The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius employs a variety of expressions in describing the episcopal successions of the important churches. Some of these are theologically colourless, as the forms of λαμβάνειν to declare that one has ‘received’ the episcopate, or often the ‘ministry’ (λειτουργία), of a given church. Other formulae are related to the most important motifs associated with ordination in the ancient Church.

A round 960 king Harald Bluetooth ‘made the Danes Christians’. But for another hundred years outsiders would have found the Danish Church provincial and backward. Until the end of the eleventh century Denmark had no cathedral schools and few of its native clergy were learned men. There were no influential monasteries until 1089 and, therefore, no party in the Church to counteract the influence of the married clergy and champion the ideas of reform favoured by the Roman Curia. It was not until 1054 that king Sven Estridsøn divided his kingdom into nine bishoprics and the ecclesiastical map of the kingdom began to assume its medieval shape. It took even longer for these bishoprics to acquire adequate endowments. The churches of Denmark were so poor that simony was often a necessity. Finally, Denmark had no metropolitan authority of its own until the beginning of the twelfth century. Throughout the eleventh century its bishops owed obedience to the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen and the efforts of Sven Estridsøn to establish a native archbishopric were unsuccessful.

The claim of the archbishops of Canterbury, by virtue of their metropolitical power, to administer the spiritualities of vacant sees within their province, culminated during Boniface's archiepiscopate (1245–70) in compositions between the archbishop and the chapters of Lincoln, London, Salisbury and Worcester. These permitted the members of the chapters to administer their respective sees at times of vacancy, but it was at Worcester alone that the head of the chapter, the prior, or failing him the sub-prior, secured the right to automatic appointment as official sede vacante. We are concerned here with the events which led up to the Worcester composition of 1268, the composition itself, and its implementation during the first half of the fourteenth century.

The system of compulsory tithes in the Middle Ages has long been used by protestant and liberal historians as a stick with which to beat the medieval Church. ‘This most harassing and oppressive form of taxation’, wrote H. C. Lea in his well-known History of the Inquisition, ‘had long been the cause of incurable trouble, aggravated by the rapacity with which it was enforced, even to the pitiful collections of the gleaner’. Von Inama-Sternegg remarked on the growing hatred of tithes in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, especially among the small free landholders, ‘upon whom the burden of tithes must have fallen most heavily’. Gioacchino Volpe said that tithes were ‘the more hated because they oppressed the rich less than the poor, the dependents on seigneurial estates less than the small free proprietors to whose ruin they contributed…. At that time tithes were both an ecclesiastical and secular oppression, a double offence against religious sentiment and popular misery’. G. G. Coulton, writing before the introduction in England of an income tax at a rate of over ten per cent., proclaimed that before the Reformation tithes ‘constituted a land tax, income tax and death duty far more onerous than any known to modern times, and proportionately unpopular’.

Amongst those who have devoted their studies to the registers of archbishops and bishops, there has been a natural tendency to select for notice or publication those registers which will be most amply useful to scholars in the provision of historical evidence, and to set aside those volumes which are imperfect or in any way defective. The reasons for this are obviously cogent, yet complete neglect of the less satisfactory registers would be unfortunate. There is much to be learned even from the omissions and defects due to a decadent registry or a period of institutional confusion. In the hope, therefore, not only of indicating the nature of some of these less satisfactory registers, but also of showing in what directions they may include matters of interest, the registers chosen for notice in this paper are not those of Melton or Thoresby, not even that of Wolsey, which although late in date is a volume of great regularity, showing a well-conducted registry; the selected registers are those of Edward Lee (1531–44) and of his successor Robert Holgate (1544–53). They are volumes which cover the early part of the changes in ecclesiastical constitution in Tudor times, and may therefore be expected to show some reflexion, perhaps many reflexions, of the effects of those religious changes.

The first Register of the Faculty Office, in Lambeth Palace Library, is a document which throws much light upon those who left religion before 1538. These ex-religious were, in the main, unpensioned. Although the late E. H. W. Dunkin made an almost complete transcript of the register in 1890, these early records of the Court of the Faculties were at one time thought to be lost. So much has been written about the treatment of the ex-religious, their pensions and benefices, that only the appearance, or more correctly the re-appearance, of fresh evidence justifies further consideration of this subject. Views as to whether the ex-religious were well treated or ill treated have been widely expressed, and of those who applied for capacities in 1536, Professor Knowles has recently written ‘whatever the numbers concerned, they were certainly not very large, and as they were the first religious to appear in the market in search of employment they were probably absorbed without great difficulty’. Any material which increases our knowledge of the unpensioned religious should be brought before scholars for, as the late Geoffrey Baskerville wrote in 1937, ‘the after-careers of the religious who were dispersed in 1536 are more difficult to trace than those of their companions whose sense of vocation led them to accept transference to the larger monasteries, and who were eventually able to claim a pension.’

It is probably no one's fault that general histories of the Church in the nineteenth century are so misleading about bishop Colenso. Unless one gets down to the primary source material, which is almost all in South Africa, there is no way of escaping from the distortions of controversy. Almost all the books about Colenso are unreliable. His own biography was written by an ardent admirer who hoped to succeed him as bishop of Natal. The lives of his principal opponents, Robert Gray and James Green, are just as unsatisfactory. Gray's life was written by his son. Green's was written by Dr. Wirgman, a frank and open controversialist. Histories of the Province of South Africa are either missionary propaganda, or else become so immersed in the constitutional and legal issues connected with Colenso, that the character of the man himself is lost. In consequence, the bishop of Natal appears in history as a kind of religious schizophrenic—on the one hand a great missionary who loved the Zulu people with an infinite tenderness and, on the other, a wilful and spiteful heretic for whom no action was too base and mean. Or, worse still, he is represented as a brilliant but misunderstood fore-runner of modern biblical scholars who was also by accident a South African missionary.

I have to thank Mr. Peter Walne, County Archivist at Reading, for kindly drawing my attention to the following letter in the Trumbull papers deposited in the Berkshire Record Office and for providing me with a photostat. It adds some small points of interest to my previous Bibliographical Note on ‘The Manuscripts of the Vargas-Granvelle Correspondence, 1551–2’ in this Journal (xi. 219–24). I print the text first and comment on it afterwards.