Some works survive by a thread. The Beowulf manuscript is a good example of how tenuous our knowledge of the medieval past can be, as it survives in only one manuscript that was very nearly incinerated in the Cottonian fire of 1731. The chapter describes the knowledge that existed of the manuscript prior to that – virtually none – and the scholarly work done on it since then.

Clerics and monks were originally chalk and cheese. The clergy were an increasingly complex system committed to highly structured hierarchy – but there were unresolved uncertainties about the precise form it should take. The chapter discusses for instance the clerical cursus honorum, reactions against fast-track promotion, and the bigamia rule against clerics in higher orders marrying more than once and the rule’s relation to pagan marriage. The apostolic see was called in to clarify problems arising from these systems and also from the awkward relation between clerics and monks. Monasticism was an unstructured movement, sometimes out of control, at one point banned from towns by imperial law. The interpenetration of the clerical and monastic systems only intensified the challenge of integrating them. The problem would recur in different forms throughout the history of the Latin Church, and the difficulty of coordinating the two overlapping systems had the unintended consequence of strengthening the papacy, constantly called in to integrate monks within the religious legal system and adjust the differences between the two religious elites. The process is already in evidence with the earliest papal jurisprudence.

That papal responses about Pelagianism belong to a specifically legal domain is a secondary conclusion of the chapter. The primary conclusion can be integrated with a central argument about the origins of the first papal jurisprudence, viz., that it was demand-driven, and that the demand was driven by uncertainty. We should not be surprised at uncertainty in late Antiquity about grace and free will when modern scholars write in such different terms about Augustine. Many modern people prefer Pelagius, but Augustine’s understanding of grace won the assent of intellectuals like Gottschalk in the ninth century, Bradwardine in the fourteenth, and Luther and Calvin in the sixteenth, and it continued to have adherents within Catholicism, even after the Council of Trent. Self-evident the solution to the argument was not. Given the violently opposed views, in this apparently purely Western controversy, it is not surprising that the apostolic see was asked for a response. Baffled by the paradox of divine omnipotence and human free will, it did what it would do in subsequent centuries: step back from acceptance of Augustine’s late views, without breathing a word of criticism against him.

Command hierarchy is as much in evidence as status hierarchy in this first age of papal decretals, though the two structures do not map tidily on to each other. By the end of the fourth century a complex chain of command with many levels had developed in the Christian Church. The bishop in his city played a pivotal role, but below bishops were large communities of clerics, sometimes running their own churches, and between an ordinary bishop and the bishop of Rome there might be two layers in the hierarchy of authority. This hierarchy of power regulated elections to bishoprics. It went with an increasingly precise geographical division of the Christian world into dioceses. Could a cleric move from one diocese to another? This was the kind of practical problem that arose.

Tensions arising from the establishment of monasteries in Gaul by John Cassian get associated in a long decretal of Celestine I with Cassian’s mild but firm critique of Augustine of Hippo’s views on grace and free will. These topics are the only core theological subjects discussed at length in the Dionysiana and Quesnelliana collections: the latter has three fascinating letters of Innocent I to African bishops, apparently endorsing their hard-line views on grace and (corrupted) nature, but in fact significantly silent on key points, stoppping short of some hard-line Augustinian positions.