The rule which Benedict Biscop had laid down for the monastery of St Peter and St Paul at Wearmouth and Jarrow is twice mentioned in some detail in the writings of the Venerable Bede. Unfortunately both passages are rather vague in that no clear indication is given of which particular rule Biscop introduced at Wearmouth–Jarrow. It is certain, however, that Biscop did not compose a totally new rule, but accepted for his own houses the monastic institutes which he had learned abroad.

In the summer of 1337, representatives of the English King Edward III and the German Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria concluded negotiations leading to the formation of an Anglo-imperial alliance. Edward, who was in the midst of preparations to pursue by force his dynastic claim to the French crown, received from Ludwig the title of imperial vicar-general per Alemanniam et Galliam, an act which conferred upon him sovereign rights over subjects and lands west of the Rhine. In return, Edward provided the emperor with the substantial financial remuneration which he required to stabilise his own position within Germany. This Anglo-imperial treaty, the greatest achievement of Edward's early diplomatic programme, was solemnised in a ceremonial meeting between the two rulers during September of the following year. One figure who was no doubt in attendance throughout these events was William of Ockham, the Franciscan philosopher and theologian exiled from his native England as the result of a dispute with Pope John XXIL. Ludwig, while never an entirely reliable protector, had sheltered Ockham and numerous other intellectuals who had run afoul of the papal court at Avignon.

The economic standing of the English parochial clergy in the early sixteenth century has been re-examined recently by Michael Zell, and the evidence at his disposal suggests that many of them were poverty-stricken in the extreme. He points to the large surplus of unendowed curates, chaplains and the like, and to the fact that when employment was available it was neither rewarding, in a monetary sense, nor necessarily secure. Stipends were officially regulated by an early fifteenth-century statute which set a maximum of £5 6s. 8d. per annum, and ‘evidence from all regions of England indicates that very rarely were curates and chaplains given more than that’. It was not uncommon for areas in the north to pay even less than this. In Lancashire, for example, the average salary of about 100 curates and chaplains in 1524 was £2 9s. 6d. In the East Riding of Yorkshire a year later it was £4. On the basis of such evidence, Mr Zell reasonably concludes that the unbeneficed clergy must have found it very difficult to survive, and that ‘the average country priest could not have been a person of high social status’.

When Immanuel Bourne published his larger catechism in 1646, he prefaced it with an unusually full account of the history of catechising. He was not the first author of the period to trace the practice back to the examples of religious instruction in both Old and New Testaments, or to cite the works of Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen as proof of the existence of religious education in the early Church. Nor was he alone in praising the efforts of those continental reformers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries who thought they had revived the characteristic form of instruction of the early Church after centuries of neglect, though it may be added that Bourne's list of contemporary European catechists was longer and more cosmopolitan than others'.

The issue in the series of crises leading to the suppression of the Jesuit order in France in 1764 was the absolute obedience owed under the Jesuit Institute by every French Jesuit to the superior general of the Society of Jesus resident in Rome. On the eve of the suppression, the French law courts and the Crown reasoned that Jesuit subjects of the king of France ought not to owe such obedience to a foreign superior living on foreign soil. In the eyes of the secular authorities, the French Jesuits' connection with their superior general constituted a threat to the security of the French state. Initially, most French Jesuit leaders accepted this point of view and tried to come to an accommodation with the state which would have loosened their ties to the general.

Though the political ideas of JohnPonet, Edwardian bishop and Marian exile, continue to attract interest, the facts of Ponet's life and, especially, of his activities during his years of exile have excited no high degree of scholarly attention since the works of Christina Garrett and Winthrop S. Hudson. Yet one piece of evidence, unknown to both Garrett and Hudson, exists that tells us a few important things about his attitude toward and, particularly, his involvement in, the propaganda and polemical activities of Protestant exiles under Mary. The evidence in question is a letter from Ponet in Strasbourg to John Bale ‘at Frankfurt’; and since this document has appeared to date only in excerpts, it will be well to begin by offering a complete transcription of it.