These two fundamental difficulties, both based upon ignorance, Bancroft believed were administratively far more important than the more spectacular troubles with Puritans and Catholics, for he saw that the malcontents from conscientious scruples were few, while he knew that the nonconformists from ignorance and indifference were legion. Under such circumstances information was more necessary than coercive force and was an indispensable prerequisite to its use. Until the culprit was found, it was idle to think of punishing him. If, by frequent Visitations, the clergy were given thoroughly to understand what the law was-and the Canons of 1604 furnished a definite and unambiguous law to lay before them -if they also saw that ample power to enforce the law was latent somewhere and that it would be used if necessary, there would be comparatively few cases where more than the ordinary ecclesiastical censures would be needed to bring the culprit to his senses. It had always been easy to secure from the clergy and churchwardens presentments of the laity for all sorts of crimes, but Bancroft now meant to secure information about the clergy and about the wardens themselves.

What Bancroft therefore brought into the administration of the Church was not an innovation of form, nor an attempt to do what his predecessors had not a legal right to do, but a new feeling of institutional unity, of corporate life, a new quickening and awakening of the administrative instinct and spirit. He gave the ecclesiastical officials a common cause, the infusion of life and vigour into the old system-and roused them to a vivid conception of what the crisis meant to the Church of the future as well as of the present. He was himself an able leader, whose knowledge and experience. evoked confidence, whose ideals awakened enthusiasm, and whose clearness of vision and power of expression clothed his orders in a form easily comprehended.

Nevertheless, his determination to vitalise the old system was, in itself, an innovation, for the experience of the previous three decades had convinced most of the bishops that the Visitation was moribund. They were willing to admit that it was perhaps desirable to continue it, but quite unable to believe that it could ever be anything more than a form. If the Visitors came, if the questions were asked and answered, if the results were copied out neatly in a paper book, with a few lines of writing on each folio

and with plenty of space for future entries, the officials thought that they had accomplished all that could be expected. When Bancroft visited St. Paul's Cathedral in 1598, his informants told him that the abuses had long existed, had been often complained of, but were still without remedy because the Visitation was only a form. The Bishop of Chester also declared that little attention was paid to his citations to appear and answer for misdemeanours: his commissions for reform were seldom executed and were never effectual, while at Visitations "the ecclesiastical proceedinge (was) voide of all validity and good effect."1

Nevertheless, while little had been accomplished by the Visitations since the Reformation, it was not due altogether to the slackness of the Episcopate. During the first years of Elizabeth's reign, Parker and Grindal had made praiseworthy and serious attempts to put into working order the old administrative system of the Church. The Visitations were held and some attempt made to prosecute offenders. But, from the sum total of their experience, Whitgift reached the conclusion that more strenuous measures were needed. Consequently, by a renewed insistence on subscription at ordination and induction, by the use of the Twenty-Four Articles for the examination of the recalcitrant, by the passage of the Articles of 1584, 1585, and 1586, and by the promulgation of the Statutes for the ecclesiastical courts in 1587, he attempted to strengthen and to systematise ecclesiastical administration. His efforts ended in the development of the High Commission as an extraordinary means for the enforcement of ordinary regulations and in the increase of the number of diocesan commissions. Indeed, several of the bishops declared that they could administer their dioceses in no other way and that so useless a form as the Visitation might as well be abolished altogether. The neglect of the Visitations, therefore, which displayed itself in the perfunctory manner in which they were made and in the failure to proceed further against the culprits revealed by the inquiries, had its root in that fundamental difficulty of the ecclesiastical administrationthe necessity of accomplishing one end with the means which were intended to compass something far less considerable or difficult.

1 Tanner MSS. 144, f. 28, (1590) Parker wrote, in 1567, to Lady Bacon that certain scandalous clerics "bearing them great under my Lord's

(the Bishop of Norwich's) authority, despised mine to be at the Church's Visitation." February, 1567. Strype, Parker, I, 495.

But the lack of power in the Episcopate, the want of an able leader thoroughly trained in administrative matters, the powerful interference of the Queen and the Privy Council, and the many demands on the time and strength of the various bishops for minor political tasks, these were, no doubt, powerful contributory causes of this negligence during Elizabeth's reign.

The administrative work which Bancroft now undertook had two definite sides,-first, the codification of the Visitatorial constitution in the Canons of 1604 and the Visitation Articles of 1605; and second the vigorous execution of both in the Visitation of 1605. In an administrative sense, the Visitation Articles of 1605 marked an epoch of much the same sort as the Canons of 1604, and became certainly the most important single administrative precedent of the seventeenth century. The Visitation of 1605 infused into the old system a vitality which impelled it onward for three decades with what seemed to be constantly increasing force.

The Canons of 1604, (cix-cxix) systematized the old practice at Visitations. The wardens and sidesmen should be obliged to present twice a year, but not oftener, (although they might make voluntary presentments at any time); the yearly fee should not exceed four pence, nor should any one be liable to suit at ecclesiastical law for honestly presenting offenders. A presentment should always be made at Easter time by the wardens going out of office and should on no account be left to the new wardens who could not have any real knowledge of the condition of affairs. The old practice of summoning the wardens and asking them various questions to be answered viva voce was also to be stopped. In all cases, the wardens should now have a copy of the Articles for the Visitation of the year following and a copy of the oath they were to take, so that they might collect the information required before they arrived, and, above all, realise what the law was which the Bishop wished enforced and what sort of an interpretation he placed upon it. Recusants and noncommunicants were to be presented yearly without special orders from London and each rank of the hierarchy was to forward the information without delay to its superiors, so that, within three months from the date of presentment, a complete record of all recusants in England might be in the King's hands. The wardens were to be chosen once a year by "joint consent of the minister and the parishioners," and might be re-elected. Their

duties were minutely defined by a long series of Canons which codified and amended the administrative orders and Visitation Articles issued during the previous half century.

The Visitation Articles of 1605, based on the Canons of 1604, were strictly in accord with previous precedent, both in substance and in form. In fact, these Articles were usually based upon the ordinance or Canon in force at the moment and embodied in their questions practically the whole of its requirements. The thirtyfive most important prepared for the Visitation of 1559 were taken directly from the Queen's Injunctions for 1559, and of the remaining twenty-one, fourteen were concerned with the moral sins of the laity, and four more with marriages and wills, so that all those not taken from the Injunctions were, in the main, a repetition of the old pre-reformation Canon law. In the articles of 1605, fiftyseven out of the seventy-three were based directly upon the Canons of 1604, and the remaining twelve were occupied with ordinary questions regarding recusants and minor matters of discipline. Until 1576, the enactments, to which most attention was paid at the Visitations, were the Queen's Injunctions, the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, the Act "touching ministers of the Church," (13 Eliz. c. 12), and the Advertisements of 1564. Then, in 1576, the gradual results of the experience of former years were embodied in the Visitation Articles of that year, which, as a codification of Church law, was the most important document issued between 1564 and 1604, and which exercised an influence on the institutional life of the Church which it is difficult to overestimate. There were, therefore, three stages of growth marked by three sets of Articles: the stage of development, 1559-1576, when the precedent was furnished by the Articles of 1559 and when considerable changes and modifications were being constantly made; the crystallisation of the Elizabethan regulations into the Articles of 1576, from which were bodily taken all the subsequent Elizabethan Visitation Articles; and the codification by Bancroft in 1605. Then opened a period which continued without alteration for twenty years, when, in the Visitation of Laud in 1635, some further developments along the same lines were introduced.

In each case, the development was carried on by the introduction 1 The detailed evidence for these statements upon precedent will be found in the Appendix.

of clauses based upon parts of the Queen's Injunctions, or of the Advertisements of 1564, or of the Canons of 1604, which had not hitherto been explicitly represented. Of Parker's twenty-six Articles of 1569, twelve were based on the Visitation Articles of 1559; eleven appeared for the first time as Visitation Articles to enforce parts of the Injunctions which had been hitherto neglected; four were based on statutes, two on the Declaration of the Articles of Religion of 1559, two upon the Prayer Book, and one upon the Advertisements of 1564. Of the whole sixty-five, only fourteen could be described as without precedent and they were not of great importance. The Articles for the Episcopal Visitation of Bath and Wells in 1583 and those for Salisbury in 1588 were taken verbatim from those of 1576, upon which were also based Aylmer's set for London, 1581-2, and the Articles of 1585 for Chichester. Bancroft followed this same practice and of the fifteen Articles of 1605 which were not derived from the Canons of 1604, half (seven) came from the Visitation Articles of 1576. In 1616 Abbot repeated Bancroft's Articles practically as they stood, though he rearranged them into what he believed to be more logical order. He also revived four articles of 1576 and introduced four more based upon certain of the Canons of 1604 which Bancroft had not considered worthy of inclusion.

When, however, we turn from matters of law and precedent to the more crucial question, how much had been done, how much was actually enforced of these regulations, we enter a field of inquiry where the conditions are widely different. We exchange relative certainty for vague statements and incomplete evidence. Previous to Bancroft's time the records of Visitations were so badly kept, have been so mutilated by careless hands and rendered. so incomplete by the loss of volumes here and there, that the student must confess that no amount of diligence and care can be rewarded by more than tentative results. Nevertheless, the amount of available material is so enormous that a man's life would hardly afford time for a glance at it all. It is, therefore, impossible to speak on administrative matters without some qualification of every statement and without realising that conditions differed very much in various dioceses and that any general deductions for all England are tentative.

Furthermore, our records are often entirely silent on some of the