The great Mongol invasion of Eastern Europe in 1241–2 has received a fair degree of attention from historians.1 The same cannot be said of the crusade it provoked: at least from a crusading vantage-point this paper could be subtitled ‘a neglected category‘. The general histories of the crusades are content, at most, to mention the invasion and the proclamation of the crusade against the Mongols by Pope Gregory ix; some omit any reference to the episode. And if the Mongols receive more notice in Maureen Purcell's investigation of papal crusading policy in the thirteenth century, it is nevertheless in rather general terms; there is no mention of the crusade of 1241. The only author to examine that crusade at all qua crusade seems to have been Paulus in his history of the Indulgence.

Andrew Holes, a canon lawyer working in the papal court, was one of the few foreigners really admired by Vespasiano da Bisticci. Roberto Weiss directed attention to him, but in 1944 Josephine Bennett for the first time thoroughly discussed his career, trying also to discover the titles of some of the books he bought in Florence. These were said by Vespasiano to be so numerous that he had to have them specially shipped home. In 1944 only about three were discoverable. Nor, of course, during the war was Bennett able to examine the sermon (known only in a Vienna manuscript) that Holes delivered at the English Hospice probably on Tuesday 7 July, 1433 for the Feast of the Translation of Thomas Becket, which would have been one way to investigate his attitudes. Weiss had examined the sermon and Bennett knew of it from him. However, to someone such as Weiss, primarily interested in the Renaissance viewed narrowly as the revival of the pagan classics, there was nothing in it of importance.

The prominence of religious issues in eighteenth-century British politics has received growing, and gratifying, recognition in recent years. In particular, attacks upon, and defences of, the doctrine of the Trinity have been seen as central to theological, and hence to political, debate. For many, the term ‘orthodoxy’ without qualification referred to one's position on this question. Although there is perhaps still insufficient emphasis upon trinitarian orthodoxy as a central feature of what is fashionably termed the state's self-image, Unitarianism is rightly perceived as important to critiques of the existing regime, especially after 1750. Historians of the Wilkites, of later eighteenth-century radicalism and of peace campaigns in the Napoleonic period, have cast Unitarians in at least a supporting, and sometimes a leading, role. Yet too often Unitarianism has appeared elusive and difficult to pin down, manyheaded and half-concealed under the vague label of ‘heterodoxy’.

In a general history of modern England A. J. P. Taylor stated that by the 1920s England ‘had ceased to be, in any real sense, a Christian nation’. He was no doubt referring to declining membership and attendance figures in most Protestant Churches (not the Roman Catholic Church), and may have been implying that there had been substantial abandonment of traditional belief. In regard to traditional morality, based on Christian precepts, he found greater laxity but no very noticeable decline; and this conclusion seems to be generally supported by Church experience in trying to uphold established morality in the inter-war years. Church assembly records and church newspapers show constant concern with familiar moral enemies such as drunkenness and gambling, and possible new dangers in the shape of films, broadcasting and information about birth control. Gambling was increasing because of the popularity of football pools and greyhound racing, but drunkenness appeared less common than before 1914, and the cinema was reasonably harmless (a Cinema Christian Council and other bodies striving to keep it so), as also was television when its broadcasts began in 1936. None the less, the general decline in church attendance was an indication of an increasingly secularised society in which the Churches, taken as a whole, had diminishing influence, and arguably this had a weakening effect on traditional morality.