The session before dinner was entitled ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning this one. What I want to say is also about ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning the first one, in 1958. When Timothy McCann and I were asked to mark the opening of the fiftieth Conference, we agreed that he would say something about people and I would say something about the questions which they discussed. But, rather than attempt in half an hour a survey of more than three hundred papers, not all of which I have heard or can remember, I want to focus on that first Conference, at Oxford in 1958, of which I am the only survivor here tonight. I was then still an undergraduate, and therefore short of cash. But I was already passionately interested in recusancy and reading manuscripts in Duke Humphrey when I ought to have been writing my next essay. So I did a deal with the Conference secretary, Anne See, that I could come for nothing if I would run the bar. That was obviously a vital contribution but on that occasion it was my only one: I was much too shy of the great experts around me to venture any opinions in discussion. All the same, I listened and learned, and there were three issues in that first conference which were to shape much of what was to come.