It has been argued that the handbooks of penance known as the ‘Frankish’ penitentials, though ‘an important and necessary stage in the development of medieval church and society’, were an ‘ephemeral and ultimately despised intrusion’ into the Frankish Church of the eighth and ninth centuries. The importation of these books by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries and the adverse reaction of the Frankish bishops to the Irish system of private penance which they introduced is a story too well known to require rehearsal here; after spreading rapidly in the eighth century the penitentials were challenged and condemned by several synods in the century which followed. This reaction had important consequences for the penitentials, to be sure, but to my knowledge it has not previously been asserted that the Frankish penitentials were merely transitional or that their impact on the Frankish Church was either peripheral or minimal. On the contrary, Fournier, Watkins and McNeill and Gamer, among others, believe the Carolin-gian era to have been heavily influenced by these texts and, in turn, to have been decisive in their development.

The question of why the Reformation failed to win any significant number of adherents from among the native population in Ireland has, since the nineteenth century, been posed frequently by historians and, until very recently, the question has been accepted as valid and the answers provided have generally been considered plausible. That the problem of the Reformation in Ireland should be approached in this way is at least a concession by scholars that Irish history is a part of European history and that Irish society has always been influenced to some degree by general European movements. Historical practice has unfortunately not conformed with appearance, and historians have lost sight of the broad comparative perspective implied in the question and, as a consequence, have shirked the fundamental issue of whether or not a reform movement developed within Ireland, or whether the necessary conditions for such a development existed. Instead, the problem has been pondered almost exclusively within the context of the Reformation in England with die result that historians, while appearing to be embarked upon a general discussion of the pre-conditions for reformation, have in fact confined their attention to the much more specific issue of why measures which in a relatively short time produced a solidly Protestant society in England failed to achieve anything like the same result in Ireland.

History has not been kind to Alexander Nicoll, a brilliant oriental scholar who is now a forgotten figure, partly because he died before he could achieve the fame he deserved, and partly because his work in the 1820s was soon to be overshadowed by the turmoil of the Oxford Movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Even Dr E. B. Pusey, a pupil of Nicoll's, and his successor as Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, seems to have forgotten the quiet but scholarly way in which Nicholl had worked to combat the liberalism of the German biblical critics. Furthermore, much of what Nicoll said about written Aramaic sources underlying the Synoptic Gospels would be considered by many present day New Testament scholars to have been mistaken; most modern biblical scholars favour the view that Mark's Gospel was written first and used as a source by Matthew and Luke, although there is still considerable disagreement about the explanation of those passages which occur in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark. Even though he may have been mistaken, however, Nicoll was an important figure in the Oxford of the 1820s in so far as he was grappling with the problems posed by the biblical critics at a time when hardly anyone in Oxford—even the Oriel Noetics like Whately and Davison—was doing so, and it is perhaps time to question the commonly held assumption that the Oriel Noetics, together with Newman, Keble and Pusey, held the monopoly of the best theological scholarship in the Oxford of the early nineteenth century.

In St Mary's Church, Barbados, there is a monument to a curate who died in 1851, and ‘whose labours as a clergyman of the Church of England for fifty years were distinguished by talent, energy & faithfulness. His efforts were unceasing to make known the truths of the Gospel to all classes in this island. At an early period in his ministry he led the way in rescuing the then slave population from spiritual bondage and darkness. In this work of Christian love he was ever resolute, singlemin-ded, Sc uncompromising’. Mr Harte's claim to our interest is further increased when we learn that he was once prosecuted by the vestry of his parish for, among other things, teaching slaves ‘doctrines of equality inconsistent with their obedience to their masters’ and for comparing the white inhabitants of his parish to those of Sodom and Gomorrah, somewhat to the advantage of the latter.