To Englishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few institutions inspired such horrified fascination as the Bedlam hospital, the principal London mad-house. Yet Bedlam, or to give it its proper title, the hospital of St Mary of New Bethlehem, had been in existence for several centuries before its principal charge became the care, or perhaps more correctly the confinement, of the insane. The origins of Bedlam lie in the 1240s, in the reign of King Henry III. To date, the circumstances which gave rise to the hospital's foundation have failed to attract the understanding and attention which they deserve. Bedlam's founders would no doubt have been surprised to learn of the subsequent fate of their institution, intended in origin not as a mad-house but as a link between England and the Holy Land, part of a wider movement in which the cathedral church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and its bishops sought land, alms and hospitality in western Europe. The purpose of this present essay is to investigate the links between England and the church of Bethlehem which gave rise to the foundation of Bedlam. In the process, it is hoped that new light will be shed upon English attitudes to the crusades, upon the reorganisation of the finances and administration of the bishops of Bethlehem exiled from the Holy Land after 1187, and in particular upon the career of one bishop, Goffredo de Prefetti. It was Goffredo who was to be personally responsible for the introduction of the Bethlehemites to England, and so it is with his career that we should commence.

Preaching before parliament in April 1571, the bishop of London, Edwin Sandys, lamented the low popular esteem which clergy enjoyed in the England of his own time, which encouraged the gospel message to be undervalued or ignored. Lay greed impoverished the Church, depriving God's ministers of their lawful maintenance. Little had changed since the break with Rome, when the crown and laymen began to secularise the church's lands and revenues in the name of religious reform. Sandys observed in sorrow that ‘the Gospel hath evil luck: it is never preached, but the patrimony thereof is pinched’. This Reformation legacy of lay sacrilege would haunt the English Church throughout the sixteenth century, and pose a serious threat to the preservation and advance of Protestantism. The sixteenth-century English Church faced fundamental economic problems, which hindered her clergy from fulfilling the increased pastoral duties demanded by reformers. While doctrine and liturgy were reformed, clerical finances and the parochial structure remained largely untouched. At the same time, the decline in offerings and payment of personal tithes, the prohibition of lucrative pilgrimages and prayers for the dead, and the fiscal consequences of the royal supremacy (especially increased taxation) all damaged clerical finances. Reform of the clerical economy was essential. While some wealthier clergy continued to prosper, the perception of poverty and decline became commonplace. Many commentators responded to rising lay and clerical expectation of ministers by stressing the urgent need to recover and reallocate the church's economic resources. At the heart of this discussion of ministers' maintenance lay an unresolved tension between a state Reformation with strong political and economic elements and a religious reform movement.

Notice is hereby given, that if any man be mindful to enlist in his Majesty's service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White, Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieut.-General of his Majesty's forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both which are now in danger, let him repair to the drum-head at the Cross, where each man shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and all other proper encouragements.

This notice, which was published at the height of the agitation which beset the forest of Pendle in the summer of 1748, conjures images beloved of the Methodist hagiographer. Assuming quasi-military titles, squire and parson rally a drink-sodden mob to do battle against the preachers of the Gospel, and all in the name of religion and commerce. Historians, however, are required to take a more dispassionate view of the motives and actions of those who, through violence or polemic, attempted to arrest the growth of the Evangelical Revival, a movement which was to prove one of the most influential religious and cultural movements in the history of the British Isles. John Walsh's pioneering essay on ‘Methodism and the mob’ was one of the first serious attempts to treat anti-Methodist agitation sympathetically, and to place it in the much broader context of the norms of popular protest in the eighteenth century. However, detailed academic studies of anti-Methodist protests remain scarce, and the strong correlation between these and other examples of popular hostility towards other deviant religious groups, such as Catholics, Nonconformists and Jews, remains understated.

The Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church, founded in the seventeenth century, had by the 1820s dwindled to a group of just seven women without a minister. One of their seventeenth-century forebears, Joseph Davis, a wealthy linen draper, had established a charitable trust for the purpose of perpetually supporting the cause of Seventh Day Baptists. He had entrusted to it the Mill Yard property in London – which gave the congregation its name – and the task of paying the minister's salary, as well as listing some other suitable beneficiaries. In 1830, however, the trustees at that time resolved to give the property to another congregation on the grounds that the historic Mill Yard church had ceased to exist. The members – all women – protested that they were a true church and all parties agreed to take the case for arbitration to the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers – a ministerial society comprised of the bulk of the Independent, Baptist and Presbyterian ministers in London and its vicinity. Thus, for several days in 1831, many of the most prominent Nonconformist ministers of that era gave themselves to passing judgement on the theological legitimacy or otherwise of the unusual situation arrived at by a remnant of this obscure religious group, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover Dissenting attitudes during that period toward the relationship between gender and the very nature of the Church itself.

The year 1804 was something of a watershed in British church history. In that year the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, the first large-scale experiment in ecumenicism, uniting evangelicals of various stripes and colours in a gigantic publishing venture that would cover the globe with Bibles printed in every language known to humanity. A key ingredient that would enable various Churches to work together in this massive ecumenical enterprise was a strict rule, to which all subscribed, stating that only the Authorised Version of the Bible would be published and that these Bibles would be circulated ‘without note or comment’. This rule, known as ‘The Fundamental Principle’, was designed to protect the Bible Society from accusations that it was promoting a seditious or heterodox document. Moreover, governance of the new society would be equally divided between Churchmen and Dissenters. In this way it was hoped that Baptists and non-Baptists, Calvinists and Arminians, Dissenters and Anglicans, could forget that which divided them, and join together in publishing and distributing a book to which they all subscribed. And to a large degree the Bible Society was successful in this enterprise, circulating 4,252,000 Bibles by 1825 and uniting many denominations and Churches in the process. In the year 2004, the Bible Society will celebrate its bicentennial, still intact as an ecumenical institution.

Yet in the early years of its history, achieving consensus over the translation and distribution of the Bible proved problematic. A case in point involved Baptist and Anglican evangelicals in West Bengal, India, where ecumenical co-operation worked for a season, but only as long as certain cherished theological principles were kept sacred. Thus when these evangelicals engaged in a joint enterprise to translate the Bible into the Eastern and Oriental languages under the auspices of the Bible Society, co-operation gave way to bitter controversy over how to translate key biblical concepts sacred to each group.

This paper studies the challenges to pan-evangelical co-operation in the Bible Society through a little known episode that took place in and around Calcutta and which covered the first forty years of the Bible Society's history. It first examines the forces which brought Baptists and Anglicans together in a common quest to translate and distribute Bibles. Next it outlines the stresses and strains which this activity produced between Baptist and paedobaptist members of the Bible Society in England and between William Carey and his Anglican counterparts in India. It ends by describing the schism that resulted in the creation of the Bible Translation Society, an event which proved that the Bible could be a force for division as well as for unity. Along the way, we get a candid glimpse of interpersonal relationships between evangelical leaders of the day. They emerge not as the unsullied saints often portrayed by their official biographers, but as fallible human beings. This understanding gives us a more realistic view of the people who guided the nineteenth-century evangelical revival, both their strengths and their shortcomings.

John Foxe and the English Reformation. Edited by David Loades. Pp. xii+340 incl. 54 figs. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997

This volume, a collection of papers presented at a colloquium held in Cambridge in 1995 on John Foxe and his seminal work, the Acts and monuments (popularly known as Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’), has the chief virtue of any good collection of conference papers: it presents a range of diverse topics approached from a variety of disciplines and methodologies by a number of respected scholars. This volume also succeeds in avoiding one of the paramount shortcomings of such collections, a lack of focus and common themes. In fact, Loades's book is so tightly focused that its title is slightly misleading inasmuch as the articles in it tend to ignore Foxe's life and career (indeed several of the contributors write about periods, decades or even centuries after Foxe's death), while only one article in it discusses any of the other works, apart from his martyrology, that Foxe wrote. Instead the contributions to this collection largely address three topics: the composition or manufacture of the Acts and monuments, the influence of continental writers and craftsmen on the book and, finally, its influence on Foxe's contemporaries or on subsequent generations. As such this is the most important book on the Acts and monuments, that most important of books, since William Haller's influential study was published over three decades ago.