Why did Christianity decline relatively to Islam in wide areas of the Mediterranean world during the European Middle Ages? The problem has deserved more attention than it has received from historians, for the pattern is not a consistent one and the decline where it took place, cannot be explained on the grounds of Moslem military superiority alone. The first generation of Moslem conquerors that so decisively defeated the Byzantine armies were plunderers who sought booty and revenge for past wrongs suffered at the hands of the Byzantine authorities or simply from the agricultural and urban populations of the east Roman frontier provinces. Confronted with undreamed of success, they had little idea of establishing either civil government or settling in the areas they had conquered. They had little desire also to convert their new Christian subjects, for that would diminish the flow of tribute exacted in exchange for protection. Yet as time went on, Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean showed none of the survival and recuperative power that characterised the Orthodox Church in the Balkans during the five centuries of Ottoman occupation from 1390–1912. Of the areas overrun by successive Moslem invaders down to 1400 only Spain, Sicily and Crete re-emerged as Christian territories.

Of the many testimonials to the importance of the role assumed by the European universities in the political and ecclesiastical machinations which accompanied attempts to find a solution to the problems created by the elections of the rival popes Urban VI and Clement VII in 1378, there is none more striking than the tract written by Boniface Ferrer (brother of the saint) in 1411, after the Council of Pisa in 1409 had declared both the then rivals deposed, and had replaced them by Alexander v. This tract, intended as a defence of the Avignonese claimant, Benedict XIII is an extremely bitter attack on the academics of the day, both individually and generally. Several of them are singled out for criticism, especially those who had taken a major part in producing the conciliarist viewpoint. Thus, Simon de Cramaud, patriarch of Alexandria and acting president of the Council of Pisa for most of its sessions, is twice called an heresiarch. Many of the other major thinkers of the day have their integrity attacked, notably Pierre d'Ailly, bishop of Cambrai, and Baldus de Ubaldis, one of the major lawyers of the period.

The calibre of the early Elizabethan clergy left much to be desired and much criticism was levelled by contemporaries and near contemporaries at the bishops for their failure to check the flow of insufficient ministers into benefices. While historians have acknowledged the existence of legal obstacles in the way of a firm episcopal policy in this regard, and have come gradually to realise some of the profound implications of the patronage system, no one has charted in detail the law of patronage which so hampered hierarchical attempts to raise the standard of the parochial clergy.

Little attention seems to have been given by Zwingli's biographers to the Reformer's pastoral activities between the end of the Marburg Conference (October 1529) and his own death two years later. This may be because the critical edition of his writings in the Corpus Reformatorum, started in 1905, has not yet covered the two final years. Koehler long ago stressed the preponderance of political interests in Zwingli's thought and activities during these twenty-eight months between the two Kappel wars—‘die dämonische Macht der Politik’ as he called it—and the recent work of Hauswirth, Fabian and Haas has followed this clue effectively.

The importance of Augustine Baker in the history of English devotional literature has long been recognised, but there has always been a major handicap to any proper understanding of him—the fact that most of his works have not been published, except in a onevolume digest, entitled Sancta Sophia, which one of his disciples, Serenus Cressy, produced in 1657. Thus Baker has recently been the subject of a full-scale monograph, which, though otherwise scholarly and accurate enough, suffers from the fact that the author has not consulted the Baker MSS., and has, therefore, together with almost every other expert in this field of study, begun and ended his work without knowing whether Cressy's digest truly reproduces his master's voice. What follows is an attempt to answer this hitherto unanswered question by reconstructing the circumstances of the book's publication and by comparing it with some of the MSS. But first, some definitions.

In February 1917 the Geographical Journal published a paper by C. B. Fawcett in which he analysed some principles which might underlie any successful division of England into those larger administrative areas which a new concept of devolution in government would require. His paper became a small book, The Provinces of England, which was published in 1919. Both the paper and the book are now regarded as classics in the English literature of this particular field of geographical studies. Ecclesiastical areas and the boundaries containing them are susceptible to a similar analysis and, prompted by the need for additional dioceses to meet pastoral problems arising from the growth and redistribution of the population, Anglican churchmen had been attempting such analyses many decades before the appearance of Fawcett's paper.

The purpose of this article is first to give some account of a short collection of Anglo-Norman councils of the eleventh century, then to suggest that one of these councils, hitherto unknown, represents the canons of a council held by archbishop Lanfranc in 1072, and lastly to offer a tentative explanation of why the whole collection came to be put together.