In recent discussions about the Apostolic Ministry of the Church the Jewish factor in its development has proved a disturbing element. Therefore, a book dealing with the early rite of rabbinical ordination, which has been lately published in Germany, should be certain of an interested reception, even though the main facts can be found already in Billerbeck. Dr. Lohse, its author, shows himself well versed in rabbinical literature, and the evidence which he has collected is well-nigh complete. Unfortunately, the author's main thesis, although it is by no means new, is apt to provoke serious misgivings. For he claims (101) that ‘the Christian ordination was modelled on the pattern of that of Jewish scholars, although early Christianity filled it with a new content’. To support his claim the author has given only one important reason, namely that both rites had the imposition of hands as their centre. The other support which the author has tried to build up to strengthen his thesis is, to say the least, feeble. It is therefore necessary to enquire whether the laying-on-of-hands had the same intention in the early Christian ordination rite as in the rabbinical rite. Such identity of intention is, however, not even to be found in all the various cases of laying-on-of-hands in the New Testament, and the same is also true of contemporary Judaism.

In the medieval schools the Bible and the Fathers of the Church together constituted the fundamental argument in theological speculation. They were the two auctoritates, though different in order and degree, upon which the whole structure of the Sacra Doctrina was built. ‘The foundation stones of the edifice, of which the masters in theology are the architects’, as bishop Grosseteste in a famous letter addressed to the regent-masters in theology at Oxford put it, ‘are the books of the Old and the New Testaments’. The authoritative interpreters of Holy Writ are the Fathers of the Church. It was, therefore, imperative that the Masters in Sacra Pagina should be familiar with both the biblical and patristic teaching. That they were deeply versed in Holy Scripture cannot be doubted. Their writings bear witness to their thorough knowledge of the Sacred Books. The Bible was the text-book of the faculty of theology, the beginning and the end of the whole theological course. And since it was their main duty to expound the Scriptures, the masters in Divinity were rightly styled Magistri in Sacra Pagina, or in Sacra Scriptura.

The organisation of the properties of a medieval secular cathedral like Lincoln differed radically from that of a monastic foundation like Canterbury or Durham. In the latter the endowments, though particular estates might be permanently assigned to one or other of the obedientiaries, were all used for the community as a whole. At Lincoln great estates and wealthy rectories were allotted to individual canons as their prebends so that accounts of these never came into those of the chapter except in vacancies of the prebends, which were rarely of long duration. The properties which were used for the additional payment of those of the canons who were in residence (their commons) and for the maintenance of the services and general administration were known as the Communa or Common Fund of the canons. It is from the records of this Common Fund that we learn much of the internal management of chapter affairs and of the relations of the chapter with external bodies.

The rural economy of late medieval Italy displays many features and obeys many tendencies common to western Europe at the time. In the age of fully developed communes and nascent despotism it is customary to emphasise that peasant unfreedom and dependent tenure had as good as disappeared, demesne farming and labour services were forgotten, and seigneurial rights diminished or suppressed; where these things have been discovered to persist they are noticed as curious survivals from a different society. Income from land consisted of rents, which on the older estates of church and nobility were commonly fixed rents in money or kind, paid in perpetuity or to an increasing extent for a term of years or at pleasure. New landlords however were displacing the old, men of the urban oligarchies and middle class, who were harsher than their feudal predecessors and pursued an active agriculture by way of grants in mezzadria (sharecropping), protected in their interest by municipal statute. Among ecclesiastical lordships many monasteries succumbed to debt or moral decay, and ecclesiastical property fell victim to a fresh wave of lay encroachment, proceeding from the towns. In Lombardy and the north all classes of society sought their advantage in taking church land at nugatory rents to sublet for high profits or even in time to possess outright. A new cupidity was in the air.

In the late twenties and the thirties of the nineteenth century, the failure of the Anglican Church to provide adequate pastoral superintendence became glaringly obvious. There were too few churches and clergymen in the new industrial and urban areas, and even in the rural districts poverty restricted the usefulness of many of the clergy. The Commission of Inquiry appointed by Grey in 1831 reported that the average annual income of each living was £278.

One of the principal arguments against the authenticity of the Constantinian documents, and of the Life in which they are incorporated, has been the phrase used by Constantine in one of them to describe his age at the opening of the Great Persecution in a.d. 303—ττε κομιδ παῖς ἔτι ὑπρχων. According to data provided by the author of the Life—and by other sources—Constantine was about 63 when he died in 337, and would therefore have been about 29 when the Persecution opened. A man of 29 could not possibly be described as a παῖς, and the phrase was, therefore, it was argued, evidence that the document in which it occurred was a forgery. As there is now strong presumptive evidence that the document is in fact genuine, it may be worth while to reconsider the passage.

Marginalia in medieval theological manuscripts are rarely worth investigating further but Merton College, Oxford MS. L. i. 14 (Coxe 132), ‘Peter of Poitiers on the Sentences’ followed by Simon of Tournai's Summa in sacram paginam has several most important drafts of letters. The manuscript which was written early in the thirteenth century has at fos. 109r, 110r and 113r in a cursive hand of the second half of the second quarter of the thirteenth century entries almost certainly made by William of Thetford, an early prior of the Oxford house of the Friars Preachers.

So little is known of William Laud's life at Oxford that the following letters assume some importance. They were written during his term as President of St. John's College and have recently come to light amongst the Court papers of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters. Laud here pleads on behalf of a poor student, and the pleader's rôle seems surprisingly to become him.