The immediate purpose of this article is narrative, in particular its aim is to draw attention to two little-known incidents in the early life of William of Corbeil, archbishop of Canterbury (1123–36) and to a rearrangement of the chronology of the Canterbury-York dispute in the 1120s, and, in general, to tell part of the story of that dispute again. The story is worth telling because it is colourful and dramatic and crowded with incident, because it is almost all that we know of a remote and thinly-documented period of English Church history, and because it marks an entirely new interest in English affairs on the part of the popes, who took part in the dispute with an energy and effect unparallelled since the seventh century. Despite (or perhaps because of) the excellence of the sources—Eadmer, monk of Canterbury, and Hugh, precentor of York—the story has only once been told at all fully for its most important period, that from 14 August 1114 to 9 December 1128—by Mr. Nicholl, in his recently published ‘Life’ of Thurstan, archbishop of York (1114–40). Naturally, he concentrated on Thurstan, the greater man of the two, the man with the better case, the victor in the dispute, of whom much more is known. This article is intended to give a brief synopsis of the early life of the loser, to tell of his early introduction to the dispute and his eventual part in it.

The coronation of Edward VII at the beginning of this century was an unfamiliar scene in Westminster Abbey after the long rule of Victoria, and it elicited a spate of scholarly investigations into those ancient ceremonies. As one of the minor fruits of this renewed interest, a controversy was carried on concerning the ceremonial of the coronation of Elizabeth I on 15 January 1559. Three questions occupied the centre of the stage: Who celebrated the mass: Owen Oglethorpe, the bishop who anointed and crowned her, or George Carew, the priest whom she had made dean of the Chapel Royal? Were the consecrated elements elevated during the canon of the mass? Did Elizabeth withdraw during the consecration to the chapel of St. Edward behind the high altar?

The Rev. H. D. Leeves, recently appointed as the British and Foreign Bible Society's first full time agent in the Levant, arrived in Constantinople in January 1821. Before this time the Society's interests in Turkey had been promoted at different times by the Rev. Robert Pinkerton; the Rev. Henry Lindsay, Chaplain to the Embassy in Constantinople; and the Rev. James Connor, an agent of the Church Missionary Society. Within a short time of his arrival Leeves was reporting to the Committee in London on the position with regard to the Society's proposed edition of the New Testament in Karamanlidika, that is, in Turkish printed with Greek characters. In a letter of 8 February 1821 he reported that ‘the transcription of the Turkish Testament, in Greek characters, has advanced very little. This is upon the whole fortunate, and I think it will be best to suspend it entirely until the corrected edition is ready. The Secretary to the Patriarch (i.e., Alexander Petropolis), who has undertaken this work, has so little time to spare, that I believe it will be necessary to look out for another person to perform it, when the amended copy is ready to be put into his hands’.

The study of local history can contribute much to the understanding of religious changes in the nineteenth century, for, as Professor Asa Briggs has shown, each provincial city of Victorian England had its own distinguishing class structure and manner of life. Nonconformity was strong in Birmingham and Sheffield, towns of the steel and iron industry which was largely in the hands of small masters; Manchester with its cotton mills, its large proletariat and Irish immigrants, its wealthy employers and cosmopolitan merchants, was a very different society, marked not only by a dominant Dissent but also by a strong Roman Catholicism. Although Liverpool resembled Manchester in its wide class differences and its large number of Irish poor, it was a commercial rather than an industrial city. Moreover, unlike Manchester, it was an ancient incorporated borough and the activity of the town council in building churches in the eighteenth century during a period of great population growth (from about 10,000 in 1700 to 77,000 in 1801) appears to have been one factor in stemming the tide of Dissent, which was noticeably weaker in Liverpool than in the other three cities referred to above. In the nineteenth century the main religious issue at Liverpool was not Dissent versus the Establishment, but conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Chartism, so powerful in other cities, appears to have taken second place to the sectarian conflict at Liverpool.