Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh (c. 1300–60), is a well-known but ill-defined figure in the history of fourteenth-century thought. Two aspects of his writings have chiefly attracted the attention of modern scholars: his theory of dominium and grace, and his polemics against the mendicant orders. In the former role, he is considered the source of one of the major doctrines of Wyclif; in the latter, a continuator of the polemic of William of Saint-Amour, and a source of the anti-mendicant sentiment prevalent in English literature in the age of Chaucer.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the local history of the English Reformation — that long, slow process of religious change which in many parts of the country did not really begin until after Elizabeth's accession and was still not complete at her death. The process was slow because of the paucity of parish clergy able and willing to preach the Word, catechise the young, upbraid the ungodly and so plant Protestantism firmly in the land. It took a long time to raise the intellectual and moral standards of the Church's personnel – to carry out a thorough ‘reformation of the ministry’.

The five days of municipal insurrection in Toulouse from 13 to 17 May 1562 were critical ones for the city's Protestants. The Huguenots attempted to seize control of the city in a coup which failed on a grand scale. Two hundred Protestants may have died in the street fighting alone; over two hundred were executed after the rising had been suppressed and at least as many again were hanged in effigy. In all, over a thousand suspects were investigated by the authorities, determined to ensure that the city would remain safe from Protestant contagion in the future.

The Established Church in the eighteenth century, although not monolithic in its structure, had evolved a delicate counterpoise in its attitude to the fraught question of the relationship between Church and State. The Church was the protector of public religion and morality and as such was protected by the State with a test law and endowment. William Warburton, bishop of Gloucester, was the chief theoretician of the idea of a mutually satisfactory alliance of ‘the two swords’. The ecclesiastical policy of Georgian England, however, owed less to ideology than to the natural development of the English Church after the break with Rome and under the influence of emerging nationalism. The French Church had developed along similar lines to the English – without losing its Roman connections – and there has been a tendency to blur the distinctions between ‘Anglican’ and ‘Gallican’.

These well-known words of Frederick Engels date from 18441 and did not go unsupported by contemporary opinion in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In Sheffield, for example, it was generally thought in 1843 triat not one family of artisans in twenty attended church or chapel, while Horace Mann, the author of the report on the religious census of 1851, reached the melancholy conclusion that ‘the masses of our working population…are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations’. In 1860 Lord Shaftesbury remarked that not 2 per cent of the working men in London attended church, while a modern authority, Dr K. S. Inglis, has declared that even in northern and midland towns, where social relationships were more harmonious and the range of worshippers far wider than in East London, the majority did not attend worship; popular abstinence from worship (to use his term) had become an inherited custom.