Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

In the twelfth or thirteenth century the monks of Evesham Abbey, an ancient Benedictine foundation in Worcester diocese, seem to have altered their domestic chronicle so as to conceal the decisive role of Oswald, bishop of Worcester, in the tenth-century reform of their house; after c. 1100 the abbey was anxious to suppress evidence of Evesham's early dependence on the church of Worcester lest the post-Conquest bishops should use it in the papal courts to refute Evesham's current case for exemption. Privately, however, the monks continued to honour St Oswald and their relic of his arm; he had become a political embarrassment, but in heaven he remained their spiritual friend.

This article employs evidence relating to church seating between 1560 and 1640 in order to argue that English people experienced the interior of their parish church as a setting of profound significance. It seeks to augment the rather secular interpretative framework within which social and economic historians have tended to consider the importance of church seating. Such seating mattered to people not only because of their preoccupation with social precedence during a period of economic strain, but because of its stirring and symbolic location. Church seating also deserves to be interpreted as evidence of popular attachment to the church, rather than almost exclusively as an instrument of social control deployed by parochial leaders. Much of the surviving documentation relates to the misdemeanours of a conspicuous minority, but it is also possible to examine the sources for what they reveal of the arguably more positive attitudes of the ever elusive majority.

The decline of anti-Catholic sentiment in twentieth-century England stood in stark contrast to attitudes in Wales, where a distinct and persistent anti-Catholic polemic was common as recently as the 1960s. While research into British anti-Catholicism has ignored the situation in twentieth-century Wales, many of the reasons suggested for the fervent nineteenth-century English hostility seem not only to explain the absence of Welsh animosity in the same era, but also to illuminate the predicament in Wales a century later. What we have is a striking example of historical synchronicity: two eras where the majority Christian denomination, already facing an internal crisis, reacts to a Church that is seen to threaten its existence and status, as well as the national way of life it upholds.

In 1994 the archive of Liddon House, London, was moved to Pusey House in Oxford. The journals of Henry Parry Liddon, kept more or less daily from 1858 to 1890 (the year of Liddon's death), thus came to be housed alongside the enormous correspondence of Edward Bouverie Pusey which Liddon himself spent much effort in collecting. Liddon's journal entries from 1863 onwards contain a number of references to the young Gerard Manley Hopkins, then an undergraduate at Balliol. A number of Hopkins scholars have made use of the journals in their research but none, to my knowledge, has examined them since their move to Oxford. Recently, a number of other documents have come to light which relate to Hopkins's time in Oxford, and in particular to his conversion. One of these documents strongly suggests that the only extant letter from Edward Pusey to Hopkins has been misdated since its publication in 1935, and hence that the accepted chronology of the days leading up to Hopkins's reception into the Roman Catholic Church needs slightly to be revised.