Bede's historical interests frequently manifested themselves in his exegetical writings. In the case to be studied here, his references to Acts ii. 42–7 and iv. 32–7 and related passages, verses which describe the first Christian community at Jerusalem immediately after Pentecost, Bede broke new ground in trying to picture for himself the life of the first Christians, while accepting the traditional monastic reading of these passages almost without question. Alongside, and conflicting with the well-established view of the first Christian community as one distinguished by perfect love and monastic abandonment of the world, there was in Bede's mind a second, more historically minded, tendency to see the primitive Church as having passed through stages of development, and to try to imagine the historical circumstances in which the ideals of Acts ii. 42–7 and iv. 32–7 had been expressed.

On 23 January 1120, in the ancient town of Nablus in Samaria, Patriarch Warmund of Jerusalem and King Baldwin II of Jerusalem held a famous assembly of the highest dignitaries of the clergy and nobility. It has become known as the Council of Nablus, although it was not, strictly speaking, a church synod. Because of lay participation it was more of a parlement, or a Reichsversammlung, a kind of assembly common in all medieval kingdoms which would have been summoned to decide matters of general interest. William of Tyre gave it a whole chapter of his chronicle and stated that its decisions were so widely known that it was superfluous to enumerate them. He correctly called the assembly a conventus publicus et curia generalis, and only in the rubric to the chapter was its synodal character referred to: Apud Neapolim urbem Samariae concilium celebratur.

One dinnertime in the early 1540s Thomas Seymour, brother to the future Lord Protector, arrived at Lambeth Palace with an urgent message from the king to the archbishop of Canterbury. He found Cranmer's household at their meal in the great hall, the company sitting in due order under the watchful eyes of the senior officials of the establishment. Seymour was warmly received by the archbishop in his chamber and a meal was pressed upon him; then he was sent on his way with the appropriate response for the monarch. The occasion was more than a routine one for an exchange of messages: indeed it may have been deliberately contrived by Henry vm, with or without the connivance of the archbishop, to force the courtier literally to eat his words. Seymour had been busy denouncing Cranmer for keeping no hospitality ‘or house correspondent with his revenues and dignities’, but, instead, for wasting his income on the purchase of lands for the benefit of his family. When the king enquired of him about the adequacy of the Canterbury household he was, grudgingly, forced to admit ‘he be not in the realm of none estate or degree that hath such a hall furnished, or that fareth more honourably at his own table’. Henry seized the opportunity to lecture the assembled company on the dangers of seeking after episcopal wealth. So long as the prelates continued to dispense hospitality he would not, he asserted, allow them to be despoiled by laymen who had already dispersed the wealth of the monasteries. As for the archbishop he was above reproach and a model to all his fellows ‘for he spendeth (ah, good man) all that he hath in housekeeping’.

Contemporaries and historians alike have regarded the 1880s as a watershed in Victorian thought. They have argued that before the 1880s the well-to-do held firmly to a belief in Political Economy and attributed economic success to the high moral character and hard work of the individual. By the 1880s these beliefs had begun to waver, and many who had themselves prospered from the new economic system began to question its assumptions and develop a sense of responsibility toward those beneath them in the social order. One institution which seems to represent this change is Toynbee Hall, the first English settlement house, founded in 1884. Headed by a middle-class clergyman, Samuel Barnett, staffed by well-educated and well-to-do volunteers and dedicated to bringing education and culture to the poor, it seems to be an example, par excellence, of the newly heightened middle-class social conscience typical of the 1880s.2 But close examination reveals that the origins of Toynbee Hall date back to the 1870s, to the broad church orientation and parish practices of Samuel Barnett. Rooted in his modest day-to-day pastoral work rather than in new concepts of social justice, Toynbee Hall raises the question of whether in fact the 1880s constitute a great divide in Victorian thought or a period of continuation, expansion and institutionalisation of earlier ideas and practices.

Since the major continental archival collections were calendared in the nineteenth century no new sources for the history of the Parliament of 1559 have been reported. Thus it was with some elation that I recognised a draft of a bill from that Parliament among the Lansdowne Manuscripts. Described by the cataloguer as the ‘draft of an act to confirm Bishop Bonner's deprivation and admit Bishop Ridley to episcopal authority’, it had been assigned the date of 1549, but to anyone familiar with the bills introduced in 1559 it obviously belongs to Elizabeth's first Parliament.