Alfred's royal anointing by Leo IV has long been one of the puzzles of Alfredian scholarship. Despite the ingenuity of the greatest Anglo-Saxon specialists, no really satisfactory explanation has yet been given of the strange story retailed by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 853, and repeated in Latin translation by Asser in his Vita Alfredi. Such near-contemporary evidence demands careful attention, especially since it has important implications for the authorship of the Chronicle itself.

In 1927 Dom Berlière published a series of articles in the Revue Bénédictine entitled ‘L”exercise du ministere paroissial par les moines dans le haut moyen-age’. These give a careful, analytical survey of the evidence for the performance of pastoral work by monks from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. In a period so long treatment was necessarily brief: and there is room for amplification of many of the topics he discussed.

The relations of England with the Curia in the thirteenth century is hardly a subject neglected by historians. From A. L. Smith to C. H. Lawrence stretches a long line of scholars who have been concerned during the last sixty years or so with the impact of papal authority on this country in that century. Meanwhile, on the continent, the vast output of studies on papal doctrine and curial machinery elucidate the particular question of England's links with Rome. When so much has been written, and where so many experts are in the room, it is temerarious to say more. I do not intend to present a startling new view of Anglo-papal relations in the time of Innocent III. My object is much more modest. For the last few years Mrs. Cheney and I have been tracing as much as possible of the correspondence between the Roman Curia and England during that pontificate, 1198–1216. All I want to do is to offer a few facts and figures and reflexions which come from our search.

In 1620, twenty-two years after his death, Thomas Stapleton received the tribute hoped for, I suppose, by many, if not all professors. Four of his friends collected together his works and published them. His Opera Omnia fill four folio volumes: translation, controversy, the fruit of his years of lecturing worked over and set out in lengthy, ordered dissertations, history, biography, moral instruction, panegyric, speeches made on academic occasions, commentaries on the Sunday, feast-day and Lenten gospels. The whole was prefaced by a life of the author written in Latin verse by Henry Holland. The best preserved and best cared-for copy is to be found in Lambeth Palace library.

Père Lecler, in his survey of Toleration and the Reformation, concluded that ‘among all the countries that were divided by the Reformation … England comes last so far as tolerance is concerned. Even the simple freedom of conscience which was gradually extended to the whole of Europe, was constantly threatened in England by police inquiries’. With the exception of Spain, Italy and possibly Scotland, the English government was more successful and persistent in its attempts to enforce unity of religion than its counterparts. The explanations of this fact are probably largely political: in most European countries, the willingness to listen to tolerationist arguments was in proportion to the practical difficulty of suppressing dissenters. As Professor Owen Chadwick said, ‘Catholic France accepted the Edict of Nantes in 1598 … not because Catholic France affirmed toleration to be merely right, but because without the Edict France must be destroyed’. The victory of toleration was normally a victory of expediency over principle. Featly, for example, says that ‘toleration of different religions falleth in some respects, within the compass of the mysteries of State, which cannot be determined in the Schools, but are fittest to be debated at the Council table’.