During the last hundred years our knowledge of the educational institutions of medieval England has steadily increased, both of schools and universities. We know a good deal about what they taught, how they were organised and where they were sited. The next stage is to identify their relationship with the society which they existed to serve. Whom did they train, to what standards and for what ends? These questions pose problems. They cannot be answered from the constitutional and curricular records which tell us about the structure of educational institutions. Instead, they require a knowledge of the people—the pupils and scholars—who went to the medieval schools and universities. We need to recover their names, to compile their biographies and thereby to establish their origins, careers and attainments. If this can be done on a large enough scale, the impact of education on society will become clearer. In the case of the universities, the materials for this task are available and well known. Thanks to the late Dr A. B. Emden, most of the surviving names of the alumni of Oxford and Cambridge have been collected and published, together with a great many biographical records about them. For the schools, on the other hand, where most boys had their literary education if they had one at all, such data are not available. Except for Winchester and Eton, we do not possess lists of the pupils of schools until the middle of the sixteenth century, and there is no way to remedy the deficiency.

Nothing put the clergy and laity at odds so much as money. Quarrels over tithe provide the background against which all the hostility between Londoners and their parish priests must be seen. Since the thirteenth century the citizenry had engaged in periodic disputes with the city clergy over the assessment of tithe, but at the Reformation fervent new issues exacerbated the acrimony and the quarrel seemed to have become intractable. In the city, where individual disputes soon became common knowledge and might stir formidable partisanship, the citizens were often convinced that they were being robbed by their priests. Once the reforming ideas of Protestantism began to spread the London clergy were forced to defend themselves not only against criticism of clerical wealth and privilege but also against far profounder attacks upon their authority and faith. The London tithe controversy in many ways reflects the struggle between the lay and ecclesiastical orders at a national level. The conciliation which had marked the negotiations between the Church and city government in the later Middle Ages gave way to open conflict in the reign of Henry vm until, finally, the tithe issue could be settled only by Parliament, and the Church lost its traditional powers of judgement in tithe causes to the city.

One of the most important contributions of the Council of Trent (1545–63) to the Catholic or Counter-Reformation was its decree calling for the establishment of diocesan seminaries for the education of the secular clergy. To date, however, the role played by seminaries in the training of parish priests has not been the subject of detailed research. Most Italian diocesan histories, concerned more with the lives and decrees of reforming bishops than with the development of parish life, do not go beyond the institutional aspects of the problem, noting when seminaries were founded and what financial difficulties they faced. Little has been done to investigate the academic content of seminary training and the quality of seminary graduates. Among the few valuable points of reference are a study of clerical education at Rome by G. Pelliccia and brief comments on the seminary curriculum of Bologna by Paolo Prodi. While they have found that seminarians of both cities received practical instruction in the exercise of the cure of souls, they have not uncovered sources pertaining to the books used at seminaries or possessed by parish priests.

The years 1864 and 1869 fall between what are generally recognised as two milestones in the career of Lord Acton. On the one hand, this period in his life began with the important decision to stop publishing the Home and Foreign Review; on the other hand, it drew to a close with the beginning of Vatican I. Both of these events have long been acknowledged as decisive steps in Acton's progressive alienation from his fellow Catholics, the one because it marked the unsatisfactory conclusion of six years of conflict in England, the other because it brought on the momentous struggle over the definition of the dogma of papal infallibility. What is not generally recognised, however, is that the years 1864 to 1869 constitute in their own right a crucial phase in Acton's career. The tendency has been to skip from the end of his endeavours as a journalist in England to the opening of the Vatican Council, as if the five years in between were little more than an interlude. Even recent studies of Acton's career have dealt with this period in a very incomplete fashion, leaving much wider gaps than are required by the evidence now available. For instance, the volume of essays and documents bearing the promising title of Lord Acton: the Decisive Decade, 1864–1874, though it brings to light some important material, contains not a single document dating from the period between October 1866 and September 1869.