More than one comprehensive theory of liturgical history has made much of the difference between the eucharistic prayer in the Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus and that described in the Catecheses of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The former consists of a thanksgiving for creation and redemption through Christ, leading to an institution narrative, and followed by an anamnesis and an epiclesis, in which, however, the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the oblation is asked for, not to convert it, but to join the Church in one. The latter consists of a ‘preface’ (which is not a thanksgiving, although the opening dialogue suggests that it will be) and sanctus, followed at once by a fully consecratory epiclesis, and intercessions. It is true that scholars of former generations thought that the prayer described by St. Cyril was, in fact, a fully developed prayer of the Syro-Byzantine type, and that St. Cyril only commented on certain paragraphs of it. It was natural to think so when it was believed that the liturgy of Apostolic Constitutions VIII, which contains the oldest known prayer of this type, was the work of St. Clement of Rome and a true description of apostolic practice; but it will hardly do to-day, when we know that Apostolic Constitutions was written several years later than St. Cyril's Catecheses. Besides, St. Cyril describes the prayer in considerable verbal detail, a procedure which is not easy to reconcile with the omission of whole paragraphs. Nor will it do to say that he comments upon the institution narrative elsewhere; he could scarcely explain the Eucharist to catechumens without doing so, but that hardly explains how, after mentioning and explaining the various choirs of angels who sing the sanctus, he could pass over the thanksgiving for creation and redemption, institution narrative, and anamnesis without a word, and expect an audience of people who were new to Christian worship to be able to follow the prayer as a result. And it would be a strange coincidence if the parts omitted by St. Cyril were just those which are in the Apostolic Tradition.

Each generation of historiographers has had its own interpretation of the persecutions. In their hour of triumph in the years following the Council of Nicaea, Christians in both halves of the Roman Empire looked back to these events as the heroic age of the Christian faith. The sufferings of the Church were linked to the sufferings of the children of Israel and this time, too, anti-Christ and his abettors, the pagan emperors, their officials and the mobs had been worsted. Like the Egyptians they had perished miserably. But, as so often happens, victory dissolved the common bonds which united the victors. In the next centuries the relations between Church and State in the East and West were to follow different paths. In the East the ‘martyrdom in intention’ of the monastic life tended to replace the martyrdom in deed in opposition to the emperor. In the West, the martyr tradition was to underline that same opposition. Tertullian, Hilary, Ambrose, Gregory VII, Boniface VIII embody a single trend of ideas extending over a thousand years.

St. Oswald's part in the English revival of Benedictine monasticism usually known as the tenth century reformation was the subject of a classical study by the late Dr. Armitage Robinson, whose conclusions have gained very wide acceptance. Dr. Robinson was mainly interested in the part St. Oswald played in the conversion of Worcester cathedral into a fully Benedictine community. He drew a sharp distinction between the conduct of St. Æthelwold at Winchester and that of Oswald at Worcester.Accepting the usual opinion that Æthelwold expelled clerks from Winchester by violence and replaced them with monks, he argued that Oswald on the contrary was a gentle man who preferred to convert the Worcester community to monasticism gradually and made no expulsions. In his argument Dr. Robinson found himself greatly handicapped by the paucity of information in the few narrative sources relevant to the tenth century which were reasonably contemporary. He found himself forced to take into consideration post-Conquest hagiography and to discriminate within the conflicting details of late traditions. In spite of the poor character of the narrative evidence he thought, and he has carried most later scholars with him in this, that he could supply the defects of his narrative sources by what was mainly a statistical study of the witness-lists to the many charters issued in Oswald's name during his pontificate. It is upon his calculations that Dr. Robinson's theory in the end rests. It will be argued in this paper that the late traditions are of little value and that the witnesslists of Oswald's charters do not quite bear the weight Dr. Robinson put upon them. A rather different view of Oswald's pontificate will be suggested and by taking into account some allegedly contemporary evidence which Dr. Robinson, on reasonable grounds, ignored, some wider considerations relating to the establishment of the monks will be offered.

The corrodies described in this article are the only corrodies granted by a house of mendicant friars in England that have yet come to light. It is natural to suppose that the mendicant friaries provided in this way for some of their regular lay servants, just as houses of the endowed Orders did. But the nearest approach to an example of this kind that I have noted is the lease of a house over the gateway at the Grey Friars of London in 1440 to William ‘conciliarius’ of the convent and Elizabeth his wife in return for services, rent free for their lives; but this did not involve provision of food and drink, which was an essential part of a full corrody. There is frequent mention of seculars living in friaries whose status is not specified. Thus at Oxford we find incidental references to William Kemp, tanner, ‘living within the Austin Friars’ in 1501, and ‘Katherine Newcome, widow, living within the house of the Carmelites’ in 1527. They were probably lodgers like John Martin, who lived with his wife and son at the Grey Friars of Canterbury till his death in 1496; he perhaps had special privileges through the influence of his brother, bishop Richard Martin, O.F.M., who lived at the friary in considerable state. A good many seculars were living in friaries at the time of the Dissolution, but these were tenants who had acquired leases of houses or chambers within the precincts, not corrodiers.

Luther's name was unknown in England on that 31 October 1517 when he posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Relatively soon, however, after this momentous event it would be widely known in London.

George Amiroutzes, commonly called the Philosopher for his wide learning, was a native of Trebizond. In 1437 he accompanied John VIII Palaeologus, emperor of Constantinople, to Italy to the Council of Ferrara-Florence as one of the three erudite laymen (the others were George Scholarius and George Gemistus ‘Pletho’) that the emperor took with him to advise him on the difficult theological questions there to be discussed. As the events unfolded division arose in the ranks of the Greeks. First, in Ferrara, there was the question as to what should be the subject of the opening discussion—the addition of the Filioque to the Creed, or the doctrine of the Filioque. Bessarion, metropolitan of Nicaea (later cardinal) and Scholarius (later the patriarch Gennadius) wanted to start with the latter as the more fundamental; Mark Eugenicus, metropolitan of Ephesus, and Gemistus preferred the former and their opinion prevailed. Amiroutzes agreed with Bessarion and Scholarius. In Florence, where the subject of debate was the doctrine of the Filioque, the rift between the two parties was more serious. It was a rift mainly between the leaders, for the majority of the Greek bishops, of a lower intellectual standard, was content to follow. For union the protagonists were Bessarion, Isidore, metropolitan of Kiev and of all Russia, Gregory, the imperial confessor, and Dorotheus, metropolitan of Mitylene. Against union, Mark of Ephesus stood almost alone but indomitable. George Amiroutzes was a staunch supporter of the unionists, who in several of the private conferences of the Greeks bitterly attacked Eugenicus and who gave a written vote in decisive and clear terms in favour of the orthodoxy of the Latin doctrine on the Procession of the Holy Spirit. The decree of union of the Latin and the Greek Churches was promulgated in solemn session on 6 July 1439. It bears the signatures of the emperor, of all the Greek prelates but two (Eugenicus and Isaias of Stauropolis), of five deacons of the Great Church and of several monks. The three ‘philosophers’ did not sign because they were laymen. As is well known, after their return to Constantinople most of the Greek prelates, under the influence of Mark Eugenicus and of popular sentiment, repented of their adherence.

The Brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford, an anonymous tract commonly ascribed to William Whittingham, dean of Durham, and printed in Heidelberg in 1574 and 1575, enjoys a unique reputation among the polemical writings of the Elizabethan puritans for its well-documented if partisan account of the controversies of the Marian exiles in their German and Swiss congregations. The importance of the Brieff discours as a source for the history of the Exile has hitherto tended to divert attention from the circumstances of its origin in the Elizabethan puritan controversy. This note is intended to introduce new evidence on the activities of a group of puritan propagandists responsible for organising the publication of this and other tracts in the early years of the Elizabethan Presbyterian Movement; to call in question the traditional attribution of the Brieff discours to Whittingham; and to suggest that the author may have been a relatively obscure exile, Thomas Wood.

A bout four hundred years ago John Knox wrote as follows in his Comfortable Epistle to Christ's afflicted Church: ‘Let Wynchester, and his cruel counsell, devise and study till hys wits faile, howe the kyngdom of his father, the Antichrist of Rome, may prosper: And let him and them drink the bloudde of Goddes sainctes till they be droncke, and theyr bellyes burst, yet shall they never provide long in their attemptes. Their counsailes and determinacions shalbe like the dreame of a hungry or thyrstie man, who in his slepe dreameth that he is eatinge or drinckinge; but after he is awaked, his pain continueth, and his soule is unpacient and nothinge eased. Even so shall these tyrantes, after their profounde counsayles, long devices and assured determinations, understand and know that the hope of ypocrites shal be frustrate; that a kingdome begunne with tyranny and bloudde, can neither be stable nor permanent; but that the glorie, the riches, and manteiners of the same, shalbe as strawe in the flame of fyre. Altogether with a blaste they shal be consumed in such sorte, that their palaces shal be a heape of stones, their congregations shal be desolate; and such as do depend upon their helpe, shalfal into destruction and ignominie with them.’

The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge was established 8 March 1699. It flourishes happily to this day as a leading Anglican missionary society (it was the first within the Anglican communion), and as the major Anglican publishing house. It is then important in many other connexions than as a founder and an instigator of the foundation of schools. In its early years especially it diffused its energies among a bewildering variety of projects, religious, moral, social and educational. The notes below are concerned with one group only of the Society's multifarious activities, and with but one archival source of information upon them. There is some interest and value in the study of the aims and methods of the Society in the establishment under its auspices of some 1,500 English schools, mainly during the period 1704–32. Much light is thrown upon the ideals and the proceedings of the Society and its members in this connexion by references in the annual Charity Sermons preached during this same period

‘Without me’, wrote John Henry Newman in 1869, ‘Golightly would not have come to Oxford, and he was my chief persecutor.’

Charles Pourtales Golightly was born in 1807, and died on Christmas Day 1885. He was thus six years younger than Newman, and died some five years before him, but not too soon to see him made a cardinal. Like Newman, Golightly had on his mother's side a Huguenot ancestry. He went to school at Eton, which he thought a vile place. He travelled in Europe, and stayed in Rome, where he relished the society of cardinals. In 1824 he matriculated at Oriel College Oxford. In 1828 he proceeded B.A., in 1830 M.A. But for his ample means, he might (it was said) have been elected into the brilliant company of Fellows of Oriel. Though various well-meaning persons pulled strings to establish the young Golightly in a benefice, he never received any ecclesiastical appointment except one or two curacies.

The preface to the Book of Common Prayer, entitled Concerning the Service of the Church since 1662, but before that simply The Preface, was derived substantially from the preface to the revised Breviary of Quiñones, which was one of the sources for the revised daily offices of the Church of England. It appeals from what it considers the corruptions of the medieval office to the ‘godly and decent order of the ancient Fathers’. This order, it says, was devised for the systematic reading of holy scripture in the offices of the Church, and it was the intention of the compilers of the English Prayer Book to restore such a regular order of reading for the instruction of the people. It represented a revolt against three features of the lessons in the medieval breviary: first, against the frequent interruptions of the reading of scripture in course by the occurrence of feasts with proper lessons; secondly, the lack of completeness and continuity in the lessons themselves; and thirdly, the use of non-biblical material in the lessons. Even if the daily office of the breviary, which is based on the ecclesiastical year, were not interrupted by any immoveable feasts having proper lessons, it would still not provide for the reading of the whole of scripture, as its lessons are too short, and also the variable lessons are confined to the night office.