A major manuscript discovery of hitherto unknown letters of Augustine of Hippo is a scholarly event whose importance can hardly be exaggerated. It is as though one of the lost books of Livy had suddenly turned up in palimpsest among medieval manuscripts in a cathedral library. For a discovery in similar circumstances, one has to go back to December 1904 when the learned Rev. Dr Karapet Ter-Merkettshian found an Armenian manuscript of Irenaeus' Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching in the library of the church of the Blessed Virgin at Eriwan in Armenia.

In the middle of the fourteenth century the Castilian Church was suffering severe strains. Falling rents exacerbated by plague were affecting many monasteries and making it difficult for them to maintain discipline. At the same time the nature of the regime of Pedro 1 drove a distinguished group of secular clergy into exile in France and Italy. An alternative reaction lay in seeking the eremitical life, and this was to lead to the remarkable phenomenon of the Jeronimite Order. The cause of ecclesiastical reform was to be sustained by both exiles and hermits.

Tudor governments were characterised by their concern that Tudor power and policies should be advertised in pomp and pageantry and in the printed and spoken word. A great deal of work has been done by modern historians on this subject. One of the most exhaustively researched aspects of Elizabeth's reign has been the pomp and pageantry surrounding the queen herself; the products of the Elizabethan printing presses and pulpits have also been dealt with, although not as systematically. There has been little attempt to follow up Conyers Read's introductory article on William Cecil as one of the government members responsible for propaganda. The present study proposes to consider from this perspective the career ofan eminent Elizabethan ecclesiastic and statesman, Elizabeth's first archbishop of Canterbury.

Laudian divines cried up the king's prerogative. But they also affirmed that episcopacy was by divine, not human right. Was jure divino episcopacy, which many clerics asserted in the decades after Bancroft's famous sermon of 1589, in fact incompatible with the traditional English theory of the Royal Supremacy? Catholics and extreme puritans answered this question in the affirmative, and many recent commentators have accepted their judgement. The purpose of the present study is to question this interpretation, and to suggest that the first two Stuarts endorsed the theory of jure divino episcopacy not because they were misled by the rhetoric of such men as Bancroft, Barlow and Laud, but because they correctly perceived that these divines were vigorous supporters of the king's Supremacy in ecclesiasticals.

In 1852 a Roman Catholic procession at Stockport, held in spite of the warning given by a recent royal proclamation, had caused widespread rioting, physical damage and the loss of a life. This was at the height of popular reaction to the main wave of Irish Catholic immigration and in the aftermath of popular Protestant upheaval over the restoration of a Catholic hierarchy. Other anti-Irish riots had subsequently occurred in industrial towns, for example at Liverpool frequently and at Tredegar, Monmouthshire, in 1882. Despite this, it may seem somewhat surprising that a serious crisis over a Catholic procession should have occurred as late as 1908. But the procession was intended to be a notable and explicit vindication of Roman Catholic sacramental beliefs, and there was a considerable and active residue of anti-Catholic feeling in Edwardian England.

Manuscript Douce 103 in the Bodleian Library is one. of three manuscripts compiled in the late fifteenth century by a priest of Hereford diocese, the others being MSS Douce 60 and Douce 108. The manuscripts contain elementary grammatical texts such as an English version of Donatus's Ars minor, with rearrangements and expositions of hymns, psalms, canticles and sequences (often using material peculiar to the Hereford Use in this country, and showing a particular interest in St Anne and the Virgin), and copies of John Mirk's Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests. A note in the hand of this compiler on fo. 228v of MS 60 may give some clue as to his identity;