Lest it should seem to some that this is a strange subject for a Presidential Address to an Ecclesiastical History Society, may I say at the outset that I propose to deal with it as an historical and not a theological problem, and, secondly, that in my view the history of the Christian Church must necessarily include the history of how Christians have worshipped God in every age. The Church is a living organism and not merely a human organisation with a hierarchy; general, provincial, and diocesan councils; canons and creeds; patrimony and patronage; social and economic responsibilities. All these aspects of her life, from the study of Church-State relations to the editing of episcopal registers and monastic constitutions are the proper concern of the Church historian, but so too is her inner life—spirituality, asceticism, and worship.

It is well known that the old Syrian, or to give it a more comprehensive description, the old Eastern liturgical usage of Baptism differed markedly from that which obtained in the West. The most obvious difference is one of pattern, and appears in connection with the ceremony known to us as Confirmation. In Western usage, as we find it in North Africa, described by Tertullian at the beginning of the third century in his De Baptismo, the act of baptising is followed by two ceremonies. The first of these is an anointing with oil. Tertullian connects this anointing with that of Aaron by Moses, and ascribes to it an undefined spiritual benefit. The second ceremony is the last of the rite, and its culmination; it conveys, according to Tertullian, the gift of the Holy Spirit. ‘Dehinc,’ he says, ‘manus imponitur per benedictionem advocans et invitans spiritum sanctum. . . . Tunc ille sanctissimus spiritus super emundata et benedicta corpora libens a patre descendit.’ Shortly after the writing of De Baptismo, we meet with evidence for the existence of a similar rite at Rome. The text of Apostolic Tradition, as it has been put together from its several versions, requires to be treated with caution; but there is no doubt that Hippolytus knew a post-baptismal ceremony, comparable with the use of oil after the bath, and held to apply, ώς μύρῳ, the powers of the Holy Spirit, to those who have newly come up from the ‘bath’ (λουτρόν) of Baptism.

My theme is a melancholy one. It is the story of what happens to a Church of second-class citizens in a land dominated by rulers of an alien religion, an alien culture, and, officially at least, an alien race. We all know, with Tertullian, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. But when the martyrs are not fiercely persecuted but, instead, merely consistently humiliated, the outcome is less stimulating. It leads to decline and decay.

In the two ninth-century treatises on the Eucharist written by Paschasius Radbertus and Ratramnus two opinions are expressed which seem to be in complete contradiction with each other. Both, however, are founded in the liturgy of the Church and spring from the same orthodox root. Their doctrines, therefore, do not differ from each other in every detail of the argumentation. The one may be characterised as the realistic-metabolic doctrine, the other as the symbolic doctrine. J. R. Geiselmann in his penetrating studies of the eucharistic doctrine in the early Middle Ages prefers to distinguish between three tendencies: (1) the metabolism of St Ambrose and the Gallican liturgies; (2) the realism of the Roman liturgy; (3) the dynamism of St Augustine’s more spiritual doctrine. The most diverse answers were inspired by closer inquiries into the realisation of the sacrament, i.e. the question firstly how the conversion of the elements should be understood and, secondly, how the relation should be seen between the consecrated elements and the body of Christ ascended to heaven. In these answers the terminology used is not always the same, so that a reliable interpretation offers great difficulties.

After reading the title of my paper, you may well have wondered whether anything worth while or useful can still be said about the mediaeval papacy. Your apprehension would certainly be justified, if I were concerned merely with its history, but of recent years the institution has not been so much the subject of purely narrative treatment as of the underlying principles and aims. And here so great a variety of views has been set forth that an outsider might well feel somewhat perplexed by the contradictory views propounded. Why does the mediaeval papacy evoke such divergent interpretations?

When, in modern ecumenical converse, it is suggested that a non-episcopal church may do well to take episcopacy into its system, there is bound to be discussion of the theology of episcopacy, of whether or not the bishop is of the esse of the Church, is necessary to its being, necessary for the perpetuation of orders and sacraments, and of the nature and significance of apostolic succession. But that is not all. Besides these high doctrinal problems, there will be questions about bishops as facts of history. Fear of prelacy may cast doubt upon their being even of the bene esse of the Church. Frequently, however, there is a genuine interest in the pastoral potentialities of episcopacy. While it is claimed that the ministers of non-episcopal churches do in fact exercise episkope over their parishes or congregations, it is freely allowed that, for good pastoral and evangelistic reasons (and not solely for the sake of what is sometimes called mere administration), the modern trend has been strongly towards the appointment of ministers to an office involving supervision of larger areas and of other ministers, whether the former are called moderators, superintendents, chairmen, general secretaries, what you will—even bishops. But if such men are meant to exercise a pastoral office, how can it be secured that they do not degenerate into ‘mere administrators’?

A week before Christmas 1604, Robert Cecil, secretary of state to James I, and recently elevated in the peerage to a viscountcy, received from Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, a frank piece of advice. ‘Good my Lord Cranborne,’ wrote the archbishop, ‘let me put you in mynde that you wer borne and brought up in true religion. Your worthy father was a worthy instrument to banish superstition and to advaunce the Gospell. Imytate him in this service efectyally.’ There followed some unkind observations about James I’s love for the blood sports, and a further warning about the Roman Catholics, and then a concluding prayer: ‘Thus beseching God to bless your Lordship with his manyfold graces that you may as long serve his most excellent Majestie as your most wyse father did serve most worthy Queen Elizabeth, I bid you most hartely farewell.’

The Great Persecution in the Western provinces of the Roman Empire was relatively short and sharp. Eusebius in both his Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine contrasts the eight long years of repression suffered by the East, first under Diocletian and Galerius and then under Maximian, with the persecution of ‘scarcely two years’ duration’ endured by the Western Christians. In the West, indeed, the persecution of Valerian 257-60 seems to have been longer and perhaps more costly in human lives, and that of Decius more dangerous to the Church.

Anyone reading the Solemn Prayers of Good Friday in the Roman rite is at once struck by the clear distinction which exists between the biddings and the collects of this ancient intercession both in language and in rhythm, and closer examination shows that whereas the biddings are almost destitute of rhythmic endings, showing only four in the nine biddings (two each in Biddings VI and VII), the collects abound in them, and not one of the nine collects is without at least one. This enables us to conclude that the biddings are earlier than the collects. For it is known that Roman liturgical composition, like the work of the papal chancery, conformed to the principles of the cursus from some time in the fourth century until the middle of the seventh. Presence of rhythmic endings is therefore useless for dating a document within this period, but in the case of writings before or after it, attention to the presence or absence of cursus can give a good indication of date. The cursus became the rule in the papal chancery from the time of Siricius (384-98), and disappeared after St Gregory the Great (604), and in the case of liturgical composition it prevailed roughly from 350 or a little later until about 650. The collects of the three ancient Roman sacramentarles abound in rhythmic endings. Dom Mocquereau collected about 1030 clausulae from the Leonine Sacramentary, of which only ten did not conform to the rules of the cursus. The Gelasian and Gregorian Sacramentarles show a like adherence to this literary principle, and their prayers nearly all date from within the classic period of the cursus, from the fourth to the seventh centuries.

This paper wishes to draw attention to a phenomenon which is of equal importance to the historian of art as to the ecclesiastical historian. In correlating facts which are largely known, it tries to explain the emergence of a new type of illustrated bible at the end of the eleventh century, chiefly in France and in Italy. These giant bibles, usually in more than one volume, were obviously not made for an individual reader who studied the bible in private. Their large size, as well as the richness and content of their decoration, indicate that they were conceived as visual symbols of the authority, the history, and the structure of the Church as an institution, as revealed in the Old and the New Testament. The origin of this new type of illustrated bible is closely connected with the Reform of the eleventh century, and it appears first in the diocese of Rheims, though its example was followed rapidly throughout western Europe.

The coronation of Henry II’s eldest son, the younger Henry, in Westminster Abbey on 14 June 1170 was an event of the highest significance. The ceremony was performed by Roger, archbishop of York, assisted by the bishops of London and Salisbury, in the presence of Henry II, but in the absence, and against the will, of the exiled archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and in defiance of the commands of the pope, Alexander III. The coronation itself has an intrinsic interest: the practice of crowning an heir in his father’s lifetime, though customary in France, and occurring at times in the German and Byzantine empires, was unusual in England.

This paper seeks to present merely a preliminary report on a twelfh-century English canonical manuscript of more than usual interest. The work in question is the Durham Cathedral MSC.III.i, ff. 1v-18r, of which a complete analysis with full palaeographical description will be published later, giving clearer definition to the discussions simply outlined here. To deal briefly with the physical appearance of the manuscript first: the folios are 13½ × 9½ in. in size, and the canonical matter is transcribed in double or triple columns with an average of sixty-five lines to the column, carefully written in several different hands of the later twelfth century, with many rubrics and occasional brief marginal references, comments or glosses. It may be said at once that one obvious point of interest in this work is the variety of types of composition, many of them common-place enough individually, gathered together compactly within a few folios of a single volume, revealing the many-sided activities of English canonical collectors at a very creative and formative period in the history of canon law.

It is becoming ever clearer how English canonists, by their intense and early activity in collecting current papal decretal letters, made a vital contribution to the law of the Church in the second half of the twelfth century. Dr Charles Duggan has recently produced a fascinating study of these decretal collections and has shown how they reflect the interest and activity of four bishops in particular: Richard of Dover, archbishop of Canterbury (1174-84); Roger, bishop of Worcester (1164-79); Bartholomew, bishop of Exeter (1161-84); and Baldwin of Ford, bishop of Worcester (1180-4) and archbishop of Canterbury (1184-90). These were all foremost papal judges-delegate, concerned to preserve the pope’s letters for the practical purposes of legal reference. Their collections often consisted of a core of letters directed to themselves. Copies of letters directed to other bishops were added to these as obtainable, and also letters copied from other decretal collections then in circulation. An interesting question arises from Dr Duggan’s work. Although particular decretal collections may in this way be associated with particular bishops, is it likely that the bishops themselves were personally responsible for the work of selection and compilation ? Would they have had time? Since they had trained clerks in their familia, would they not more probably have left all this to them, especially to their legal experts? And so we find ourselves looking past the bishops into their households.

This communication treats of a small detail of a large subject. The claim to a power of deposing secular rulers is a major theme in the history of the papacy. As a theory, it epitomises the whole political logic of the mediaeval papacy: the deposing power was the primum caput of papal hierocracy and its origins lie deep in early papal centuries. As a political doctrine put into practice, it had profound effects at several points in the history of mediaeval Europe, particularly in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, while its shadow lay banefully over many a governmental decision and politico-religious controversy of more modern times.

At the Council of Lambeth in 1261, Archbishop Boniface of Canterbury promulgated canonical legislation which may fairly be described as a belated retort by the ecclesia Anglicana to the Constitutions of Clarendon. Almost a century before, Henry II at Clarendon had insisted on a formal and public recordatio vel recognitio of the limitations imposed on canonical jurisdiction by English law and custom, and after the murder of Becket he had achieved a concordat with the papacy which amounted to de facto recognition of most of them; now Boniface’s decrees denounced many of those limitations as intolerable, and prescribed in detail the severest canonical penalties for all those—whether clerk or lay—who connived at their maintenance. These decrees provided a constructive gloss on the vague promise in the Great Charter, quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit, et habeat sua iura integra, et libertates suas illaesas, and their promulgation marks the end of a period during which the episcopate had repeatedly tried and failed to get the agreement of the crown and the lay baronage to such a gloss. In short, they were the product of an ecclesiastical revolt which ran parallel to, but was quite independent of, the baronial revolt of 1258.

For nearly six hundred years the significance of Wyclif’s theory of dominion and grace has been in dispute, although it is generally agreed that his chief claim to fame as a political figure rests upon it. It has recently been described as his main contention, and there can be no doubt that it was a thesis of which he was inordinately proud. It became a major feature in both the papal condemnation of 1377 and that of the Blackfriars Council five years later; it looms even more largely in the forty-five Wycliffite propositions condemned at Prague in 1403, at Rome in 1413, and subsequently by the Council of Constance in 1415. Hus’s defence of the theory was an important factor in bringing him to the stake. But if Wyclif’s contemporaries had little hesitation in recognising a destructive potential, modern scholars have been far more cautious in assessing its political value. Neither R. L. Poole nor Workman could reach a firm judgement.

The purpose of this paper is to raise a problem of more than antiquarian interest in Reformation literary history. The Unio Dissidentium is a collection of passages from the Bible together with nearly 550 quotations, many of them quite lengthy, from the Fathers. This latter feature gives to the book much of its interest, as well as a place in the patristic revival begun by the classical humanists and brought to a high level of development by the work of such men as Erasmus and Beatus Rhenanus.

So far as can with certainty be stated, the first part of Unio Dissidentium was published by the Antwerp printer, Martin de Keyser, in March 1527. The ten sections into which it is divided contain passages supporting the compiler’s theology on such current theological issues as original sin, infant baptism, predestination, the nature and function of law, grace and merit, faith and works, and human ordinances. Later that same year the same printer published the second part, dealing with the value of the Word of God, penitence, brotherly correction, fasting, prayer, indulgences, the Eucharist, ecclesiastical constitutions, the vocation of all Christians to be priests, kings, and prophets, and antichrist. To the editions printed in and after 1531 a further three sections were added, the first two of which are on expensive funerals and the flight and persecution of Christians, respectively, while the third is the tract of Pseudo-Augustine, De Essentia Divinitatis.

Of all the early but non-contemporary works which throw light on the history of Lollardy, the Acts and Monuments of John Foxe is undoubtedly the most important. Although it contains many tendentious comments, the products of an age when religious passions burned fiercely, comments which are of greater value to the historian of sixteenth-century propaganda than to the student of fifteenth-century heresy, it would be unwise to reject its source-value on these grounds. Besides Foxe’s comments, it also contains material, sometimes no longer extant in other records, which Foxe claimed to draw from the original accounts of the heresy trials, and, for the early sixteenth century, memories of observers, and it is some of this material which I wish to consider today. Because Foxe is noted as a propagandist, his reliability has sometimes been questioned, so the first task of the historian is to subject his excerpts from documents and his other source-material to a more than usually careful scrutiny. In cases where the original sources are still extant, these can be used to reach some estimate of his accuracy in general; in cases where they are not, other records can sometimes serve as a cross-check.