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Chapter XVII of the book "Long Live the King," by Mary Roberts Rinehart is presented. It highlights the activities at the palace during the death anniversary of Prince Hubert. It describes the visit of Father Gregory of the monastery of Etzel to the king, his old friend. It narrates the trip of Crown Prince Ferdinand William Otto to the fortress in a launch with his Princess Hedwig, Archduchess and Miss Braithwaite.

The article focuses on glossary for keys and terms in medieval literature and culture. Topics discussed include Acts of Dissolution which concerns act passed by parliament in 1536 to dissolve English monasteries, allegory which uses personification of ideas and abstract entities and Anglo-Latin literature.

The article focuses on knowledge of medieval English pronunciation and poetic meter and mentions collecting the fragments of medieval culture aware of that had come to an end. Topics discussed include peruse the libraries of all cathedrals, monasteries which went down after the Acts of Dissolution in 1536 and 1539 and censor of Corpus Christi plays.

The article focuses on history of kings and politics involved estate of England and mentions world of institutional religion in medieval England. Topics discussed include priests considered feature of medieval religion from establishment of parish system, religious groups that grew in dominance and medieval nunneries compared to medieval monasteries.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have long been seen as a key era in the development of the modern state in central Europe. After 1500, the consolidation of patrimonies and the promulgation of territorial laws, especially under the influence of Roman law, provided the legal grounds for ‘state’ action. A developing bureaucracy and the information technology of improving literacy skills and printing expanded the ability of officials to oversee the populace and divorced the exercise of authority from direct personalised relations of lordship. The increasingly expensive wars of the seventeenth century provided the greatest impetus towards the creation of a ‘tax state’ that moved beyond princely rulers' earlier reliance on more limited personal finance. Taken together these breakthroughs provided the underpinnings of the self-consciously interventionist and modernising state of the eighteenth century, whether in its ‘absolutist’ or ‘enlightened’ guises. These processes have been encapsulated in the term ‘state building’, describing the conscious centralisation of power. However, equally important for this process was the gradual accumulation of local loyalty across the entire period, integration of village powerbrokers into the machinery of government, and the ‘social disciplining’ of personnel to conform to centrally determined norms. These processes were far less directed and were subject to the approval of relatively lowly subjects. They were, however, essential for a state that bound the ambitions of ‘the centre’ and those of the ‘locality’ (or at least those who wielded influence locally) into a coherent unit that expected both to act to resolve problems, and was expected by its subjects to provide solutions to problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1544 the forester Hans Hagen stated that 150 oaks and pines that had been requested for a new barn at a ducal sheep station was beyond the capacity of any of his woodlands to supply. Mature timber was certainly in short supply in the Forstamt, but it is hardly likely that the 2,300 hectares of ducally owned forest could not supply a mere 150 pieces of timber. What Hagen presumably meant was that he could not fell so many in one place without jeopardising the staddles and mature trees that provided acorns for natural regeneration and fodder for wild boar and pigs. Scattered across the woodlands, and according to the survey of 1583, rather better maintained in ducal woodlands than elsewhere, these fairly isolated mature trees would most likely have grown up fairly crooked with numerous large lateral branches, and thus often also been far from ideal building material. They would have been able to develop amid the clusters of juniper and thorns left alone by grazing animals. As such the ducal woodlands seem to have had enough trees to supply occasional construction needs, especially for repairs, but nowhere enjoyed the density of stock to supply large amounts of timber for even quite minor projects. Is this evidence of a ‘timber famine’? Certainly it shows the relative lack of a very particular kind of tree for a certain use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key to understanding the particular ‘peasant dynamic’ of early modern Württemberg is the collective institution that played the greatest role in governing village resources, the commune and its court. While there was little that was ‘immobile’ about this society, it nevertheless appeared little altered in the early eighteenth century from the world of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. This was true not only of its levels of productivity and agricultural techniques, but equally, as we will see, the social order. A major contributor to this degree of stability was the continued ambition of certain groups within the village to employ collective measures to regulate village life, measures that generally worked in tandem with those promulgated by central government. This world was generated by institutional effort, and the manner in which village institutions managed the resources available to them. Early modern Württemberg was clearly a very unequal society. Property holding conferred institutional power and thus societal development was shaped by particular interests. Nevertheless, communal institutions themselves allowed far wider access among the populace to resources held as communal property than was the case for the resources that were held as private property, access to which was more inequitably distributed. Even if shares in communal property were also ‘inequitably’ apportioned, by an overwintering rule, for example, or allotting wood according to the size of one's property, overall this property system still probably worked to the advantage of the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I will begin with two stories, stories that seem to provide contradictory accounts of the powers of the early modern state over the lives of its lowly subjects. Sometime in the late 1540s, a forest warden, a lowly paid official who was responsible for enforcing forest laws on the ground, was walking on patrol in an area of meadow in the wooded hills to the north-west of Stuttgart. ‘Young Hans’ was about thirty-five years old and had only recently begun what would be a long career as a warden. On the meadows he ran into his neighbouring warden, one Martin from Rutesheim. Hans commented that he hadn't seen Martin in a long while, and they agreed to go and have a drink of wine together, almost certainly the locally produced white wine, in the nearby village of Weilimdorf. On the way they ran into the swineherd of Weilimdorf with his pigs on the ‘wasted meadows’. The name was somewhat misleading, as the pasture there was in fact quite good owing to its open canopy and protected status. ‘Horstus Leckher’, Hans said to the swineherd, ‘I have forbidden you more than once’ to be taking his herd into the meadows. As he told the swineherd he would do, Hans went to the house of the ducal bailiff and village headman (Schultheiβ) of Weilimdorf to complain. The Schultheiβ, however, was not at home, and so Hans dropped the matter and we may presume went off for his drink with Martin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 6 of the book "Everyday Life: Middle Ages" is presented. It focuses on the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages in Europe, emphasizing its power, prestige, and influence over members. It discusses the conflict that occurred between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. Other topics discussed are excommunication, monasteries, and the contributions of monks to the society.

Our theme is religion and the early modern state, with all the polarities such a title implies. In this chapter, I want to consider the impact of the Reformation in a community in which “folk belief” and the state religion – or at any rate the religion of the local clerical and social elites – were intimately bound together, and in which the social, economic, and religious dynamics and interests of the community were represented and inscribed in a great building, one of the most harmonious perpendicular churches of fifteenth-century England. I want to explore the way in which that building even now encodes the interplay of social realities and relations within a gentry-dominated community on the eve of the Reformation. I also want to raise some questions about the extent to which the Reformation should be considered not an act of state so much as an assertion of social hegemony, a radical simplification of social as well as religious space, the elimination or overwhelming of some of the key constituent elements in the balance of a late medieval community. THE PARISH OF SALLE The great church of Salle stands isolated in the north Norfolk fields near Aylsham: There is no longer anything that could be called a village. The parish was once a rich and important place, weaving linen and Hessian for the region as well as wool, but there were never enough people in Salle to fill the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: CHINESE ORTHODOXY In his contribution to this volume, Professor Richard Shek has illuminated the “alternative moral universe” of the Eternal Mother sects, a universe made by dissenters from a “Chinese orthodoxy” that he defines as the “doctrine of propriety-and-ritual” (lijiao). Under their religious aspect, the rites of the lijiao were understood to have been an expression of the will of Heaven and its correct performance was necessary for the maintenance of social and cosmic harmony. The sociopolitical content of the lijiao is reduced to its core, the “three bonds” (sangang), which were the paradigmatic relationships between subject and ruler, child and parents, and wife and husband. In what follows, I turn from Professor Shek's “alternative moral universe” to look at the other term of his polarity – “Chinese orthodoxy.” I start from the assumption of a Chinese social whole, and I understand the social whole under its religious aspect as a hierarchically ordered system comprising four distinct religions (each with its own evolving orthodoxy). These were, first, the legally prescribed official religion of the empire, followed in rank order by Buddhism and Daoism (both of which were quasi-legal, i.e., accommodated and regulated, but not mandated by the law), and, finally, the diffuse popular religion that was embedded in the “natural” communities of village, neighborhood, and household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular religion – the religion of the generality of people, especially those of the lower orders – is a large subject. It ranges from belief, worship, private prayer, and reading to morality, charity, and the payment of church dues. These elements may vary according to people's gender, age, status, and context, presenting the historian with many aspects to study and evaluate. This chapter is concerned with three of them: worship in church, the economic support of churches, and ceremonies outside church. It begins by reviewing the systems in force in early Tudor England, continues by studying the impact of “state religion” during the Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century, and concludes by tracing the survival of some pre-Reformation beliefs and practices between about 1600 and 1750. To achieve focus, the survey centers on one English county, Cornwall, an appropriate area for this purpose because it is rich both in pre-Reformation records of popular religion and in literary descriptions of its society and customs after the Reformation. Some features of Cornish popular religion were characteristic of other parts of England and illustrate general conditions. Equally, Cornwall had attributes distinct to itself, like all English counties, and some of these were untypical of England elsewhere. Its study reveals both national verities and regional variations. Cornwall is England's most maritime county: a long peninsula attached to the mainland by a short land border with Devon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TheSpiritual Regulation of 1721 embodied Peter the Great's blueprint for the perestroika of the Russian Orthodox Church. Among its many provisions outlining the public purposes of religion and establishing a new administrative structure for the Church, the Spiritual Regulation expressed concern for the problem of “superstitious practices”: wandering holy fools, klikushki (hysterical women), improbable versions of saints' lives, false reports of miracles from icons, and bogus relics. The Spiritual Regulation charged Church authorities – parish priests, local bishops, and its new central ruling body – with investigating such inappropriate popular religious observances and stamping them out. Specifically, the new edict dictated that priests inform the appropriate ecclesiastical and secular authorities if “someone imagined in some way a false miracle, or contrived it hypocritically, and then broadcast it so that the simple and unreasoning people take it for the truth.” Bishops, for their part, were to report to the Ecclesiastical College (or, as it was renamed almost immediately, the “Most Holy Governing Synod”) twice annually about the state of their eparchies, including instances of “false miracles from holy icons” and “unattested dead bodies” – that is, the relics of unofficial saints. After receiving such reports, the Synod then had the obligation to launch formal investigations of all such “apparitions” and “miracles.” Offenders would be subject not only to ecclesiastical penalties, but also to severe civil ones. Scholars of the Petrinereforms have not previously tried to trace the methods the Russian Church hierarchy used to regulate popular religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an age of wars of religion. From the Catholic-Huguenot struggle in France to the Defenestration of Prague (1618), religious differences both caused and justified numerous civil and foreign wars. In one case – the English Civil War – political and social radicalism grew out of religious disputes. Although modern historians have come to question religious motives and justifications as the principal catalysts in struggles such as the Dutch war of independence, they have not questioned the importance of religious divisions within societies and monarchs' attempts to impose religious uniformity as major issues in early modern struggles. The European phenomenon stretched from the Urals to the Atlantic. In Russia, religious disputes and millenarianism played a major role in all revolts after the Old Believer schism of the late seventeenth century. Few events in early modern Ukrainian history drew such widespread contemporary attention as the Khmel'nyts'kyiuprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rumors of the slaughter of landlords, Jews, and Catholics in 1648 reverberated in the grain ports on the Baltic, in the Jesuit houses in central Europe, and in Jewish communities on the Mediterranean. The destruction of the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth led Sweden, the Habsburgs, France, and many other powers to reevaluate their view of the balance of power. The Cossack leader Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had upset this balance by his alliance with the Crimean khan in early 1648. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian church schism of the seventeenth century is the focal point of this brief examination of popular belief and practice and the struggles of ecclesiastical elites to shape, control, and change them. The chapter will review and reflect on the most important phases of the interaction between the leaders of Russian Orthodoxy and ordinary parishioners between the late 1630s and the beginning of the eighteenth century in light of recent studies of Christian communities elsewhere in early modern Europe. It contains no new archival discoveries: Most of the documents and monographs on which it draws have long been familiar to historians of Russia. These sources, moreover, reflect the perceptions of government officials or ecclesiastical polemicists. Thus, as Eve Levin cautions, when describing popular religious beliefs and practices, they are likely to focus on “the most heterodox elements” that diverge most dramatically from established norms. In spite of the country's enormous territory, the discussion will consider Russia as a single unit for two reasons. First, even a glance at scholarship on Western and Central Europe shows how limited and scattered are the surviving sources on Russian parish life and popular religious practice. For one thing, historians of Russia must live without systematic parish records. Second, in spite of the Muscovite monarchy's vast size, movements of popular religious protest spread quickly, in large measure through the efforts of itinerant agitators and exiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late-medieval England was a land of dichotomies. The most conspicuous were those between upland and lowland, dispersed and nucleated settlement, woodland and champion, weak and strong lordship, free and customary tenants and tenures, remoteness and proximity to major markets, and between the marches and the metropolitan core. Some of these contrasts were inherent in England's climate and topography, others sprang from deep-rooted human institutions such as field systems, manors, and property rights, while yet others derived from the centralising and differentiating forces of governments and commercial exchange. Many of these dichotomies had a strong north–south dimension but this does not necessarily mean that there was such a thing as a ‘North–South divide’ or that distinctions between the North and the South should be privileged above other spatial and regional differences. The strength and nature of these dichotomies also varied over time, depending upon whether centripetal or centrifugal tendencies were more to the fore. Any systems shift in the balance between these two tendencies was likely to heighten the tensions between core and periphery thereby giving rise to expressions of northern (and southern) consciousness (Jewell 1994). This is what seems to have happened at the close of the Middle Ages. It was then that the dichotomy between North and South in the medieval period was probably at its most pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The histories of western and central mainland Southeast Asia were closely joined and reasonably comparable. The central mainland is here defined as present-day Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and more peripherally, the Mekong delta. Although in fact communications between this region and China were at least as easy as with South Asia, from an early date India and Sri Lanka provided the central, no less than the western, mainland with its chief high cultural inspiration. The broad similarities between the western and central mainland in art, literature, law, kingship, and Theravada affiliation that grew from this common South Asian exposure were reinforced by a constant west-central exchange. Monks, diplomats, traders, soldiers, and migrants showed that upland barriers between the Irrawaddy, Chaophraya, and Mekong river systems were relatively porous. Thus a unique Theravada civilization embracing virtually all wet-rice areas in the western and central mainland cohered and diverged from the ever more Sinic eastern sector. To these shared cultural traditions must be added the unifying effects of demography and geography, particularly in what became the two chief Theravada kingdoms, Burma and Siam. In both kingdoms a semicircle of highlands surrounded a great alluvial plain whose chief river, the Irrawaddy or Chaophraya, provided the main avenue of communication. In both sectors a maritime coastal region competed with a less commercially privileged interior zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eastern mainland exhibited a number of unique features whose interpretation became particularly embroiled in 19th and 20th century politics. The eastern mainland is here defined as the Red River basin and surrounding uplands, the eastern half of the Annamite Chain, the coastal lowlands, and the Mekong delta. The most obvious difference between this region and the rest of the mainland was the east's unique exposure to Chinese culture, which began in systematic fashion with the incorporation of the Red River basin into the Chinese empire between 43 and 938 c.e. Encountering a monarchy that congratulated itself on fidelity to Confucian norms, Frenchmen in the late 1800s developed what has been termed “the little China fallacy”: they assumed that Vietnam owed everything to Chinese tutelage, made few independent advances, and thus was no more able than its “stagnant” northern mentor to enter the modern world without European direction. That this endorsement of Europe's historic mission would appeal to many colonizers is hardly surprising. Curiously, however, long after the French left Indochina, the notion that China provides the most appropriate template continued to grip even resolutely anticolonial Western historians who inherited the scholarly apparatus of colonial researchers, together with the Sinocentric bias inherent in Chinese-language records. So too the alliance c.1950–1978 between Vietnamese and Chinese Communism may 1have encouraged linkage in the minds of anti-Communist scholars and those sympathetic to Communism alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our detailed examination of mainland history begins with the western sector of the mainland in part because it is convenient to proceed west to east and in part because here I am best able to address regional conundrums with indigenous-language primary sources. Moreover, insofar as any sector can be representative of so varied a region, the western mainland has a good claim. In duration and degree, for example, post-charter disruptions were intermediate between those of the central and eastern mainland. The same may be said of intrasectoral tensions: Upper Burma reemerged as the dominant zone within the western mainland in the 1630s. This was long after Ayudhya had established its preeminence in the central mainland, but almost 170 years before Hue gained a secure authority along the yet more fragmented eastern littoral. As elsewhere, political change had a cyclic character: periodic breakdowns encouraged administrative reform, but reformed administrations collapsed before destabilizing economic growth, external attacks, and domestic factionalism. Whenever the capital region was in trouble, restive provinces were quick to magnify its difficulties. Thus Lower Burma exploited Upper Burma's problems in the 1280s and 1740s, and when the south faltered in the late 1500s, Upper Burma returned the favor. With the interior home to Burmans and the south to Mons, endemic north–south tensions had an irreducible, if fluid, ethnic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1792 the French monarchy collapsed. Between 1799 and 1815, a new Parisian regime improved the efficiency and penetration of the central apparatus, while dramatically extending French military power. Short-lived though France's conquests were, her continental wars precipitated imitative reforms of administrative and military structures across Europe and a permanent reduction in the number of independent states. Between 1752 and 1786 the Burmese, Siamese, and Vietnamese kingdoms all disintegrated. In each realm, a new, more dynamic leadership then succeeded in quelling the chaos, increasing the resources and local authority of the state, and enlarging its territorial writ. The ensuing wars between reinvigorated empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries accelerated competitive reform while diminishing the number of independent polities across mainland Southeast Asia. How shall we explain these parallels between Europe and Southeast Asia? Surely, one is tempted to say, no explanation is needed: the cultural contexts were so different, the interstate and domestic systems so unique, the trajectories so disparate as to render parallels ultimately meaningless. This is historical flotsam, curious but basically random coincidences, like similarities between Meso-American and Egyptian pyramids or between Jewish and Buddhist cosmogonic explanations for the origin of suffering. But closer scrutiny suggests rather more was involved. In fact, in mainland Southeast Asia as well as in France, the late 18th and early 19th centuries ended the third and inaugurated the last of four roughly synchronized cycles of political consolidation that together spanned the better part of a millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 5 April 1815, Frederick William III proclaimed the incorporation of the two Rhenish provinces – the grand duchy of the Lower Rhine, and the duchies of Cleves, Berg and Geldern – into Prussia. Two million souls, including 1.5 million Catholics, were thereby added to his kingdom. Frederick William undertook to protect property, safeguard religious beliefs and ensure justice. Significantly, he promised the creation of a representative body. The vast majority of Rhinelanders became aware of the transfer of sovereignty with the appearance of Hohenzollern eagles in their towns instead of French symbols. On 30 April, Berlin decreed the future administrative structure for the enlarged Monarchy, and the King promised ‘respect for the constitution, uniformity of action, liberality and impartiality’, and the protection of ‘all advantages gained through the free employment of personal talent’. Prussia was divided into ten provinces, each headed by a governor (Oberpräsident), and twenty-five districts, administered by district governors (Regierungspräsidenten). The two Rhenish provinces were Jülich-Cleves-Berg, administered from Cologne, and the grand duchy of the Lower Rhine, governed from Koblenz. Each was sub-divided into three districts.At the local level, the French structure remained intact and, like other Napoleonic institutions, became the focus of dispute between reformers and conservatives. To complement the administrative reforms, Frederick William issued his fateful edict of 22 May, promising ‘representation of the people’ through an ‘assembly of representatives of the land’, a vague formulation that implied representation through estates. Nevertheless, the edict raised Rhenish expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rivers convey ideas as well as merchandise, Victor Hugo observed during his Rhineland tour of 1838–9. Though essentially a geographical expression, the ‘Rhineland’ encompasses a distinct if diverse historico-cultural space, albeit one whose precise limits have varied over time. Like many, Hugo was especially captivated by the central stretch of the river, the Middle Rhine, which flows between Bingen and Bonn. Enclosed by rocky hills, this segment presents the familiar panorama of ruined castles and vineyards clinging precariously to terraces. Less known are the upper reaches of the Rhine, between Basel and Mainz, where the wide and shallow river valley is bordered by the Black Forest in the east and Vosges in the west, and the lower reaches north of Bonn, where the Rhine undergoes its second metamorphosis as it merges with the great northern European plain. The Rhine has moulded its surrounding landscape and shaped the civilisation that developed along its banks over the last two millennia. Rome, whose legions stood on its banks for the first four centuries after Christ, left its indelible mark in the form of cities – notably, Moguntiacum (Mainz), Confluentia (Koblenz), Colonia Agrippina (Cologne) and Augusta Treverorum (Trier) – and the Church. These survived Roman rule and the subsequent Frankish epoch that closed with the Carolingian Empire's collapse in the ninth century. They survived over the following centuries, within the framework of the Holy Roman Empire. Architecturally, Romanesque abbeys and cathedrals attest to the medieval Church's vitality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rhineland's military contribution to Napoleon's war effort, though impressive, made up but a small fraction of the total combined effort of the Grande Empire. The region's place within the so-called Continental System, the economic component of Napoleon's struggle for hegemony, was in contrast central. First, the region was one of the most industrialised within the French Empire. It thus made an important contribution to Napoleon's attempts to establish autarchy within the Empire's frontiers and French economic dominance beyond them. Second, the Rhineland's geographical location placed it on the frontline in the war against smuggling, which posed the greatest threat against the System. However, before examining this, it is necessary to look at the Rhenish economy more generally. Despite the dramatic expansion of manufacturing in parts of the Lower Rhine in the late eighteenth century, agriculture remained the most important sector within the region as a whole. Here, French rule brought three important developments: the abolition of ‘feudalism’ (26 March 1798), the sale of secularised lands and ‘privatisation’ of common rights. The abolition of ‘feudalism’ in the Rhineland was less favourable to the peasantry than in France proper, but more generous than elsewhere in German-speaking Europe. The French abolished tithes, the corvée, noble administrative and judicial privileges, as well as exclusive hunting and fishing rights. They did this without requiring the payment of compensation to landlords. In addition, they granted peasants enjoying hereditary tenure full property rights over their land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At Cologne they speak simply a coarse vulgar German, which degenerates in approaching the flats of Holland: but at A[a]chen, bad German, bad French, some Dutch and Flemish (bad or good I know not) and a mixture of the Walloon dialect, of which you hear more at Liège, conspire to form a Babel of harmonious diversity. An objection [against the reunion of the Rhenish departments with France] … is that a mixture of many peoples of differing language and character can destroy harmony, public opinion, internal peace. Few sights more disconcerting could have confronted a rationally minded Napoleonic bureaucrat than the heterogeneous Rhineland. He viewed cultural diversity ‘not [as] the characteristic of the rational individual, but [as] evidence of the historical survival among groups and communities of beliefs and superstitions that belonged to earlier ages’. It was not only that a Rhenish department like the Roër encompassed under the Old Regime thirty-two territorial entities. Territorial fragmentation was matched by confessional diversity and a plethora of local patois, or ‘local dialects and ways of speech’, as Braudel more accurately refers to them. Contemporaries experienced difficulty placing Rhinelanders within any single, culturally defined category. Dorsch, the former radical who became sub-prefect of Cleves, distinguished between Rhinelanders of Dutch origin, who spoke ‘German gibberish’, and ‘Prussians’. Many Germans from the right bank believed Rhinelanders closer to the Dutch in character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The territory that lies between Paris and Saint Petersburg as well as Moscow will soon be made French, municipal and Jacobin. It took two decades before Napoleon briefly justified Chaumette's prediction, minus the Jacobin ingredient. Initially, the Rhineland enjoyed strategic and ideological front-line status following the French declaration of war on Austria in April 1792. The Austrians and Prussians first held the initiative, advancing and capturing Verdun on 2 September. Then the French, under Dumouriez, managed to redeploy and block the Prussians at Valmy (20 September), a battle that condemned Europe to a generation of war. The French, exploiting their numerical superiority, followed up Valmy by invading the Reich: one army, under Custine, entered the Palatinate, whose cities fell quickly, whilst a second, under Dumouriez, advanced into the Netherlands, pushed aside the Austrians at Jemappes (6 November), captured Brussels and invaded the Lower Rhine. As the situation deteriorated, Austria attempted to mobilise the military potential of the Holy Roman Empire. This proved difficult. Officially, France was not at war with the Reich, as she had declared war on the Habsburgs as kings of Hungary. The Reich as a whole lacked the internal consensus to resort to force, and this French diplomats exploited. Opposition to the war was led by France's old allies, the Wittelsbachs, but was a sentiment that extended widely. In electoral Cologne domestic opposition to war from the estates prevented mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on development of indigenous church elite which was prevented by Venetian policy towards Orthodox Church on Crete in Greece. Topics discussed include consideration for providing stipend by Venice to Orthodox priests in villages, experience of economic revival by monasteries in sixteenth century and contacts between orthodox and coreligionists were encouraged due to absence of bishops.

The south-west comprises the modern counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire. This region bestrides the divide between highland and lowland England. The majority of the region comprises the older, harder rocks of upland Britain, together with the more acidic soils derived from those rocks, the consequent pastoral farming systems, an ancient bocage landscape and a dispersed pattern of rural settlements. There are few large towns (Map 22.8). The upland moors of Mendip and Exmoor and the granite bosses of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor add transhumance and mineral exploitation of silver, tin and lead to the economic equation, whilst the long, indented coastline to both the north and south of the peninsula brought opportunities for fishing, coastal trading and links with South Wales, Ireland, north-west France and Iberia. However, the south coast is altogether more sheltered than the north with its steep cliffs and lack of inlets. In contrast, Wiltshire, Dorset and east Devon are part of the lowland zone with fertile clay vales, chalk and limestone escarpments and plateaux. Soils are more fertile, the climate is drier, mixed farming systems predominate and nucleated village settlements are the norm. However, there were also large areas of lowland heath on the poor sandy soils of south-east Dorset, and extensive down-land pastures on the chalk of Salisbury Plain which could be exploited to feed huge flocks of sheep. Whereas water was in short supply on the downs, the opposite was true in the marshlands of the Somerset Levels which provide a third distinctive local landscape of much richer pastureland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measured in terms of their populations, twenty or so towns emerge as important provincial centres with some 2,000 taxpayers in 1377. To these must be added Exeter, which doubled in size during the fifteenth century to emerge as the third largest provincial town in 1524–5, and Edinburgh, whose population was growing towards c. 12,500 by 1560 (see Table 18.1). York alone achieved a size or status comparable to large European towns such as Antwerp, Bremen or Lyon. Most of the greater towns of Britain were distinguishable from market towns by the scale and intensity of their urbanity: physical size and appearance, complex internal economic and social structures, sophisticated government and regional significance. Even so, few enjoyed the close formal interdependence of a large Italian, French or German town with its contado or umland. In Britain, administration outside urban liberties commonly remained subject to the crown. Coventry, Gloucester and York were exceptions: Coventry by acquiring some 15,000 acres of the manor of Coventry, Gloucester through its incorporation of thirty or so villages in 1483, and York as the result of its jurisdiction over an adjacent rural wapentake, the Ainsty. Population size in 1377 reflected the economic vitality of towns which had recovered from the depredations of the Black Death. Though population losses varied, it is likely that many of the greater towns lost a third to a half of their inhabitants between 1348 and 1349. Some, like Boston and Winchester, were already beyond their most successful phase by 1348–9 and retained their rank on the strength of earlier prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the period under review the data allow a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, approach to towns and, therefore, important issues such as the relative size of towns can be addressed only in an oblique fashion. From the late tenth century an indication of the relative intensity of urban development can be gained from, first, the coin evidence and, then, Domesday Book, followed by the taxation records. While the documentary record increases from the twelfth century, it is largely ‘external’ to the town itself and reflects the growth and interests of central government; historical evidence is, therefore, mainly concerned with the process of creating and administering towns. A major exception are the urban surveys which survive for a small number of towns and start in the later thirteenth century. Much new information has come from archaeological fieldwork, but this, like the documentary material, has a bias towards the larger towns. The proportion of any town that has been excavated is very small, and consequently it is difficult to assess the validity of the sample. Excavated evidence can show the diversity of a town through information about the urban fabric, including communal structures such as defences and churches, as well as domestic and industrial buildings, and about the inhabitants themselves and the kind of environment they lived in. Where it is possible to draw upon the results of a number of archaeological excavations in the same town, aspects of the urban economy can be discussed, such as the range and organisation of industries and trading patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveying the topography of towns before 1300 inevitably draws heavily on the disciplines of archaeology and plan analysis, rather than on documents and standing buildings, which are predominantly late medieval. Fortunately, the proliferation of urban excavations since the 1970s has produced a huge volume of topographical material, telling us much more about the siting, phases and layout of many towns than could be learnt from documents alone. This does not mean that we should neglect the value of early documents, however brief and laconic: the expert excavator of medieval Paris, Michel Fleury, demonstrates from personal experience ‘la nécessité d'allier constamment les données des sources écrites à celles que fournissent les fouilles archéologiques’. Nevertheless, there is much detail that we could never have gleaned of early medieval topography without excavation, and for the very earliest periods for the most crucial facts – whether a town site remained inhabited, or whether it was relocated – such evidence is all we have. It is therefore important that major discoveries of the past few years be built into general syntheses as soon as possible, and that is one of the purposes of this volume. Most Roman town sites were also urban in the middle ages, and in most cases the Roman core lies beneath the modern town centre. However, to move from those premises to the conclusion of ‘continuity of site if not of urbanism’ is to go beyond the evidence. It is now clear that, of the four most important towns of the earliest post-Roman period, Ipswich was without a Roman past, while London and York developed on open sites outside the Roman walls before shifting back into the fortified area in the ninth and tenth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in many other parts of Europe, churches are often the key to explaining the revival or emergence of towns in Britain in the earlier middle ages; nor did they cease to be influential once the towns were well established, but, on the contrary, continued to dominate many smaller towns, or to be powerful forces in larger ones, as landlords, consumers and patrons of the arts. Not least among the last was architecture: churches were usually the most important features in the landscape, being usually the tallest structures, often topographically the most extensive, and architecturally the most innovative. While defining the role of churches in towns is fairly straightforward in the earlier middle ages, exploring culture is much harder, chiefly because it is difficult to define a specifically urban culture before the end of the thirteenth century. The high culture of courts and major churches did not necessarily require, though it often enjoyed, an urban setting, while popular culture is not only hard to divide into urban and rural forms but is also poorly documented for this period. None the less, it is possible to discern one cultural area where towns played an active role towards the end of this period: that is the growth of literacy and the development of education. Accordingly, this chapter will be broken up into four sections of unequal length: first, a short summary of the role of churches in the embryonic towns of the 600-900 period; secondly, an overview of churches in towns as they expanded or were created in the tenth and eleventh centuries; thirdly, an overview of the diversification of ecclesiastical institutions in towns in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and fourthly, a sketch of three separate aspects of urban culture: schools, the increasing use of the written word by townspeople and the development of the genre of urban panegyric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinctive characteristics of the Great Revolutions – the modern transformation of sectarian utopianism In the preceding discussion we have seen that while the kernels of proto-fundamentalist movements existed in all the Axial Civilizations, in some they developed more and had greater influence. Their influence became very important, possibly central, in the crystallization of modernity, and they have generated, in a highly transformed way, a central component of the cultural and political program of the discourse of modernity, as well as of different modern social and political movements, including that of the modern fundamentalist movements. Modern fundamentalist movements, despite their seemingly traditional flavor and their affinity to proto-fundamentalist movements, can – perhaps paradoxically – best be understood against the background of the development of modernity and within the framework of this development. These movements and ideologies constitute one of the social movements in modern societies as movements of protest that developed with modernity. They constitute one possible development within, or component of, the cultural and political program and discourse of modernity, as it crystallized above all with the Enlightenment and with the Great Revolutions, as it expanded throughout the world and has continually developed with its different potentialities, contradictions, and antinomies. By the Great Revolutions we mean, following general usage, the English Civil War and Great Rebellion; the first Great Revolutions – the American and French Revolutions; and the later ones – the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese Revolutions. The Revolt of the Netherlands has been sometimes designated, and justly so in my mind, as the precursor of the first Great Revolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on religious rule in early Catholic monasteries. Factors that contributed to the development of written procedures that govern religious orders; Form of rules; Discussion on the voluntary element of religious orders; Issues concerning obedience and decision-making in the management of traditional religious orders; Description and significance of the Pachomian System.

The accession of Elizabeth almost inevitably meant the end of the attempt to restore England to the arms of the papacy. The precise intentions of the queen, the degree of her commitment to Protestantism and the nature of the religious settlement she wished to impose have been endlessly debated by historians. On two topics, however, there seems little room for controversy: the queen intended to be head of the church once again, and that church would be dominated by the crown in all important matters of policy and finance. This second point was confirmed as soon as the 1559 Parliament assembled: the first government bill presented to it was for the return of first-fruits and tenths to the crown. The purpose was very practical, to help to solve the pressing financial problems of the new regime, but the move was also symbolic, for nothing better represented the subjugation of the clergy to the crown than the regular taxation first introduced in the 1530s. It was no wonder that the Marian bishops felt obliged to oppose the measure, which marked a reversal of the cautious progress towards financial autonomy that had occurred during the previous reign. The severance of all links with Rome by the Supremacy Act also had some political and economic consequences, for it returned to the crown an uncontested control over patronage within the church. As the settlement matured and lost the temporary character that it possessed in 1559, the principles of royal control over the fortunes of the clergy became an accepted part of the pattern of the church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of Henry VIII, which occurred in the middle of a period when there were intense demands for the lands of the church, could well have been followed by a complete expropriation of episcopal property. The group of men who were now able to assume political power were precisely those who had been busy in the transactions and exchanges of the old king's last years. William Paget, William Herbert, John Russell, Edward North and Anthony Denny were among the sixteen executors of Henry's will and were therefore members of the privy council. They were also supporters of the new leader of the realm, Edward Seymour, soon to be duke of Somerset. Seymour's own attitude to the lands of the church had yet to be clarified; his only excursion so far into exchanges with the episcopate had been the 1545 agreement with Wriothesley and the bishop of Salisbury. Nevertheless, the general behaviour of his friends and the disposition towards Protestantism that he had already demonstrated suggested that he would be even less indulgent towards independent bishops than Henry VIII had been. And indeed it transpired that consideration of the sensibilities of the higher clergy was rare for either of the regimes that held power during the minority of Edward VI. One of the first actions of Somerset's government was to require the bishops to accept new commissions for the exercise of their authority, an authority which they henceforward held only during the prince's good pleasure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early years of Henry VIIF's reign witnessed some increase in that hostility to the established church which is loosely classified under the heading of anticlericalism. In the major incident associated with the case of Richard Hunne resentment of clerical privilege was expressed both by the citizens of London and by the House of Commons. A decade later, as Lutheran influence began to penetrate the country, anticlerical writing became common. The authors ranged from those who had a deep commitment to the new theology, such as Tyndale or Jerome Barlow, to those who expressed principally the negative aspects of criticism of the clergy, such as Simon Fish. Yet whatever their starting-point and approach, most of the writers shared in common at least two assumptions: that general reform within the church was necessary if it were once again to fulfil its true function of ministering to the faithful and that clerical immunities and privileges were one of the main obstacles to such reform and must therefore be abolished. Immunities and privileges included not only the legal advantages enjoyed by the clergy but also the secure possession of wealth. The reformers were already arguing that great wealth was not compatible with devotion to spiritual duty: ‘love of worldly things’, commented the lawyer Christopher St German, ‘strangleth the love of God’. An attack upon the riches of the church was also one of the best ways to rally support for the cause of reform; the cry that the clergy were too affluent, that they held in their hands a disproportionate part of the wealth of the realm, had an immediate appeal that needed no reference to any change in doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just as the bishops had their ample revenues as a reward for services rendered, so they were expected to expend them in a manner appropriate to their high office in church and state. That traditional moralist Edmund Dudley urged that they could do so merely by keeping to the obligations enjoined by the canon law. This required that they should divide their disposable income into three parts, ‘one part thereof for their own living in good household and hospitality, the second in deeds of charity and alms to the poor folk, and specially within their Dioceses and cures … and the third part thereof for the reparations and the building of their churches and mansions’. Such an arrangement should have left little scope for the forms of expenditure of which Dudley disapproved, the purchase of land for their heirs or ‘for marriages of their kinsfolks’. The tripartite division which won his praise was no doubt a valuable point of reference, a standard against which the bishops might judge themselves, but it took little account of the realities of their situation. The first obligation, to keep good household and hospitality, covers only a part of their secular charges. They had to discharge the duties both of a good lord and an obedient subject, the latter including some of their most burdensome and least predictable financial commitments in the form of taxation and the furnishing of men for war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wealth and power of the pre-Reformation episcopate lent force to the criticisms of the friars and Lollards. The bishops were spiritual noblemen and as such were inevitably far removed from any apostolic pattern of ministry. Instead, they were possessed of all the trappings of authority that the church and monarchy could offer. The most essential of their secular adjuncts of power was land, for no nobleman could maintain his place without the income and control over men that land alone afforded. The way in which land had come to the church served to stress the dual role of its leaders. It had come as pious donations and bequests from the Saxon monarchy and nobility and as a reward for feudal service from the Normans. This, of course, simplifies unduly the complex process by which the episcopal estates were acquired, but all the bishoprics had those two elements as the foundation of their possessions. Service to the crown, primarily in the form of the provision of revenue and men for war, continued to be an important duty of the bishops as tenants-in-chief in the early sixteenth century. In this sense, as in their daily management of property, it is difficult to differentiate the spiritual peers from their lay counterparts. The fact that much of the land had originally been given as an act of piety, to aid the church in its work of organising the faithful and of charity, was more easily forgotten in the daily lives of the bishops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The possessions of the early Tudor bishops were valuable as sources of patronage and offered lordship over men. But above all they provided incumbents with the income necessary to support the dignity and charge of sitting upon the episcopal bench. The temporalities were only one part of that income, which also included spiritual dues, and some prelates had the additional benefit of ‘foreign receipts’ from the profits of office. For a few of theTeally powerful clerical servants of Henry VII and Henry VIII, such as John Morton, Thomas Ruthal and of course the voracious Wolsey, the last-mentioned were probably more important than the swelling acres of their sees as forms of revenue. Most of their colleagues, however, found their principal security and profit in their lands and their ecclesiastical office, which were often the reward for earlier service to the state. Any discussion of episcopal income must therefore be first and foremost concerned with the value of the estates, of those manors and lordships which were encountered in the preceding chapter. Revenue derived from land has the additional advantage that it was regularly recorded in complex series of accounts and that enough of these have survived to form the basis of reasonable estimates of value. The great survey of ecclesiastical properties made in 1535, the Valor Eccksiasticus, also provides an apparently comprehensive picture of the receipts of the bishops' estates at the beginning of the Reformation. Unfortunately, the figures to be gleaned from these sources all too often give only the illusion of accuracy and comparability. The pitfalls which greet any student of medieval accounts are notoriously legion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Reformation of the sixteenth century brought changes of great importance in the life of northern Europe. The consequences of the new confessions of faith were far-reaching: political and economic patterns of behaviour were altered just as definitely as were the modes of worship. An obvious feature of these changes was the transfer of much of the power and wealth of the old church to the laity. Wherever the authority of the papacy was rejected the symbols of ecclesiastical power, independent jurisdiction and large estates, were likely to be denied the clergy and turned to other uses. The great reformers all advocated a fundamental change in the condition of the priesthood; they all converted the separated, consecrated sacerdos into a preaching pastor, called by his congregation to his particular vocation principally for his skill in expounding the Word. Such a man had no need of great possessions, merely of the ‘sufficient maintenance’ which would guarantee him the freedom to pursue his duties. The residual wealth of the old church should be used for godly purposes – charity, learning and the building of a Christian commonwealth. These ideas took deep root in Protestant Europe: it became part of the common coin of contemporary polemical writings that many of the errors of the Roman church derived from its acceptance of wealth and political power in the century of Constantine. Such ideas were as music to the ears of those princes who saw the wealth and power of the old church as more appropriate for themselves than for the priesthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FORGIVENESS SEALED AND RENEWED The doctrine of justification by faith (with its insistence upon the freedom and completeness of the transformation of the individual's position before God) was not intended by Luther to conflict with the theology of baptism. But he did intend it to show that an elaborate penitential system was unnecessary, and its ‘imposition’ on the faithful dangerously likely to distract them from the great simple truth of their redemption. The new emphasis brought into clear view once more an anomaly which had in fact existed for many centuries. As a rule, the first generations of Christians were baptised as believing adults, able to declare their faith for themselves and to make a deliberate choice in committing themselves to Christ. The response of faith and the rite of baptism went together without strain. There was an emphasis in the first Christian centuries on the power of baptism to wash away sin and also its consequences; and a concomitant discipline which expected those who were baptised not to fall into serious sin again, for it would make a mockery of baptism to suggest that it could be repeated. Not every community was willing to restore to fellowship those who did lapse, and where penitents were readmitted they usually had to demonstrate the sincerity of their repentance to the community so that there could be no doubt about it. Penitents were marked by the wearing of special garments, and they performed various penitential acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confession of Christ as Lord is the heart of the Christian faith. To him God has given all authority in heaven and on earth. As Lord of the Church he bestows the Holy Spirit to create a communion of men with God and with one another. To bring this koinonia to perfection is God's eternal purpose. The Church exists to serve the fulfilment of this purpose when God will be all in all. Christian authority is Christ's authority. The debates on authority which rent apart the Church in the West in the sixteenth century turned again and again on whether Christ's sovereignty was being set at risk in the Church's life; and whether his Word, Holy Scripture, was being disregarded or overridden by those in authority in the Church. The chapters which follow look first at sixteenth-century concerns over the authority on which Christians believe matters of faith. As textual scholarship investigated Greek and Hebrew and raised the possibility that there ought to be emendations, Scripture itself could no longer be looked upon, in an uncontroversial way, as a text to which one could simply point. The testimony of the authorities other than Scripture with which everyone in the West had been familiar for generations, ceased to be uncontroversially acceptable to many Protestants, and qualifications hedged about the use even of the Fathers. Proof by reasoning, which had reached a high point of sophistication in the late Middle Ages, and in which there had normally been embedded authorities to support propositions, underwent revolutionary attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘NON FUGIMUS SED FUGAMUR’: CHANGING VIEWS OF THE FLIGHT FROM ROME As we have seen, Jacobean writers across the whole doctrinal spectrum agreed on the importance of Revelation 18.4 (the flight from Babylon). Not only was it seen as a text which justified separation from the Church of Rome, but it was also interpreted as a divine command which could not be ignored. This was a point argued, not just by moderate puritans such as Willet and Bernard, but also by Calvinist conformists such as Powel, Hakewill and Bedell. Even an avant-garde conformist such as Andrewes argued that the Roman Church was Babylon. It did not exhaust the possible lines of defence, however. When William Bedell confronted the issue of what authority the Protestants had for leaving Rome, he resorted first to the familiar passage from Revelation. This was a justification which was sufficient in itself. But this did not mean that other arguments could not be made, and Bedell chose to buttress his position further by deciding to settle the argument ‘at the Bar of Reason out of the common Principles of Christian Doctrine’. Romanists could always quibble about whether the papal monarchy was Babylon and therefore, said Bedell, ‘let us for the present set aside the Mystical Arguments from this place, and all other Prophetical Circumstances’.Similarly, Anthony Wotton's popular Runne from Rome, which dealt specifically with the separation from Rome, bore the text of Revelation 18.4 on its title-page, but avoided discussing the issue of Antichrist because (as Wotton explained) it was a long controversy which had already been sufficiently disputed elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]