Walter Stapledon, bishop of Exeter 1308-26, treasurer of England and victim of the downfall of Edward 11, was a notable benefactor of the Church. As well as giving generously to the rebuilding of Exeter Cathedral (where he was buried in a splendid tomb beside the high altar), he founded or planned three institutions for the clergy of his diocese: a school foundation for a tutor and twelve pupils in the hospital of St John at Exeter; a college for a chaplain and twelve scholars at Oxford (now Exeter College); and a hospital for two chaplains and twelve infirm priests at Clyst Gabriel in Bishop's Clyst, four miles east of Exeter. Unlike the college, the hospital has long since disappeared, but its records survive in unusual profusion for such a small foundation. Not only do they reveal the constitutional and financial history of the house, they also preserve the names of many of its inmates, the dates of their entry and of their deaths or departures. Clyst Gabriel possesses, in effect, one of the oldest registers of patients in an English hospital, commencing as early as 1312.

In Rome the Inquisition was not above that of other places, but applied it self only to that City, as others did in their Cities. The Pope indeed was superintendent and overseer of them all, maintaining nevertheless the agreements, immunities, and lawful Customs of every one, and so it continued until Paul the third, who did institute a Congregation of Cardinals in Rome, giving them the Title of Inquisitors General, who nevertheless do not command the Inquisition of Spain, which by agreement was first instituted: So likewise they ought not to take away the authority of this States Inquisition, also instituted by agreement some hundred years since. Which thing I have considered for to conclude, that it is not reasonable that Inquisition should take that which belongeth unto this.

John Foxe's De censura, sive excommunicatione ecclesiastica, rectoque eius usu, published in 1551, was the earliest tract to be written by an English Protestant on the subject of ecclesiastical discipline and, as such, deserves a closer examination than it has received to date. Given that continental Protestants and, later on, Puritan apologists alike accepted as axiomatic that the Reformation could only be established on the twin pillars of pure doctrine and right discipline, the appearance at this time, amid a stream of doctrinal polemic, of a tract on discipline, was significant. It indicated that Protestants had become confident enough, after waging war on the claims of the Church of Rome, to regulate the lives of its members, to assert similar claims in the name of Scripture and reformed ‘true religion’. That this tract should appear in Edward VI's reign, and not earlier, was important in this respect, for the effect of the Henrician Reformation had been to render impossible any suggestion that the Church should or could be autonomous in discipline. The psychological climate - as well as the theoretical framework - of the Supremacy persisted throughout Edward's reign, but the fact that the king was a minor gave Protestants a breathing space in which to approach the problem of trying to bring the Church into line with pure, apostolic models. In terms of quantity of published material, doctrine, rather than discipline, was undoubtedly much the more important of the issues discussed; by dealing with discipline a Protestant writer was grasping the nettle, for the subject raised questions about the relative roles of Church and State in the reformation of society and, ultimately, about the structure of the national Church. Foxe's tract was the first attempt to face the question of discipline; that it was the only one, even in Edward vi's reign, showed what a hold the Supremacy had taken. The aim of this article, therefore, is to bring out the significance of Foxe ‘s tract and to explore some of the tensions in mid-Tudor Protestant thought which it reflects. The first part (by Catharine Davies) aims to set it more precisely in its Edwardian context; the second (by Jane Facey) uses it to illuminate the changed emphasis of Foxe's thought on the relationship of Church and State required by the writing of the Acts and Monuments.

The years 1764-8 form a rare unity in Polish history, distinguished by an unprecedented attempt at constitutional and economic reform on a scale not to be repeated for another two decades. The fragile nature of the reforms which accompanied the election, in September 1764, of King Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1764-95) was revealed as early as autumn 1766, when internal opponents, supported by Russia and, to a lesser degree, Prussia, imposed the first serious checks on the reformers and then proceeded to try to secure their total defeat. The tensions between reformers and conservatives, compounded by large-scale Russian military and diplomatic intervention, were to plunge Poland into ungovernability and civil war by March 1768 and to drag it inexorably towards the First Partition.

The political turmoil which characterised the decade from 1825 to 1835 is interestingly reflected in a religious crisis, as a result of which Established Church and traditional nonconformity alike were found by seceders to be spiritually wanting. Millenarian and charismatic movements are often, in part, an expression of social uncertainty. Any analysis of such movements as the Plymouth Brethren or the self-styled ‘Catholic Apostolic Church’ must take into account their social milieu which, at that time, included a great deal of political agitation - for causes like Roman Catholic Emancipation, parliamentary reform, currency reform and nascent socialism - as well as anxiety arising from the outbreak of cholera and social unrest, with several European revolutions in the background. It may not be entirely fortuitous that, when Edward Irving was expelled from his church in Regent Square in 1832, his congregation (not without some misgivings) met for a while in Robert Owen's socialist Rotunda in the Gray's Inn Road.