Cassian was not a systematic writer; or, perhaps to be more just, he was not afraid to allow his ideas to develop, and even change. He suffers, therefore, more than some at the hands of historians of spirituality. It is temptingly easy to present him as the instigator of a twotier system: of an asceticism that distinguished contemplation from the ‘practical’ eradication of vice, or the régime of the hermit from that of the coenobite; and that distinguished them as activities of greater and lesser merit, raising the contemplation of the hermit above the more preoccupied discipline of community life. Those who think of Cassian in these terms have also to face the fact that most western ascetics, in the centuries that followed, came together in groups to conquer sin; and yet they thought Cassian (as did Benedict) in some sense their master. Indeed, there are signs that Cassian himself witnessed the growing popularity of the coenobitic life. Given this apparent contrast, therefore, between his supposed interpretation of the spiritual life and the relentless development of communal asceticism, many feel impelled to regard him as a remote perfectionist, or at best—where signs of resignation to community life appear—as a weary and reluctant realist.

Despite royal favour the promotion of leading king's clerks to the episcopal bench in fourteenth-century England was not always easily accomplished. The difficulties which Edward in encountered when trying to secure the see of Winchester for William of Wickham are well known. Several years earlier John Buckingham, Wickham's predecessor as keeper of the privy seal, had also met with opposition which threatened to bar his path to a bishopric, despite the fact that his early ecclesiastical career had given no cause for papal offence.

The importance of the influence of returned Marian exiles on the origins of Elizabethan Puritanism has been widely recognised. The majority of the exiles, even those who had been ‘Coxians’ in the Frankfort disputes, were men who from the outset regarded the Elizabethan Settlement as a compromise, a mere step on the road to full reformation. Both in Parliament and in the Lower House of Convocation in 1563 small but determined and vociferous groups of exiles pressed for and carried others with them in support of radical reforming measures. The vestiarian controversy marked a turning-point, for it threw up the problems of priorities and obedience to the magistrate in a peculiarly stark form. In the need to resolve these problems many of the exiles found themselves committed, with greater or less reluctance, to an ‘establishment’ position and parted company with the younger radicals who became the leaders of Presbyterian Puritanism in the 1570s. But it was nevertheless from the exiles that the Puritans had first learned to treat the English Church as only imperfectly reformed and the work of rooting out popery as a work which had scarcely begun.

‘It is now disputed at every table’, declared Whitgift in 1574, ‘whether the magistrate be of necessity bound to the judicials of Moses’. Edwin Sandys told Bullinger of Zürich in the previous year that it was being maintained, to the great trouble of the Church, that ‘The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them’. Though often neglected by historians as an important factor in the Reformation, the question of the validity of the Old Testament judicial (as opposed to moral or ceremonial) law frequently arises in the writings of the Reformers, and their various answers made no slight impact on the course of events. It bears directly on Henry VIII's divorce and the bigamy of Philip of Hesse; the treatment of heresy and the possibility of toleration; the persecution of witches; usury and iconoclasm; Sabbatarianism and the rise of the ‘puritan’ view of the Bible as a book of precedents, and the corresponding shift to legalism in Protestant theology. The question is also of fundamental relevance to the thought of the Reformers on natural law, the godly prince and magistrate, and the so-called ‘third use of the law’. This article is an attempt to survey, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the various interpretations of the Mosaic penal and civil laws, with particular reference to the development of legalistic tendencies after Luther.