Even after Constantine, at the beginning of the fourth century, had laid upon the Church, henceforth no longer a cult suspected of disloyalty and liable to persecution, the duty of acting as the cement which should bind together the threatened Empire, the verities of the Faith were customarily declared in Christian art as much by symbolic allusion as by representations of a fully descriptive character.

No. 273 in the Vatican Archive series of Instrumenta Miscellanea is the surviving fragment of a register of letters despatched by Boniface VIII's camerarius, Theoderic of Orvieto. The register is on paper and consists of eleven folios, of which the last four are blank. The first three of the seven folios used have been badly damaged by damp in consequence of which all but two of the first twelve letters in the register are illegible in parts. The fragmentary nature of the register in the form in which it has survived is proved by the fact that it begins and finishes in the middle of a letter. Including these two truncated letters, it contains twenty-eight letters. The earliest legible date of writing is 3 January 1297 and the latest is 17 July 1297, but in some cases no date is given and in others the full date is not legible. Since the letters are not registered in chronological order it is evident that, as with the contemporary registers of papal letters, they were not always copied into the register—or at least not into the register in the form in which it has survived—at the time when they were drawn up in the chamberlain's chancery. Several of the letters (nos. 15, 17 and 23) mention the fact that the chamberlain has caused a copy of the letter to be registered.

Thomas of Bekynton, the son of a weaver, a famous churchman of the fifteenth century, was born about 1390 at Beckington, a village three miles north of Frome in the county of Somerset. He was admitted to Winchester College under the election of 1403, proceeded to New College, Oxford, on 24 June 1406, was elected a fellow 25 June 1408, admitted B.C.L. in 1414 or 1415 and incepted D.C.L. in 1418. He resigned his fellowship in November 1420 in order to become chancellor of duke Humphrey of Gloucester until he became secretary to king Henry VI in 1437. He was ordained sub-deacon on 20 December 1421, and priest on 18 September 1423 at Salisbury on the title of his benefice of Sutton Courtney. Preferments rapidly followed, the most important being the archdeaconry of Buckingham to which he was collated on 15 October 1424. From that date he would be summoned to attend Convocation and he acted as prolocutor at the sessions in November 1433, 1434 and May 1438 (session 28 April to 18 October 1438, with prorogation). He was Dean of the Arches in 1422 (possibly earlier) and it is most likely that he carried on up to 1433 when in October he became Official and remained in that office until April 1438. Thus for nearly five years he held simultaneously the two most important offices of Prolocutor and Official of the Court of Canterbury, having for nearly eleven years been Dean of the Arches.

The political situation in Ireland during the pontificate of Innocent III was highly complicated and, if we are to understand the relationship between the pope and the native Irish kings, it is necessary to make a short historical retrogression.

St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle has, from its foundation, been closely associated with the Sovereigns of England, and, through the Order of the Garter, with many of their most distinguished servants. Yet the history of the Chapel has seldom received treatment in any detail by church historians; as an exempt peculiar it has doubtless seemed too far removed from the main currents of ecclesiastical life. St. George's Chapel, however, has led, in whatever isolation from its province, a life of its own that has been of particularly marked vigour in the realms of music and theology. The members of the college serving St. George's, moreover, have had a direct influence on the life of the nation, whether as ministers of the crown or prominent civil servants, as royal tutors, or as personal advisers to the Sovereign. St. George's Chapel, in fact, may have played a far greater part in the life of both Church and State than has as yet been generally realised, and within the last twenty years a group of local historians has undertaken studies in the records of the Chapel, the interim conclusions of which already go some distance towards substantiating such a claim.

Among the many ‘unions’ between the Roman Church and the various Eastern Churches, none, perhaps, has been more unknown than the Union of Suzdal, 1222–1252. How important this union really was, outside the ecclesiastical questions involved, will appear immediately upon reflexion that its span coincides with the Tartar conquest of Russia and the consolidation of Tartar power. All the more startling, therefore, is the neglect of this union by Russian and non-Russian historians.

Though well known to specialists in the history of early Polish literature, the figure of Andreas (Andrzej) Galka of Dobczyn, an ardent admirer of John Wycliff, is probably not familiar to English students of Middle English. This fifteenth-century professor at the University of Cracow is notable for several reasons. Not only is his eulogy of Wycliff a precious monument of medieval Polish, but his Latin letters also have great interest, revealing as they do a colourful and pugnacious individual whose meteoric career is linked with some profound social changes occurring in his age and country. Both his literary activity and his personal adventures relate him to the movement for Church reform then sweeping over central and eastern Europe, as a precursor of the more decisive movement which was to occur in the early sixteenth century.

A previous article traced the formulation of the proposals for Prayer Book revision made by bishops Wren and Cosin in the years 1660–1. These proposals were entered in the ‘Durham Book’ (DB), and reached their final form in ‘Sancroft's Fair Copy’ (FC). In November 1661 the proposals were laid before Convocation, and, as amended in debate, were entered by Sancroft in the ‘Convocation Book’ (CB), a folio Prayer Book of 1636, the text of which differs in only a few particulars from the familiar ‘1662 Prayer Book’. A MS. copy of the complete text as revised was prepared concurrently in order to be subscribed by all members of Convocation. This was subsequently attached to the Act of Uniformity (1662), and is known as the ‘Annexed Book’ (AB). The course of the discussions which intervened between FC and CB remains obscure; the Convocation records are disappointingly sketchy, and there is very little external evidence. From what there is of the latter, and from analysis of the changes made, however, it is possible to discover the authorship of some of the alterations and additions, to identify the most influential figures in the discussions, and to recover a few proposals which failed to secure acceptance.

On 8 June 1841, Frederick William of Prussia sent Christian Carl Josias Bunsen on a special mission to England. Bunsen was to obtain the approval of the British government for a conference between himself on one side and Howley, as Primate of All England, and Blomfield, as immediate head of the congregations of the Anglican Church abroad, on the other. In this conference, he was to try to persuade the two prelates to concede to the Evangelical Church of Prussia ‘a sisterly position’ in the Holy Land. Deploring the disunity among Evangelical Protestants there, Frederick William instructed Bunsen to propose the establishment of a bishopric at Jerusalem as a joint enterprise by the Evangelical Church of Prussia and the Church of England. He would allow the clergy and missionaries of his own Church to work under the auspices of such a bishopric; and, whilst it was not his intention to sacrifice or jeopardise the independence of the Church of Prussia, any ordinations by the bishop of Jerusalem would be respected throughout his dominions. Two principles were to guide Bunsen: the utmost possible collaboration among protestants in the Turkish Empire, especially in the Holy Land, and the maintenance of an independent Evangelical German Church. Frederick William was intelligent enough to see that political and economic facts ruled out an exclusively Prussian episcopate in the Holy Land: it was a shrewd move to attach German congregations to a bishopric closely associated with the Church of England.

The convening of the Assembly of Notables and the prolonged conflict between the government and the Parlement of Paris gave rise to a ferment of discussion throughout France during 1787 and 1788. This increased after the publication of the arrêt du conseil on 8 August 1788 which gave 1 May 1789 as the date for the opening of an Estates-General. The public debate was greatly encouraged by, and indeed largely carried on in, the innumerable pamphlets which appeared after the king had, in July, invited informed persons to submit memoranda on the proper form and functions of such an assembly. Amid this ‘avalanche of proposals, complaints, protests and far-fetched schemes’ there were a considerable number of pamphlets written by members of the lower clergy. Although the great majority of these are anonymous, the form of the titles and, more important, internal evidence indicate that they are almost certainly the work of clerical writers. The nature and content of these pamphlets are a valuable indication of the attitude of at least a considerable section—and this an influential section—of the lower clergy on the eve of the Revolution. In these pamphlets are expressed in their clearest form the ideas which formed the content of many of the speeches made by curé agitators in the electoral assemblies which met in the spring of 1789, and which, modified in more sober committees, dictated many of the clauses which clerical cahiers devoted to Church affairs.

Of all European states in the nineteenth century, Spain was among the slowest to respond to the great changes, social, political and economic, which were transforming Western civilisation. The Spaniard's reluctance to adopt the innovations of his neighbours, or to abandon the habits and outlook of a past age were a frequent source of friction between Spain and other nations; so much so that Lord Clarendon, whilst British foreign secretary, once likened Spain to a North African state with which Britain could have little in common on account of her failure to do ‘any of the many things which bind nations together’. Among the most persistent causes of dissension of this nature was the Spanish reluctance to tolerate the free practice of the protestant faith, and it is the object of this article to trace the gradual establishment of freedom of worship in Spain, and to estimate the respective contributions of the Spaniards themselves and of foreign pressure.

The elder James Raine published in 1839 as appendix no. CCCXXXII to his edition of Historiae Dunelmensis Scriptores Tres a document entitled ‘Consuetudo et lex sancti patris Cuthberti’. Attention was subsequently drawn to it, in 1905, by Professor Lapsley. As Lapsley was only concerned in his article with the status of drengs, he forbore to enter into what he called ‘the quellenkritik of this curious document’, and, as we shall see, he mistook its date. It is therefore worth while carrying investigation further.

The principal source for the history of the Order of Prémontré in England is the three volumes of Collectanea Anglo-Premonstratensia edited by cardinal Gasquet and published by the Royal Historical Society in 1904–06 (Camden 3rd Series, vols. vi, x, xii). The documents which make up this collection were derived from two sources:

1. The register of Richard Redman, abbot of Shap, and visitor of the order in England during the second half of the fifteenth century. (Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS. 1519).

2. Transcripts of a Registrum Premonstratense made by the antiquary Francis Peck early in the eighteenth century, and now in the British Museum (Additional MSS. 4934–5).