Since apostolic times Christians have treated the family as a micro-community which reflects the values and problems of the larger Christian community as a whole. Most communities, including Christian ones, are reluctant to contemplate the possibility that their own existence will end. But although Jesus is said to have promised St Peter that His Church would survive death, and although the notion of the Church as a community that never dies became a commonplace in subsequent ecclesiology, there was no such guarantee of immortality to the individual family. The breakup and restructuring of family units through death or the dissolution of marriage was a reality which medieval Christian communities had to face in each generation. Even so, high-ranking social groups sought to minimise generational disruptions by adopting the fiction of the family that never dies, a notion that is especially familiar to historians of the theory of monarchy in the Middle Ages. The medieval Church was a keen champion of the continuity of domestic units. As Georges Duby has recently pointed out, the Church in the early Middle Ages struggled mightily to make its own theory of marriage prevail over the alternative marriage theory popular among the laity. The ecclesiastical model of marriage, which emphasised the free consent of the contracting parties and the indissolubility of unions, triumphed over the lay model of marriage, which, according to Duby, valued family concerns above the wishes of the individual at the end of the eleventh century in France. The pattern of marriage arrangements that Duby calls the lay model seems to have persisted vigorously until much later in other places, including Catalonia and Aragon. This paper will examine a case from mid-thirteenth century Arago-Catalonia in which the conflict of lay and ecclesiastical marriage ideals features prominently.

While much has been written about the London Missionary Society and its very impressive record in the foreign mission held, comparatively little recognition has been given to the Society's early and equally important contribution to church union. This is not surprising. The London Missionary Society has historically been associated with the Congregational Church and until recently was called the Congregational Council for World Missions. Its founding fathers and early patrons, not to mention its missionaries, were mostly Independents although other sympathetic evangelicals—mostly Calvinistic Methodists and English and Scottish Presbyterians—were also involved in its formation. In the view of most historians, the significance of the London Missionary Society lay principally in its impact on heathen popujations in far away lands, only minimally in its impact on those who united to direct its affairs in England. In short, it has often been assumed that, like the Baptist and Wesleyan missions that preceded it, the London Missionary Society was designed to serve a limited denominational or theological constituency and that its evolution into a branch of the Congregational Church was almost inevitable from the beginning.

Many missionaries in the nineteenth century came from the lower middle and artisan classes. From this two deductions have been drawn. Firstly, it has been pointed out that these were the social origins of many of the most dynamic and discontented elements of Victorian society, for example, trade union leaders. This parallel has led t o the suggestion that the typical nineteenth-century missionary was a potential radical who could easily become a threat to the status quo. Secondly, the employment of so many men from the skilled mechanic class has been taken to indicate some awareness by missionary administrators of the wider dimensions of the gospel message; that they were concerned with the material as well as the spiritual, with the passing on of practical skills as well as with the inculcating of a new religious understanding. It will be argued below, on the evidence from four British missionary societies, the Church Missionary Society, the London Missonary Society, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society and the China Inland Mission, that these deductions require substantial qualification.

Much recent commentary on Henry viii and Thomas Cromwell emphasises their use of propaganda against ‘papacy’ during the initial stages of the schism from Rome. G. R. Elton, for example, considers this genre to be well conceived and mature in technique, all the more remarkable since Cromwell's project was the ‘…first such campaign ever mounted by any government in any state of Europe’. Notwithstanding its sophisticated presentation during the years after the schism, such polemic has been described by Elton and others as having started ‘rather late’, i.e. when definite political action had already commenced. Its purpose, therefore, was to explain specific official enterprises, commencing with the legislation on Appeals in 1532–3. But was this an after-the-fact endeavour? Might not a creation so well-wrought in fact antedate Henry's use of parliament against Rome? At least two MS documents describing a new sort of ‘christian’ kingship survive to suggest that Henry's propaganda efforts commenced in early

The role of Thomas Cromwell in the events of the English Reformation has long been a contentious issue. This brief study is designed to introduce some new evidence on Cromwell's interaction with the monasteries and the issue of the royal supremacy. The information arises out of Henry viii's exchange of lands with the abbey of Waltham Holy Cross in 1531-2. On 1 November 1531 the abbot and convent granted to the crown the manor of Stansted Abbot and other property in Stansted, Hertfordshire, and Roydon, Essex. They were compensated on 1 January following with a royal gift of Blackmore Priory, the manor of Wormingford, and other lands. The abbey's surrender has long been available in print, but these sources have been based upon the formal copy in the close roll. The discovery of a longer, more informative draft version of this grant, composed by the crown, provides new insights of significance for the Church at large during this period.