Ernulf, bishop of Rochester, died aged eighty-four, on 15 March 1124. In the course of his life, he studied under Lanfranc and was a close friend of Anselm at Bec. One-time prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, his advice was apparently sought by the king; he became a much respected abbot of Peterborough; and, as bishop, he instigated the important collection of secular and ecclesiastical law, the Textus Roffensis. Of his own writing, only three letters survive: one to Anselm, pleading with him to return from exile; one to the monk Lambert of St-Bertin, answering four questions on the eucharist and a fifth concerning a passage from the prophet Joel; and the third to Walkelin of Winchester, dealing with the case of canon law which the two men had previously discussed. It is this last letter, appearing in the manuscripts with the title De incestis coniugiis, which makes of Ernulf something more than a shadow among the Anglo-Norman theologians and men of letters who came to England in the aftermath of conquest. It is in this letter-treatise that Ernulf emerges as an accomplished lawyer and juridical thinker, whose approach has departed radically from that of Lanfranc, his former teacher, and is closely comparable to the principles for legal judgement set down by Ivo of Chartres in the preface to his Decretum and Panormia. Ernulf's use of such methods, grounded in, and made possible by, the new systematic collections of canon law, helps to confirm what has already begun to be evident, that this systematic, deliberately and self-consciously rational, jurisprudence finds its way into England well before the dissemination of Gratian's Decretum in the mid-twelfth century.

As many had done long before, John Henry Newman, in his sermon of 1842 on ‘The Christian Church an imperial power’, drew his model of the corporate life of the Church from the state: ‘We know what is meant by a kingdom. It means a body politic, bound together by common law, ruled by one head, holding intercourse part with part, acting together’. This description, little changed, could have applied as well to the university community of Newman's Oxford, and it is not implausible that an experience of fellowship there, strained and divided as it sometimes was, could have provided an unconscious model for his understanding of the ecclesial community. Even if it did not become explicit in Newman's thought, the analogy of head and members was present to the thinking of university men at Paris with regard to their own corporate life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly when relations were strained and division of the body threatened. Whatever the origins of conciliarist theory, then, in the reflections of canonists and theologians, there was an experience of ecclesial community in the corporate life of medieval Paris that could have given living content to speculation about the Church in the most influential intellectual centre of Christendom. The shaping of that experience deserves some attention as a matrix for conciliarist thought.

One night in the early 1520s, probably in the first half of 1522, the church of St Mary's, Rickmansworth, was badly damaged by arson. Iconoclasts deliberately set fire to all the images, to the reserved sacrament on the high altar, to the ornaments and jewels in the vestry, and to the rood and organs in the rood loft. The incendiaries made sure of their blaze by wrapping tow around the rood and pushing tow and banner staves through the bars of the chancel to act as fire-lighters. Their conflagration was also assisted by the large amount (280 pounds) of candle wax in the rood loft. At the same time, the offenders broke open the font and scattered the holy water. As a result of these actions, the chancel and vestry of the church were either severely damaged or destroyed.

The godly magistrate was an essential figure in the progress of the Protestant Reformation throughout Europe, and Scotland with its very powerful nobility was no exception. Prophetic preachers, discontented lairds, cosmopolitan merchants, and English troops all contributed to Protestant success in 1560, but there can be little doubt that it was the Lords of the Congregation themselves, the nobility, who made the Reformation happen. Furthermore, only by harnessing lordship to Protestantism could John Knox and his colleagues ensure that the fortuitous circumstances which provided the protesters with their opportunity in 1560– the fusing of patriotic and religious ideals – could be built on to ensure the future of a reformed kirk. The godly magistrate provided that combination of theological truth and practical reality which could translate the ideas of the new Church's clerical leaders into practice, particularly in the context of a hostile Crown.