not.’

‘The Church of England’ declared a leading article in The Times on 8 July 1980 ‘is the British national church’. Such a novel declaration produced apoplexy at the presidential breakfast-table. My topic is an impossibly wide one, only tackled previously, in his distinctive fashion, by Dr Daniel Jenkins. I cannot hope to cover every aspect of it. That apparently innocent sentence in the newspaper does, however, provide me with my text. Its context was an article concerning itself with the possibility that the Prince of Wales might marry a Roman Catholic. Not even a president of the Ecclesiastical History Society can offer comment as to probabilities in this matter and, like The Times, we are only concerned with principles. Concluding, perhaps not surprisingly, that it would seem intolerable to the ‘broad public’ that an excellent heir to the throne should be excluded because of his wife’s religion it added that ‘any sensible person’ would hope that the matter would not be raised. There were still what it called ‘anti-Catholic prejudices’ among a relatively small minority in England and Wales, a rather larger minority in Scotland and a considerable proportion of the Protestant community in Northern Ireland. A constitutional issue ‘which would bring all these birds flapping down out of the rafters’ was not desirable.

Few of the major heretical movements of continental Europe have found permanent homes in England. One of the periods when it seemed most likely that they might do so was the years between the Henrician reformation and the growth of native separatism towards the end of the sixteenth century. The persecution of continental anabaptists, sectaries and spiritualists in their native lands forced many of them into exile in England; an exile which they often used to continue their evangelistic work, as well as to maintain their own versions of the radical reformation. They found a ready reception for their beliefs among certain sections of the population of south-east England; notably, but not exclusively, the artisans. Devout but ill-disciplined study of the Bible, the lack of protestant preachers, and the social dislocation of Tudor England, all facilitated the missionary work of the radicals. A majority of the preachers were Netherlandish by origin, and continued to look to the Low Countries as the source of their inspiration; none more so than one of the most interesting of the spiritualist sects, the Family of Love.

In the year 1033, the Bishop of the city of Arezzo in Tuscany awarded to the hermits of Camaldoli all the tithes of buying and selling by citizens of Arezzo, urban and suburban, and by all merchants and dealers in the diocese. In so doing he gave classic expression to the hierarchy’s view of money-making. ‘I wish you to know what a great sin it is not to give God tithes of the profits of your business dealings, which you can rarely or never conduct without grave danger of fraud or crime.’ The poorest peasant, he went on, did not presume to avoid paying tithe on the fruits of the just labours of his hands. The merchant, indeed, had urgent need to give generous alms over and above the tithe for the remission of his sins.

A gravestone in a Teignmouth cemetery displays the following inscription:

That unassuming epitaph bears testimony to one of the most remarkable figures in the story of Victorian missionary expansion. The missionary movement from both Britain and North America depended for its regular income on the enthusiasm of the small-scale contributor, but the munificence of the wealthy was essential to the financing of special projects or the opening up of new fields. The role of, for example, the jam manufacturer William Hartley as treasurer of the Primitive Methodist Missionary Society, or of the chemical manufacturers James and John Campbell White in providing much of the finance for the Free Church of Scotland’s Livingstonia Mission, is relatively well known.

The example of co-existence between Christians, Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain should, in theory, be an inspiration to those who hope for a successful multi-faith society today. On the other hand, the expulsion in 1492 of Jews who refused baptism, and of Muslims who adopted a similar attitude, from Castile in 1502 and Aragon in 1610, implies that the Spanish example should rather be seen as a warning of the consequences of failure. The question of interfaith relations will be considered here mainly from the point of view of Christians who attempted to cope with the proximity of the other two ‘religions of the book’. It will, however, be possible to look at the feasibility of the long-term existence of Jewish and Muslim communities in Spain, and at the problems faced by converts from these two faiths to Christianity.

The evidence given us by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs provides more information about the social and theological standing of Lollards than we know about many later religious dissidents. Recent work has added to our knowledge. Geoffrey Dickens and Claire Cross have reconsidered the place of the Lollards in the development of the English Reformation, especially in theological matters. John Thomson drew our attention to the continuity shown in some areas. Claire Cross and Margaret Aston showed the importance of women Lollards. J.F. Davis has supported the idea of a continuous movement, and stressed the involvement of the remaining Lollard brotherhoods in the Reformation proper. Margaret Aston saw the reformers using Lollard texts to settle the Reformation into a tradition. And John Fines found one group of Lollards definitely not of a low or ‘middling sort’. But despite this attention on the part of historians, we still know little of the people labelled Lollards. How did they react to developments locally and nationally? Did they assimilate into their local communities despite their beliefs? What social and economic standing did they have? Was contemporary abuse, which dismissed them as ‘lowly sorts’, justified?

In his recent and excellent book The Coming of Christianity Henry Mayr-Harting has some interesting things to say about lay society and the monastic ideal. Taking as his sources those two fundamental guides to seventh-century history, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica and the Penitential of Theodore of Tarsus, he shows how the Christian pattern of holiness, as demonstrated especially in the monastic life, could be observed also in the lives of Bede’s heroic kings. ‘The King’ he says, ‘was a kind of Christ, and his life should show forth the virtues of his prototype as they were cultivated in monastic circles. Oswald demonstrated his generosity and charity, . . . Sigbert of the East Saxons demonstrated his meekness, . . . Oswin of Deira demonstrated his humility . . . The Ecclesiastical History presents a gallery of exemplary kings, each of whom had many virtues, but each of whom is brought forward in a narrative of great care and skill to illustrate the particular virtue in which Bede regarded him as pre-eminent.’

Richard Hooker, in justifying the formula of the baptismal rite of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, objected to the Puritan preference for referring to godparents as witnesses ‘… as if they came but to see and to testify what is done’, adding,

Until the pioneer work of Dr G. R. Owst in the 1920s and 1930s English sermon literature was a neglected field. Even today Owst’s two general studies remain largely isolated monuments, the starting-point of those who would pursue the sermon, but not, perhaps, so influential in related fields as their intrinsic worth and astonishing thoroughness would appear to merit.

As Owst pointed out, James Gairdner’s four-volume work on Lollardy failed to take account both of unpublished material in episcopal registers and of an extensive sermon literature in manuscript. It was by means of the sermon that Owst himself was able to recreate much of the social background of fourteenth and fifteenth-century England. A prominent element in that background was Lollardy.

In the middle of the fourteenth century Sir John Mandeville, travelling through Macedonia, came across the grave of Aristotle. In a place called Strages, he writes, ‘there is an altar upon his tomb, and there they make solemn feast ilk a year, as he were a saint. And upon his altar they hold their great counsel and assembly; and they trow that, through inspiration of God and him, they shall have the better counsel’.

In the thirteenth century the tomb of Plato was said to exist in a church at Konia in Asia Minor. There was a spring and a river of Plato nearby, for it was believed that ‘the plain of Konia was once a sea, which Plato caused to disappear’. In the chapel of the Panagia Portaitissa in the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos one may still see among the rows of saints and prophets painted on the walls the figures of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and even Thucydides. At the lowest level of enlightenment in the Byzantine world the ancient philosophers were revered as magicians or prophets. But among educated people Plato and Aristotle were universally admired for their literary merits, if for no other reason. It was they who, in their differing ways, had set the style and standard of literacy for all Greek Christian writers, philosophers, and theologians.

The council of Constance, convened by Sigismund, king of the Romans, in 1413 had as its primary aim the reform of the western church in head and members. Its most urgent task, which in fact took almost three years to accomplish, was to end the schism which had divided the western church since 1378; it also took measures to combat the ‘Wycliffite heresy’, which resulted in the condemnation and burning of John Hus, and later of his friend and supporter, Jerome of Prague. However, the problem of relations with the eastern, or Orthodox church was not forgotten, though it played only a marginal role in the council’s activities. This subject was kept before the notice of the council by the presence of delegates from Constantinople, who were among the first to arrive, and by some sermons on the subject. For the Byzantines, some kind of understanding with the western church seemed to offer the only hope of securing effective military aid from the west, which might yet save Constantinople from the Turks; and indeed it was the belief that Sigismund would place this topic on the agenda of the council that induced the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos to send representatives to Constance.

A learned Jesuit historian of the Japan mission recently observed: ‘The aim of Christian missionary activity in every mission land is to establish the Church. The goal of the foreign missionary is primarily to prepare the ground and lay the foundation of the future Church. What he envisages, therefore, is the idea of a fully matured hierarchy of native-born bishops and priests capable of carrying on the work of the Church without foreign assistance.’

Identical sentiments have been voiced by other erudite Jesuit historians of Portuguese India and the Spanish Philippines; but their own well-documented works show very clearly that, however much this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, the road to its achievement was a long and an arduous one. Indeed, at times this objective was actively opposed by those very missionaries who should have been most anxious to attain it. Whatever the theory may have been, in practice the indigenous clergy were apt to be kept in a strictly subordinate condition to the European priests, particularly where these latter were members of the Regular clergy. How this discrimination arose, and the length of time for which it endured, is the theme of this paper.

Disciples of Christ do not consider how things will proceed in the sight of judges. For thus he forewarned us, saying, ‘But when they hand you over, do not worry about how to speak or what to say; what you are to say will be given to you when the time comes; because it is not you who will be speaking; the Spirit of your Father will be speaking in you’.

Since Independence in 1957 the Anglican Church in Malaysia has disavowed any inclination towards Malay evangelism in concert with a general climate of Christian opinion which sees such efforts as not only legally difficult, if not actually illegal following enactments in a number of states, but also politically impossible and threatening to the stability of the nation. This is the background to the claim in a Singapore Anglican history written in 1963 that ‘In the Peninsular… no missionary work among the Muslim Malays was considered and their faith always has been respected.’

The Sunday school was an art form. Its classical age has been explored by T. W. Laqueur and its totality by P. B. Cliff. Like those of great art, its creative moments were the simultaneous issue of evolution, system, and individual genius. Those moments were intensest in their Nonconformist aspect, for Nonconformists, though often thwarted, were born educationists. Their buildings reflected this: theological colleges, for instance, which grew from overgrown houses to imitations of Oxford, and eventually to Oxford itself; or proprietory schools, strait-jacketed between the financial constraints and social aspirations of an enlarged middle class trying to reconcile Manchester’s values with those of Thomas Arnold. And there were the Sunday schools themselves, complexes of hall, parlour, and classroom, enfolding the chapel, reflecting the activity, mentality, and spirituality of a particular society, encompassing therefore a concept of the Church, and designed with considerable ingenuity to meet the needs of a rounded yet carefully graduated community. By the turn of the twentieth century they housed daily activities for all ages. Their influence reached far. Fuelled by the Word proclaimed from the pulpit, and empowered by the decisions of representative meetings taken in hall or vestry, the Sunday school broke chapel bounds to teach more people than could be met with in chapel pews.

Between 1170 and 1220 the cult of Thomas Becket had spread widely within Christendom, bearing with it the primary message that the Archbishop was a martyr who had died for the liberties of the Church, and in opposition to royal oppression. But no well-documented medieval cult, and certainly no major cult, is adequately characterized in such as simple and straightforward way. If ‘the causa beati Thome became the symbol of the rights of the church throughout the thirteenth century’ and beyond, this did not prevent it embracing other ideas and aspirations, some of them in apparent tension with each other, from the 1170s onwards. Over much of Europe the image of the Martyr’s fortitude confronting the King’s tyranny, already to some extent pre-sold in the propaganda of the exile years 1164 to 1170, required no qualification. In England, as Beryl Smalley has pointed out, ‘Writers had the more difficult task of combining loyalty to their king with defence of ecclesiastical freedom’, especially after Henry II had achieved a rapprochement with the Church. One way of handling this problem was to universalize the cult, by emphasizing that it ultimately transcended issues of royal-clerical relations, however important. Becket was portrayed as the martyr of the age, whose death had benefited the whole of Christendom. Such beliefs, made more plausible by the extraordinary miracle-working achievements of the tomb at Canterbury, led at their extreme to the systematic comparison of Becket’s death with that of Christ.

Long had the ‘still small voice’ been spoke in vain,
But God now thunders in an awful strain!
Commercial woes brought down our nation’s pride,
Our harvest fail’d, and yet we God defy’d:
But now the ‘voice’ cries loud to all the Land,
The ‘Rod’ is felt, Oh! may we see the Hand.
’Tis God who speaks – ’Tis He who ’points the blow,
’Tis God who’s laid the pride of Britain low!

In these lines, written in November 1817, a lady member of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne Nonconformist congregation unambiguously attributed the death of Princess Charlotte to specific divine intervention. This conviction reflected that of her minister, James Pringle, in a recent sermon preached on an Old Testament text widely expounded at that time, the chastening rod (or voice) of God in Micah 6: 9. Such a perception of adverse national events as divine retribution for sin, comparable to prophetic interpretations of the history of Old Testament Israel, was a noticeable strand in early nineteenth-century British evangelical discourse.

Hagiographical narrative is often examined through the well-established text-critical principle according to which the earliest text is necessarily the most skeletal in outline, the least wondrous in plot, and therefore the most historically believable. According to this view, to the bare bones of truth, fanciful narrative and miraculous tales are added with time, as the tale grows in the telling. The development of the Legend of St Alexios has been viewed as a case in point. The idiosyncratic life-story of this fourth-century ascete has been described as evolving from a nucleus of ‘fact’, essentially coinciding with the early Syriac Life, to a romanced complexity with the Byzantine version influencing the later versions in all major romance languages. Consequently, critics have isolated and, to a large extent, derided the ‘miraculous’ element in the plot, while failing to articulate an understanding of the role of miracles in Alexios’s Life.