bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Churches and the ’45
Authors: Deconinck-Brossard Françoise
Published: March 2016

The limits of this short paper will not allow me to give a full account of the question, but only to consider some aspects of the sermons preached on the occasion of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. There was a spate of sermons published at the time, not only by famous whig bishops, understandably eager to prove their zeal for the house of Hanover, but also by unknown members of the inferior clergy who felt the need to express their loyalty to the establishment. In many cases, the sermons they preached were the only ones they ever published. It is worth noting, in this respect, that the names of only five antijacobite preachers are to be found in the DNB. This phenomenon, namely the crucial part played by humble preachers, is all the more remarkable as it is in marked contrast with other fields of eighteenth-century pulpit oratory. (Charity sermons, for instance, could only be delivered by bishops or archdeacons or by well-known speakers with a good preaching reputation). Besides, nonconformist ministers were as anxious as their Church of England counterparts to be regarded as pillars of the Hanoverian cause, so that they too had many sermons printed for the occasion. From the available evidence, it is reasonable to assume that they sold well. On the flyleaf of any one of these pamphlets, John Hildyard, the York printer, with his usual advertising techniques, set out a list of other sermons published on the same theme, as an incentive to buy further books on the subject.
‘Ulster will Fight and Ulster will be Right’: The Protestant Churches and Ulster’s Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–14
Authors: Holmes R. F. G.
Published: March 2016

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Randolph Churchill may never have uttered these emotive words during his visit to Ulster in 1886—they appeared in a public letter to a Glasgow Liberal unionist—but they undoubtedly expressed the belligerence and self-righteousness of the Ulster protestant resistance to the prospect of home rule for Ireland. Joseph Lee has observed correctly that ‘Orangemen did not need to be told that they were right or that they would fight’, but after 1886 it was not only Orangemen who made such claims, nor even opportunist tory politicians like Churchill, but protestant churchmen and solid middle class citizens and farmers who would previously have distanced themselves fastidiously from Orangeism. In this paper we shall examine the encouragement and support given by protestant churches and churchmen—Presbyterians in particular—to the movement to resist home rule by force in the period 1912–14.
Et Virtutem Et Musas: Mill Hill School and the Great War
Authors: Binfield Clyde
Published: March 2016

‘It is the duty of every Christian man to regard his religion as the Expeditionary Force of his soul’.

In the autumn of 1950 W. H. Balgarnie, a retired public school-master, was asked to reminisce about his early days in the profession. Balgarnie’s boys certainly remembered him, ‘very young-looking for his age, so much so that on one occasion we were rejoiced by a parent approaching him on the touch-line of the football field and saying: “Can you tell me where Mr. Balgarnie is, my boy?”’ Balgarnie replied from his house in Cambridge:

... I came in 1890, and stayed only 3½ years, and know nothing of the great Eltham days. ‘S.S.M.’ was our abbreviation for ‘School for the Sons of Missionaries’, wh. I suppose was held not terse enough for a slogan on the football field. The School was quite small in my time, and 50 was accounted a full house. The Rev. Edward Waite was Headmaster—a beautiful reader of the Psalms at morning prayers—and I was under Mr. Hayward for only a year: it was he who took the motto from the Apocrypha, Filiorum gloria Patres.
The Sword of the Spirit: A Catholic Cultural Crusade of 1940
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

In the anxious second half of 1940 certain developments took place which cardinal Heenan, the late archbishop of Westminster, was to describe, somewhat grandly, as ‘the opening chapter of the modern history of religion in Great Britain’. He was referring to an unprecedented series of events which led up to and flowed from a letter to the Times in December extolling the five peace points of pope Pius XII. The letter was signed not only by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster, cardinal Hinsley, but also by the two Anglican primates and the moderator of the Free Church council. Such a public manifestation of religious harmony reflected the national unity of the hour and was further reinforced a few months later by two joint meetings which were each addressed by both catholic and protestant leaders. But the pressures for national and religious cohesion which were at their height in 1940–41 were to decline with the passing of the immediate threat and to be effectively countered by the resurgence of older and more powerful denominational suspicions and susceptibilities. What might have been an ‘opening chapter’ turned instead into little more than an isolated essay in inter-church relations. As such it would hardly justify closer scrutiny but the episode is more significant because it throws light on several problems which arise when religion has to function in a modern society at a time of crisis. More particularly it draws attention to the pressures and constraints involved in the mobilization of religious commitments in the national interest and to the strategic considerations which impelled church leaders to opt for a particular course of action when confronted by a complex web of national needs, institutional inhibitions and popular sentiment. This paper does not attempt a comprehensive analysis of the various facets of the situation but concentrates on those aspects which relate to the Roman Catholic church in England.
The Fall of France
Authors: White Gavin
Published: March 2016

‘As for the good things of this life and its ills, God has willed that these should be common to both’ the righteous and the unrighteous. So wrote a well-known north African theologian of the fall of Rome in AD 410, an event which many observers attributed to the abandonment of ancient religious practices and beliefs in favour of Christianity. That they should do so was perhaps natural; it is always easier to claim betrayal than to admit defeat in the field of battle. Even Gibbon, who was judicious enough in assessing the causes of the fall of Rome, held that the main cause was ‘the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves’, and implied that the city might not have fallen had it not been that, ‘At the hour of midnight, the Salarian gate was silently opened . . . ’ And what was said of the fall of Rome was also said of the fall of France.
To Flee or Not to Flee’: An Assessment of Athanasius’s De Fuga Sua
Authors: Pettersen Alvyn
Published: March 2016

The very question ‘to flee or not to flee?’ strikes the historian of the early church as an unusual question. Forneither the martyrologies nor the histories of that persecuted body seem to entertain such. The death of Polycarp at Smyrnaseems to rule out the possibility of flight for subsequent confessors of Christ; and the events of Maximian’s reign (AD 306–13) confirm that identity with Christ, even in death, was the true vocation of the faithful. Eusebius, an eye witness of some of the events of that reign, records examples of weakness and apostasy, but only to set off what was the real character of the Christian church at the time, namely constancy and defiance in the face of persecution. Yet not only does he allude to that constancy, but he records it:

and we ourselves also beheld … many, all at once, in a single day, some of whom suffered decapitation, others the punishment of fire; so that the murderous axe was dulled and, worn out, was broken in pieces, while the executioners themselves grew utterly weary and took it in turns to succeed one another. It was then that we observed a most marvellous eagerness and a truly divine power and zeal in those who had placed their faith in the Christ of God. Thus, as soon as sentence was given against the first, some from one quarter, and others from another would leap up to the tribunal before the judge and confess themselves Christians; paying no heed when faced with terrors and the varied forms of tortures, but undismayed and boldly speaking of the piety towards the God of the universe, and with joy and laughter and gladness receiving the final sentence of death; so that they sung and sent up hymns and thanksgivings to the God of the universe even to the very last breath.
Popular Violence and Popular Heresy in Western Europe, c1000-1179
Authors: Moore R. I.
Published: March 2016

In general modern writers on popular heresy in the high middle ages have shared the opinion of contemporary observers that the capacity of dissident preachers to attract a popular following, stimulate sentiments of intense devotion and loyalty, and canalise resentment of clerical exaction and abuse, constituted a significant threat to the authority of the Church. Hence, more or less explicitly, the extension of the theory and practice of coercion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been seen as a defensive reaction designed (with the emphasis according to the preference of the historian) to protect clerical privilege and spiritual authority. There are, however, distinguished exceptions. In one of the few passages in his writings where religious persecution is discussed, Southern accounts for it thus:

… those who bore authority in the church were agents with very limited powers of initiative. They were not free agents. Doubtless they were responsible for some terrible acts of violence and cruelty, among which the Albigensian Crusade holds a particular horror. But on the whole the holders of ecclesiastical authority were less prone to violence, even against unbelievers, than the people whom they ruled.
Infidels and Jews: Clement VI’s attitude to persecution and toleration
Authors: Wood Diana
Published: March 2016

Clement VI was a pope who appeared to face both ways. This impression is confirmed by the fact that some historians have hailed him as a humanist pope, if not the first humanist pope, whereas his conception of the Christian society and of papal sovereignty followed thoroughly traditional and authoritarian lines. A glance at his best known political sermon, that preached in 1346 to approve the future emperor Charles IV as king of the Romans, would suffice to show this. His attitude to infidels and Jews also appears paradoxical, for he persecuted the one and tolerated the other, and this despite the threat presented by both to the purity of the Faith. This is not to suggest that Clement was the only pope to exhibit this dichotomy, for it was a common enough one: it was just that his views on infidels and Jews were more extreme than those of others, and the contrast therefore more pointed.
Reginald Pecock: a tolerant man in an age of intolerance
Authors: Haines Roy Martin
Published: March 2016

Reginald Pecock, bishop of St. Asaph and subsequently of Chichester, has surely been one of the most misrepresented of men. Condemned in his later years as a heretic, he was grossly misunderstood by that garrulous prophet of doom, Thomas Gascoigne, who described him as this ‘Pacock’ who loosed arrows at the sun, one of which by the just judgment of God fell upon his own head. John Foxe allotted him a place as a protestant confessor and Father Robert Parsons wished the martyrologist joy of one who had [allegedly] denied three articles of the Creed and ‘perjuriously abjured’ against his conscience.
Sir Peter Pett, Sceptical Toryism and the Science of Toleration in the 1680s
Authors: Goldie Mark
Published: March 2016

In the charged atmosphere of religious xenophobia in England in the 1680s it was an unusual person who could survey the state of Christendom and the zealotry of his fellow countrymen with a detached eye. Such a one was Sir Peter Pett, ‘a virtuoso, and a great scholar, and Fellow of the Royal Society’. His vast and inchoate book, The Happy Future State of England, is eirenic, Erastian and Hobbesian in outlook. It is also an exercise in the fledgling science of ‘political arithmetic’. With the panoply of scientific reasoning it predicted the imminence of a secular age in which the knot of politics and religion would be untied. This paper will first sketch the background to this book, then examine its account of the state of Catholicism and dissent, and lastly appraise its claim that ‘a science of politics’ could provide a solvent of religious persecution.
The Politics of ‘Persecution’: Scots Episcopalian Toleration and the Harley Ministry, 1710–12
Authors: Szechi D.
Published: March 2016

Religion was the ideological motor of politics in the first age of party. Though the distinction between the Whig and Tory positions on religious issues was often small compared to their internal divisions on other matters, religion was felt to be the only real justification for both parties. The Whigs stood for a cosmopolitan Erastianism embracing protestant dissent, the Tories for a stronger, national Church for which religious uniformity was still a worthwhile goal. The Church was inextricably caught up in these national political divisions, and its own internecine warfare between high and low church mirrored them exactly. It naturally followed from this that religious issues were the most passionately upheld by the Whigs and the Tories, and were those which had most impact on national politics. Hence the Tories put themselves out of office in 1704–5 by the zeal with which they tried to push the Occasional Conformity Bill through, even though it was certain to create a constitutional crisis which would paralyse the British war-effort against France. And the Whigs seized the opportunity to ‘roast a parson’ afforded by Henry Sacheverell’s high church ranting on the theme of ‘the Church in Danger’ by trying to impeach him. Their partial success only served to validate and refresh the ‘Church in Danger’ preaching they had hoped to silence, and they were crushed by an avalanche of outraged Toryism in the 1710 election. Since religious issues were the most keenly felt and constituted the central dynamic of the party battle, the translation of religious conflict from the nation at large to Westminster gives us a glimpse of the real strength of religion’s hold on the concept of party, and hence its influence in contemporary politics.
The Pope and the Jews in 1942
Authors: Chadwick Owen
Published: March 2016

This paper runs from the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 to the Pope’s Christmas message of 1942. The final solution of the Jewish problem was planned at the Wannsee Conference under the chairmanship of Heydrich. On 24 December 1942 the Pope believed that he protested publicly against it. On 20 January no one outside the secret inner Nazi ring knew that such a plan was even contemplated. By Christmas 1942 all the world new in outline what was going on. So this paper is partly a study in information: how much did they know in the Vatican, how soon, and by what means did they know it? And partly it is a study in pressure. As the knowledge grew, so grew the pressure on Pope Pius XII to do something, say something, tell the world, condemn. Naturally the effectiveness of all such pressure depended on the extent of the knowledge, and the belief that the knowledge was reliable.
A Hermit Goes to War: Peter and the Origins of the First Crusade
Authors: Blake E.O. , Morris C.
Published: March 2016

Just over a century ago Heinrich Hagenmeyer published his definitive book on Peter the Hermit. It has shaped most subsequent discussions of Peter’s career, and it must be said at once that no completely new material has come to light since then. There is, however, a problem of perpetual interest posed by the divergences among twelfth-century accounts of the origins of the First Crusade. Until the advent of modern historiography, it was accepted that the expedition was provoked by an appeal from the church of Jerusalem, brought to the west by Peter the Hermit, who had visited it as a pilgrim, had seen a vision of Christ and had been entrusted by the patriarch with a letter asking for help against the oppression of the Christians there. The crusade was on this view born in the atmosphere of pilgrimage, visions and popular preaching which continued to mark its course, and is so evident in, for example, the discovery of the Holy Lance and the visions and messages which accompanied it. Peter is in some sense the embodiment of these charismatic elements, and there is no controversy about his prominence in the history of the movement. He appears as a sensationally successful preacher, who recruited and led a large contingent which left in advance of the main armies, and was cut to pieces in Asia Minor. Thereafter, he appears in the chronicles in a variety of capacities: as a runaway, and an ambassador to the Moslems, as an adviser, as an associate with the popular element among the crusaders, and finally as a guide to the sacred sites at Jerusalem. It is, however, not with these wider aspects of his career that we wish to deal in this paper, but with his special role in the summoning of the expedition. The older view was that he was its first author. Every student of the early church is familiar with militant monks and hermits. It was once believed that Peter, their spiritual descendant, was the most supremely successful of all the ascetic warmongers.
Plainness of Speech, Behaviour and Apparel in Eighteenth-Century English Quakerism
Authors: Hall David J.
Published: March 2016

The aim of this communication is to illustrate and examine the official attitude of the Quakers to their testimony on plainness in the eighteenth century, with a few examples, limited by available space, of the opinions of individuals. It is also limited to England since official attitudes in America and Ireland were somewhat different; it attempts no comparison with other contemporary English traditions; it cannot do more than touch on such gaps as may have existed between individual practice and official attitude; nor can it make use of the ample surviving local records. To understand what lay behind the testimony on plainness it is necessary to go back briefly to the rise of Quakerism in the mid-seventeenth century.
‘A Standing Miracle’: La Trappe at Lulworth, 1794–1817
Authors: Bellenger Dominic Aidan
Published: March 2016

English monasticism survived the Reformation only in exile. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many monks came to England as pastors to the Catholic community (indeed all members of the English Benedictine Congregation, revived at the beginning of the seventeenth century, took an oath promising to work in England after ordination), but they lived alone or in small groups and except during the early Stuart period there were no organised religious communities in England which could properly be called monastic. This state of affairs was to change dramatically in the years of the French Revolution when the English communities on the continent were repatriated and a number of French religious made their way to England as émigrés. The English communities (including those now represented by the abbeys of Ampleforth in Yorkshire and Downside in Somerset, formerly at Dieulouard in Lorraine and Douai in Flanders respectively) managed to settle in England without too much opposition. These monks had been trained for circumspect behaviour on the mission and were not noticeably ‘monastic’ in either appearance or behaviour; the complete Benedictine habit was not used at Downside, for example, until the late 1840s and working in parishes away from their monasteries remained the normal expectation of most English Benedictine monks until well into the present century. The same could not be said of the community of Saint Susan at Lulworth in Dorset which provided between the years 1794 and 1817 the setting for the first experiment in fully observant monastic life in England for two hundred and fifty years.
Changing Images of Roman Catholic Religious Orders in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: March 2016

‘“Camelot-Camelot:” said I to myself “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”’ so said Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. But the irony is that the joke is now on Twain. In examining The Discovery of the Asylum, David J. Rothman has persuasively argued that the American asylum which developed in the 1820s and 1830s served a dual purpose. It would create the correct desirable attitudes within its inmates and by virtue of its success, set an example of right action to the larger society. The well-ordered asylum would exemplify the proper principles of social organisation and thus insure the safety of the republic and promote its glory. My purpose is to suggest that the monastery in Europe served a similar purpose. Europeans faced similar social and political problems to Americans and the rediscovery of monasticism paralleled the growth of American institutions and served a similar purpose in the public arena. In the process a more tolerant and sympathetic attitude towards religious orders emerged.
Fourpenny Retirement: the Yorkshire Templars in the Fourteenth Century
Authors: Hill Rosalind
Published: March 2016

It is now generally accepted that the Order of Templars was destroyed not because of its heresy but because of its wealth. Having outlived its usefulness in the Holy Land, it fell a victim to the forces of financial, jealousy, not entirely unprovoked. Although in England the Order did not hold such an influential position as it did in France, it was nevertheless wealthy and very highly privileged. Edward I, himself a crusader, had in 1290 renewed and amplified a charter of Henry III which exempted the Templars from almost every kind of secular taxation, in addition to guaranteeing such valuable rights and immunities as they already held by authority of the Pope. On their English lands they enjoyed the rights of sac and soc, with all the appurtenances of a private court, and in addition they were quit of scot and geld, feudal aids, tallage and lastage and carucage, and of all tolls, charges, and payments connected with fairs throughout the land. They paid no tax on the export of wool, which their northern estates produced in abundance; in 1390 it was claimed that this privilege, in the counties of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire alone, accounted for more than half the income of the London Temple. They were free of demands for watch and ward, castle-guard, and requisitions for building the King’s works. They were exempt too from forest law, and could create assarts at pleasure; nor need they cut the claws of their dogs. Moreover, they could claim the forfeits, fines, and chattels of all felons taken upon their lands, even when these had been judged in the King’s court.
The Root of all Evil? Money and the Scottish Catholic Mission in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: McMillan J. F.
Published: March 2016

We are all familiar with the idea that the Church is in the world but not of it, and that too great a preoccupation with earthly things may compromise the Church’s other-worldly objectives. One thinks of the extravagance of a Renaissance pope such as Leo X, reputed to have said, ‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’: or of an ancien régime prelate like the Archbishop of Mainz, who arrived for the coronation of the Emperor Joseph II with a retinue of fourteen sumptuous carriages: or, in our own time, the Vatican’s reported links with some of the shadier elements in the world of international finance. Yet, it is equally obvious that lack of adequate material resources can act as a serious impediment to the Church’s mission to go forth and teach all nations. Excessive poverty, like excessive wealth, brings its own problems. As the adage has it, not money itself but the desire for money is the root of all evil. Excessive poverty and the desire for money are the themes which I wish to pursue in this paper, in the context of the Scottish Catholic Mission in the eighteenth century, and more specifically as they relate to the so-called Jansenist quarrels which divided the Mission in the 1730s and 1740s.
The Church and the Two Nations in Late Medieval Armagh (Presidential Address)
Authors: Watt J. A.
Published: March 2016

Perhaps I can best introduce my paper, explain its nature and state my objective in writing it, by describing it as another step towards completing the second part of a study of which my book The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland was the first part.’ The study which concluded with the Statute of Kilkenny of 1366 needs extending chronologically by at least a century. More importantly, the nature of the analysis itself needs to be deepened. The ‘Two Nations’ book began with asking a fairly simple and limited question: what was the relationship of the ecclesiastical and civil powers within the English-settled parts of Ireland—in short, English law and the Irish Church. But it ended raising a more complex and more fundamental question about the overall effects on the Church of the establishment in Ireland of an English colony which was not coterminous with the country as a whole and whose strength and influence declined in the later middle ages. There may have been a more or less satisfactory answer in the book to the restricted question. There was, at best, no more than a tentative beginning to an answer to the more fundamental one.
The Rise of Recusancy Among the Dublin Patricians, 1580-1613
Authors: Lennon Colm
Published: March 2016

‘The mayor, aldermen, merchants and inhabitants of Dublin are notorious papists, hating the English nation and government’, wrote a state official in 1596. It was noted about the same time that, by contrast, there had been scarcely six of that ilk to be found there in the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. While grossly mistaken in perceiving a conjunction of religious dissidence and political disaffection, this commentator on late sixteenth-century Dublin correctly identified a steady trend towards adherence to the older religion on the part of the leading citizens and others. Within a decade the assertion was publicly confirmed, at least in the case of the aldermen. More than half of that elite group of senior city councillors were convicted of recusant offences and suffered imprisonment and heavy fines. And by 1613 the much-feared merging of the religious and political discontents of Dubliners seemed to be closer to becoming a reality. The freemen chose as their members in the forthcoming parliament two avowed Catholics. The election of Aldermen Thomas Allen and Francis Taylor (which was later overturned by state intervention) was regarded as a deliberate effort by the civic body to defend cherished liberties, including that of conscience, through determined recusancy.
United Irishmen and Unionists: Irish Presbyterians, 1791 and 1886
Authors: Holmes R. F. G.
Published: March 2016

When Gladstone decided, some time in 1885, that the only way to achieve ‘social order’ in Ireland was to concede Home Rule, he was disappointed to find that among his most implacable and vociferous opponents were the Irish Presbyterians. In vain he was to remind them that their ancestors had been United Irishmen in the 1790s, the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. His appeal to them to ‘retain and maintain the tradition of their sires’ fell on deaf ears.

It seemed to Gladstone as it has seemed to Irish nationalists and to some historians that the Irish Presbyterians had turned their political coats, that the grandsons of the United Irishmen had repudiated the principles of their grandfathers. Lecky, in his monumentalHistory of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, writing in the context of the Home Rule crisis, expressed his magisterial opinion that ‘the defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments… are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination’.
The Irish Priest in North America
Authors: Edwards Owen Dudley
Published: March 2016

To assert at the outset of this study, as I do, that the task before me is both impossible and essential, may be justly proclaimed a proceeding both cowardly and obvious. We are principally concerned with the nineteenth century, but the twentieth century prolonged many of the features of Irish Roman Catholic clerical identity of the nineteenth, in North America as elsewhere. Vitally important patterns and castes (social and mental) were established in the eighteenth century, and the first Irish-American Roman Catholic priestof major significance in the United States, John Carroll (1735-1815), first Roman Catholic bishop in the U.SA and first archbishop of Baltimore, owed his American birth initially to migration of his father’s kinsmen in the late seventeenth century. Anglophone North America from 178 3 consisted of two political obediences, with similarities and contrasts both subtle and, at least superficially, forceful. The huge and consistently expanding area of white settlement in North America in which the Irish Catholic clergy participated, created other great divergences: when American historians at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of figures as divergent as Frederick Jackson Turner of the ‘frontier thesis’, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips of slavery apologetics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan of sea-power celebration, looked to environmentalism as the chief explanation of the American past, they may have oversimplified—indeed, they did oversimplify—but their sheer preoccupation with the question gives its own warnings against a filio-pietism which chooses to see an Irish ethnic character resolutely asserting itself to the third, fourth, and even later generations.
New Zealand Catholicism and the Irish Issue, 1914-1922
Authors: Sweetman Rory M.
Published: March 2016

Recent biographies of Archbishops Mannix and Duhig have shown how those doughty warriors for the Catholic faith in Australia faced a rising tide of anti-Catholicism in the period 1916-23. Studies of Australian society and politics during and after the First World War have dwelt at length on the sectarian impulse. The conflict between Catholic and Protestant has even been cast by Professor Manning Clark as the central theme of Australian history.
The Hunger-Strike of the Lord Mayor of Cork, 1920: Irish, English and Vatican Attitudes
Authors: Mews Stuart
Published: March 2016

On 25 October 1920, a new name was added to the martyrology of Irish nationalism. On that date, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Alderman Terence MacSwiney, died in Brixton prison after a hunger-strike which had lasted 74 days. He had held office for little more than six months, his predecessor having been roused from sleep and shot, most Irish people believed, by plain clothed policemen. MacSwiney had succeeded not only to the symbolic positions of head of the municipality and titular chief magistrate, but also the less decorative but potentially more deadly positions of president of the Cork branch of Sinn Fein and commandant of the First Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. Brought up in the full flood of the Catholic spiritual and Gaelic cultural revivals, MacSwiney had a long record of active commitment to the struggle for Irish independence. He had been imprisoned by the British in 1916 in the aftermath of Dublin’s Easter Rising which he had watched from Cork in an agony of indecision, developing in one English historian’s view ‘a guilt complex which he was later to expiate in the grimmest possible way’. In August 1920, only days after the introduction of courts martial to replace civilian courts in Ireland, he was arrested in the City Hall, while presiding over a meeting of the Brigade Council. Proclaiming his allegiance to the Irish Republic, the Lord Mayor challenged the right of the British Army to detain him, and immediately commenced a hunger-strike.
Conversion in Constantine the Great
Authors: Chadwick Henry
Published: March 2016

The study of church history, in a degree perhaps unparalleled among the various branches of historical study, combines both the analysis of flux and change and also the continuities and constants that somehow remain through the vicissitudes and disasters of human history. Without needing to have any prefabricated pattern imposed upon it, in Marxist or other style, church history discloses startling continuities, so that to talk about Constantine or Origen or Augustine is somehow not to indulge in antiquarianism but to be talking about issues which (despite vast changes in the intellectual framework within which the debate proceeds) remain alive for the living community of the church now. The sweat drips from our brows as we make die effort to preserve impartiality and detachment. My subject is Constantine’s conversion and the shift that this brought to the intellectual and religious history of Europe. If we put the story back into its historical context and try to look at it with the eyes of a contemporary, the shift may not seem exactly the kind of shift that at first the modern historian thinks he sees.
The Motives of the Cathars: Some Reflections
Authors: Lambert M. D.
Published: March 2016

Catharism in the affected regions of Languedoc, especially the eastern Toulousain, Carcassès, part of the Albigeois, where the problem of heresy first reached crisis point for twelfth-century churchmen, affected all classes. This is admitted by Marxist as well as non-Marxist historians. A working hypothesis has been put foward by Griffe to explain why the heresy, which affected a whole series of localities in the twelfth century, built up support more strongly in these areas of Languedoc than anywhere else. Usurpation of tithes, he suggests, predisposed an impoverished rural nobility to support cathar preachers who confirmed them in their hostility to the church by suggesting religious reasons why they should not give up the detained tithes. Disputed allegiances, conflicts and war costs weakened the position of the lords who might otherwise have supported persecution at the early and vulnerable stage of the heresy’s development. So preachers were free to gain converts.
Religious and Secular Motives for some English Monastic Foundations
Authors: Mortimer Richard
Published: March 2016

Hanc autem donationem feci eis pro salute memorati domini mei illustris Regis Henrici et pro salute anime mee et Berthe uxoris mee, et omnium antecessorum et successorum nostrorum. Thus briefly Rannulf de Glanville explains his foundation of Leiston abbey, and we have no reason to doubt his word. This motive is completely conventional and occurs in virtually every contemporary monastic foundation charter, which underlines its validity rather than detracting from it. Perhaps there is no need to look further; but Glanville’s is not the only voice to be heard on the foundation of Leiston abbey, and the founder does not answer all the questions we should like to ask. Did he perhaps have other motives? How did he go about choosing a religious order? To these questions we have to find our own answers. We can arrange facts in a suggestive series, and then ascribe more or less simple intentions which explain them. The shortcomings of such a method are obvious, though the results can be plausible and are often the only ones available. The unreliability of the answer is our penance for the temerity of the question.
The Flagellant Movement and Flagellant Confraternities in Central Italy, 1260–1400
Authors: Henderson John
Published: March 2016

The 1260 movement was the first widespread outbreak of popular fervour in medieval Italy to make flagellation the centre of its devotion. Together with subsequent movements it provided a general impetus to lay religious life by leading to the foundation of a large number of confraternities all over the country. In this paper I intend to describe this phenomenon and in this way examine the motivation, collective and individual, which led people to participate. I shall then outline briefly the devotional practices of flagellant companies and show how they came to institutionalise the spirit of this popular fervour.
Some Statistics of Religious Motivation
Authors: Greatrex Joan G.
Published: March 2016

Motives are the inner springs of action, the invisible causes which are apprehended only in their visible effects. The latter, when collected and classified as numerical data, are known as statistics, through which at least one aspect of the former can be explored and analysed. Thus, while we cannot ask them to reveal such fundamental questions as to what moved men to enter or leave the monastic life, we can legitimately seek an answer in quantitative terms to what is preliminary and, as such, vital to our understanding of the problem of religious motivation: what do statistics disclose with regard to the force of religious motivation and to its rise and decline among the black monks in England in the two centuries between the first catastrophic onslaught of the Black Death and the dissolution (AD 1350–1540)? This question encompasses a vast field and, for the purposes of this present study, our attention must be limited to the three cathedral priories of Ely, Norwich and Worcester.
The Religious Motivation of Cromwell’s Major-Generals
Authors: Fletcher Anthony
Published: March 2016

When Oliver Cromwell sent his most trusted lieutenants into the provinces in 1655, the instructions he gave them were wide ranging and the task he set them was enormous. They were to oversee every aspect of local government, prevent conspiracies, remove negligent or scandalous ministers and promote godliness and virtue among the people. No wonder the major-generals felt daunted. John Thurloe, who as secretary-of-state handled their correspondence, soon found himself acting as a bureau for encouragement and advice. Once they were out on their own there was little to sustain the major-generals beyond their religious faith. This is not to say that their accounts of their doings should be taken wholly at face value, nor that baser motives were necessarily absent from their minds. It is hard to believe that any of the major-generals expected immediate material gain. But some at least may have been influenced by the search for power and the desire for revenge against their enemies in the civil war. Plainly, several of them still felt bitter hatred of cavaliers almost ten years after the war had ended. Such attitudes can be no more than glimpsed in letters designed to give a good impression of the major-generals’ performance. The motives that lay behind that performance must be assessed on the basis of what they wrote and the aspects of the CromweUian programme upon which they concentrated. The letters to Thurloe do much to explain why the major-generals worked so hard, riding the muddy lanes of England through a hard winter; they also illuminate the nature of their vision of a godly commonwealth.
The Seven Bishops: A Reconsideration
Authors: Bennett G. V.
Published: March 2016

For Lord Macaulay the defiance offered by the seven bishops to James II marked a turning-point in English history. It was the story of men who would not stand by as a ‘harsh and inexorable prince’ destroyed constitutional liberties, established a military despotism, and imposed Catholicism by force. The great whig historian was not much given to praise of the clergy in general or bishops in particular, but even he could not withhold his admiration from an archbishop of Canterbury ‘who was ready to wear fetters and lay his aged limbs on bare stones rather than betray the interests of the Protestant religion and set the prerogative above the laws.’ Macaulay’s account of the seven bishops is, however, closely bound up with his view of James II as one of the great villains of English history, and recent historians, while enjoying the rich texture of Macaulay’s prose, find it difficult to accept the version of classical whig historiography. In their work James appears as not so much a tyrant as a peculiarly maladroit politician, not so much an absolutist with wide-ranging ambitions as an obstinate man of narrow religious perspectives. His little army was quite incapable of imposing Catholicism by force on a fiercely protestant nation. James’s aim was as simple as it was injudicious: to achieve civil emancipation for the small minority of his catholic co-religionists by a process of political manoeuvre and manipulation. Now, if this re-interpretation be correct, it is time to extend the process into ecclesiastical history and look afresh at the motives and policies of the seven bishops. I would suggest that what emerges is something quite different from the traditional heroic version but nonetheless an instructive study in the clerical mind of the late seventeenth century.
Aristocratic Vocations: The Bishops of France in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: McManners John
Published: March 2016

‘Cas III Aristarque, Abbé de qualité, et d’unmérite distingué, il sollicite un Evêché, désirant de servir utilement l’Eglise. R. Il ne peut désirer l’Episcopat dans la vue d’être élevé à une si haute dignité, sans se rendre coupable d’ambition ou de présomption; il ne peut le désirer dans le dessein d’être honoré et respecté, ou de devenir riche sans se rendre coupable d’ambition ou d’avarice. Ajoutons que ce n’est point assez d’avoir une intention pure pour pouvoir désirer sans péché l’Episcopat; il faut avoir toutes les vertus que l’Apôtre demande dans un Evêque’.
Black Europeans, White Africans: Some Missionary Motives in West Africa
Authors: Walls A. F.
Published: March 2016

Sierra leone was the first success story of the modern missionary movement. The years from 1787 to 1830 saw it pass first from a green if not very fertile land supporting subsistence farmers and riverine slaving factories to Utopia in a disaster area; then transformed again as free blacks from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, full of evangelical religion and American republicanism carried out a Clapham-inspired scheme in ways the men of Clapham did not always like; and again as this population was overwhelmed by new uprooted peoples from all over west Africa, brought in from the slaveships before they had ever seen the transatlantic plantations. The new population responded, sometimes with enthusiasm and rarely with prolonged resistance, to missionary preaching; and, with those same missionaries appointed to superintend their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, adopted the norms and characteristics of their Nova Scotian and Maroon predecessors. Contemporary British sources do not suggest that at the time Sierra Leone was regarded as a huge success; people in England tended to think of the appalling loss of missionary life in the white man’s grave, and the enormous expense of the Sierra Leone mission; besides, they heard stories which suggested that the serpent still dwelt in their west African garden. Nonetheless, here was the first part of Africa, one of the very few parts anywhere in the world, where there was a mass movement towards the Christian faith, where a whole non-Christian people became Christian.
‘The only True Friend’: Ritualist Concepts of Priestly Vocation
Authors: Yates W. N.
Published: March 2016

The title of this paper was inspired by a piece of ecclesiastical doggerel published in the Hensal-Cum-Heck Church Monthly for November 1895:

They may call me a Papist, and laugh at my creed,‘Tis the Faith that will save in the hour of need;Let them talk, let them laugh, but when death is at handThe priest is the only true friend in the land.

It is not the only ritualist concept of priestly vocation; in a somewhat earlier tract on confession priests are described as ‘the spiritual police of Almighty God; they must hunt out, track, pursue, and arraign sinners, as the police pursue and apprehend thieves and rascals’. Although both concepts are to be found elsewhere in ritualist literature, and both would have been accepted by many ritualist priests as not being mutually exclusive, it would seem that the concept of the priest as ‘friend’ was the dominant one.
Becoming a Sectarian: Motivation and Commitment
Authors: Wilson Bryan R.
Published: March 2016

During the period of their emergence and growth, sects are generally discussed in terms of opprobrium, perhaps because most of those who have written about them have been people not only of other theological persuasions, but often people with vested professional interests in sustaining their own theology against that of others, or, occasionally, they have been men of decidedly rationalistic temper, eager to condemn all religion by reference to what they take to be the latest and most patent religious outrage to common sense. By the time a sect becomes a historical phenomenon it is likely that those still interested in it will discuss it with a measure of detached objectivity: for contemporary sects, only sociologists are likely to espouse the same canons of ethical neutrality and objectivity that are, perhaps so much more easily, endorsed by historians in their treatment of things past.
TheModus Medendiand the Benedictine Order in Anglo-Norman England
Authors: Dawtry Anne F.
Published: March 2016

The Benedictines played an important part in the development of medicine in England between 1066 and 1215. In pre-conquest England, the care of the sick had been based upon little more than the practices of Anglo-Saxon leeches which were largely founded upon superstition. Botany had become a drug list and medicine had deteriorated into little more than a collection of formulae. After the Norman conquest, chiefly through the influence of Benedictine scholars from the continent, medical learning in England began to be based upon the writings of the ancient world. These included not only the works of Galen and Hippocrates but also anonymous medical treatises in Latin such as theDe Modo Medendi.
Restoring Man’s Creative Power: The Theosophy of the Bible Christians of Salford
Authors: Lineham Peter J.
Published: March 2016

As the reformation took effect, claims of miraculous healing were discountenanced. So argues Keith Thomas in his fascinating book on the decline of magic in modern Europe. He argues that protestants turned to natural methods and empirical science for answers to their medical and practical needs. If he is right there may seem to be little to say about the relationship between the churches and healing in the history of the church in modern western society. Yet, as Thomas himself admits, the link had not been completely destroyed. Traditional culture proved resistant to this aspect of the reformation. It seems to me that this traditional culture was revitalised and redirected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by revivalist and heterodox protestantism and not just by secular developments. The case of the Bible Christians or Cowherdites of Salford in Lancashire may illustrate my point.
Anti-Establishment Healing: Spiritualism in Britain
Authors: Barrow Logie
Published: March 2016

Most of the people discussed in this paper would have been amazed at being drawn into a publication chiefly concerned with ecclesiastical history. Some would undoubtedly have treated the words as a rag of very great redness. To elucidate the incongruity, I will briefly summarise who these people were, and when they lived.

The period is roughly 1850-1910; the people are those whom I define as plebeian autodidacts. By plebeian I mean, inclusively, anyone from lower-middle-class downwards. By autodidact, I mean anyone who makes their education their own affair, independently of social superiors. In the nineteenth century at least, self-education was seldom a matter of individual effort alone, but also of collective endeavour: comprising agitations for freedom of the press and of assembly, and the defence or exercise of such rights once gained; public readings, scientific demonstrations, lecture-series and, not least, marathon public debates. Thus we have to speak of a plebeian autodidactculture. It was not, of course, the culture of the majority of members of those classes I have lumped together as plebeians. Had it been, we could use the glibber word ‘popular’.