Paul Tagaris was a Byzantine Greek, born perhaps in the 1320s. Only in quite recent years has his name been unearthed from the documents in which it had for long been lurking unobserved. Fr. R.-J. Loenertz, O.P., and Fr. Joseph Gill, S.J., have both, though independently, assembled most of the evidence for his remarkable career. This article can add only a few details to that evidence. But it has been thought worth-while to present the whole story as a connected narrative worthy of the attention of ecclesiastical historians.

An eminent reformation historian of the present day has complained that histories of the Tudor period have concentrated on ‘too few and too untypical figures’. The observation is most apposite with regard to the opening phases of the English reformation. Reformation figures of more ordinary metal have been neglected as a result of a preoccupation with the few whose lives, and deaths also in some cases, were more spectacular. Furthermore, and for the same reason, even those who were not consigned to oblivion have been frequently misrepresented. To some extent the subject of this study, George Browne, claims the attention of the modern research worker on both counts.

During the period of Laudian supremacy in the 1630's many of the bishops pursued a rigorous policy of enforcing the Book of Common Prayer ‘w[i]thout addition, alteration or diminution’. They found that ‘the Divine Service in ye forenoones is neither performed w[i]th that solemnity of time, manner, and ord[e]r, w[hi]ch of right it ought, nor frequented and attended by those that belong to the severall parishes’. Bishop Wren of Norwich, who was, perhaps, Laud's most forthright supporter deliberately went to stay in Ipswich, the main Puritan centre in his diocese, and in June 1636 celebrated divine service in full ‘which had never been there observed before’. Wren, in common with other Laudian bishops, maintained that the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer required him to decide the precise form which services should take in the diocese, because it stated that ‘for the resolution of all doubts, concerning the manner how to understand, do, and execute, the things contained in this Book; the parties…shall always resort to the bishop of the diocese, who by his discretion shall take order for the quieting and appeasing of the same’. Archbishop Laud expressed himself well satisfied with Wren's work in this matter, and told Charles I in his annual report to the king at the end of 1637 that ‘divine service…is diligently frequented; and that beyond what could suddenly be hoped for in such a diocese, and in the midst of the humourousness of this age’. Charles I told Wren ‘not to desist from enforcing all canonical observance’ in the diocese.

Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries the Church of England and the Nordic Churches had by no means uncommon contacts, which extended, on at least one occasion, in the correspondence between the Reverend Edward Lye and Carl Jasper Benzelius, to matters specifically ecumenical. From the Restoration period there was a Scandinavian presence in London, which was graced with a remarkable degree of religious freedom virtually amounting to ‘most favoured nation’ treatment, and the contemporaneous English commercial colonies at Elsinor and Gothenburg enabled some members, at least, of the Anglican Church to observe their Scandinavian counterparts in their native habitat. Yet, notwithstanding these apparent advantages, Anglicans, on the whole, remained more ignorant of the Episcopal Churches of Northern Europe than of the Dutch, French and Swiss Reformed Churches, and the one cross-influence which there was in this period, through bishop Jacob Serenius of Strängäs, was apparently so superficial that nothing of significance could be built upon it. Part of the reason was, no doubt, that Scandinavia and Iceland were outside the normal itinerary of the Grand Tour and also outside the main channels of eighteenth-century British diplomacy. This being so, the peculiar external characteristics of Lutheranism, particularly its northerly variety, were likely to baffle and deter those rare Englishmen who came face to face with it.