Amongst those who have devoted their studies to the registers of archbishops and bishops, there has been a natural tendency to select for notice or publication those registers which will be most amply useful to scholars in the provision of historical evidence, and to set aside those volumes which are imperfect or in any way defective. The reasons for this are obviously cogent, yet complete neglect of the less satisfactory registers would be unfortunate. There is much to be learned even from the omissions and defects due to a decadent registry or a period of institutional confusion. In the hope, therefore, not only of indicating the nature of some of these less satisfactory registers, but also of showing in what directions they may include matters of interest, the registers chosen for notice in this paper are not those of Melton or Thoresby, not even that of Wolsey, which although late in date is a volume of great regularity, showing a well-conducted registry; the selected registers are those of Edward Lee (1531–44) and of his successor Robert Holgate (1544–53). They are volumes which cover the early part of the changes in ecclesiastical constitution in Tudor times, and may therefore be expected to show some reflexion, perhaps many reflexions, of the effects of those religious changes.

With one minor exception, it was not much more than a series of coincidences which linked Jowett and Colenso. The one exception was when Colenso was in England after being excommunicated by Robert Gray, bishop of Capetown, as metropolitan. Samuel Wilberforce refused to allow Colenso to function in the diocese of Oxford but Jowett invited him to preach in Balliol chapel, which was not under the bishop's jurisdiction. Apart from this there seems to be no evidence of direct personal contact between the two men.

This article looks at a largely neglected aspect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religio-political activism and public doctrine, the conservative politics of premillennialist Protestantism. It approaches this subject through a case study of the doctrines and activities of the Catholic Apostolic Church, a relatively small premillennialist and Pentecostal faith-community extant from the 1830s through to the mid-twentieth century. The translation of these doctrines into Conservative party politics by Henry Drummond MP and by the seventh and eighth dukes of Northumberland is given especial attention.

Early in March 1554 the three English reformers and later Oxford martyrs, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the former bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, and the bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, were transported to the supposedly safe location of Oxford to expedite their trials. Their stay in Oxford, however, turned out to be a long one, lasting until their execution by burning outside the Northgate there: Latimer and Ridley on 16 October 1555; Cranmer on 21 March 1556. During the time they spent in Oxford – between nineteen and twenty-four months – they were usually confined apart from one another, in a number of locations, by the municipal officials responsible to the crown for their safekeeping: the mayor and the two bailiffs of Oxford. Cranmer, the most important and politically the most sensitive of the prisoners, appears to have spent most of his long confinement in the Bocardo, the local prison over the town's Northgate next to St Michael's church. Latimer and Ridley, on the other hand, spent considerable time privately boarded in the houses of, respectively, the bailiffs and the mayor, and Ridley, in particular, seems to have been able to maintain regular written and personal contact with their supporters and sympathisers. Their confinement must have put the three reformers, all of them Cambridge graduates, into a variety of contacts with local residents, but records for only two of those relationships have survived, and from diametrically opposite sources.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the local history of the English Reformation — that long, slow process of religious change which in many parts of the country did not really begin until after Elizabeth's accession and was still not complete at her death. The process was slow because of the paucity of parish clergy able and willing to preach the Word, catechise the young, upbraid the ungodly and so plant Protestantism firmly in the land. It took a long time to raise the intellectual and moral standards of the Church's personnel – to carry out a thorough ‘reformation of the ministry’.

John Bale acquired the MS. of Fasciculi Zizaniorum sometime after he left the Carmelite Order and before 1540 when he went into exile in Germany taking it with him. He was already familiar with Fasciculi Zizaniorum long before he left his Order. Bodley MS. 73 is an autograph MS. of Bale's and is one of his earliest notebooks. The bulk of it was written before 1524, though there are several later additions, the latest of which is 1526. This notebook was compiled, therefore, whilst Bale was a zealous Carmelite student, and before he went abroad to Toulouse and Louvain. It is a mine of miscellaneous information about the Carmelite Order: a list of all the Carmelite houses in England with their dates of foundation; the names of all the Priors Provincial of the Order; descriptions of the antiquities of many Carmelite houses, of the friars buried in different convents, often with their epitaphs; a lengthy selection of the letters of Thomas Netter. Of special concern here are Bale's notes on Carmelite writers. The ascription of the authorship of Fasciculi Zizaniorum to Thomas Netter of Walden first appears in this notebook in Bale's notes on Walden, where he says that Netter wrote the Doctrinale Ecclesie and Fasciculus Zizaniorum. The incipit to the latter work he gives as ‘Colligite Zizania’, which appears on the second folio of our MS. Later there follow four folios of ‘Extracta quedam ex fasciculo doctoris fratris Thome Walden’. There can be no doubt that all these extracts are taken from our MS., which was well known to Bale. He summarises its contents as far as the condemnation of Wyclif at the Council of Constance. His summary is interesting.

According to Western canonists, husband and wife had a debt towards one another: they were obliged to render sexual intercourse on demand. This article looks at the differences and similarities of the ‘marital debt’ in Byzantium and the West in order to evaluate whether this concept can be applied to Byzantine couples. It argues that, contrary to the West, in Byzantium there was no fixed linguistic terminology or sophisticated rules to describe a sexual obligation between spouses. Ultimately, there was also less need for one as sexual intercourse within marriage was not considered sinful and needed no justification.