At the beginning of Langland's poem Piers Plowman, the narrator, having glimpsed the field of folk and the two castles, meets a lady with a beautiful face, clothed in linen. When he fails to recognise her, she gently chides him. ‘I am Holy Church; you ought to know me. I received you at the first and taught you faith. You brought me pledges to fulfil my bidding and to love me loyally while your life lasts.’ In these few words, Langland affirms the importance of childhood as inaugurating the relationship between human beings and the Church. Every child becomes a member of the Church by baptism soon after birth. The Church teaches its faith to the child, and the child is committed by its godparents to carry out the Church's requirements in a loving way. This view of childhood is a limited one. It centres on the outset of life—birth and baptism – not on the following fifteen years or so, and it does not perceive the status of children in the Church to differ in principle from that of adults, who also received teaching and owed commitments. Nowhere in his work has Langland much to say about children and in this respect he is typical of most medieval writers. Little was written about the work of the Church with children or the involvement of children in Church, despite the extent to which children – actually or potentially – made up the membership of Christendom.

Studies of medieval society in recent years have laid increasing stress on the effectiveness of the power of the saints. They enriched their churches, defended their possessions, created great centres at once of pilgrimage and commerce and provided for the healing of the sick and the care of the poor. The cults of the saints formed a model for secular government. Kings appeared before their people as walking reliccollections and exercised the power of healing, and patron saints (like St Mark at Venice and St Denis in France) helped to define the identity of the political communities over whose well-being they were thought to preside. Often such saints, even those whose cults were rapidly developing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were figures from the New Testament or from the ages of conversion: St James at Compostella, Mary Magdalen at Vézelay, and Benedict at Fleury. On occasions, however, a charismatic figure in contemporary society emerged as the centre of a healing cult and a focus for widespread devotion.

That many divines during the middle decades of the seventeenth century were filled with high hopes for the Church's future, and that many of these high hopes were expressed in millenarian terms is by now a commonplace. That, furthermore, this phenomenon did not appear out of the blue and must have had a prehistory would be evident to most. But how far back should one go to find its roots? More than twenty years ago William Lamont argued in his controversial study Godly rule that Elizabethan reformers shared with their more radical brethren of the revolutionary years the hope of ‘godly rule’, a term he never clearly defined but which he nevertheless called millenarian. He singled out John Foxe as the chief spokesman of the ‘godly rule’ idea, and moreover claimed that Foxe was the one who above all ‘made the pursuit of the millennium respectable and orthodox’ in England. The idea that Foxe was a millenarian, even the chief spokesman of millenarianism in Elizabethan England, has not found general approval. In well-documented studies on Foxe, the British apocalyptic tradition, or the English Reformation, scholars such as Bernard Capp, Viggo Norskov Olsen, Richard Bauckham, Katharine R. Firth and Patrick Collinson have all denied that Foxe believed in a this-worldly and future period of peace and ecclesiastical felicity; they have instead drawn attention to his view of end-time persecution, and to his belief in the imminent end of the world.

Ever since Henry VIII, the law of marriage has occupied a special place in the relationship between the Church of England and the state. Changes made to the law since 1857 have raised far-reaching and difficult questions about the nature of this relationship, involving the status of canon law. Marriage in church has remained, perhaps even more than the other rites of passage, an essential point at which the Church of England still touches the lives of great numbers of the otherwise unchurched, and these questions have thus impinged on the practical reality of the Church's work.

The letter Benedictus Deus, which forms the basis of this study, was first printed by J. A. Giles in his 1845 edition of the letters of Thomas Becket, and the Abbé Migne later reproduced it in the same context in Patrologia Latina, without comment. Neither ventured identification of the author or recipients, although some connexion with the Becket controversy must have been presumed, since they included the text with his correspondence. In fact, it has no connexion with Thomas Becket, despite its inclusion in one of the large manuscript collections of Becket correspondence assembled in the late twelfth century. It was neither written nor received by any of the participants, nor is it concerned with the matters at issue in the controversy. It concerns the removal of the unnamed superior of a religious house, and the circumstances of its composition are obscure. The heading and protocol are damaged, and although the author's name can be clearly read as Frater R., and the recipients' initials as G. and R., the address is incomplete, and there are no internal clues to date and context.

Thus Gibbon opened the thirty-seventh chapter of the History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, a lengthy chapter devoted to the twin topics of ‘the institution of monastic life’ and ‘the conversion of the northern barbarians’. The connection between the history of the Roman Empire and the Christian Church was indeed indissoluble. The Church was destined to follow the pattern of the empire by gradually degenerating as it grew in strength from original purity in the life of Christ and the Apostles to become a corrupt and baleful influence on the fortunes of secular society. Looking back over twenty years of research and writing (1767–87) he wrote near the beginning of his final chapter, ‘In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion and I can only resume in a few words, their real or imaginary connection with the ruin of ancient Rome.’ He goes on to list ‘potent and forcible causes of destruction’ by barbarians and Christians respectively. As he finally laid down his pen on 27 June 1787 at Lausanne, he concluded with a sentence whose strict accuracy has sometimes been doubted: ‘It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candour of the public.’ The date of this decision was 15 October 1764. Here we survey briefly the role of ‘religion’, i.e. Christianity in the ruin of the Roman Empire.