The secular clergy - priests and other clerics outside of monastic orders - were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. The secular clergy got their title from the Latin word for world, saeculum, and secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. This gave them enormous religious influence, although they were considered too worldly by many contemporary moralists - trying, for instance, to oppose the elimination of clerical marriage and concubinage. Although their worldliness created many tensions, it also gave the secular clergy much worldly influence. Contemporaries treated elite secular clerics as equivalent to knights, and some were as wealthy as minor barons. Secular clerics had a huge role in the rise of royal bureaucracy, one of the key historical developments of the period. They were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, the rise of the schools, the creation of the book trade, and the invention of universities. They performed music, produced literature in a variety of genres and languages, and patronized art and architecture. Indeed, this volume argues that they contributed more than any other group to the Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Yet the secular clergy as a group have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England from 1066 to 1216.

Awarded the 2007 National Research Prize SAES/AEFA. This study is a reappraisal of John Bunyan in the light of the dissenting religious culture of the late-seventeenth century. Charges of schism and fanaticism were repeatedly levelled against Bunyan, both from within the dissenting community and without, but far from being chastened by these accusations, Bunyan responded with a religious discourse marked by a rhetoric of excess. The focus of this book is therefore upon Bunyan's overwhelming spiritual experiences, especially the representation of torment, in his literary and polemical works. The believers' suffering was an obsessive concern of dissenting ministers, even to the point where their writings are often remembered today for little else. Hitherto, most scholars have termed all the mental states that they invoke 'despair', but this simplifies the experiences at issue. A wealth of contemporary material helps to restore the nuances of seventeenth-century physical and spiritual conditions, from enthusiasm to melancholy and madness; from fear to desertion and sloth. These chapters explore fresh ways in which this subtle typology of torment and its extreme manifestations form the core of the literary expression of Restoration dissent, challenging Bunyan to represent spiritual equilibrium as the ultimate quest of the earthly pilgrimage.

A detailed handbook to the English and Welsh Quarter Sessions records, their background, and how they can be used by genealogists and historians. For over 500 years, between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Justices of the Peace were the embodiment of government for most of our ancestors. The records they and other county officials kept are invaluable sources for local and family historians, and Stuart Raymond's handbook is the first in-depth guide to them. He shows how and why they were created, what information they contain, and how they can be accessed and used. Justices of the Peace met regularly in Quarter Sessions, judging minor criminal matters, licensing alehouses, paying pensions to maimed soldiers, overseeing roads and bridges, and running gaols and hospitals. They supervised the work of parish constables, highway surveyors, poor law overseers, and other officers. And they kept extensive records of their work, which are invaluable to researchers today. As Stuart Raymond explains, the lord lieutenant, the sheriff, the assize judges, the clerk of the peace, and the coroner, together with a variety of subordinate officials, also played important roles in county government. Most of them left records that give us detailed insights into our ancestors’ lives. The wide range of surviving county records deserve to be better known and more widely used, and Stuart Raymond’s book is a fascinating introduction to them. Praise for Tracing Your Ancestors in County Records “This is invaluable stuff: while other books may mention the records, this volume provides a useful understanding of the processes and public philosophies that led to them in the first place. There are plenty of references for further reading, too. . . . An excellent textbook exploring the mechanics of local record-keeping.” —Your Family History (UK) “This great introduction to county records will soon have you chomping at the bit to head to your nearest archive to begin exploring beyond the records available online. Well-known family and local historian (and Family Tree contributor) Stuart A. Raymond provides a concise and easy guide to the rich seam of records you can expect to find (and those you can't), going back 500 years to when Justices of the Peace were the embodiment of local government for our ancestors. There’s a wealth of information to get your teeth into.” —Family Tree (UK)

Protestant Nonconformity, the umbrella term for Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists and Unitarians, belongs specifically to the religious history of England and Wales. Initially the result of both unwillingness to submit to the State's interference in Christian life and a dissatisfaction with the progress of reform in the English Church, Nonconformity has been primarily motivated by theological concern, ecclesial polity, devotion and the nurture of godliness among the members of the church. Alongside such churchly interests, Nonconformity has also made a profound contribution to debates about the role of the State, to family life and education, culture in general, trade and industry, the development of philanthropy and charity, and the development of pacifism. In this volume, for the first time, Nonconformity and the breadth of its activity come under the expert scrutiny of a host of recognised scholars. The result is a detailed and fascinating account of a movement in church history that, while currently in decline, has made an indelible mark on social, political, economic and religious life of the two nations.