Just over a century ago Heinrich Hagenmeyer published his definitive book on Peter the Hermit. It has shaped most subsequent discussions of Peter’s career, and it must be said at once that no completely new material has come to light since then. There is, however, a problem of perpetual interest posed by the divergences among twelfth-century accounts of the origins of the First Crusade. Until the advent of modern historiography, it was accepted that the expedition was provoked by an appeal from the church of Jerusalem, brought to the west by Peter the Hermit, who had visited it as a pilgrim, had seen a vision of Christ and had been entrusted by the patriarch with a letter asking for help against the oppression of the Christians there. The crusade was on this view born in the atmosphere of pilgrimage, visions and popular preaching which continued to mark its course, and is so evident in, for example, the discovery of the Holy Lance and the visions and messages which accompanied it. Peter is in some sense the embodiment of these charismatic elements, and there is no controversy about his prominence in the history of the movement. He appears as a sensationally successful preacher, who recruited and led a large contingent which left in advance of the main armies, and was cut to pieces in Asia Minor. Thereafter, he appears in the chronicles in a variety of capacities: as a runaway, and an ambassador to the Moslems, as an adviser, as an associate with the popular element among the crusaders, and finally as a guide to the sacred sites at Jerusalem. It is, however, not with these wider aspects of his career that we wish to deal in this paper, but with his special role in the summoning of the expedition. The older view was that he was its first author. Every student of the early church is familiar with militant monks and hermits. It was once believed that Peter, their spiritual descendant, was the most supremely successful of all the ascetic warmongers.

To speak of miracles in post-Reformation England may seem like something of an oxymoron. The sense of internal contradiction in my title springs from the fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant ministers consistently maintained that this category of extraordinary events had long since ceased. They did not deny that supernatural acts of this kind had taken place in biblical times. As set down in the books of the Old Testament, God had vouchsafed many wonders to His chosen people, the Hebrews, including the parting of the Red Sea, the raining of manna from heaven, and the metamorphosis of Aaron’s rod into a serpent. Equally, the New Testament recorded the prodigious feats performed by Christ and his apostles to convince the disbelieving Gentiles and Jews: from the raising of Lazarus and the transformation of water into wine at the marriage at Cana to curing lepers of their sores and restoring sight to the blind, not to mention the great mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection. But dozens of sermons and tracts reiterated the precept that God no longer worked wonders above, beyond, or against the settled order and instinct of nature – the standard definition of miracle inherited from the scholastic writings of St Thomas Aquinas. Such special dispensations were the ‘seales and testimonials’ of the Gospel. They had been necessary to sow the first seeds of the faith, to plant the new religion centring on the redemption of mankind by Jesus of Nazareth. But this gift, stressed John Calvin and his disciples, was only of ‘temporary duration’. Miracles were the swaddling bands of the primitive Church, the mother’s milk on which it had been initially weaned. Once the Lord had begun to feed His people on the meat of the Word, he expected them to believe the truth as preached and revealed in Scripture rather than wait for astonishing visible spectacles to be sent down from heaven. Although there was some uncertainty about exactly when such wonders had come to an end, Protestant divines were in general agreement that, as a species, miracles were now extinct. Christians could and should not expect to see such occurrences in the course of their lifetimes.

The notable part played by women in the Reformation has rarely been given its due recognition in English historical studies. In recent years Professor Wallace Notestein has written with characteristic authority and grace on ‘The English Woman, 1580-1650,’ but one does not learn from this essay that the English women of this age had any religious propensities at all. And leaving aside the more prominent figures such as Queen Catherine Parr, Lady Jane Grey, and Catherine Brandon, duchess of Suffolk, women make but few appearances in most accounts of the English Reformation. This is no doubt only one symptom of the tendency of so many of our histories to dwell upon the officially inspired aspects of the Reformation to the neglect of the spontaneous and the local; to be concerned with the making of settlements and their enforcement rather than with the means by which Protestantism actually spread in families, towns, and other communities. And of course there are special factors which obscure the female contribution to history, the legal disabilities of the sex, which so often hide the married woman and allow us to catch glimpses only of the widow, a ‘person’ in law.

When Martin became bishop of Tours c370, Christianity had already taken root in the town; but the surrounding countryside was still untouched by the new religion. Although it was over fifty years since Constantine had first recognised Christianity, and thirty-three years since Tours had had a permanent bishop, the attention of the Gallic bishops had been distracted first by the Arian heresy, and latterly by Julian’s revival of paganism. Martin was therefore the first bishop of Tours to concern himself with the conversion of the countryside, and this work was continued by his successors in the fifth and sixth centuries.

On Friday 6 July 1274 the reunion of the Greek and Roman Churches was solemnly proclaimed at the Second Council of Lyons. It was a great occasion, and an occasion of great rejoicing for Pope Gregory X who had convened the assembly. In some ways the Greeks, or the Byzantines, had responded to his invitation rather more satisfactorily than his own people. For of the thirteen crowned heads of western Europe who had been invited to attend only one had found it possible to accept. But the Byzantine Emperor from distant Constantinople had sent his own representative in the person of his Grand Logothete George Akropolites; and with him had come a former Patriarch of Constantinople, Germanos, and the Metropolitan of Nicaea, Theophanes. The Council had opened at Lyons in May 1274. But the Byzantine legates had been delayed by shipwreck on their long journey, and it was not until 24 June that they reached their destination. They were welcomed with the kiss of peace by the Pope and all his cardinals and presented the sealed documents that they had brought with them from the Emperor Michael Palaiologos and from the Byzantine clergy.

The cult of the saints, according to Emile Male, ‘sheds over all the centuries of the middle ages its poetic enchantment’, but ‘it may well be that the saints were never better loved than during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ Certainly their images and shrines were everywhere in late medieval England. They filled the churches, gazing down in polychrome glory from altar-piece and bracket, from windows and tilt-tabernacles. In 1488 the little Norfolk church of Stratton Strawless had lamps burning not only before the Rood with Mary and John, and an image of the Trinity, but before a separate statue of the Virgin, and images of Saints Margaret, Anne, Nicholas, John the Baptist, Thomas à Becket, Christopher, Erasmus, James the Great, Katherine, Petronilla, Sitha, and Michael the Archangel.

For use on the first Sunday in Lent, the service books of the Greek Orthodox Church include a special office known as ‘The Synodikon of Orthodoxy’, which contains no less than sixty anathemas against different heresies and heresiarchs. Yet in this comprehensive denunciation there is one unexpected omission: no reference is made to the errors of the Latins, no allusion to the Filioque or the papal claims, even though more than a third of the anathemas date from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, a time when doctrinal disagreements between East and West had emerged clearly into the open. This omission of the Latins is an indication of the curious imprecision which prevails in the relations between Orthodoxy and Rome. It is altogether obvious that an estrangement has long existed between the Greek East and the Latin West. What is much less obvious is the precise point at which this estrangement evolved into a definitive schism, into a clear and final breach in sacramental communion. The division between the two halves of Christendom did not occur as a single event, accomplished once and for all at a specific moment in history: it was, on the contrary, a gradual, fluctuating, and disjointed process, stretching over a remarkably extended period.

That Gladstone was religious is obvious enough, and to state it does not get us very far, but this remains as far as most historians get. The aim of this paper is to show by exposition the religious motivation behind two of the greatest Gladstonian and Victorian outbursts—the clutch of writings on the Vatican council published in 1874–5 and the pamphlet and articles on the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876. These two expostulations, though they occurred within twenty two months of each other, are usually treated by historians as quite unrelated. Moreover, although attention has been paid to their proximate causes, they have not been placed in the complex and long-drawn out process of Gladstone’s religious development. I hope to show that both groups of pamphlets, though written in passion spurred by proximate causes, reflected long standing and interrelated intellectual, theological and political interests, an understanding of which illuminates both Gladstone and his age. If this paper ranges from idealism to cabinet diplomacy, this reflects the range of influences on Gladstone who consistently and deliberately tried to place himself at the cross-roads of Victorian culture, society, religion and politics.

When Samuel Clarke’s The Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in this Later Age was published posthumously in 1683, the ‘godly life’ was a well-established genre of Puritan literature. Clarke himself had contributed to its popularity with his various compilations of’lives’ of ministers and laity culled primarily from published funeral sermons and spiritual biographies by other authors. Today such editions would be regarded as blatant plagiarism, but in the mid-seventeenth century, before the advent of the copyright laws, they were widely appreciated, and in the Introduction to this, his last work, Clarke wrote,

The purpose of this paper is to question some generally held assumptions concerning the character of Donatism, and its relations with the Catholic Church, during the later period of Byzantine rule in North Africa. The features of the Donatist Church during its classical period, in the fourth and fifth centuries, are now well known. They are conveniently surveyed by Dr Frend in his magisterial study of the movement. He has established, definitively in my view, that the schism in the African Church had roots far deeper than historians had previously discerned. The theological divergence between Catholicism and Dissent, as he put it, ‘was interwoven with other differences, such as geography, culture and economic circumstance.’ ‘The two churches were in fact two societies, differing fundamentally in outlook on both religious and social questions.’

This communication summarises the findings of an enquiry into the origins of English Sabbatarianism at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Two aspects of this movement have seemed to merit fresh investigation: the sources of English Sabbatarian notions and the circumstances in which the Sabbath became a major controversial issue in the Church of England, dividing the puritan Nonconformists from the representatives of authority.

Sabbatarianism, for the purpose of this discussion, is defined as something more than a certain ethical and social attitude to the use of Sunday: it implies the doctrinal assertion that the fourth commandment is not an obsolete ceremonial law of the Jews but a perpetual, moral law, binding on Christians; in other words, that the Christian observance of Sunday has its basis not in ecclesiastical tradition but in the decalogue.

Heartening as it is for someone like myself, for whom the study of relations between Christianity and Judaism is a central concern, to see the Ecclesiastical History Society devote its annual conference to this subject, it is proper to recall that it has not been wholly neglected in the past. The very first volume of Studies in Church History (1964) contains a contribution by James Parkes under the title of Jews and Christians in the Constantinian Empire’, which is a short but well-judged summary of the attitudes to Judaism emerging from a reading of the Christian authors, Roman laws, and conciliar canons of the fourth century. I should like to begin now by paying tribute to James Parkes, partly because he was my own mentor, someone who encouraged and influenced my study of our subject, and also because he occupies an important place as a pioneer in the study of Jewish-Christian relations as a whole, and specifically in the part of the subject that concerns me today, the Byzantine phase.

Early Methodism is often studied as an example of a popular religious movement, but the purpose of this paper is to explore some of the reasons behind its unpopularity, for suffering and persecution characterised its early phases as well as growth and success. The persecution of Methodists took many forms. Perhaps the hardest to bear were those least often recorded, such as the eviction of society members from their homes and jobs, or the unnerving social ostracism which made life intolerable in many villages and families. The persecution usually described in the journals of the methodist pioneers, however, was that inflicted by ‘the mob’. ‘The mob’ was an elastic term in their vocabulary and could range from a knot of village youths throwing stones to the ferocious urban crowds which cruelly assaulted worshippers in Exeter in 1745 and Norwich in 1752. ‘Mobbing’ too covered a gamut of activity. Much of it was rude horseplay, like the release of sparrows at the candles in a cottage meeting; some was petty malicious damage, like the breaking of windows. But not infrequently it erupted more violently. Preaching-houses at St Ives, Sheffield, Arborfield, Wolverhampton, Nantwich and Chester were pulled down, and others severely damaged. A number of houses, generally of poor people, were wrecked or sacked. Many persons, women and children among them, were cruelly beaten and some scarred or injured for life. A few, like William Seward, first blinded and then killed by a mob at Hay in 1741, paid for their beliefs with their lives. The knowledge of these ordeals, transmitted by biographies and oral tradition, gave the movement its equivalent of a martyrology and built up that image of heroic, primitive Methodism which, like the image of primitive Christianity itself, stimulated and reproved the piety of later, more comfortable generations.

The bishop of Pamiers, Bernard Saisset, said that Philip IV of France was like ‘an owl, the most beautiful of birds, but worth absolutely nothing ... He is the most handsome of beings but he knows only how to stare fixedly at men’. Philip the Fair gave away little about himself to contemporaries, and he remains a controversial and enigmatic figure, whose personal involvement with the events of his reign remains a matter of dispute. For a long time, many scholars followed contemporary critics of the king like Geoffrey of Paris in blaming Philip for allowing himself to be duped and misled by evil councillors. More recently, however, analyses of the copious administrative records of the reign have suggested that Philip, while not often in the forefront of negotiations, retained control over his advisers, and that, while he delegated power, he was not dominated by his councillors. Philip has thus become the moving force behind the events of his reign, if not the director of all the details of policy; but this in its turn makes his character and convictions a matter of great importance.

Held almost as an article of faith amongst Merovingian historians is a belief in the strength of the bishops’ position in the town in early Frankish society. Passages from the life of bishop Desiderius of Cahors are often used to illustrate the busy bishop at work in his town, responsible, it seems, for maintaining the town’s defences. The assumption of secular duties by the bishop has been charted by a German scholar—Claude—who shows how in many cases the crown’s principal representative in the town—the count—began to reside outside the town, having been deprived of his specifically urban functions by the bishop. The interest shown in the bishops in the town has, however, led to a rather unbalanced picture of the bishop as an urban creature. In contrast, the Merovingian church councils of the sixth and seventh centuries show that the bishops were very much concerned with rural work, and from the legislation which applies to both town and country it could be argued that the distinctions between the two are less clear-cut than a concept such as bischöfliche Stadtherrschaft implies.

‘Have done with doctors. Don’t fall into their clutches: you will get no help from them. Be satisfied with this prayer and blessing and you will be completely restored to health.’ Theodore of Sykeon’s obloquy and exhortation find numerous parallels in the social history of early Byzantine medicine. The hostility of holy men to doctors is a familiar theme. Less familiar may be that delegation of responsibility and spirit of cooperation suggested by another passage in the Life of Theodore:

In the charged atmosphere of religious xenophobia in England in the 1680s it was an unusual person who could survey the state of Christendom and the zealotry of his fellow countrymen with a detached eye. Such a one was Sir Peter Pett, ‘a virtuoso, and a great scholar, and Fellow of the Royal Society’. His vast and inchoate book, The Happy Future State of England, is eirenic, Erastian and Hobbesian in outlook. It is also an exercise in the fledgling science of ‘political arithmetic’. With the panoply of scientific reasoning it predicted the imminence of a secular age in which the knot of politics and religion would be untied. This paper will first sketch the background to this book, then examine its account of the state of Catholicism and dissent, and lastly appraise its claim that ‘a science of politics’ could provide a solvent of religious persecution.

The denominational writers on late Stuart dissent used to put their emphasis upon the heroism and sufferings of forbears in the faith and on cherished works of spiritual autobiography produced under restraint such as John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding and William Penn’s No Cross, No Crown.’ The most important, and to my mind the most interesting, questions about persecution in this period have therefore gone unasked and unanswered. Aware of the most dramatic cases of malice and brutality, we have too readily accepted that the decades between the Restoration and the Toleration Act can be represented as the period of the ‘Great Persecution’. But how far did the acts which are conventionally summarised as the Clarendon Code represent the settled mind of the Anglican gentry, whose supremacy was confirmed by the political events of 1660 and 1670? How far were these acts actually enforced? How easy were they to enforce? These are large questions, much too large for a short communication. What I shall attempt here is an analysis of the enforcement of two statutes, the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, in a limited number of counties over a confined period. By 1679 popery, the alternative bogey to dissent, was at the front of magisterial minds and the 1670 act was for the moment largely in abeyance. Greater glory for the Second Conventicle Act was yet to come, with the Tory reaction of 1682 to 1686, but that period is beyond the scope of this paper.

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

Recent seventeenth-century historians have stressed the opportunities the disruption caused by the Civil War gave to women to assert a new role for themselves, first in religion, then in society in general. There is much truth in this thesis: especially among the more extreme sects like the Ranters, and, later, the Quakers, women did publicly teach and evangelise, activities hitherto exclusively reserved for men. Yet this emphasis upon radical women sectaries can be misleading since it tends to obscure the importance of more sober protestant matrons. For them the Civil War did not mark a new period of spiritual awakening or intellectual enlightenment: rather it brought to fruition a tradition of independent action by laywomen which can be traced back at least to the days of the Henrician Reformation.