Some may wonder why Acton is a suitable subject for a Butterfield Lecture. People who knew Butterfield's writing will not wonder. He was fascinated by Acton's mind. He did not quite like Acton's mind. Yet something in Acton was so powerful to Butterfield that it needed arguing with all the time. In some ways you can say that Butterfield spent a lot of his historical life arguing with Acton, even though he was born only just before Acton died. Sir Geoffrey Elton said in his first Butterfield Memorial Lecture that he, Elton, much regretted Butterfield's obsession with Acton. He said that Acton was an ‘unproductive monument’ who really deserves ‘honourable oblivion'. ‘I could wish’, he told you here two years ago, ‘that after 1931 Butterfield had forgotten about Acton. He wasted much time, effort and subtlety, in that doomed enterprise to make something of a bogus enigma.’

This paper (a companion to an article published this Journal lxvii [2016]) considers a twelve-year campaign by some Church of England clergy to discredit Nonconformists as irrational enthusiasts. It began in 1668–9, to discourage concessions to Nonconformists through ‘comprehension’ and to prove the loyalty of men suspected of lukewarm attachment to the Church. Congregationalists responded by accusing the conformists of Socinianism. But Presbyterians were less willing to differ from churchmen, and claimed that orthodox Protestants did not disagree about reason. Any differences were exaggerated for polemical advantage, and the controversy drove conformists and Nonconformists further apart.

This article explores the reception of the European Protestant Reformation in the British Atlantic using the early Bermudan Church as a case study. It offers an alternative model for Puritan colonisation which was driven by a reformed vision for godly globalisation and evangelisation rather than flight from persecution in England. By shedding light on ecclesiastical ties between the reformed Churches on the continent and the British Atlantic, it extends the ideological foundations for the establishment of British America beyond the theories of empire and economic opportunism usually addressed by historians.

St Simon Stock is an elusive thirteenth-century Carmelite saint of whom it may be said that very little is known but about whom much has been written. The details of his life and even the fact of his existence have aroused considerable controversy over the centuries. In part the lack of firm information could be attributed to the fact that, until recently, the early history of the Carmelites, or Whitefriars, was little known and clouded by legendary claims about the order being founded on Mount Carmel by the prophet Elijah. In addition, church historians have tended to focus on the larger and better documented Franciscan and Dominican orders. The Carmelites, although numerically fewer, were nevertheless a significant presence in medieval England comprising at their peak some thirty-nine communities and a total approaching 1,000 friars. Fortunately, in the past few years, the quantity of published research on Carmelite history has increased significantly.

Historians have offered a variety of explanations for Pope Innocent III's release of King John from the promise that he made to observe the clauses of Magna Carta. None has won general acceptance. This article proposes an alternative by examining the tenets of the canon law as it was understood in 1215. That examination shows that the law of oaths (De iureiurando) played a central role in canonistic thought of the time. It contained the juristic resources that made it possible for Innocent to release John from the oath that he had taken at Runnymeade.

Edmund Dudley, minister of Henry VII, was a man both personally extraordinary and yet representative of his age. He abandoned the normal cursus honorum of the legal profession to enter the king's service more suddenly than any of his contemporaries; yet he was one of many common lawyers newly influential in the king's councils of the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. He was probably the only layman in Henry's inner circle to have studied at a university; yet within fifty years of his death most English statesmen of the first rank would have done so. In pursuing the king's interests, Dudley generated sufficient animosity to make himself one of the two scapegoats for Henry's policies tried and executed in 1509–10; yet it was more his manner, his efficiency and his political isolation than any difference of intent that distinguished him from Henry's other ministers. In pursuing his own interests he built a large landed estate faster than any of his colleagues, but their aims and eventual achievements were not so different from his. The one respect in which Dudley was unique was that he had leisure, while under arrest in the Tower of London, to commit to paper his thoughts on English government and society. The resulting treatise, The tree of commonwealth, enables us to juxtapose his stated ideals with his actions as a royal minister and as an influential layman. Thereby we may hope to shed new light on the relations between Church, State and lay elites on the eve of the English Reformation.

The recent extensive article on this subject by the distinguished French Scholar Dr. Jérome Carcopino provides an opportunity to return to a subject which I have already discussed in a paper published shortly before the War. Since its publication fresh evidence has come to light which may be thought to bear upon the subject, and various explanations of the origin of the square have been put forward which seem to invite comment. The exhaustive article of Fr. de Jerphanion, which is largely summarized by Carcopino, makes necessary only the briefest sketch of the development of our knowledge of the square. In its later form (beginning with Sator, fig. 2) it can be traced in a more or less complete form from the sixth century to modern times over an area extending from France to Ethiopia, Nubia, and even to South America, where its prophylactic virtues were accepted in the nineteenth century. The discovery of its earlier form (beginning with Rotas, fig. 1) incised on Roman wall-piaster at Cirencester in 1868 caused little interest, and it remained almost exclusively a matter for the medievalist for many years. In 1926 it was observed by Grosser that twenty-one of the letters of the square were made up of the word ‘Paternoster’ twice over (but necessarily arranged as a cross since the N, the middle letter, appears only once) and that the remaining four letters are two A's and two O's (fig. 4).

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution.

Most Anglican crises, including recent ones, seem to boil down in the end to two linked questions — those of identity and authority. Is the Church of England pre-eminently a national or a catholic Church, a Protestant Church (and if so, of what kind?) or Anglican and sui generis? With which of these types of Church should it align itself? Where lies the famed via media, and which are the extremes to be avoided? And who has the authority to decide: as a national Church, parliament, the government, the monarch personally; as an episcopal Church, the bishops? Or should the clergy in convocations (or, latterly, the General Synod, including representatives of the pious laity) take decisions? Anglican crises have always raised these twin problems of identity and authority. In the mid-eighteenth century — from the end of the 1730s and particularly in the 1740s — the Church of England faced another crisis. The Anglican bishops had to come to terms with the movement known as the ‘evangelical revival’. Principles had to be applied to a new situation. The bishops had to decide how to categorise the new societies (or would they become new churches?) which were springing up all over England.

When students of early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical history come to compile a religious ‘map’ of England, their attention will be drawn to a matter commented upon often enough by contemporaries, but almost entirely neglected now—the catastrophic decline in the influence of the Church in much of the countryside. The greatest triumphs of Nonconformity were won in the rural areas of Wales, and by the time of the religious census in 1851 English Dissenters had established a long lead over the Church in the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, were ahead in Huntingdonshire, and were within striking distance of drawing level in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk. In the southern and south-eastern counties the Church preserved its formal ascendancy, but often attracted a smaller proportion of the people to its services on census Sunday than in counties which were overrun by Dissent. The real tragedy for the Church in this period, it may be argued, was not that industrialisation concentrated people where her. endowments, manpower and accommodation were thinly spread, but that things went so badly where her resources were concentrated. It is the object of this paper to draw attention to this major question of ecclesiastical history and geography, and to suggest that part of the answer to it lies in the tithe question.

The year 1688 was for England a religious as well as a political turning-point, and nowhere more so than among the English Roman Catholics. The post-Revolution Church was maintained and led by the same clergy who had flourished under James 11, but in very different circumstances. The hectic triumphalism of the years before 1688 gave way to a period of slow, cautious, and self-consciously a-political consolidation. The change can be seen in the careers of two men, Bonaventure Giffard and John Gother. Giffard had been provocatively consecrated bishop of Madura in the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall in 1688. In the same year he had gone to Oxford, to preside over twelve catholic dons at Magdalen College, intruded in the place of the evicted protestant Fellows. There he had confirmed and sung the mass, while protestant undergraduates stormed and howled outside the chapel windows. The Revolution brought a fourteen-month prison sentence in Newgate, from which he emerged, a chastened man, to oversee the formation and consolidation of congregations and clergy funds and organisations in the Midland District and, after 1702, to take charge of the London District with its mission to the London poor and unchurched.

Although Constantine was interested in the Council from a political point of view, and although he evidently got what he wanted from it, he did not simply walk away from Nicaea with the creed and consider the matter at an end. His letters written after the Council are important evidence for his attitude during it.

Professor Margaret Deanesly and Père Grosjean have devoted some discussion to Dom Suso Brechter's study of the sources for the English mission of Gregory the Great. The debate which it has since provoked has centred almost exclusively on the question of the authenticity of the Responsa attributed to Gregory the Great in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People [H.E.], i, 27. Mr. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill has rightly insisted that ‘Dom Brechter's book discusses much more than the Gregorian Responsa’. It is my purpose in this paper to consider some of Dom Brechter's arguments concerning the course and the chronology of the English mission, and his attack on the accuracy of Bede's account and on his honesty.

On 20 November 1210, before a large crowd of spectators which had flocked to the market-place of Les Champeaux outside the Saint-Honoré Gate in Paris, the heretical Amalricians were burnt at the stake. Fire that day consumed ten men, of whom nine were certainly laicised priests, deacons and sub-deacons. Six days earlier, at the nearby church of St Honorius, they had been stripped of their clerical status and handed over for execution to the royal officials of the rex chrislianissimus, Philip Augustus. Indeed, from the time some three months beforehand that Master Ralph of Namur, discoverer of their existence and pseudo-convert to their beliefs, was instructed by his clerical superiors to infiltrate the sect – an act of ecclesiastical espionage which eventually delivered the Amalricians to the flames – a highly placed royal counsellor, the Hospitaller Brother Guerin, had been consulted immediately. For this was a matter of urgency, and not just to the Church.

Orthodox criticism of Bishop Reynold Pecok began ten years before he recanted and resigned in 1457–8. It came from a group of consciously orthodox theologians whose views were outraged by Pecok's teaching in sermon, disputation and writings. Long before his trial and recantation, Pecok had offended two important movements: a pastoral movement, deeply committed to preaching, which he outraged by belittling the importance of preaching; and a patristic movement which had grown up in the universities from the 1420s and whose members were now undertaking pastoral work. Pecok's gradually revealed hostility to the Fathers was particularly offensive to his younger opponents. If differences in age thus gave rise to differences of emphasis among Pecok's opponents, so too did differences of academic background. Nevertheless, as learned, consciously orthodox theologians with pastoral interests, they shared a common theological culture. The changes in emphasis found their expression in the course of controversy.

Writing to Wolsey from Bergen op Zoom in 1527 the English ambassador described the Low Countries as being in grave peril from heresy, ‘for yf ther be tre men that speckes, the tweyn keppis Lutter ys openyon’: it was a pardonable exaggeration. Of Luther's immediate popularity in the Netherlands there can be no doubt. In taverns, private houses and on barges the religious issues of the day were hotly debated; from pulpits the new doctrines were championed or denounced, and in public places posters appeared pillorying the mendicants. The succession of placards forbidding the reading, sale or printing of Luther's writings and the increasingly severe penalties prescribed for attendance at conventicles, for harbouring apostate religious and, above all, for spreading heretical notions tell the same tale. Already by 1525 Luther had become a household name in the Netherlands and a new synonym for heretics ‘Luytrianen’ had entered common speech, displacing the older ‘Valdoysen ende Wijclevisten’.

No one doubts that the treatise on repentance published in 1648 as the sixth book of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is by Hooker, but there has been considerable doubt that 1648 (as I shall call it) belongs in the Laws. Keble pronounced it ‘an entire deviation from its subject’, which should have been the Disciplinarian proposal that the power of ecclesiastical jurisdiction be exercised by congregational lay-elders, while W. Speed Hill concludes his recent detailed discussion of the problems surrounding the posthumous three last books of Hooker's great work by calling on those who would include 1648 in the Laws to argue their case for its inclusion ‘in the face of a substantial body of evidence, internal and external, to the contrary’. The present note is a response on the ‘internal’ side to Professor Hill's call for argument.

During the past forty years, the religious history of Elizabethan and early Stuart England has received a great deal of attention from intellectual, social and Church historians. Because of the nature of the general interpretation traditionally followed, most scholars have found it fruitful to concentrate their research upon particular groups or individuals and to fit the ensuing studies into either a rather narrow stream labelled ‘Anglican’ or a very broad one named ‘Puritan’. While the number of biographies of English bishops and analyses of ‘Anglican’ divines has increased at a more than respectable rate recently, studies of English ‘Puritans’ and their brethren in New England have grown to almost unmanageable proportions. With all of these riches at hand, however, no recent historian has published an overall synthetic history of the Church of England under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts to match that completed by W. H. Frere more than two-thirds of a century ago. Indeed, a good deal of controversy still ranges over the boundaries and validity of such terms as ‘Anglican’ and—especially— ‘Puritan’. Plunging into that dispute, this paper will examine the nature and historiographical origins of these categories, redefine them so that they better apply to the evidence from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and spell out some of the social and political implications that spring from this modified point of view. While the argument presented here, no doubt, will neither please nor satisfy all historians working in the field, one hopes that it will provide some with a glimpse at the outlines of a new synthesis.

The Restoration was a victory for the governing classes, a victory for social stability and discipline. Dissent, the gentry argued, led to republicanism and social disintegration: Anglicanism and the monarchy meant order. Yet despite the ease with which Charles it returned in 1660 and the relative lack of bloodshed which accompanied his restoration, it was by no means certain that the settlement would be anything more than transitory. God, in his infinite and impenetrable