Each generation of historiographers has had its own interpretation of the persecutions. In their hour of triumph in the years following the Council of Nicaea, Christians in both halves of the Roman Empire looked back to these events as the heroic age of the Christian faith. The sufferings of the Church were linked to the sufferings of the children of Israel and this time, too, anti-Christ and his abettors, the pagan emperors, their officials and the mobs had been worsted. Like the Egyptians they had perished miserably. But, as so often happens, victory dissolved the common bonds which united the victors. In the next centuries the relations between Church and State in the East and West were to follow different paths. In the East the ‘martyrdom in intention’ of the monastic life tended to replace the martyrdom in deed in opposition to the emperor. In the West, the martyr tradition was to underline that same opposition. Tertullian, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory VII, Boniface VIII embody a single trend of ideas extending over a thousand years.

St. Oswald's part in the English revival of Benedictine monasticism usually known as the tenth century reformation was the subject of a classical study by the late Dr. Armitage Robinson, whose conclusions have gained very wide acceptance. Dr. Robinson was mainly interested in the part St. Oswald played in the conversion of Worcester cathedral into a fully Benedictine community. He drew a sharp distinction between the conduct of St. Æthelwold at Winchester and that of Oswald at Worcester.Accepting the usual opinion that Æthelwold expelled clerks from Winchester by violence and replaced them with monks, he argued that Oswald on the contrary was a gentle man who preferred to convert the Worcester community to monasticism gradually and made no expulsions. In his argument Dr. Robinson found himself greatly handicapped by the paucity of information in the few narrative sources relevant to the tenth century which were reasonably contemporary. He found himself forced to take into consideration post-Conquest hagiography and to discriminate within the conflicting details of late traditions. In spite of the poor character of the narrative evidence he thought, and he has carried most later scholars with him in this, that he could supply the defects of his narrative sources by what was mainly a statistical study of the witness-lists to the many charters issued in Oswald's name during his pontificate. It is upon his calculations that Dr. Robinson's theory in the end rests. It will be argued in this paper that the late traditions are of little value and that the witnesslists of Oswald's charters do not quite bear the weight Dr. Robinson put upon them. A rather different view of Oswald's pontificate will be suggested and by taking into account some allegedly contemporary evidence which Dr. Robinson, on reasonable grounds, ignored, some wider considerations relating to the establishment of the monks will be offered.

Luther's name was unknown in England on that 31 October 1517 when he posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Relatively soon, however, after this momentous event it would be widely known in London.

The Brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford, an anonymous tract commonly ascribed to William Whittingham, dean of Durham, and printed in Heidelberg in 1574 and 1575, enjoys a unique reputation among the polemical writings of the Elizabethan puritans for its well-documented if partisan account of the controversies of the Marian exiles in their German and Swiss congregations. The importance of the Brieff discours as a source for the history of the Exile has hitherto tended to divert attention from the circumstances of its origin in the Elizabethan puritan controversy. This note is intended to introduce new evidence on the activities of a group of puritan propagandists responsible for organising the publication of this and other tracts in the early years of the Elizabethan Presbyterian Movement; to call in question the traditional attribution of the Brieff discours to Whittingham; and to suggest that the author may have been a relatively obscure exile, Thomas Wood.

‘Without me’, wrote John Henry Newman in 1869, ‘Golightly would not have come to Oxford, and he was my chief persecutor.’

Charles Pourtales Golightly was born in 1807, and died on Christmas Day 1885. He was thus six years younger than Newman, and died some five years before him, but not too soon to see him made a cardinal. Like Newman, Golightly had on his mother's side a Huguenot ancestry. He went to school at Eton, which he thought a vile place. He travelled in Europe, and stayed in Rome, where he relished the society of cardinals. In 1824 he matriculated at Oriel College Oxford. In 1828 he proceeded B.A., in 1830 M.A. But for his ample means, he might (it was said) have been elected into the brilliant company of Fellows of Oriel. Though various well-meaning persons pulled strings to establish the young Golightly in a benefice, he never received any ecclesiastical appointment except one or two curacies.