When Augustine and his monks landed at Thanet in 597, they were confronted with a situation rare even in the Völkerivanderung. What was to become the church of the English people had to be built up from scratch. In his despatches to Pope Gregory during the first years of his mission, Augustine gives no hint of an existing native Christian population, survivors of Roman Britain under Jutish rule, who might form the nucleus of a Church. There was Ethelbert's Frankish Queen Bertha and her retainers for whose use a church dedicated to St Martin outside the royal city of Canterbury, had been restored, and Bede mentions that this had been ‘built of old while the Romans yet inhabited Britain’. But despite Canterbury providing evidence for Christianity in the late fourth century and being relatively near sites such as Lullingstone, Richborough and Faversham, where there had been Christian worship in Roman times, Augustine's problems were concerned entirely with how to deal with Germanic paganism. What had happened? How was it that the ecclesia Britannorum failed to provide foundations for the ecclesia Anglicana even in Kent?

No doubt the metropolitan church of St Peter of York, which celebrated its 1350th anniversary two years ago, has always been a difficult institution for the outsider to comprehend; but in the later middle ages its organisation was at its most formidably complex. The reasons for that complexity need no particular urging nor indeed explanation. Even more than other major medieval cathedrals York. Minster fulfilled a wide variety of very different and at times conflicting purposes. As the single largest church within the pre-Reformation ecclesia Anglicana it was inevitably committed to an especially elaborate series of acts of worship in choir, in nave and at the many subsidiary altars with which the cathedral literally abounded. As a house of God deliberately rebuilt and refurnished as magnificently as possible during the later middle ages, it provided a focus of spiritual allegiance for the inhabitants of York and Yorkshire as well as courting the attention of pilgrims and visitors from other parts of England. As the largest religious corporation in the region, York Minster was especially familiar to popes and kings as the most important agency through which the surplus wealth of northern churches and their parishes could be diverted to the professional ‘permanent civil service’ which administered the detailed operations of the English church and state. Most important of all, and despite the personal absence of the archbishop himself, the cathedral of York was still performing its original function as the administrative and judicial head-quarters of thenorthernprovinceinanage when ‘if wecome, therefore, to a general conclusion with regard to the organization of English dioceses in the fifteenth century, we find that it has become highly centralized’.

Few phrases in an English Statute can have left such an indelible imprint as the opening words of the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533: they have evoked a literature of their own. If on this occasion a mere medievalist has the temerity to enter the precincts of the Henrician Reformation measures it is not because he is unaware of the pitfalls that may be in store for him, but because he believes that an exegesis which sets these famous words in their strictly confined historical context may possibly contribute to a better comprehension of the matrix of what came to be the Ecclesia Anglicana of the Reformation era. In offering the jubiland a modest essay on this topic, I hope he will accept it in the spirit in which it is submitted to him: as a token of gratitude for the services he has conspicuously rendered to ecclesiastical history. Specifically, this brief sketch is to pay respect to Clifford Dugmore as the parent and editor of the JEH which for long will remain a monument to his initiative, courage and perseverance: he has tended his own creation in an exemplary way for 30 years and saw the Journal grow to an internationally acknowledged organ of ecclesiastical history. It is a self-evident duty to pay tribute, however inadequate it may be, to his single-minded devotion to historical scholarship and dedicated editorship. Rarely can an occasion so clearly have offered a three-fold cause for rejoicing: the celebration of his seventieth birthday, the celebration of the thirtieth birthday of the JEH, and the conclusion of thirty years of his editorship. Quid plura?

The proud boast of Bishop John Jewel in Apologia Ecdesiae Anglicanae that ‘we lean unto knowledge, they unto ignorance’ a swift retort from his catholic opponent: ‘Ye lean to the favour of secular princes.’ To which Jewel replied: ‘We flatter our princes, M. Harding, as Nathan flattered King David; as John Baptist flattered Herod; as St Ambrose flattered Theodosius; and as salt flattereth the green sore.’ How much credibility was there in this resounding riposte when it was made in 1567, and how much would survive three more decades of Tudor royal supremacy? Not many Nathans in bishops' clothing were prepared to confront monarchy itself with a bold ‘Thou art the man’, and it was scarcely in the Tudor character to confess with King David: ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ Nor were the sins of Henry VIII's children of the kind to provide many occasions to play Nathan or John the Baptist. But the integrity of the Church and its faith are always in need of defence, even against misguided Christian princes. Or, to put the case less prejudicially, the possibility of a difference of opinion between Christian princes and Christian bishops can never be excluded. For all such occasions the appropriate model was the third of Jewel's exempla, that notable father of the Church, St Ambrose. In the words of Jewel: ‘We say to the prince as St Ambrose sometime said to the emperor Valentinian: “Noli te gravare, imperator, ut putes te in ea quae divina sunt imperiale aliquodjus habere: Trouble not yourself, my lord, to think that you have any princely power over those things that pertain to God.”’

The clergy who with a good conscience were unable to conform to the requirements of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 have been the subject of much attention—too much, Professor Dugmore may think. But among them is a group not yet examined, consisting of those who were not affected by one major requirement of the Act: they were already episcopally ordained. ‘At least 420 of the ministers’, i.e. not far short of a quarter of the 1,760 known to have been deprived of their livings, ‘were in full episcopal orders before the Civil War’. Richard Baxter figures among them, and it might be expected that the group as a whole would be like Baxter in being only ‘moderate’ Nonconformists, not opposed to episcopacy in principle; but this was not the case. Their number comprised men of many shades of opinion and practice, including some who had gone so far as to renounce their episcopal ordination for ordination of another kind.

Gladstone's Diary records all the books which he read and persons with whom he talked.

If a man read a book, it cannot be asserted with certainty that he was influenced by the book. Knowledge passed into the mind if it was interesting enough not to be forgotten. But it is a larger step to attempt an analysis of the development of a mind when the evidence consists largely in lists of books read. On the books which Gladstone read, he seldom commented in the Diary. When rarely he added a comment, it is always important.

The death of Canon R.J. Campbell on 1 March 1956 did not cause a national stir. There was an obituary the following day in The Times and some comment on subsequent days from friends and associates, but little to indicate that fifty years earlier he had been a substantial public figure. One obscure diarist, who had known Campbell as a young man, felt that ‘the grudging admission…of some academic distinction’ was an inadequate summary of Campbell's life and work. In part, of course, having outlived most of his contemporaries, Campbell was paying the penalty for his longevity. More important, however, was the fact that for decades he had consciously avoided the limelight. ‘No man’ he had written to the novelist Margaret Lane in December 1947 ‘could more carefully avoid publicity than I have done for a generation’. From 1930 to 1946 he had been a residentiary canon and then chancellor of Chichester and before that served as vicar of Holy Trinity, Brighton for six years. It would appear that he possessed an eminently Anglican pedigree. In May 1903, however, a frail, ascetic-looking, prematurely white-haired Campbell had commenced his ministry at the City Temple, the leading Congregational church in London. W. T. Stead's Review of Reviews looked forward to the ‘Renascence of Nonconformity’ under the leadership of this thirty-five-year-old young man. Over seven thousand people attended the services on his first Sunday. Picture postcards of Campbell were soon on sale and later admirers could purchase the R. J. Campbell Birthday Book containing his ‘favourite poetical quotations, portrait and autograph’. There was even A Rosary from the City Temple, described as being threaded from the writings and sermons of R. J. Campbell. The publicity which attended his arrival in London rarely left him for the next dozen years. In September 1915, rumours of Campbell's intention to resign the pastorate and speculation about his subsequent course were thought of sufficient interest to reach the news columns of The Times. His resignation merited a leader in the newspaper and, following his reception into the Church of England in early October, the comments of prominent religious leaders were printed. In 1916 Campbell published A Spiritual Pilgrimage, and a reconsideration of this volume throws interesting light on the cross-currents of Edwardian religious life.