England

ENGLAND. - A region which, together with Scotland and Wales, constitutes the Island of Great Britain, and a toponym used in a generic sense as a synonym for it. Here we deal both with the Island (Great Britain) and with the United Kingdom, which is formed together with the former by the north-eastern strip of neighbouring Ireland (the so-called "Northern Ireland"), by the smaller islands (Anglesey, Wight) and archipelagos (Shetland, Orkney, Hebrides, Scottish Islands).

I. GEOGRAPHY.

The island of Great Britain is, by area, the largest (224,220 sq. km.) in Europe and the eighth in the world (more than 9 times Sardinia), and it stands out for its fortunate geographical position, at the centre of the continental hemisphere, interposed as it is between the Atlantic and the North Sea - that is, between the eastern edge of the most frequented Ocean and what was for centuries the meeting point of world trade - and facing the mouths of the most important navigable rivers of Europe (Meuse-Rhine, Scheldt, Elbe, Seine). The coastal perimeter, well articulated into gulfs, bays, firths and estuaries, allows the sea to penetrate so far inland that no point is left more than 120 km. away. The Solway Firth and the Cheviot Hills separate Scotland, to the N., from England, to the S. The fragmentation of the relief into groups isolated by lowlands, characteristic of Great Bri-

Britain, appears less than that of Scotland, where long and relatively elevated mountain peaks (Ben Nevis, 1343 m., in the Grampians) are separated by deep valleys (Glenmore). In England, on the other hand, while the NW sector gives way to numerous but short mountain chains (Pennines, Cambrian), in the SE sector plains (low lands) prevail, bounded by modest hilly swells (hills, downs), which on the Channel rise into the white chalk cliffs to which the island owes the classic name of Albion. The two sectors are delimited by a line that from the mouth of the Exe (on the Channel) leads by way of the Severn and the plain of York to the mouth of the Tees, on the North Sea. With the dominant character of very ancient, worn-down reliefs, proper to the terrain, is to be connected the wealth of mineral deposits (above all iron and coal) that distinguishes them.

The climate is typically maritime and temperate, with cool summers, mild winters, and modest temperature ranges. The abundant humidity in every season translates into frequent and copious precipitation (snow is scarce), an almost always overcast sky (fewer than 40 clear days a year, on average) and thick fogs. The rivers, as a rule short, have considerable flow and a regular regime and constitute excellent navigable routes, extensive and connected by numerous canals. The landscape stands out for the intense green of its vegetation, well preserved in the plains (meadows), much damaged on the mountains, where the forest is by now reduced to small residual patches on the highest areas.

The population of the United Kingdom (50.5 million inhabitants, of whom 43.5 in Great Britain, 5.4 in Scotland and 1.4 in Northern Ireland), having nearly doubled in number over the last century, is very unevenly distributed. Four fifths of it live in urban centers, and while in the industrial and mining districts and in the vicinity of the ports population densities are very high, the countryside is as a rule sparsely inhabited, except in some of the most fertile and productive areas. On the whole the density both of the United Kingdom (208 inhabitants per sq km) and of Great Britain (194) is the highest in Europe when compared with regions of equal size. Of the 25 cities that counted (1950) more than 100,000 inhabitants, three each exceed one million inhabitants (London and Birmingham in England, Glasgow in Scotland), four exceed 500,000 (Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds, all in England) and 48 exceed 100,000 (of which 41 in England, 3 in Scotland and 1 in Northern Ireland).

The economy of the United Kingdom has a markedly industrial and commercial character. While more than two thirds of the British population are devoted to industry, trade and transport, only a very modest proportion of it (about 4%) is engaged in agriculture.

Cereals (oats, wheat, barley) and food or industrial crops on the one hand, and livestock products (sheep, cattle, horses; meat, dairy products) on the other, attest to the highly advanced level of the activity of British country people, but without imports the metropolitan territory could satisfy internal demand for no more than three months, perhaps, a year: indeed, from one third to more than two thirds of those imports is normally absorbed by food products. In agricultural holdings large property and large-scale management prevail.

Fishing is of notable importance, favored both by the ample possibilities of the nearby seas (herring in the North Sea) and by the activity of the island sailors (cod from the Newfoundland banks); silviculture is insignificant.

The enormous development attained in the United Kingdom by extractive industries and, consequently, that of manufacturing industries at the beginning of the last century is in evident relation to the abundance of the resources that Great Britain possesses in coal (calculated at 200 billion tons) and in iron ores, as well as to the fortunate location of such resources and the ease of transport in this, the only completely insular region of Europe. The coal deposits are grouped around the Pennines and in Wales; production has remained from 1910 to today at an average of about 200-250 million tons a year, of which about one fifth is exported. As for iron, on the other hand, despite the notable quantity of ore extracted (from 7 to 16 million tons a year), it must be imported from abroad, to feed the vast group of heavy industries (concentrated above all in Sheffield, Birmingham and Glasgow), which, after the textile industries (with cotton at their head, essentially localized between Manchester and Liverpool, and on the Clyde), are the basis of the British economy. Naturally, the mechanical industries, widespread throughout the country, shipbuilding (Clyde), metallurgy (southern Wales), aluminum working, the chemical industries, etc., have also greatly developed. The post-war period is characterized by a rational modernization of all these activities, oriented ever more toward the production of consumer goods, which find their market for the most part on the national market.

The needs posed by such an economic structure are met by an adequate development of commerce, which benefits from an excellent banking organization and above all from a merchant fleet that was, before the Second World War, the first in the world (with its 18.5 million tons of tonnage, it is today surpassed by that of the U.S.A.). The United Kingdom has some of the most frequented ports in Europe (London, Liverpool, Birkenhead, Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff, Newcastle, Hull, etc.), an excellent railway network (32,800 km) and an air infrastructure that ensures rapid connections with every part of the world. Finally, one should take into account that the United Kingdom constitutes the center of one of the vastest and most populous political complexes on Earth, the British Commonwealth, distributed as follows:

The United Kingdom is a hereditary constitutional monarchy, governed by a democratic government with bicameral representation (House of Lords, partly elective, and House of Commons). Northern Ireland has its own institutions (autonomous Parliament and government), as do the Isle of Man (572 sq km and 51,000 inhabitants) and the Norman Islands (194 sq km, 95,000 inhabitants). In Europe, Gibraltar and Malta (321 sq km with 280,000 inhabitants) depend on the United Kingdom. The capital of the United Kingdom is London, whose metropolitan district counts 8.3 million inhabitants, of whom 3.3 constitute the so-called county of London, the rest the Outer Ring.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. CIVIL HISTORY.

I. MEDIEVAL HISTORY

The abandonment of the island by the Romans marked the beginning of the Teutonic invasions (Jutes, Angles and Saxons). The Celtic populations withdrew into the western provinces and in part emigrated to Armorica. The Saxon tribes organized themselves into kingdoms: seven (heptarchy) in the 7th century, reduced to three in the 8th; and finally they unified in the 9th century under the supremacy of Wessex. But already in the second half of the 8th century the invasions of the Danes had begun. The Saxon king Alfred checked their advance, leaving them the north-eastern territories, but forcing them to recognize the sovereignty of Wessex. At the beginning of the 11th century other Danish invaders penetrated the island, and the conquest was completed by Canute (1016-35). After his death the throne returned to the Saxons with Edward the Confessor (1042-66), who, educated in Normandy, filled the high ranks with Norman elements. In 1066 the Saxon Harold was elected king, but the Duke of Normandy William declared him a usurper and, having landed in England, defeated the Saxons at Hastings, where Harold fell on the field. William succeeded in consolidating his conquest: although elements of feudalism pre-existed the coming of the Normans, only then did it establish itself as a political system, but William knew how to found a strong monarchy, limiting the power of the great feudatories. On the death of his successor Henry I, the throne, after a period of anarchy, passed to the Angevin house of the Plantagenets with Henry II (1154-80). The latter further strengthened sovereign power, increasing the authority of the curia regis and instituting the itinerant judges, who in the local courts replaced the king's justice with private justice. From this system derived the formation of the common law, in which the various native customs merged; and for two centuries and more, the essential theme of English politics was the search for a balance between royal power and the rights of the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy. In 1215 the barons imposed on John Lackland the Magna Charta, which at that time fixed only the feudal concept of a limitation of monarchical absolutism, but which foreshadowed broader aspirations, such as appeared with ever greater prominence in the successive revisions. A first hint of these developments came with Edward I (1272-1307), when those representatives of the communities who later constituted the House of Commons (the lesser nobility and the bourgeoisie) were also convoked. For that period, however, they were called in only in part, and only to decide on financial requests of the Crown. In these years the conquest of Wales unified southern England, while from 1314 Scotland declared itself independent.

In 1328 Edward III (1327-77), claiming the crown of France, began the Hundred Years' War. Despite their military victories, the English finally had to abandon France, where from 1453 they retained only Calais. This failure subsequently had happy consequences for England because, obliging it to renounce territorial expansion, it oriented it toward a policy of maritime power; but the immediate effect was the disastrous civil war of the Two Roses, provoked by the rivalry between the houses of Lancaster and York. After a dark period of violence and usurpations, Henry Tudor, related to the Lancasters, married Elizabeth of York, reconciling the parties and beginning a new dynasty.

MODERN HISTORY

Henry VII (1483-1509), by establishing a system of strict economies, did not have to resort to new taxes and could thus do without summoning Parliament. On the other hand, the nobility had emerged decimated from a century of wars, while the fear aroused by the Lollard movement induced property owners to support the King in order to obtain protection from him. Thus Henry VII, relying on the lesser nobility and the merchants, was able to subdue the survivors of the great feudal aristocracy. But he created neither a new administration nor a legal absolutism, and therefore in England the monarchy did not attain that omnipotence which it acquired in France with the Valois. Under Henry VIII (1509-47) English foreign policy was directed at preventing a hegemony of France over the continent. And the support given to Charles V in the wars of predominance became a closer bond of alliance and almost of dependence when Queen Mary (1553-58) married Philip II. A complete reversal of this course occurred instead under Elizabeth (1558-1603). The English now began to become conscious of their maritime possibilities, and since, looking out upon the oceans, they saw the way barred by Spanish naval power, Spain appeared to them as the enemy to be eliminated. Thus it may be said that political reasons even more than religious ones induced Elizabeth to help the Flemish against Spain. And Elizabeth gave the greatest encouragement to bold navigators and explorers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh (who founded in 1584 the first colony, Virginia). In 1587 the execution of Mary Stuart was regarded by Philip II as a challenge. A war followed, and the defeat of the invincible armada, which crippled Spanish naval power. Internally, during Elizabeth's reign, a profound economic upheaval began, favored by Flemish immigration which helped transform the English from cattle breeders and wool producers into industrialists, shipowners and navigators. But this gave rise to a conflict between Crown and Parliament which the Queen's energy and prestige could soothe but not eliminate. The new class of those who had enriched themselves through the confiscations of ecclesiastical property and through trade now saw in Parliament the defender of its interests and in royal absolutism its adversary.

During the reign of James I Stuart there were the first signs of the conflict which, aggravated by religious disputes, broke out violently under Charles I (1625-49). In the civil war the royal army prevailed over that of Parliament, until the latter found a leader in Oliver Cromwell. Defeated and taken prisoner, Charles was tried and executed. Cromwell too soon found himself in conflict with Parliament: thus, having failed in his attempt to create a democratic republic, he established a dictatorial regime, having himself proclaimed Lord Protector (1653). Two years earlier he had issued the Navigation Act, which forbade trade in English ports and colonies to all ships not built in England and not manned by English sailors. The victory over Holland, which reacted to the blow with arms, gave enormous development to England's trade and to its merchant marine. In 1657 Cromwell concluded with Mazarin an alliance against Spain, and in the new conflict England gained Dunkirk and Jamaica. Cromwell died in 1658: his son Richard succeeded him as Lord Protector, but, lacking his father's energy and prestige, he had to abdicate shortly afterward. In 1660 Parliament recalled the Stuarts with Charles II (d. 1685). He aimed to restore monarchical absolutism: in order to obtain the support of Louis XIV he sold him Dunkirk and allied himself with him against Holland. But this policy and his Catholic leanings aroused the reaction of Parliament, which imposed on him the peace with Holland and the marriage of his niece Mary to William of Orange. In 1679 the Habeas corpus ad subiciendum Act was also approved, which protected the liberty of citizens against arbitrary arrests. Charles was succeeded by his brother James II (1685-80). Although Catholic he did not arouse opposition, because his advanced age and the fact that the heir Mary was married to the Orange did not make the Protestants fear a Catholic restoration; but when James had a son who was baptized with the Catholic rite and sought to impose a declaration of indulgence for non-Anglicans, his opponents called William of Orange, who landed in England and marched on London. James fled to France, and Parliament recognized as sovereigns William III and Mary, after they had ratified the declaration of rights, in which were enumerated all the liberties conquered by the English, from the Magna Charta onward. With the Orange a constitutional regime begins: the practice is established that ministers be chosen by Parliament, and to Parliament the succession law of 1701 attributes the right of choosing the sovereign.

William III was the animator of the League of Augsburg against Louis XIV, who in the peace of Ryswick had to recognize him as King of England. In this war, as in that for the succession of Spain, England takes the direction of European policy, in the guise of champion of the balance of power. In reality, in order to consolidate and defend its maritime dominion, it wants the medium or small states, riparian of the North Sea, the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, not to be absorbed by the great powers but to remain independent and thus open to the political and economic influence of the most powerful nation on the sea. These reasons, and strategic necessities, will induce it in the future to take the field and to promote coalitions against any power that seeks to establish itself on the continental shores of the North Sea.

(propr. Enc. Catt.)

The new great anti-French alliance of 1700 was also promoted by William III. He died in 1702 and was succeeded by Anne Stuart (1702-14). The year before, the Act of settlement had been approved, which, should Anne have no children, assigned the succession to the House of Hanover. Foreign policy underwent no changes. In the War of the Spanish Succession the English fleet penetrated into the Mediterranean, occupying Gibraltar and Minorca. By the peace of Utrecht England kept these acquisitions, received from France the Hudson Bay and Newfoundland and from Spain valuable commercial privileges in Latin America. In 1707 the union of Scotland with England had been proclaimed.

In 1714 George I of Hanover ascended the throne. The mediocrity of the first sovereigns of the new dynasty favored the transformation of the cabinet, hitherto composed of simple counselors of the king, into a true ministry responsible before Parliament, and one of its members, Robert Walpole, in fact assumed the functions of prime minister. Walpole adopted a policy of withdrawal, and maintaining good relations with France, during twenty years of peace, he consolidated the dynasty and enriched the country.

But this enrichment generated new expansionist aspirations. In 1739 England declared war on Spain and shortly afterwards took part in the War of the Austrian Succession alongside Austria. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which forced the parties to return the acquisitions they had made, the English continued the struggle in India, defeating the French and preparing the foundation of a new empire. The increased Habsburg power induced England to ally itself in 1756 with Frederick II of Prussia, and this provoked the alliance of France with Austria. In the Seven Years' War the English minister William Pitt regarded the operations in Europe as a diversion and gave the greatest impetus to the colonial war, extended, after the conclusion of the Bourbon Family Compact, to the Spanish dominions as well. The French reoccupied Minorca, but their fleets were defeated by the English one. With the Peace of Paris (1763) France returned Minorca, and had to cede Canada, almost all its Indian possessions, part of the Antilles and Senegal. Thus England, by fighting or financing allies, had successively brought down the Dutch and the Spanish power, eliminated the hegemony of France and balanced on the continent the supremacy of the Habsburgs, opposing to them the young forces of Prussia.

In the second half of the eighteenth century the great economic revolution produced by the introduction of machines into the factories takes shape. This happens in England before elsewhere, because the imbalance between the working population and the demand for products is stronger there, and this precedence enables it to triumph in the industrial competition among nations. But this victory gives rise to bitter social struggles. The workers, who see in the machines a source of unemployment and in the labor of women and children an expedient for keeping wages low, unite in the first associations. Their weapon is the strike, which often ends in insurrectionary riots. The government intervenes by authorizing employers' associations for resistance and going so far as to regard workers' unions and agitations as political crimes. The industrialists promote works of assistance to the workers, but the method is the philanthropic one of the Enlightenment, and only in the following century would the great laws of social welfare be reached.

III. CONTEMPORARY HISTORY

The first period of the reign of George III (1760-1820) marks a halt in English fortunes. The revolt of the American colonies provoked the intervention of France and Spain, which assured victory to the insurgents. With the Peace of Versailles (1783) England recognized their independence, restored Senegal to France and Florida to Spain, but kept Canada. The French Revolution at first aroused sympathy among the more liberal English and did not displease the politicians, because internal struggles could only weaken their traditional adversary; but when the Convention took up again the old hegemonic program of the Bourbon monarchy and occupied Belgium, England intervened, and from this moment she was the tireless organizer of coalitions against the French Republic and against the Napoleonic Empire. The British fleet cut short the Egyptian expedition with the victory of Abukir (1 Aug. 1798) and definitively secured command of the sea with that of Trafalgar (1805). The continental blockade, which, while it seriously struck their trade, brought no lesser damage to the nations of the Empire, did not suffice to bend the tenacity of the English. The resistance that the Spanish insurgents, with the help of Wellington's soldiers, opposed to the French marked the first decline of Napoleonic fortunes, which collapsed in the defeat inflicted upon them by the same general at Waterloo. At the Congress of Vienna the support that Castlereagh gave to Talleyrand maintained the continental balance, preventing a further expansion of Russia and assuring Europe some decades of peace. Of the colonies England would not permit any discussion, and thus she was able to keep all the acquisitions made in the last twenty years.

After 1815 the predominance of the conservatives, with the repression of workers' movements and the rise in the cost of living produced by the protective corn laws, provoked the spread of socialist ideas and popular agitation against the parliamentary privileges of the landed aristocracy; until the Canning and Peel ministries initiated a new policy of reforms. In 1832 the right to vote was broadened, and in 1846 the free-trade campaign promoted by Richard Cobden triumphed.

In 1837 Victoria ascended the throne. Her reign represented for England an enormous increase in wealth and power. In foreign relations English statesmen, whether conservatives or liberals, always opposed any attempt to disturb the balance of forces in Europe. They supported Austria in order to prevent an imperialist revival of France; they fought, even with arms, Russian aspirations for Mediterranean expansion. In the movements and wars of the Italian Risorgimento they remained indifferent and hostile as long as they feared the formation of small states gravitating in the orbit of France; but when, against the will of Paris, the constitution of a single kingdom took shape, to which the extent of its coasts would have made English friendship necessary, they gave valid aid to the unification movement. Subsequently they sided with the "Triple Alliance" against France and Russia. In the colonial field the Victorian era saw the completion of the conquest of India, which became a colony in 1858 and an empire in 1877, the acquisition of Aden and New Zealand, the annexation of Natal to the Cape Colony, and the forcing of China to open its ports and cede Hong Kong. These enlargements were nevertheless accompanied by a profound transformation of the colonial regime: Canada in 1867 and Australia in 1900 became autonomous federal states under British sovereignty (dominions). And this transformation subsequently extended to the majority of the English colonies.

At home the electoral franchise was further broadened in 1867 and in 1884 (only in 1918 was universal suffrage reached). For many years conservatives and liberals alternated in power; but Gladstone's proposal to grant autonomy (home rule) to Ireland provoked the split of the liberals and the formation of the unionist party, headed by Joseph Chamberlain, with an imperialist and protectionist program. In opposition to it arose the Labour Party, the political expression of the Trade Unions. In 1906 the liberals and labourites won a great electoral victory. In 1911 laws were approved that limited the authority of the Upper House; from 1911 to 1914 a series of measures in favor of the workers.

Until the death of Victoria (in 1901 Edward VII ascended the throne, and he was succeeded in 1910 by George V) England had abstained from any commitment with other powers; but when the hegemonic ambitions of Germany took shape, and the latter began an arms race, including naval, and disputed with English goods all the markets of the world, London concluded agreements with France and Russia, gave greater impetus to naval construction and reorganized the army. In 1914 the German illusion of a neutral England was immediately disappointed. The intervention, fatally determined by the traditional policy of opposition to any continental hegemony, was hastened by the violation of Belgian neutrality, which allowed England to legitimize the defense of her interests with excellent juridical and moral grounds. At the peace conference at Versailles the English representative Lloyd George, in agreement with Clemenceau, after having accepted in theory Wilson's principles, succeeded in practice in nullifying them. Thus England secured new vast colonial acquisitions; but the absurd attempt to destroy Germany politically and economically, and the attitude maintained toward Italy which, in disregard of the concluded pacts, was treated rather as an enemy than as an ally, were one of the causes, not the only one but certainly not the least important, that plunged the two nations into the fascist and Nazi adventure. In the interval between the two world wars the British economy, after a period of grave industrial crisis, recovered brilliantly between 1931 and 1935. But four years later the new conflict broke out.

The Anglo-American victory has not solved the essential problems of English policy, but in many respects has aggravated them. Already in 1931, while Ireland acquired full independence, the statute of the Commonwealth was modified: the British Parliament no longer has the right to legislate for the dominions, and the prime ministers of the states that are part of it no longer depend on the English cabinet but directly on the sovereign. India too is now no longer an empire, but an independent republic inserted like the others in the Commonwealth. And England, while the United States have taken from her world supremacy in the economic, political and military field, must face the difficult problem of reconciling her interests and duties as head of a community of states scattered across all the continents with her interests and duties as a member of the European community, which can no longer be considered as in the past "near the continent but not part of it."

### III. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY.

I. FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE "REFORMATION"

The penetration of the Angles and Saxons, after the departure of the Romans, submerged Christianity in the occupied territories (for the first evangelization: v. BRITANNIA), to which however the Celtic populations of Ireland and Wales remained faithful. In Wales Catholic missionaries organized and directed the defense that saved it from invasion. The work of evangelization carried out by St. Patrick had aimed at inserting Ireland into Roman civilization and Christianity, but after his death (461), the Irish Church, because of the fall of the Empire and the isolation of its land from the Catholic world, assumed the character of a national Church, while the basis of the social order remained the tribe and not the parish, and monastic life preserved its rigidly eremitical character without Benedictine influences. From the island, St. Columba, in the middle of the 6th century, brought Irish monastic rites and ideals to Scotland. At the end of the same century Gregory the Great sent to England a mission directed by the Benedictine abbot Augustine, who succeeded in converting the population of Kent. And since London did not then welcome the Catholic missionaries, the seat of the restored Church was placed at Canterbury, where it remained permanently. Christianity spread in Northumbria (7th century) when the bishop Paulinus converted its king Edwin; it was crushed when that kingdom was absorbed by Mercia, but shortly afterward a mission coming from the Scottish monastery of the Island of Iona, led by Aidan, evangelized Northumbria, Mercia and Essex anew. When Augustine summoned the Celtic bishops and asked them to celebrate Easter on the same date as the other Catholics, to administer Baptism according to the Roman rite and to preach the faith to the pagan Anglo-Saxons (something the Celts had always refused to do, out of hatred for the invaders), the bishops refused. For some years they maintained their intransigence, until Oswy, king of Northumbria, convened a Synod at the monastery of Whitby, where St. Cuthbert and most of the Celtic prelates adhered to the Roman Church. From the moment of this unification the Church offered the country a model of administrative reconstruction of the State and of social reorganization, causing the tribal regime to disappear rapidly. The King drew prestige from ecclesiastical recognition, while the bishops and abbots became his advisers in the affairs of government. The definitive arrangement of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was the work of Gregory of Tarsus and of the abbot Hadrian. With Gregory, archbishop of Canterbury from 669 to 690, the parochial system was perfected, and the bishops, with territorial jurisdiction, were subjected like the monks to the primate of Canterbury. Gregory and Hadrian introduced Mediterranean civilization into England, bringing to Canterbury a copy of Greek and Latin volumes and promoting the study of those languages. And the new culture spread through the island, producing the school of Bede and Jarrow or founding that library of York where Egbert, a pupil of Bede, was the teacher of Alcuin. Preserved thus in England, culture was able to return to the continent in the time of Charlemagne. In the 10th century the corruption of the monasteries provoked a reformist action in England as well, a reflection of the Cluniac movement. In this work of restoration abbots and bishops distinguished themselves, among them Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, and above all St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, who was also for a long time the most authoritative adviser of the Crown.

The new Danish invasion did not harm the Church, because Canute suppressed paganism, benefited the religious institutions and allowed the Anglo-Saxon prelates to keep their posts. An influx of other Latin elements came instead from the beginning of the 11th century. The French reform movement promoted by certain monasteries (such as that of Bec, whose priors were Lanfranc and Anselm) spread to England as well, while Edward the Confessor introduced a good number of Normans into the high ecclesiastical hierarchies: Robert of Jumièges was appointed by him primate of England. These replacements were completed by the Norman conquest. But its effects were not limited to a change of persons. In England as elsewhere a profound decay of the moral and intellectual level of the clergy was lamented, which because of its ignorance and bad customs was no longer respected. Simony prevailed in the elections of bishops. The reform party which, led by Hildebrand, directed the policy of the Holy See in Rome, supported William's claims, because the Church had long been on excellent terms with the dukes of Normandy, and because the Saxon faction of the earl of Wessex, Godwin, father of Harold, had illegally conferred the office of primate on Stigand, who had also maintained relations with the antipope. William committed himself to carrying out the reform of the English Church according to the principles of Hildebrand and thus obtained for his expedition the papal blessing and the banner of the Holy See. In 1070 Lanfranc was appointed archbishop of Canterbury. Since the archbishop of York contested his primacy, the question was referred to the Pope, who remitted it to an English council. At Windsor in 1072 Lanfranc's thesis was accepted, and he thus had the authority necessary to carry out the reform work. In a series of councils the legislative independence of the Church was gradually affirmed: the King continued to convene the meetings and to preside over them, but from then on ecclesiastical questions were discussed only by the clerics, and the measures approved became laws of the Church. A consequence of this was in 1076 the separation of the ecclesiastical courts from the lay ones: violators of the canon laws were subjected to the sanction of the bishop, and the support of the temporal authorities was assured to ecclesiastical decrees. From 1070 to 1076 other measures were approved: the monastic system was improved, the Chapters of the cathedrals were reformed, replacing in many places the regular clergy with canons. Thus the tendency to subject the English Church to the Curia of Rome was becoming more precise, withdrawing it from all state interference. But regarding the two basic principles of the reform party: ecclesiastical celibacy and the prohibition of investitures by the civil power, while the pontifical decree prohibiting the marriage of priests was accepted with the reservation that marriages previously contracted by parish priests be recognized as valid, to whom in the past such a prohibition did not extend. William courteously but firmly refused to pay feudal homage to the Pope, and as for investitures Lanfranc, while recognizing the papal right to elect bishops, maintained the existence of a special privilege of the English Crown for such appointments and asked for its confirmation, which Gregory VII granted limited to William's lifetime. Thus the problem was postponed but not solved. In conclusion, while it was recognized that every bishop should request the pallium of recognition, and that the Pope could invalidate his election, and even in administrative questions recourse was made to the Holy See and its opinion was held in great account, the King kept three of his decisions unchanged: that no pontiff was recognized in England nor could his letters be received without the consent of the sovereign; that the acts of councils were not obligatory without royal sanction; that no subject could be excommunicated against the will of the king. This policy of compromise had good results at the time because of Lanfranc's conciliatory spirit and William's energy, but it was the first origin of the religious struggles that agitated England for centuries.

The son of William, William Rufus, abused the powers inherited from his father in his relations with the Church. When Lanfranc died (1089), he did not trouble to replace him and for five years appropriated the revenues of the see of Canterbury. Only when, gravely ill, he believed himself at the point of death did he yield to the pressure of the prelates and barons and elect as archbishop Anselm, prior of Bec, who tried in vain to refuse the appointment. Having recovered, William soon found himself in sharp conflict with the prelate, a man who had the modesty of a saint but an inflexible firmness in defending the rights of the Church. When Anselm recognized Pope Urban II without the King's consent, he had to leave England and take refuge in France, where he remained until the sovereign's death. Since the latter had again left the see of Canterbury without a titular, Henry I, as soon as he ascended the throne, granted a Charter by which he undertook, among other things, never to leave ecclesiastical benefices vacant. Anselm was therefore recalled and took possession of his see again. After long debates the question of investitures was resolved by common agreement in 1106. The King recognized the Pope's right to invest bishops with the pastoral staff and the ring, but the invested bishop had to pay him homage as his feudal dependent. The choice of the person remained tacitly with the sovereign.

In the struggle that followed the death of Henry I between the partisans of his daughter Matilda and those of Stephen of Blois, the Church exercised a beneficial arbitral function: the intervention of Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, led to an understanding, on the basis of which Stephen adopted Henry, Matilda's son, and declared him his heir. But with Henry II another and more serious conflict broke out between the royal and the ecclesiastical power. To the new king, Theobald recommended one of his clerics, Thomas Becket, who held the office of chancellor and by his ability won the esteem and friendship of the sovereign. On Theobald's death the latter appointed him archbishop of Canterbury. Now the perfect minister became a perfect churchman, who no longer considered himself a royal official but a representative of the Church and of the Pope, ready to sacrifice every worldly good to his duties as prelate. The competence of the ecclesiastical courts, which the agreements stipulated by Lanfranc had limited to cases of conscience, had in the course of time been extending, because the accused preferred to submit to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which did not include mutilation or death among its penalties. Moreover the Holy See claimed the right of avocation of causes to Rome. Henry demanded that a cleric found guilty be degraded and handed over to the secular arm. Thomas opposed this, declaring that an individual could not be punished twice for the same offense. The King convoked a Council at Clarendon, where Thomas was forced, under threat of death, to sign the Constitutions that sanctioned the sovereign's thesis. Not considering himself bound by a consent extorted from him by force, he took refuge at Vézelay, while Alexander III declared him released from the obligation. Henry II, fearing that the Pope would impose the interdict, met Thomas in France and was reconciled with him. As soon as he arrived in England Thomas received the papal letters that deposed the bishops who had betrayed him. This fact aroused the anger of Henry, who considered the prohibition against corresponding with Rome without the sovereign's consent violated; and certain knights, convinced they were carrying out a tacit order of the King, went to Canterbury, where they ordered Thomas to absolve the bishops, and since he refused, they killed him. The assassination provoked a violent reaction in England and in Rome. Henry appeased the Pope's indignation by revoking the Constitutions of Clarendon and swearing to restore to Canterbury the property he had confiscated. But since the crime had stirred up a revolt, in which the King's wife and sons also took part, he hastened to England, where, humbling himself before the martyr's tomb, he made a public act of repentance. In the end the rebels yielded, and the question of the ecclesiastical courts was settled by reserving cases of treason to the lay courts. In the Council of Northampton (1176) the King renounced many of his claims, but the right of patronage of ecclesiastical benefices, elsewhere subject to canon law, remained here within the competence of the royal authority.

The Crusading movement did not have in England, as in other countries, the participation of the masses, because the Roman and Mediterranean civilization of which it was an expression had been accepted only in part and rather superficially by the English mentality. There were only individual departures, and among these the most famous was that of King Richard the Lionheart. During his absence the State was governed by the archbishop of Canterbury Hubert Walter, who governed with great wisdom, relying preferably on the middle classes of the towns and the countryside. With John Lackland a new dissension disturbed the relations between the Crown and the Church. The right to elect the archbishop of Canterbury was disputed among the monks of that abbey, the bishops and the King. Innocent III, to whom the decision was referred, seized upon a fourth party, appointing a candidate of his own, Stephen Langton, who had long resided in Rome. John refused to recognize him. The Pope launched the interdict and a year later excommunicated the King and declared him deposed. John had to yield, receive Langton and acknowledge himself a vassal of the Church. The archbishop was later the organizer of the barons' movement that imposed on the King the promulgation of Magna Carta.

A new spirit penetrated the religious world with the missions of the Mendicant Orders. While the parish priests were generally incapable of preaching, the prelates absorbed in their work as state officials and the monks despised for their corruption, the Dominicans and above all the Franciscans, as those who did not withdraw to guard their faith but courageously faced the world to purify it and spread it, found a very wide following among the popular classes and poor students. Champions of a cultural rebirth, the Franciscans gave new life to the University of Oxford, flourishing again under the guidance of Bishop Robert Grosseteste, who had among his collaborators Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon (later the Order gave to scholasticism Duns Scotus and William of Ockham). The Franciscans and Dominicans too then gradually departed from the Rule, and in the 14th century became two rich and powerful corporations, hated by the secular clergy as by the followers of Wyclif, who saw in those friars their most formidable rivals. Until the end of the century they were still sustained by popular sympathy, but later the movement of the Protestant Reformation found them without friends.

II. FROM THE "REFORMATION" TO THE CATHOLIC RECOVERY

Henry III was lavish in favors to the Church, but in England a sentiment of hostility toward Rome began to spread, because of the tithes demanded during the struggle with Frederick II and above all because of the ever greater extension given by the Holy See to the use of provisors (Italian abbots to whom English benefices not yet vacant were assigned and who, when such benefices became vacant, continued to hold them by means of vicars, and collected their revenues without moving from Italy). New clashes occurred between the Crown and the papacy in 1296, when Boniface VIII with the bull Clericis laicos forbade the clergy to pay taxes without papal consent. While Edward I ordered the seizure of the Church's property, a split occurred in the English clergy: the regulars supported Rome, the seculars of the parishes sided with the King. The dispute was composed, but it was born to the prestige of the Church. Even more serious blows it had to suffer in the course of the 14th century. While the formation of Parliament was taking shape, here, unlike what happened in the Estates General of France, no estate of the clergy came into being. A few abbots and bishops sat in the Upper House but in their capacity as barons, and the great majority of the secular and regular clergy remained outside Parliament, decisions concerning tithes being taken in the Convocations of Canterbury and of York. Thus later the lower clergy was not represented in the Commons. In this way the Church could more easily preserve its wealth and privileges, but it isolated itself from the political life of the country and was more exposed to attacks when Protestantism began to spread. To restore its former prestige radical reforms would have been needed, but the papacy was too ill informed about its needs, and the direct dependence of the monks on the Pope limited the freedom of action of the bishops. On the other hand the high prelates were statesmen far more useful to the king than to the Church. This crisis unfortunately coincided with the Avignon period and with the Hundred Years' War. Among the English, the residence of the Holy See in France and its close ties with their enemy provoked a nationalist reaction, and to many of them obedience to a universal authority began to appear irreconcilable with the particular interests of the country. The expression of this hostility was the Statute of Provisors, which forbade English subjects, and especially the clergy, to pay taxes or revenues of benefices outside the Kingdom. Moreover, since the dispute over the ecclesiastical courts kept reviving, in 1353 Edward III promulgated the statute known as Praemunire, which equated with treason the recourse of an English subject to a foreign jurisdiction or his acceptance of it.

The very sad conditions of the lower clergy explain the initial success of John Wyclif, with his preaching for a return to evangelical poverty. When he fell into heresy by denying Transubstantiation and the real presence in the Eucharist, and, condemned, repudiated the authority of the Pope, the King intervened and forced the masters of Oxford to disown him. At first the knights and the Commons, who looked with hostile eyes on the wealth of the Church, disapproved of the King's conduct, but after the peasants' revolt, when the ruling classes realized that the followers of Wyclif threatened property no less than orthodoxy, Parliament voted the statute De haeretico comburendo (1401) which was applied with merciless rigor. It should be borne in mind that the malcontents, in this century and the next, intended to correct what they regarded as errors of the Church but did not think of leaving it. For a long time still the great majority of the English remained faithful to Catholic dogma.

Henry VIII began his reign by continuing the repression of heretics, and his confutation of Luther's theses earned him from the Pope the title of defensor fidei. But after, having been denied by Rome the divorce from Catherine of Aragon and having nonetheless married Anne Boleyn, he was excommunicated by the Pope, he had Parliament approve the Act of Supremacy, which made the king the sole and supreme head of the English Church. Few prelates refused to adhere to the schism: among these the bishop St. John Fisher (v.), who, like St. Thomas More (v.), preferred the scaffold to abjuration. If the ease with which the separation from Rome was accepted can be attributed to that national passion already born in the 14th century, the attribution to the sovereign of the highest religious authority can be explained only by less objective motives, such as the desire for peace, indifference and fear. It should be considered moreover that the minor clergy, very poor, did not dislike being transformed into a body of state officials. Only the monks refused to swear; and this allowed the government to deliberate the desired confiscation of monastic property, while a great number of friars were sent to death. And the sale of these properties created a class of landowners who supported the king's policy, because the security of their new property was bound up with it. Having satisfied his personal ambition, Henry VIII believed he could preserve an English Catholicism that differed from the Roman one only because it was governed by the king instead of by the pope, and in the Six Articles of the Statute of 1539 he confirmed the principal dogmas of the Church and prescribed the celibacy of priests. He admitted no Protestant deviation and fought heretics and sent them to death without mercy. After Henry's death, during the brief reign of Edward VI (1547-53) and the regency of the duke of Somerset, Protestantism increased its diffusion and obtained the revocation of the laws against heretics, the legitimization of the marriage of priests and the publication of the Prayer Book of the schismatic archbishop Cranmer, a book that was made obligatory for all the English Churches by an "act of uniformity" voted by Parliament.

The accession to the throne of Mary (1553), daughter of Henry VIII's first wife, was welcomed by Catholics as a liberation, because her ardent faith and her unshakable fidelity to the Church were well known. She met at first with the favor of the majority, weary of a regime that, under the pretext of correcting ecclesiastical rites, alternated confiscations and capital executions. Even her first decisions, to reestablish the Mass and to expel married priests, encountered no obstacles. But Mary's most serious error was her marriage to Philip II, king of Spain, vainly dissuaded from it by the Catholic bishop Gardiner. Although the marriage contract contained clauses that guaranteed the independence of English policy, this marriage aroused discontent and suspicion in the people. Nonetheless, when Philip went to London he was well received; and festive welcomes were given to the pontifical legate card. Pole, sent to consecrate the return of the Church to the obedience of the Pope, also because the Pope had promised the purchasers of ecclesiastical property to maintain them in possession. But this Catholic restoration had no lasting effects, because there was lacking in England that rebirth of religious sentiment which elsewhere assured the success of the Counter-Reformation. And when Philip returned to Spain, Mary, left alone, against the opinion of the Spaniards themselves who advised her prudence, restored the laws against heretics and began a merciless and bloody repression. Hundreds of Protestants were sent to the stake, and since they were for the most part common people, hatred against the Queen and against the Spaniards spread among the masses, becoming more violent when England, in violation of the commitments assumed at the time of the marriage, was dragged by Philip II into the war against France and lost Calais there. In her last days Mary found herself abandoned by everyone, because even Paul IV, then in conflict with Spain, had taken sides against her.

With Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, there was a partial return to his policy. In 1559 Parliament approved the Act of Supremacy, which rejected the authority of the Pope (but the Queen did not wish to accept the title of supreme head of the Church), and the Act of Uniformity, which declared the Prayer Book the only legal form of worship. Elizabeth cared nothing for religion except insofar as it could constitute an instrument or a hindrance to monarchical power. She therefore took a middle way, thwarting the attempts of the Lords to introduce amendments in a Catholic sense, disregarding the resolutions of the Convocation of Canterbury which reaffirmed the supremacy of the pope and Catholic dogma, but making no concession to Lutheranism. The Anglican confession, whose principles were fixed in the 39 articles of 1563, preserved the medieval organization, excluding any lay representation in ecclesiastical assemblies, but denied the freedom and supremacy of the Church in the face of the State, whether the latter were founded, as for Rome, on the direct derivation of the priesthood from God, or drew its legitimation from a religious democracy, according to the theories of Geneva.

In Scotland the French military occupation and the government of Mary of Guise, regent for the young Mary Stuart married to the dauphin of France, made the Catholic party unpopular, while the Protestants, led by John Knox, were able to set themselves up as champions of national independence. The support of English arms, the death of Mary of Guise and the evacuation of the French troops made the Calvinists prevail. But when Mary Stuart returned to Scotland, the discontent created by the demagogic intransigence of the Presbyterians would perhaps have allowed her to win her battle against Knox, had she known how, like Elizabeth, to subordinate her personal passions to political interests. Her frivolity, however, assured the triumph of the Presbyterians.

In Ireland the violent imposition of Anglicanism, while it failed to destroy Catholicism, dug an unbridgeable gulf between the Irish and the English. The monasteries, the only centers of education and culture, were suppressed without being replaced by schools and universities; ritual texts (Bible and Prayer Book) written in English were imposed. The island was invaded by British adventurers who treated it as a land of conquest and a colony of exploitation, and while these considered themselves the possessors of a supreme racial supremacy, in the Irish hatred of England fused together religious enthusiasm and patriotic passion.

In Elizabeth's religious policy two periods can be distinguished. For a decade the Catholics suffered no persecutions: many of them were kept in the state hierarchies, and the fines that the law imposed on those who did not attend Anglican services were rarely collected. Conditions changed after 1570: the excommunication launched by Pius V against Elizabeth, the impression produced by the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (24 Aug. 1572), the founding on the continent of seminaries intended to prepare the Catholic reconquest of England, and the penetration of Jesuit missionaries charged with spreading the principles of the Counter-Reformation on the island, allowed the ministers, more sectarian than the skeptical Queen, to gain the upper hand, once again exploiting the national spirit that saw in the Catholics the instruments of Spanish policy. Thus began a new period of ferocious persecutions and tortures and executions of presumed traitors: whereby the martyrology of the Church was enriched. But if circumstances had led Elizabeth to defend the interests of the Protestant nations against Philip II, even now she did not accept the democratization of the Church according to the Calvinist norm, and even the nonconformists were in great number tried and put to death.

The conditions of the Catholics in the last years of Elizabeth were very sad. Excluded from any local or national office; they could not leave their places of residence without a permit signed by the justice of the peace; priests and assistants at Masses could suffer the penalty of traitors. Therefore their hopes were rekindled when James I ascended the throne, whom they knew to be inclined to tolerance. But the new King offered the Catholics to abolish the fines on condition that they profess loyalty toward the King and not toward the Pope and that they renounce proselytism. The pact was refused. Agitations and plots followed, the most serious of which, called the "Gunpowder" plot (1605), provoked a bloody resumption of persecutions: even the provincial of the English Jesuits, Garnet, was executed, under the unproven accusation of having counseled the attack. The Catholics were also deprived of civil rights, declared incapable of practicing law and medicine, etc.

In the English Church three branches are now distinguished: the High Church, which accepts the Tudor Ritual; the Presbyterians, who remain in the Anglican Church in order to reform it; the Independents, who equally reject the Anglican episcopate and the Presbyterian synod and want no State Church of either the English or the Scottish type. James fought Presbyterians and Independents, many of whom emigrated to Holland and some to America.

Charles I relied on the High Church, but did not hide his sympathies for the Catholics, sympathies reinforced by the Catholic queen Henrietta. The repressive laws were no longer applied, and many, especially in the upper classes, returned to the religion of their fathers. But the political and religious struggles, in which the intervention of the Scottish Presbyterians and the revolt of the Independent Puritans of O. Cromwell led to the momentary triumph of the latter and to the martyrdom of the King, had disastrous consequences for the Catholics who had faithfully supported him throughout the civil war. Having become protector, Cromwell divided the ecclesiastical benefices among Presbyterians and Independents, succeeding in reconciling the various Puritan sects; he allowed the Anglicans to use the Prayer Book while not officially permitting it; toward the Catholics too he practiced a certain tolerance. But in rebellious Ireland he adopted the cruelest methods of repression: he was able to break its resistance, not to bring down its faith. By expropriating the Catholic landowners and completing the destruction of the lay nobility, he brought it about that the Irish people had no other leaders than the persecuted priests, and he further inflamed their religious passion and national hatred.

With the return of the Stuarts, Parliament re-established the supremacy of the High Church, ordering the persecution of dissenters (Clarendon Code, 1661) and restoring the obligation of the Prayer Book (Act of Uniformity, 1662). Charles II would have wished to favor Catholics, but in the early years he did not succeed in overcoming the resistance of Parliament, which was equally hostile to Catholics and to Puritans. After 1667, when the ministry known as the "Cabal" governed, Charles decided to resort to the help of France: in 1670 the Treaty of Dover was concluded, by which the two powers agreed on the partition of the Netherlands and, in a secret article, on the restoration of Catholicism in England. Once again an English sovereign committed the error of seeking a solution to the religious problem in agreements with foreigners, something that English public opinion would never have approved; without considering that Gallican "nationalism" was also opposed by the Holy See. The reaction of Parliament forced the King to break the alliance and to accept in 1673 the Test Act, which excluded Catholics from every kind of office. In 1678 the anti-Catholics contrived the unworthy trick of the false Popish Plot of Titus Oates, which brought other innocents to the scaffold. On his deathbed Charles II openly professed his Catholic faith.

With James II took place the last attempt at Catholic restoration. Having suppressed a revolt of Puritans, the King freed Catholics from the prohibitions of the Test Act, giving them civil and military offices and forming an army reinforced by contingents brought over from Ireland. This policy was not entirely approved even by the Catholics, who, understanding that to reconquer supremacy it would have been necessary to resort to foreign arms and to civil war, and that in any case England would have suffered that hegemony of Louis XIV which was beginning to worry the Holy See as well, limited their aspirations to the attainment of full religious toleration. But although the repercussions of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made James's action ever more difficult and dangerous, he persevered in it tenaciously, attacking the High Church, from which he took many benefices to give them to Catholics. In the struggle between the King and the Anglican Church both sides sought the support of the dissenters: the one offering them religious freedom and civil equality with a "declaration of indulgence," the other a concession of toleration sanctioned by decree of Parliament. The dissenters, both because of their traditional preference for parliamentary power over royal power and because of fear of a Catholic despotism, placed themselves on the side of the Church. When, after the birth of his son, the King obliged the clergy to read the "Declaration of Indulgence" from their pulpits and had some bishops who had protested prosecuted for sedition, the jury acquitted them, and the political leaders provoked the intervention of William of Orange. William III established a regime of relative toleration, and while he confirmed the decrees that excluded dissenters from state functions, he granted them freedom of worship, though he did not succeed in his attempt to bring the more moderate elements back into the Anglican Church. Nothing similar could the Catholics obtain, because their cause was for a long time identified with that of the Jacobite pretenders, who on several occasions preferred to renounce success rather than adhere to Anglicanism. In practice, however, English Catholics enjoyed a certain freedom of worship, and the penal laws were not applied to them except when more serious attempts at a Jacobite rising occurred. Ireland, on the other hand, continued to be tormented, its industrial and commercial activities reduced to ruin, and thousands of citizens forced to emigrate beyond the Atlantic.

III. THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL

In the second half of the eighteenth century there began to manifest itself the profound spiritual unease of all those who, while repelled by the disintegrating individualism and the often somewhat hypocritical austerity of Puritanism, did not find the satisfaction of their religious aspirations in the cold rationalism of the Anglican Church — a State Church, a Church of a purely aristocratic class, which with its political privileges and its educational monopoly was increasingly losing all contact with the people. But the attempts to reform Anglicanism from within had met with no success, because they had run up against an insurmountable barrier of established interests. The movement of John Wesley, which at the outset had not proposed to create a schism, had in the end created a new dissenting sect, the Methodists, who, seeing in the Catholics their most formidable competitors, were the most tenacious opponents of their emancipation.

The signal for a Catholic resurgence came from Ireland. After the internal struggles that bloodied the island in 1798, in 1800 its union with England was proclaimed. In approving that decree, the Irish had been promised the right for Catholics to elect and be elected to the English Parliament; but the personal opposition of George III nullified the promise. This provoked the formation of a League of Irish Catholics, which was presided over by Daniel O'Connell. In England too many now recognized their just claim, because in this way the union had deprived the Irish of any representation. But the Catholics had determined opponents in the London cabinet, the most powerful of whom was the minister Peel. For some years Ireland was threatened by a new civil war between the Catholic League and the Protestants of Ulster. Finally the minister Wellington, personally not hostile to the Catholics, convinced the King of the necessity of preventing further struggles; and in 1829 the Act of Emancipation was passed, which restored to Catholics all civil and political rights. The only restriction that remained was the obligation for the sovereign to profess Anglicanism. In 1871 the monopoly of higher education was abolished and the universities were opened to students of any denomination.

The emancipation of the Catholics was followed by a strong religious revival. The Oxford movement, which arose in 1833, began by fighting Methodism and Catholicism, but many of its adherents ended up returning to the Roman Church, such as John Newman, who converted in 1845 and received the cardinal's purple in 1879. Another illustrious convert was Henry Manning, named cardinal in 1875.

In England the Pope re-established the Catholic hierarchy in 1850, in Scotland in 1878.

In 1895 Catholics were authorized by the Holy See to attend English universities. And from the following year dates the bull Apostolicae curae of Leo XIII, which definitively declared Anglican Ordinations invalid (v.).

Roberto Palmarocchi

IV. LEGAL CONDITIONS OF THE CHURCH

The State, no longer able to disregard the very strong influence that the increased strength of the Catholic population exercised on public opinion, felt the need to establish regular relations once again, even if not by means of a concordat, with the Holy See and with the highest Catholic hierarchies existing in England. This need, which became more pressing during and immediately after the First World War, led in 1914 to the sending of an extraordinary minister plenipotentiary to Rome.

In this new atmosphere the Malines Conversations (v.) of 1921 became possible, between Cardinal Mercier and Lord Halifax, conversations which, although in themselves fruitless, were significant and provided direction.

In 1927, in fact, the English Parliament approved the "Catholic Relief Act." By this measure all the penal laws enacted up to that time against English Catholics were repealed, recognizing in them at the same time not only full juridical equality before the State with the other religious confessions, but also giving them the possibility of carrying on their public activity under the guarantee of the common law of all English citizens. In this way English Catholic citizens were recognized as having the possibility of acceding even to the highest offices of the State's juridical order, such as the magistracy, the legislature and the executive power, with the exception of the most representative ones, for example the Crown, etc.

In 1944, then, again by the English Parliament, following the conversion of the Minister of Education M. R. R. Butler, the Education Act was issued.

This measure, although not fully meeting the desires of Catholics, came to reward the strong and constant tenacity shown by them in supporting with their own resources alone the enormous expenses indispensable for the maintenance of schools capable of enabling those Catholics, who did not wish to complete their studies by entering the national system, thoroughly pervaded as it naturally was by the Anglican spirit, to form a right and true education.

By means of this measure the English State assures its own contribution, to the extent of 50%, toward the support of the expenses for the schools controlled by Catholics. And this differently from Scotland, where the government assumes all school expenses.

However, the English government, in offering its contribution, has placed the elementary schools under its control, not fully respecting the right of parents regarding the education to be given to their children and attempting to impose religious instruction in all schools, by means of an "Agreed Syllabus" that is not fully acceptable even to the Anglican Church.

But the pressure of Catholics on English public opinion was not limited to making itself felt in the internal sphere of the State alone, but was such as to put the government under the necessity of moving toward greater regularity in diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The diplomatic representative who, with the rank of minister, represents the English Nation at the Holy See, became permanent, and the Holy See, in its turn, on 21 Nov. 1938 sent an apostolic delegate to England.

Finally, as a symptom of particular importance regarding the consideration in which the Catholic current of the population is held in English public opinion, one must emphasize not only the numerous visits made by English heads of government to the Holy Father in the last years of this half-century, from the visit to His Holiness Pius XI, made by Chamberlain and Halifax, respectively prime minister and foreign minister, in 1938, to the private audience with His Holiness Pius XII, requested by a British parliamentary delegation made up of elements belonging to different parties (11 Jan. 1949). On 3 May of the same year there was then an audience granted to Sir Stafford Cripps, at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his consort, accompanied by the first secretary of the British Legation at the Holy See, and, finally, on the following 11 May, the audience with Princess Margaret, second-born of George VI of Great Britain, accompanied by the representative of England at the Holy See.

On the occasion of the centenary of the re-establishment of the Hierarchy (1850-1950), English Catholics gathered around 6 cardinals, 12 archbishops, 46 bishops to commemorate the most auspicious date with functions, conferences and an exhibition that illustrated its value. Pius XII, in addition to a letter (16 Dec. 1950) to the Archbishop of Westminster, in which he expressed his satisfaction at the conquests achieved: the greater esteem for Catholicism, the many churches erected or restored to their former splendor, the schools and institutes opened and increasingly frequented, the increase of the clergy, the union of the flock with their pastors, wished on 1 Oct., speaking by radio to the faithful gathered in Wembley Stadium, to remind them of the saints of the ancient pre-Reformation English Church, the martyrs and the whole host of priests and laymen who fed the flickering flame of the faith in the following period, and to invite them to an ever more effective work in all fields, made of love and understanding (L'Osservatore Romano, 26 Oct. and 1 Nov. 1950).

Francesco Ercolani

V. THE ENGLISH MARTYRS

This is the name given to those English Catholics who suffered martyrdom during the persecutions unleashed under Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I, Charles I, the Republic of O. Cromwell, and Charles II, from 1535 (in which year took place the execution of J. Fisher, bishop of Rochester and cardinal, and of the chancellor T. More) to 1681 (which brought the execution of O. Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh). Their number is very great (all the more so if one adds those who perished in prisons); but not for all of them do we today possess the historical documents necessary to prove martyrdom; therefore not all were inscribed in the list of those for whom the cause of beatification was promoted.

This cause had various vicissitudes, which can be summarized as follows: a first series of 54, headed by J. Fisher and T. More, "who had suffered death for the Catholic Faith and the Primacy of the Supreme Pontiff over the whole Church, from 1535 to 1583, and whose martyrdom had been formally depicted in fresco by Nicolò Cerciani, by authority of Gregory XIII, in the church of S. Stefano al Celio, and again, with the permission of the same Pope, had been frescoed by the same painter in the English church of the Most Holy Trinity in Rome and then in 1584, with the Pope's privilege, engraved on a copper plate, with an attached legend," received from Leo XIII the confirmation of cult on 29 Dec. 1886 (cf. Acta Sanctae Sedis, 19 [1886], pp. 347-350). Gregory XIII, in fact, between 1580 and 1585, had granted in their honor "vivace vocis oraculo" certain privileges of public and ecclesiastical cult, especially that their relics might be used in the consecration of altars, should it not be possible to obtain relics of ancient holy martyrs. A second group of 9, martyred in the same span of time, likewise received the confirmation of cult from the same Pontiff on 13 May 1895 (cf. ibid., 27 [1894-1895], pp. 746-47). Benedict XV beatified on 25 May 1920 the archbishop O. Plunkett (AAS, 12 [1920], pp. 235-40). Pius XI beatified another 136 of them, on 15 Dec. 1929 (ibid., 22 [1930], pp. 38-39) and separately, on 22 Dec. 1929, the Jesuit J. Ogilvie, martyred in Scotland (ibid., 22 [1930], pp. 40-42). For another 116 venerables the process of beatification is still under way.

Gathering the long series of all these martyrs according to the different epochs of their martyrdom, they are counted as follows: 50 under Henry VIII (1535-44); 180 under Elizabeth (1570-1603); 27 under James I (1603-18); 24 under Charles I (1628-46); 2 during the Republic of O. Cromwell (1631-54); 25 under Charles II (1678-81). It should be added that another 44 were "deferred," pending further valid documentation, by the Sacred Congregation of Rites on 9 Dec. 1886 (cf. Acta Sanctae Sedis, 19 [1886], pp. 460-64).

One very important observation remains to be added: all these martyrs were condemned to death as "guilty of high treason," because the laws created by the persecutors, beginning with Henry VIII, inflicted that infamous appellation, followed by the death penalty, on those who denied to the king or to his heirs the title and dignity of Supreme Head of the Church of England (cf. State's Paper, 26, Henry VIII, chap. 13). This was a cunning attempt to substitute, before the people, the political motive for the religious motive, an attempt to point out for public execution, as rebels against authority and conspirators against the security of the State, those who, instead, according to the precept of the Gospel and the voice of conscience, intended to obey God first and the state authority afterward, because in this case it was not a matter of the Kingdom of E. and of the succession to the throne, but of affirming or denying an unshakable dogma of the faith: the spiritual primacy of the supreme pontiff over all the faithful, to whatever nation they may belong. Therefore, instead of traitors, "the English martyrs — Pius XI explicitly points out — can be defined as the Martyrs of Catholicism, indeed, more distinctly, of the Catholic Church, of the Roman character, of the papal character of this Church. The duel was posed between the rights of Caesar and the rights of God; and those martyrs died proclaiming the rights of Caesar, indeed professing for them their respect: but they were nobly intractable when an attempt was made to subordinate to those rights the rights of God, which are identified with the rights of the Church, with the rights of the Vicar of Jesus Christ" (L'osservatore romano, 9-10 Dec. 1929, p. 1).

VI. ECCLESIASTICAL ORGANIZATION

At present the ecclesiastical circumscriptions consist of 6 metropolitan sees and 20 suffragan sees, distributed as follows: 1st BIRMINGHAM (Sept. 29, 1850, metropolitan Oct. 28, 1911), with the suffragans: CLIFTON (Sept. 29, 1850), PLYMOUTH (Sept. 29, 1850), SHREWSBURY (Sept. 29, 1850); 2nd CARDIFF (formerly Newport, Sept. 29, 1850; name changed and made a metropolis Feb. 7, 1916), with the suffragan MENEVIA (May 12, 1898); 3rd GLASGOW (6th century, metropolitan 1492, vacant from 1603, re-established as an archbishopric March 4, 1878, metropolitan May 25, 1947), with the suffragans: MOTHERWELL (May 25, 1947), PAISLEY (May 25, 1947); 4th LIVERPOOL (Sept. 29, 1850, metropolitan Oct. 28, 1911) with the suffragans: HEXHAM and NEWCASTLE (the former: 678, without bishops from 861, re-established Sept. 29, 1850, Newcastle added May 23, 1861); LANCASTER (Nov. 22, 1924), LEEDS (Nov. 22, 1924), MIDDLESBROUGH (Dec. 20, 1878), SALFORD (Sept. 29, 1850); 5th ST ANDREW AND EDINBURG (10th century, metropolitan 1472, vacant from 1571, re-established March 4, 1878), with the suffragans: ABERDEEN (1125, vacant from 1577, re-established March 4, 1878), ARGYLL AND THE ISLES (1200, vacant from 1579, re-established March 4, 1878), DUNKEL (1115, vacant from 1586, re-established March 4, 1878), GALLOWAY (4th century, vacant from 1558, re-established March 4, 1878); 6th WESTMINSTER (Sept. 29, 1850), with the suffragans: BRENTWOOD (July 20, 1917), NORTHAMPTON (Sept. 29, 1850), NOTTINGHAM (Sept. 29, 1850), PORTSMOUTH (May 19, 1882), SOUTHWARK (Sept. 29, 1850).

The series just outlined shows how in Ireland, strictly speaking, following an English law that forbade the representatives of the Catholic hierarchy to assume a territorial title held by an Anglican bishop, the Holy See, in reconstructing the hierarchy, had to avoid the ancient titles existing at the time of the so-called "Reformation" and preserved by the Anglican Church. In Scotland, on the other hand, the re-established sees are almost all the ancient ones, suppressed during the period of the "Reformation."

VII. CATHOLIC CULTURAL AND SOCIAL ACTIVITIES

As Catholicism came to number among its ranks, alongside the few aristocratic and landed-gentry families and the working-class masses, an ever-growing number of people belonging to the middle classes and holding positions of responsibility, there also grew the need for a press of its own inspired by its doctrines, capable of countering the objections and prejudices that were slow and difficult to dispel. For a wider diffusion among the faithful, weeklies serve admirably: The Universe, founded in 1860; The Catholic Times (1867) and The Catholic Herald (1884); to these one may link the activity of the Catholic Trust Society, begun in 1884, which, well equipped, launches onto the market thousands upon thousands of pamphlets of doctrine, controversy, history, devotion, apologetics (about two million pamphlets a year). For more cultivated readers the periodical press is numerous: Dublin Review, a quarterly, Anglo-Irish (1836); The Tablet, a weekly (1840); The Month, founded in 1864, directed by the Jesuits; The Downside (1882), directed by the Benedictines; Blackfriars (1931), directed by the Dominicans; The Clergy Review (1931), directed by the secular clergy.

Eminent Catholics have not been lacking in the literary field, besides Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Wiseman; for example: J. Lingard, J. E. E. D. Acton, G. K. Chesterton, H. Belloc, G. M. Hopkins, F. Thomson. Today at least 150 university chairs are held by Catholics.

In the field of social institutions, to limit ourselves to the most universal, mention should be made, besides the Catholic and scouting associations, of: the hospitals, the homes for abandoned or neglected children, for unmarried mothers, the mentally deficient, the incurable, the dying, the blind, the deaf-mutes, all under a general committee (Catholic Child Welfare Council), which is charged with representing Catholic opinion within the general committee (National Council of Associated Children's House), which includes the general committees for Anglicans, Jews, etc.; the Catholic Social Guide (1909), which promotes parish and university study circles, trains speakers and apologists, assists converts; the Catholic Evidence Guild, with apologetic, philosophical and theological open-air preaching; the Catholic Young Christian Workers Society (1935), for men and women, for assistance to workers, which launches the Catholic Workers Movement, for the defense of the family and of workers; the Sword of the Spirit (1940), to cooperate with parish priests and bishops in any work useful to the parish and the diocese.

Celestino Testore

IV. LITERATURE.

The Anglo-Saxon conquest of England is traditionally held to culminate in the year 449 A.D., which is also the official date of the beginning of English literature. A more important and better established fact of English history and culture is the conversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons, the work of Augustine and his monks (597). The first literary figure of note is that of the Venerable Bede, in whose Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (written, like all his works, in Latin) mention is made of the first Anglo-Saxon poet, Caedmon, a monk, an inspired author of religious hymns, to whom, however, only a few verses that Bede records translated into Latin can be attributed with certainty (Caedmon's poetic activity takes place between 660 and 670).

The most distinguished document of the poetry of this era is Beowulf, an epic poem set in a Scandinavian milieu, probably composed around 740 by an unknown author. Characteristics of the poem are the mixture of Christian and pagan elements and, technically, the alliterative verse and the habitual use of metaphor (kenning). The characters in it have an embryonically symbolic character (the struggle between good, embodied by the hero, and evil, embodied by the monsters he fights), and this work already bears witness to that predilection for allegory and didacticism that marks the Middle Ages in general and medieval English poetry in particular. More directly Christian in inspiration are the religious poems of Cynewulf (early 9th century) and other similar ones that have come down under his name but are of doubtful attribution. None of them, however, possesses the poetic vigor and suggestive power of Beowulf. More original is an anonymous short poem entitled The dream of the Rood, the first of those "visions" of which other examples are not lacking in medieval English poetry.

The most notable document of Anglo-Saxon prose is represented by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the work of the greatest of the English sovereigns of the era, King Alfred (849-901), and of his collaborators and successors, which, starting from the origins of the Christian era, reaches the middle of the 12th century.

After the Norman conquest (1066) the linguistic structure of the country undergoes such modifications as to produce in substance a new language, Middle English, very rich in French contributions and far more fluid and flexible than Anglo-Saxon. This, however, does not give rise to a subservience of literature, which on the contrary keeps its original and native characteristics quite distinct. The process of linguistic transformation is slow and uneven, so much so that various dialects arise from it, one of which, the so-called east-midland, in the end prevails, rising to the dignity of a national language. It is the period in which there slowly matures (by a slower process than in the Latin countries) that national literature in the true sense of the word which had its greatest representative, in the full fourteenth century, in Chaucer. A separate mention is deserved, not only for the effectiveness it had and the diffusion it enjoyed down to the "Reformation," but also for specific qualities of language and style, by the mystical literature in prose and verse of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The anonymous Ancrene rivile (early 13th century), Rolle's The form of living, Hilton's The ladder of perfection and Treatise of mixed life, the anonymous The cloud of unknowing, attest to the remarkable progress made in the course of the era by English prose. The same cannot be said of the prose of the heretic John Wyclif (ca. 1330-84), the first who translated the entire Bible into English, who was not aware of the developments of devotional prose in the vernacular, and whose fortune is later than the "Reformation," of which he came to be considered a precursor.

The major poet of the fourteenth century in England is Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1340-1400). He welcomes into his own work the best classical and medieval literary tradition and inscribes within it a healthy and straightforward verism. Uninhibited and even all too frank in the representation of the customs and vices of his own era, he nevertheless remains fully orthodox, nor are religious and edifying themes lacking in his major work, The Canterbury tales, drawn not only from the chivalric repertoire but also from the hagiographic and ecclesiastical one. The knowledge of Italian culture and of Italy meant for Chaucer the enrichment and maturation of his own style, aligning itself with his previous experience of French chivalric and allegorical poetry. He was also, in his own way, a scholar and a humanist in possession of a vast and solid, even if disparate and heterogeneous, knowledge of classical and European culture. Alongside Chaucer, John Gower (1330?-1408) deserves to be remembered, an eclectic versifier in English, French and Latin, a poet of no marked personality, but refined and cultured. A far more significant figure is that of William Langland (1330?-1400?), whose allegorical and social poem, The vision concerning Piers the Plowman, links up, also technically, since it is written in alliterative verse, with the Anglo-Saxon "visions."

To the same period belongs a good number of popular ballads, some of them on historical subjects, which were collected for the first time by Percy in 1765 in: Reliques of ancient English poetry. A vast production of romances arose around the traditional cycles treated in the major European literatures and originally in France and Provence: Charlemagne and his paladins, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, the deeds of Alexander the Great, of Thebes and of Troy. The Arthurian cycle, which enjoyed a special fortune in E., draws its inspiration from the accounts contained in the Historia Regum Britanniae (in Latin) of Bishop Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1140). To this cycle belongs: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, composed probably around 1370, in alliterative verse. It is the finest of the English cantari, admirable for vividness of representation and depth of content. To the same author is attributed the allegorical poem The Pearl, another "vision" preserved in the same manuscript, also composed in alliterative verse. The obligatory themes and conventional codes of chivalric romance provoked a reaction in Chaucer himself (v. the Tale of Sir Thopas, a satire of the knight errant), which he had nevertheless himself treated. It nevertheless received a kind of retrospective rehabilitation with Sir Thomas Malory, in the honeyed and almost decadent prose of his Morte d'Arthur (c. 1470), which was among the very first books printed in England (in 1485, edited by William Caxton); Tennyson made use of it for his Idylls of the King (1859-85).

The typical allegorism of English medieval lyric (which traces back, already in the full Renaissance, to Spenser) is matched by the equally typical symbolism of the drama (which can still be traced in the structure of the plays of Marlowe and of Shakespeare himself). In E., as elsewhere, the drama is born in the form of the sacred representation, and more precisely of the miracle, which has its origin in the liturgy itself and presents scenes drawn from the sacred texts and from the lives and legends of the saints, and of the morality, a type of drama more abstractive and psychological, in which allegorical conflicts of personified virtues and vices are represented. As an example of the former, the Secunda Pastorum is remembered, datable to the second half of the 14th century and belonging to the group of the so-called Towneley plays. It presents a characteristic mixture of sacred elements with comic touches and social themes, and a notable characterization of the characters. As an example of the latter, Everyman (15th century) is cited, in which the intimate conflicts of man in the face of death are vigorously represented. Finally, among the documents of English prose of the late Middle Ages, let us recall the picturesque and fantastic Mandeville's Travels (Mandeville is a pseudonym and the travels were written originally in French), the Paston Letters (a private correspondence written between 1440 and 1446), the Book of Faith (1456) of Bishop Reginald Pecock, a confutation of Wyclif and the Lollards, which is also of linguistic interest. The language of the learned continues to be Latin, which is also the official language of the University of Oxford, founded in the 13th century and dominated from the outset by the figure of the friar Roger Bacon, philosopher and scientist of European fame, and in a certain sense the founder of English empiricism.

Humanism penetrates late into E. and is strongly affected by the causes and effects of the Schism. Petrarchism was introduced into E. by the two courtly poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (the latter beheaded by order of Henry VIII). Their verses (for the most part imitated or translated from Petrarch) appear in Tottel's Miscellany, which is the first regular English anthology (1557). Surrey modified the Petrarchan sonnet into the scheme that was adopted by Shakespeare and took its name from him (three quatrains and a rhymed couplet)

but it was also called the English sonnet because of the fortune it enjoyed in E. (Milton, however, in his sonnets adopted the Italian model). Wyatt, translating two cantos of the Aeneid, made use for the first time of "blank verse", that is, an iambic pentameter or unrhymed decasyllable which enjoyed such fortune as to become the official verse of English drama (it was adopted by Sackville and Norton in what may be considered the first regular English tragedy: Gorboduc, performed in 1561) and then, with Milton, of the epic poem. A fortune, in short, equal if not greater than that of the Italian unrhymed hendecasyllable.

But the most distinguished humanists of the age were Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, who learned Greek in Italy and introduced it into the University of Oxford; John Colet, who founded the first school of classical studies in London; Erasmus, who lived and studied and taught for a long time in E. and, greatest of all, the congenial friend of Erasmus, Thomas More (1478-1535). The latter, as is well known, after a most brilliant literary and political career, having refused to subscribe, in his capacity as Lord Chancellor, to the Act of Supremacy of Henry VIII, was condemned to death and serenely faced martyrdom. The Church has made him a saint (1935). The best known of his writings, the Utopia (which he wrote, moreover, in Latin), proposes a theoretical State founded on reason alone and which does not correspond (as some distinguished critics, among them Sargent and Shafer, have rightly pointed out) to More's religious and political ideal: a State, in short, which, in the author's intentions (and in conformity with the traditional character of the English utopia) must serve more as a warning than as a model (nor should it be forgotten that some parts of the Utopia are pure digression and literary amusement). The renewed interest in the classics is also attested by the numerous translations, some of which are excellent. Thomas North translates Plutarch from the French of Amyot (1579), giving material for inspiration to Shakespeare for his Roman plays; Philemon Holland translates Pliny, Livy, Suetonius and Xenophon (beginning of the 17th century); John Florio, son of an Italian Protestant exiled in E., translates the Essais of Montaigne (1603) and writes Italian-English glossaries and phrasebooks; Il cortegiano (1561), Il gelinetto (1576) and other Italian treatises are translated, as are the Diana of Montemayor, the Divine Semaine of Du Bartas, the novellas of Bandello and of other Italian novellieri.

The "reform" possesses in the English Bible, or, as it was also called, the Bible of Cranmer, its most remarkable literary document. The translation is due in large part to the learned heretic William Tyndale, who adhered to Lutheranism before the official beginning of the English reform. From England he moved to Germany, where he had contacts with Luther himself, and there published in 1526 a version of the New Testament that was attacked by More. He then set about translating the Old Testament, and his version was well advanced when he was betrayed by an English companion, handed over to the troops of Charles V and burned as a heretic (1535). Literarily the version is of very great value, and its author possessed a perfect command of his own language and an exceptional talent in the use of metaphor. The translation was completed, after the Schism, by Miles Coverdale, under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer (who had sanctioned the annulment of Henry's marriage and the Act of supremacy), who later compiled and published under his own name the Book of common prayer (1548), which is still the official text of Anglican prayers. The definitive edition of the English Bible is the so-called "authorized version," published, under James I, in 1611. Its core consists of Tyndale's version, but it was prepared by a commission of fully fifty-two scholars. Its influence is evident throughout the whole course of English literature.

The tradition of medieval lyric poetry, Platonic and allegorical, continues in Spenser, a chivalric and humanistic poet at once. Alongside the Virgilian and bucolic Shepherd's calendar (1579), whose models are in Virgil and in Theocritus, he writes The faerie queue (1591), which is the quintessence of chivalric concepts, Platonic idealism and medieval allegory, while with the Amoretti (1595) he makes his own contribution to Petrarchism. His friend and contemporary Philip Sidney was another exemplary "courtier" and, as a poet, an exemplary champion of chivalric love. In his Defense of poesy, published posthumously, he leaves a typical document of Renaissance poetics, in Astrophel and Stella one of the most remarkable sequences of sonnets, and in the Arcadia the most refined pastoral novel of the age. Alongside it must be remembered Euphnes, or the anatomy of wit (1579), which is less a novel than a model of rhetoric, and which initiated in England the vogue of that highly elaborate prose, founded on the parallelism of phrases and periods, the frequent use of alliteration, the abuse of erudite and pedantic quotation, which from it came to be called "euphuism." An eloquent example of the contrast between humanistic ideals and Protestant rigor is offered by Roger Ascham, who, in his Scholemaster (1570), while exalting the Greeks and Romans, violently attacks not only Catholic Rome but also chivalric ideals (confuting, for example, Malory).

Meanwhile the theater, for which the English had an innate vocation, continues, perfects itself and finally emancipates itself, with the Elizabethan dramatists, from every convention and requirement that does not answer to its nature. Mention has already been made of Marlowe, the greatest of Shakespeare's precursors, who retains of the "morality" only the scheme, inserting into it individual conflicts and contrasts and titanic accents. Alongside him other theater professionals establish themselves, who in their dramas assert and impose on the public the characters and tendencies of the taste of the age: pseudo-Machiavellianism studded with exotic horrors, Stoicism in the manner of Seneca, which finds a perfect correspondence in Elizabethan customs and which spreads in England above all through the influence of Italian treatises, in the first place Giraldi Cinthio. The most typical tragedy in this sense is the Spanish tragedie of Thomas Kyd (1558-64), which sets unheard-of horrors and crimes in a conventional Spanish scenario. No less typical dramas are The white devil (or Vittoria Coronadora, 1612) and The duchess of Malfi (c. 1614) by John Webster. The anonymous Arden of Feversham (1586) is a powerful tragedy with an English setting that realistically stages an adultery. The first regular English comedy is Ralph Roister Doister (1553), an adaptation of Plautus's Miles gloriosus. The principal source of the historical dramas on English subjects, not only for Shakespeare but for all the Elizabethans, is Holinshed's Chronicle (1578).

In the works of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatic genius in the world, the English theatrical tradition reaches its ultimate summit. He represented and released on the stage universal forces, passions and conflicts, and, although he was not an innovator and accepted the models and sources of his time, he clearly surpassed all his contemporaries, who were often more prepared and culturally better equipped than he. In his dramas even measureless passions are inscribed within harmonious and skillful structures, and he possesses so perfect and superb a control of simile and metaphor, is so inexhaustible a creator of images, that he never falls into disproportion by sacrificing the parts to the whole. In Shakespeare's last dramas (and already in the so-called problem plays that belong to the poet's full maturity) the religious aspects of existence are more insistently and passionately investigated, considered and contemplated. This is true particularly of his last drama The tempest (whose evocative atmosphere recalls to Praz Dante's Purgatorio), a drama of purely Christian stamp and matter, to which the poet's return to the Catholic faith plausibly preludes (as was later asserted). Belloc indeed sees in the whole of Shakespeare's work the signs of its author's fundamental Catholic inspiration. The songs, the youthful short poems, the admirable sequence of the sonnets, represent almost a lyrical counterweight (and in the dramas as many evocative pauses) to the dramatic work of this genius, lights that better illuminate and set forth its greatness.

A celebrated author of well-constructed comedies of character was Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who in his works scrupulously observes the classical precepts. He is also the author of masques (spectacles composed of acting, music and dance, on mythological and allegorical subjects) and a refined lyric poet. Among the other dramatists of the period are remembered: George Chapman, John Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher (who wrote several plays in collaboration).

John Donne (1573-1631) is the founder of a tradition (rather than a school), that of the so-called "metaphysical" poets. The epithet is Dryden's, from whom Samuel Johnson took it up again and, especially in Johnson, it has rather the meaning of "fantastic" than that of mystical or religious. The case of Donne is singular: he is a mannerist of anti-rhetoric, his concettismo is founded far more on bold and syncopated metaphors and on bizarre allusions than, like euphuism, on parallelism and the other resources of rhetoric. Donne's conceits invest the content no less than the form of his verses. Donne and all the metaphysicals have been reappraised in recent times, especially through the work of the critic Grierson and of the poet T. S. Eliot, whose "imagism" consciously links back to metaphysical poetry on the one hand, to Elizabethan drama on the other. Donne was born a Catholic and remained one during his youth. In 1615 he was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church and from 1621 he was dean of St. Paul's in London. His sermons are among the most remarkable of the century. There is reflected in them, no less than in his verses, the restlessness and insatiability of an adventurous spirit troubled by the contrasts between nature and the supernatural world, contrasts strongly experienced in that era. Donne, like Ben Jonson but in different ways, represents a critical deepening of poetry, and this explains how S. Johnson arbitrarily and erroneously lumped together the two very different poets under the single label of "metaphysical." More specifically religious is, from its beginnings, the conceited lyric of Richard Crashaw, who had had a precursor in the Jesuit Robert Southwell (d. a martyr in 1595). Crashaw starts from the metaphysical tendency but comes closer than the others to continental concettismo (Gongorism and Marinism). Through the raptures and boldnesses of his imagination he anticipates the romantic poets (Shelley and, more recently, Francis Thompson). He became a Catholic, moved to Italy, where he was secretary to Card. Pallotta, and died at Loreto, in 1649. The major preachers of the period, besides Donne, are: Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, champions of Anglicanism and rationalist theologians, who are in reality already at the origins of deism and sensualism, champions rather of natural religion than of revealed religion.

The "essay," a literary composition that enjoyed an extraordinary fortune in E. and presides there over the birth of journalism, is well represented in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. In the Essayes of Francis Bacon it finds its complete form in a lucid and sober epigrammatic prose. Of the others it will suffice to remember Robert Burton (1577-1640), whose Anatomy of melancholy (1621) is rambling and pedantic, and strongly influenced by euphuism. More interesting in the subsequent period are the Religio medici (1643) of Thomas Browne, notable for its introspective qualities, and the writings of Izaak Walton who, alongside digression or divertissement (The compleat angler, 1653), cultivates for the first time the biographical genre (lives of Donne, of Herbert, etc.).

The 17th century has in John Milton (1608-74) its major poet. Milton, also in consideration of the numerous Italian sources he made use of, may be considered the last poet of the Renaissance in E. His controversial prose is considerable in bulk and in vigor. Milton's poetry is humanistic, idyllic and pastoral in the youthful poems, solemn and suggestively baroque in the masterpiece: Paradise lost (1667), speculative and almost unadorned in Paradise regained (1671), bitter and tragic in the last work, a tragedy of Greek and biblical inspiration together: Samson agonistes (1671). In the troubled spirit of this poet the two great facts already historically "settled" in his era, Renaissance and "Reformation," are characteristically interwoven (the English Bible too, it is well to remember, is a linguistically humanistic text). Although openly anti-Catholic, Milton was nevertheless not insensitive to the spirit of the Catholic Reformation (also through the influence of Tasso's poem), nor was he rigorously Protestant (he, for example, does not dispute but rather exalts the value of works for the purposes of the individual and social regeneration of mankind). And if he is a champion of freedom of thought, he is at the same time a most firm believer in original sin and in the necessity of redemption, which every education must set itself as its ultimate and supreme goal. He was less sensitive to the demands of revealed religion, though he had them clear in his mind, and he saw in Christ rather the vicar of God among men (he was a convinced millenarian) than their Redeemer, nor could he fully understand the value of the Passion, which in fact he refused to treat in poetry. His language is very rich in classical contributions. He was the last great English humanist, when the fortunes of Humanism were declining even in the countries of origin. His attention was entirely concentrated on sin and on the means of Redemption that were offered to man in the course of his individual and historical existence. Not for nothing does the archangel Michael set before Adam the various fortunes of his successors over the centuries, as the shade of Anchises had set before Aeneas the vicissitudes of Rome. A far more sober and rigorous expression of Puritanism is found in The Pilgrim's progress (1678), a sort of allegorical novel written for the purpose of edification and in a tone of devotion inspired by John Bunyan, of humble birth, and of no culture (his books were the Bible and the Protestant Martyrology of John Fox). He served under Cromwell and knew long years of prison during the Restoration. Clarity and composure of language make of the Pilgrim's progress a classic book of E. Its diffusion was enormous (in E. and in America, where it accompanied the first colonizers). It reflects in a spare but concise language reduced to the essential the inner torments, the intense faith and the real tribulations of this unshakeable Puritan believer.

The Restoration (1660-88) is literarily characterized by the academicism of John Dryden (1631-1700). He is the greatest man of letters of his era (to which some critics have assigned his name) and as such, although he certainly cannot be called a poet of inspiration, he had singular competences and talents. He wrote in his youth a panegyric on the occasion of Cromwell's death, but shortly afterward, in Astraea redux, acclaimed the advent of Charles II. In 1682 he defended the Anglican Church in Religio laici, but in 1686 he converted to Catholicism and justified his own conversion in the allegorical poem The hind and the panther. Following the revolution of 1688, having refused his oath, he was deprived of his offices and of the title of poet laureate, and from then on he knew no other conversions, whether political or religious, devoting himself to works of compilation and to translations of Greek, Latin and Italian classics. His versatility and the formal excellence of his verses assured him an undisputed fame until the advent of the romantics. S. Johnson, who admired him and celebrated him in one of his essays, attempted to justify even his political inconstancy by asserting that if he changed, he changed with his own country, and the final refusal to subscribe to the revolution of William of Orange helped to redeem his previous changes of direction.

Political satire, frequently treated also by Dryden, has its typical product in the long satirical poem in rhymed couplets by Samuel Butler: Hudibras (1663-78), which is a ruthless attack on Puritan hypocrisy. The theater of the Restoration (the theaters had been closed by the Puritans in 1642), that is, the so-called comedy of manners, for the most part cynical and licentious, has its principal representatives in Wycherley, Congreve, Otway, and Etherege. A picturesque document of the customs of the time is the diary of Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), written by the author as a precaution in a sort of personal shorthand that was not deciphered until 1826. Political skepticism has its classic text in the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, written even before the Restoration, and philosophical empiricism in the Essay concerning human understanding of John Locke (1690).

The poetry and theater of the Restoration are already strongly influenced by French models, but the influence of the poetics of France on English letters becomes predominant and manifest in the work of Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Pope is, after Dryden, the greatest of the English literary poets. Into his works enters to a large extent that literary, political, and social satire which characterizes so much of eighteenth-century English literature (even in moderate writers, such as Fielding and Goldsmith) and is never entirely absent from English literature, constituting indeed a salient trait of it and being found also in the Romantic poets, not only in a Byron but also in a Shelley. In Pope poetry is never to be separated from a correlative rhetoric or poetics, derived from French models. In his essays he is a critic in verse, and in his verse he is a poet-critic. Those formalistic principles that go under the name of poetic diction and that were overcome only by the Romantic reaction of Wordsworth had in him their perfect realization, and his masterpiece as a poet (understanding the word with the necessary qualifications) is The rape of the lock (1714), a most elegant composition of social satire, a miniature mock epic of perfect versification. To Pope we also owe an artificial, eighteenth-century translation of the Iliad into "heroic couplets." Pope was born a Catholic and never repudiated his faith. He nevertheless shows himself in his works to be a rationalist and a deist (as appears clearly from the Essay on man, which is directly influenced by the deism of Shaftesbury).

The eighteenth century in England (as in all of Europe) is dominated by "literature," and one must not therefore expect that the novel of the period, which is nonetheless its greatest literary expression, should be a product of pure imagination. Nevertheless it is a fact that the most creative and original spirits of the century turn by preference to prose rather than to poetry, and prose predominates over verse until the advent of the Romantics. A typical trait of the eighteenth-century novel, which links up without a clear break with the journalistic essay, is moralism (which can, however, be highly personal, as in Swift and Sterne), that moralism, or if one prefers contentism and psychologism, which are profoundly innate to the English character. The eighteenth century is not in England an era of strong religious contrasts. With the "Toleration act" (1689) the persecutions against Catholics cease, although their emancipation is a much more recent fact. The Franciscan John Wall is the last Catholic martyr (1679) and dies with the prophetic awareness of being so. Political struggle too, with the ever clearer supremacy of Parliament, the automatic subordination of monarchical power, the alternation in power of "whigs" and "tories," is lively and tenacious but not bloody. Minds turn by preference to the criticism of manners and to internal reforms. These characteristics are reflected in the novel and in the essay.

Swift (apart from the singularities of his temperament that make him a unique and eccentric figure) belongs not so much to the narrative tradition as to the polemical and utopian one. He accepted Christian ethics (and was a minister of the Anglican Church) and defended it also with his pen, but he was averse to all the historical forms of Christianity, to Catholicism, to Calvinism, to Lutheranism itself (impersonated respectively in Peter, Jack, and Martin in The tale of a tub, published in 1704). His masterpiece, the Gulliver's travels (1726), admirable for clarity of language, inventive and dialectical wit, and psychological acumen, nevertheless shows clear signs of an exasperated and pathological egocentrism. The novel proper is announced, as has been said, by the journalistic essay in which Steele and Addison excel. The first a livelier and more exuberant talent, the second more balanced and coherent, a typical spokesman of the average Englishman, more solicitous of the affairs of his own country than curious about the rest of the world (his Italian remarks on several parts of Italy [1705], placed on the Index in 1729, show a typical misunderstanding of our country). The newspaper that he directed in collaboration with Steele, the Spectator, where Mr. Spectator serves as spokesman for the tastes and needs of a circle of bourgeois characters, was the model of the best eighteenth-century European newspapers. The aim of this newspaper, which addressed a vast public not exclusively literary, was to instruct while delighting. To the success of journalism in England De Foe also contributed, with a more veristic spirit of the chronicler. His Review paved the way for the founding of the Spectator and the birth of the Tatler. De Foe wrote the most famous of his novels: Robinson Crusoe, in 1719, when he was already sixty years old. A man of few scruples in life, he is nevertheless a severe moralist, nor should we fail to recognize the edifying content of his masterpiece, whose protagonist is sustained throughout the narrative by trust in his own strength assisted by the providence of God. The moralistic note persists undiminished also in De Foe's worldly and realistic novels, stories of the underworld narrated with exemplary sobriety of style. De Foe's works lack the nuances and half-tones of humor in which the other eighteenth-century novelists would excel. De Foe also wrote on occultism (The political history of the devil, condemned by the Church). Samuel Richardson is the founder of the sentimental and psychological novel, and if his sentimentalism is often forced and conventional, his finesse of psychological analysis assures him a new ascendancy over modern and very modern novelists. His epistolary novels had a vast repercussion in continental Europe. The delicate and feminine temperament of Richardson is contrasted by the robust and unprejudiced temperament of Henry Fielding, the greatest English novelist of the eighteenth century and one of the most vigorous humorists in all of European literature. Moving, in the name of the natural goodness of the heart, to attack sentimentalism and hypocrisy, in Joseph Andrews (1742), one of his masterpieces, he intended to satirize and counterbalance Richardson's Pamela. Tom Jones (1749), which is considered his major work, essentially takes up the same narrative scheme, amplifying it. The vigor of the representation and the freshness of the humour in it are admirable, but this does not prevent the protagonist, precisely insofar as he is a champion of man's instincts, from at times turning out conventional. His only positive virtue is the one he shares with his author: sincerity. Fielding's style softens in Amelia (1751), his last novel, which is substantially Richardsonian. Social questions prevail in it, questions on which Fielding was competent, having long exercised the magistracy. The interweaving of such questions with novelistic and sentimental motifs makes it a characteristically English novel. A narrator of types and typical scenes rather than of characters and plots was Tobias Smollett (1721-71), a naval physician, who translated Don Quixote into English and wrote several travel books, among them the semi-autobiographical Roderick Random. He defamed Italy, yet in Italy he spent the last years of his life and died at Montenero, near Livorno. With Laurence Sterne (1713-68), the English parson of not irreproachable life, the novel becomes whimsical digression, erudite farce and introspective digression in which the characters lose their way and the plots are diluted. The tender expansiveness, the pathos of laughter abundantly seasoned with tears made Sterne an author dear to the Romantics, although in him sentimentalism (unlike in Richardson) is ironic and self-critical. Traits of eccentricity are also present in Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74), who nevertheless remains faithful to the conventional forms of the tale in his only novel: The vicar of Wakefield, which shows the influence of the imitation of Fielding, but is tempered by a different humor and by a more Christian sense of life. Goldsmith in fact, like his vicar, nurtures a full trust in the ways of Providence, which helps and saves the good even when it tries them harshly. Such a sense, united with a lively interest in humble lives, at times recalls our Manzoni and his masterpiece.

Erudite and academic criticism has its last champion in Samuel Johnson (1709-84), whose Dictionary (1747-55) and Lives of the poets (1779-1781) have remained famous. His contemporary James Boswell left of the man, with his talents, his humour, his extravagances, a perfect portrait in what is considered the greatest literary biography of a country in which the biographical genre enjoyed particular fortune. English historiography is enriched in the eighteenth century by what is considered the greatest historical work of England: The decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) by Edward Gibbon. Gibbon converted to Catholicism in his adolescence but, sent by his father to be educated in Switzerland, he recanted and from then on, as is evident from his work, whose chapters on Christianity provoked reactions even from the Anglican side and which is on the Index, he remained always a typical "enlightened" skeptic. Other historical works of the period are David Hume's History of Great Britain and William Robertson's (1721-93) History of Scotland, both marked by the critical investigation of facts.

The late eighteenth century possesses in England at least one playwright of marked talent: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). In the closing years of the century some of the traits that mark the subsequent Romantic era already appear. Such are the elegiac notes in James Thomson (1700-48), and the taste for graveyard poetry in Edward Young (1683-1765) and in the famous Elegy written in a country churchyard (1750) by Thomas Gray. Gray was among the first to study with passion the early Germanic era. Ossian, which was to move the Romantics so greatly, although it is largely a work of mystification, appeared between 1760 and 1773. A work, by contrast, of honest research is the first anthology of medieval English and Scottish ballads edited by Thomas Percy, published in 1765 and which promoted the study of so-called popular poetry. The very musical Ode to evening (1746) by William Collins is rich in lyrical inspiration. The taste for the exotic asserts and exasperates itself in the "black novels" of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, in Melmoth the wanderer by C. R. Maturin, a work that vividly impressed Baudelaire, in Vathek (1781) by William Beckford, a strange tale glittering with oriental splendors and horrors. A singular example of messianic and inspired poetry is found in the solemn and impetuous Song to David (1763) by the eccentric Christopher Smart, who in some way anticipates Blake. The celebrated historian and orator Edmund Burke (1729-97), the author of the Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) in which he defends legitimism, and the champion of Catholic emancipation, defended in his treatise on the "sublime" (1757) that "enthusiasm" which academic criticism had repudiated and distrusted. The poet William Cowper (1731-1800), while remaining faithful to the canons of eighteenth-century descriptivism, anticipates Wordsworth with his predilection for natural landscape, and, under the influence of Methodism (founded by John Wesley), successfully takes up properly religious lyric once more. But all the poets cited thus far remain more or less faithful to the precepts of "poetic diction," and their work belongs, with regard to form, to the eighteenth century. The first true Romantics (setting aside Chatterton, who killed himself at eighteen and whose figure takes on a purely symbolic value) are the Scotsman Robert Burns (1759-96), a powerful instinctive and revolutionary lyric poet, and the highly original William Blake (1757-1827), an occultist and visionary poet, whose verbal magic preludes the theories and techniques of the Symbolists.

Jane Austen (1775-1817), in her not long but most fruitful career as a novelist, remained faithful to eighteenth-century models, lavishing in her enchanting novels of bourgeois setting an entirely feminine talent for the minute analysis of characters through admirably balanced dialogue, and a spontaneous, most delicate humour. This earned her the praise of Walter Scott, who is nonetheless considered the creator of the Romantic novel.

The true and proper Romantic revolution officially begins with the year of publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Wordsworth himself, in his preface to the 2nd edition (1801), theorized the aims by which the two poets were moved: the adoption of a simple and essential language, even in fantastic compositions; the reaction against the artifices and the overly rigid formalism of "poetic diction." Wordsworth, after having initially adhered to revolutionary principles (and subsequently to the theories of the rationalist anarchist William Godwin, father of Shelley's second wife, Mary), fell back on increasingly moderate positions and in old age was a conservative in politics and a zealous Anglican in religion. His best verses were all published before 1815. Coleridge must be remembered not only for the singular magic and the extraordinary evocative power of his verses, but also for the originality of his critical work of a Platonic-Kantian bent, which, although unsystematic, is nonetheless rich in faithful and ingenious intuitions. Typically but differently revolutionary are the two major representatives of the succeeding poetic generation: George Byron (1788-1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). In Byron's work is reflected a contrast typical of man and exacerbated by pose, between the generous impulses of the soul and the ironic reaction of reason. A poet of rich natural vein, he nonetheless finds the happiest expression of his genius in the satirical poem (Don Juan, Beppo). Shelley is an anarchist in the footsteps of Godwin, a mystical and Platonizing deist with unclear and incoherent ideas, but endowed with an inexhaustible and very rich lyrical vein that allows him to translate into inspired verses the intense vibrations of his sensibility. John Keats (1795-1821) is Romantic precisely in his ardent nostalgia for the classical world, whose splendors and harmonies he passionately evokes; the decadents would make him their master, and the "Pre-Raphaelites" would take as their model his short poems on medieval subjects. English Romanticism is not an organized movement and its major exponents are poets very different from one another; it has no political scope nor social resonances (as would partially happen later with Victorian literature), and some of its representatives carry on a good part of their activity far from their homeland. And it is perhaps not without significance that the only social poet of the era, George Crabbe (1754-1852), still fully follows the rationalist tradition. Also extraneous to the Romantic currents remain the principal reformers of the era: Mill, Malthus, Ricardo, Sydney Smith. Moreover, the conservatives remained in power almost uninterruptedly from 1783 to 1830. The "Catholic Emancipation Act" (which was disapproved of by Wordsworth) was promulgated in 1828: with it, civil and political rights were guaranteed to Catholics.

The most celebrated novelist of the early Romantic era was Walter Scott (1771-1832), who in his numerous historical novels succeeded in a happy mixture of Romantic and veristic ingredients, and, with the lively verve of his exposition, knew how to arouse and keep alive the interest of readers. An impeccable essayist and humorist was Charles Lamb (1775-1834), also known for his study of the minor Elizabethan dramatists, whom he reassessed and brought back to the attention of scholars. A refined and precious prose writer was Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), whose Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) attracted the attention of Baudelaire. A skeptical and erudite novelist was Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), whose conversation-based novels set a model for modern narrators. Among the minor essayists, mention should be made of William Hazlitt (1778-1830) and Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), who was also a poet. Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), who lived for a long time in Italy, was particularly felicitous in the epigram. Of Thomas Hood (1799-1845), his social and humorous verses are chiefly remembered.

The succeeding era, which corresponds approximately to the long reign of Queen Victoria, is characterized by a greater correspondence between moral and social values and literary statements, by a greater (not always happy) understanding and closer relations between science and imagination, between society and culture. This is due in part to the establishment of scientific progress, which rapidly and radically transforms the country through an automatic transition from a predominantly rural civilization to a predominantly industrial one, and to its consequent and progressive democratization, whereby literature too offers a larger place to the feelings, problems and conflicts of the common man and appeals to a broader circle of readers, also benefiting the interests, rights and chances of success of authors. It cannot be denied that this literature, which finds its ideal vehicle in the novel and more generally in prose, is generally poor in speculative values.

Poetry tends to crystallize into the elaborate and precious verses of the major poet of the age: Alfred Tennyson (1809-92), endowed with an exquisite Virgilian taste, whose verses nevertheless too easily stretch out and settle into monotony. In Robert Browning (1812-89) the lyrical-dramatic inspiration too often shatters and wanders into abstruseness and eccentricity. Ideas, bold without a foundation of speculation and sorrow, pile up and twist epileptically in his celebrated and much-debated monologues. The notion of reality reality is the privilege and reserved property of a few isolated figures of Catholic poets: a dolorous but hopeful lyric poet because a believer, the Jesuit G. M. Hopkins (1844-89), the greatest of the English symbolists, whose verses were published only after his death; a solitary and intransigent champion of the Catholic tradition meditated upon and personally interpreted: Coventry Patmore (1823-96), who finds his most complete expression in certain highly wrought mystical and allegorical odes; an inspired, visionary and believing lyric poet, of feverish imagination and inexhaustible vein: Francis Thompson (1859-1907). John Henry Newman (1801-90), who converted in 1845, was throughout his life a tireless defender, and profoundly aware of the needs of modern man, of revealed religion, substantially unchanged and necessary to men of every era. His Apologia pro vita sua (1861) figures among the great models of English prose. A strenuous assertor of individualism understood as the cult of the hero and the superman, and an opponent of democratic institutions as well as a historian eloquent rather than convincing, was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), whose vast work is influenced by the idealistic currents of German thought. An analogous function of inspired critic and of opposition to industrial civilization is exercised, with regard to the figurative arts, by John Ruskin (1819-1900), who fixes his interest on the ethical and social values of the arts: he is a mystically inclined socialist and one of the greatest art critics in Europe. Against the utilitarian conception of culture and in the name of a humanistic and at the same time universalistic concept of education, the critic and poet Matthew Arnold (1822-88) also fought. The contentual basis or residue of his critical thought is documented by the definition he gave of poetry: "a criticism of life," a criticism applied to life. The conception of the absolute supremacy of art, and of aestheticism as a philosophy of life, is asserted for the first time in the essays of Walter Pater (1839-94), whose highly refined work as a critic-artist has been happily characterized by Praz, who defined it as "fictionalized criticism."

The two greatest novelists of the Victorian era are Charles Dickens (1812-70) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63). Dickens is not a great psychologist, but he possesses a singular inventive imagination and an inexhaustible humour. His novels, not impeccable in style, nevertheless speak to the heart of their innumerable readers. Thackeray is more cultured and refined and constructs his dialogues better, but he is less rich in imagination and too inclined to digression. Anthony Trollope (1815-88) is a most meticulous analyzer of typical Victorian milieus. The most notable women writers are: George Eliot (1819-80), in whose novels the didactic purpose and the preconceived thesis are often too obvious; the Brontë sisters: Charlotte (1816-1855), Anne (1820-49) and Emily (1818-48), of whom the last reveals in her only novel, Wuthering Heights, an exceptional and singular personality in a powerfully evocative style. Social novels were written by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65), whose best work is nevertheless the short novel of provincial setting entitled Cranford. "Pre-Raphaelitism" is represented in poetry principally by the medievalists Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), son of an Italian refugee, and William Morris (1834-1896), who was also an advocate of a socialism inspired by the medieval guilds of the arts. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) was a historian and a brilliant and versatile essayist but neither original nor profound, although in his day he was most celebrated.

The literature immediately following the Victorian era and of its last decades is distinguished in part by a more open and declared reaction against the ideals and customs of that epoch. The revolt against every codified morality and the crisis of ethical values in the name of the absoluteness of the aesthetic creed is well documented in the paganizing Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1900), who writes verses of rare formal perfection, and in Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), who constructs a pseudo-novel and most precious fairy tales around the theme of the absoluteness of the aesthetic ideal, around the axiom that beauty is the only truth, and in his uninhibited comedies entertains and scandalizes the public with a fusillade of clever paradoxes. A muddled mixture of skepticism, analytical acumen, and naive positivistic dogmas betray unresolved and unexamined contradictions in the novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), whose best novel is perhaps The Egoist (1879). A more powerful and suggestive narrator is Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), whose tragic pessimism, radical and programmatic (in reaction to the official optimism of the age), is refracted in numerous novels and stories, set in a desolate rural and provincial landscape. Even more radical and methodical is the socially grounded pessimism of the novels of George Gissing (1857-1903), also the author of an excellent essay on Dickens. Gloomy and desperate is the well-known poem by James Thomson, an anarchist, atheist and alcoholic: The City of Dreadful Night (1874). Fiercely anti-Victorian was Samuel Butler (1835-1902), an inspirer of Bernard Shaw, in his programmatic and semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh and in the Swiftian utopia of Erewhon (an anagram of Nowhere, which translates utopia). A poet even more literary but more sober and restrained than Swinburne was Robert Bridges (1844-1930), elected poet laureate in 1913.

The exotic narrators form a group apart: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), whose highly elaborate prose has singular evocative powers in his exotic tales, and who continues Scott in more modern forms and rhythms in his Scottish tales; Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), who sets the torments of his characters in exotic landscapes and whose analytical and introspective art makes an impression on Henry James; Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), whose activistic and imperialistic creed is nourished and colored by multicolored exotic suggestions. Catholic literature has two strong champions in Hilaire Belloc (b. 1870) and G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), the one and the other militant and versatile writers, the first sober and solid, the second imaginative and paradoxical. A Catholic convert is also Maurice Baring (1874-1945), a fine and cultured essayist, poet and most elegant novelist, who describes privileged milieus and characters with singular discretion and delicacy of touch. G. B. Shaw (1856-1950) is an assertor of individual and social evolution in his brilliant essays and in his extremely popular comedies based on whimsical paradox; H. G. Wells (1866-1946) is a champion of biological evolution and technical progress, although his last works are colored with pessimism; John Galsworthy (1867-1933) in his serial novels and in his comedies documents with finesse and precision the crisis of the bourgeoisie and of individualism between the end of the century and the first decade following the First World War.

Properly modern literature is an experimental literature, that is, the literature of our tormented epoch, to which nevertheless one must not deny the credit of proposing anew and seeking, even if confusedly or desperately, those speculative values that nineteenth-century literature had too much neglected. Such demands are mirrored in a more attentive search for psychological truth in the novel, in a revaluation of metaphor and of the absolute objectification of feeling in poetry. Psychological and introspective analysis, intended to represent even the most fluid perceptions and the minutest reactions of the character before his environment, presides over the entire work of Henry James (1843-1916), American by birth, who is the recognized master of subsequent European narrators, and in the Irishman James Joyce (1882-1941) it progressively arrives at the dissolution of every logical connection and at the dissociation of language itself into a chaotic and protean jargon, removed from time and space, which has been defined "an Esperanto of the subconscious." A writer of most rich lyrical vein and refined culture is Virginia Woolf, who took her own life during the Second World War (1941). A skeptical individualist, but a passionate investigator of the elusive and fleeting relationships of human beings of our epoch, is E. M. Forster (b. 1879), who is also a lively and penetrating literary critic. A writer of instinct and of rich lyrical vein is D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), obsessed by a sort of idolatry of sexual union. Aldous Huxley (b. 1894), an eclectic and most versatile writer, after having given a felicitous representation of the disorientation and the moral crisis of the early postwar period in Point Counter Point (1928), has progressively oriented himself, in his subsequent essays and novels, toward a sort of methodism of the ascetic and contemplative life, a programmatic and intellectualistic assertion of asceticism, deriving it syncretistically from the mystical and ascetic works of all civilizations. Some Catholic writers are among the best known and most widely read: Evelyn Waugh (b. 1903), a master of polemical satire; Graham Greene (b. 1905), perhaps the foremost of contemporary English narrators, an inexorable investigator of conflicts of conscience and of souls; Bruce Marshall (b. 1899), a moderate and far-sighted Catholic and a humorist of the school of Chesterton; Elizabeth Myers (1913-47), an exquisite and acute interpreter of troubled consciences.

The greatest living poet is T. S. Eliot (b. 1888), American by birth, who is also a highly authoritative literary and social critic, a convinced upholder of the validity of the Christian notion and tradition (Eliot is an Anglo-Catholic). The school of "imagism" that looks to him as its head has a programmatic basis in the theory of the "objective correlative" as the key to poetic language, and is ideally linked, as has already been observed, to the so-called "metaphysicals" of the seventeenth century. The poets of the following generation are largely connected to Eliot, the most representative of whom are: Cecil Day Lewis (b. 1905), Wystan Hugh Auden (b. 1907), Stephen Spender (b. 1909), all of whom also carry on the work of literary critics. Mention should also be made of the names of two excellent poetesses: Edith Sitwell (b. 1887) and Kathleen Raine (a Catholic), and, among the poets fallen in the last war, the very young and highly promising Sydney Keyes.

Historical and literary biography, always cultivated with interest and passion in England, had its most conspicuous representative in Lytton Strachey (1886-1934), a most elegant analytical and introspective essayist. Alongside him are to be remembered David Cecil (b. 1902), Percy Lubbock (b. 1879) and the already mentioned Edith Sitwell. A satirical writer of sure talent, whose recent, premature death is regretted, is George Orwell (1903-1950), whose biting social satire is noteworthy: The animal farm (1945) and the sanathific, bitter and despairing utopia of "1984", published a short time after his death.

IV. ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART.

I. ARCHAEOLOGY

Between the end of the 4th century and that of the 6th (the arrival of St. Augustine in 598 at Canterbury) the Christian monuments of E. are represented by inscriptions in rough Latin in the regions of the lowlands of Scotland, of Wales, of Cornwall. As regards the buildings of Christian worship, the two oldest churches are: the first is the small apsidal church of Silchester explored in 1892; a second is that of Caerwent in Monmouthshire. Bede recalls that St. Augustine, arriving at Canterbury in 598, found the remains of two ancient churches. In the 7th century two groups can be distinguished, one in Kent where the mission of St. Augustine was carried out, the other in Northumbria, following the constructions of Benedict Biscop and of Ceolfrith. The Kent group is represented in Canterbury by the churches of Sts. Peter and Paul, erected between 597 and 604 (C. R. Peers and A. W. Chapham, St. Augustine's abbey church Canterbury, before the Norman conquest, in Archaeologia, 77 [1946], p. 201); by that of St. Mary founded by Eadbald, king of Kent, ca. 620 (ibid., p. 211); by that of St. Pancras (Archaeologia Cantiana, 25 [1913], pp. 222-37). It must be borne in mind that Bede recalls at Canterbury an «ecclesia in honorem Sancti Martini antiquitas facta dum adhuc Romani Britanniam incolerent» (Hist. eccl., I, 26). In Rochester by St. Andrew founded in 604 by King Æthelberht; in Lyminge by St. Mary erected after 633 (Archaeologia Cantiana, 10 [1898], p. 102); in Bradwell on Sea by St. Peter, erected very probably by St. Cedd after 653; in Reculver by St. Mary ca. 669; a characteristic of this group of churches is given by the porch used also as a burial place, as at Lyminge, where Tobias bishop of Rochester and St. Ethelburga were buried. Later than these churches is that of Brixworth (Northants), notable because it is dated to the 7th century, like the other one of Abingdon of ca. 680.

The group of the churches of Northumbria offers first of all those of Monkwearmouth, erected by Benedict Biscop ca. 675, and of Jarrow with the dedicatory inscription of the year 685; then those of Escomb in Durham and of Corbridge, in which Roman material was reused. Ceolfrith built or restored the churches of Ripon and of Hexham. The church of Hexham had three naves, divided by columns, and had a transept and a crypt on the model of the Roman one of St. Stephen on the Via Latina. At Hexham a church dedicated to the Madonna was erected with a porch on each of the four sides, and it was «in modum turris erecta et fere rotunda» according to the testimony of Richard of Hexham.

Bishop Hedda (691-721) built the church of Lichfield; Ine king of Wessex (680-728) enlarged the pre-existing church of Glastonbury dedicated in the 6th century to the Madonna and later called «vetusta ecclesia»; near it was a chapel dedicated to St. David. In 676 it is a Benedictine abbey and the abbot was Berhtwald. King Ine of Wessex had a larger church built, called «maior ecclesia». In the excavations of 1927-28 the remains of its foundations were identified. William of Malmesbury calls «basilica pulcherrimi operis» the one erected by King Offa at St. Albans. For the interior decoration of the church St. Bede, called the Venerable, attests that Benedict Biscop (628-90) on his fifth journey from Rome had brought back a copy of the pictorial cycle to adorn the church of St. Peter attached to the monastery of Wearmouth, built by him, introducing for the first time from Gaul the glassmakers hitherto unknown in England (Vita Sanctorum abbatum, I: PL 94, 717-18).

Enrico Josi

II. ART

The first manifestations of Christian art in I. must be sought in the Roman era, when crosses and religious symbols of that kind were carved in stone or a Christian name was given to certain figures that were entirely pagan in appearance. But such objects can hardly be classified as artistic works, and even fewer were produced during the era of barbarian rule that followed the departure of the Romans, although there was a flourishing of pagan art, especially in the form of objects of personal ornament, of metal and of enamel. A great number of these objects, some of which are very beautiful, has been found in tombs; worthy of mention is the rich burial ship found about ten years ago at Sutton Hoo, in East Anglia.

But in the 7th century, with the spread of Christianity, things changed. Objects of personal ornament became rare, because even if they were produced they were no longer buried in tombs: instead Christian art began to flourish. Excellent metalwork was executed (among which the "Ormside" bowl, now at York, deserves to be remembered), but the most beautiful things were produced in stone on a vast scale, and in smaller number in painting. Stone sculpture was not intended for private use, but to decorate the great crosses placed in every sacred center or one of particular importance throughout the north of Britain.

Of these the most beautiful are perhaps those of Ruthwell and Bewcastle near the Scottish border, both executed around the year 670. As their principal decoration they have compositions of figures of Eastern Christian inspiration, and the quality of the workmanship has no equal in Europe, except in the Byzantine area. Similar images also appear in manuscript miniatures, but in this field the greatest interest is given by a particular decoration of geometric interlace and zoomorphic figures. The artists who worked on these books demonstrate scant knowledge of figurative art, but their ingenuity in drawing and painting complicated patterns is astonishing, and the miniatures they produced are of rare beauty. There were close ties between the school of Northumbria and that of Ireland, and there have been heated discussions among scholars about the respective contributions of these two areas to the creation of the art generally known as Hiberno-Saxon (Saxon-Irish). But it is very probable that the manuscript known as the "Lindisfarne Gospels" was produced in Northumbria, probably at Lindisfarne itself, around the year 700. A splendid work and very different in style from Irish works such as the Book of Durrow or the Book of Kells (v.: CELTS, art; IRELAND, art).

The Danish invasion of the 8th century-early 9th century halted artistic development, and manuscripts and sculptures from about 750 onward are evidently decadent. Nevertheless one notes a kind of artistic revival in Mercia around 800. King Offa (757-96) is known as an enlightened patron of the arts, and some sculptures at Breedon (Leicestershire), Fletton near Peterborough and elsewhere are perhaps to be connected with him. But this revival of the late 8th century was evidently local, and only at the end of the 9th century did art begin to flourish everywhere, an effect of the unification of government and the enlightened policy of King Alfred. Of great value are some works that can be dated to the reign of Alfred or immediately after, of which the most important are: the jewel of King Alfred himself in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford and the stole of St. Cuthbert at Durham, executed between 909 and 916; probably of the same period is a magnificent stone cross of Codford St. Peter (Dorset). But at that time the best production came about only gradually, and the peak of late Saxon art came toward the end of the 10th century. Then all the arts flourished with the greatest vigor, and even if English architecture can barely be compared with that of the continent, the sculptures in stone and ivory, the textiles and the miniatures have no equal in any country, except at Byzantium. Much has been lost, but among the stone sculptures one should remember the Madonna of York and the Crucifixes of Romsey and Langford, and among those in ivory a wonderful crucifix mounted on a metal pedestal of Germanic origin, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The highest artistic value, however, is perhaps reached in the field of manuscript miniatures. It seems that the first works were produced at Abingdon, but soon the center of production moved to Winchester and although there were "scriptoria" in all the principal monasteries, Winchester remained the most important, and the name "Winchester school" is often used to designate late Saxon miniature painting as a whole. The most remarkable of all is perhaps the Benedictional of St. Athelwold, in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, made at Winchester between 975 and 980. Other valuable examples are preserved in the British Museum, at the Bodleian in Oxford, in various colleges of Cambridge, in the National Library, in the Vatican and elsewhere. Many of these contain richly colored miniatures, but there is a particular group of decorations drawn with pen of which the oldest are connected with Canterbury. They are sometimes painted with delicate red, blue, green or yellow tints and usually scattered throughout the text. This style is the result of the copy made at Canterbury of a 9th-century Psalter of the school of Reims, known as the Utrecht Psalter, which in the 10th-11th centuries was kept at Canterbury, and was copied directly, on various occasions, both at the beginning of the Norman era and in the Saxon era. The first copy, made around the year 1000, is now in the British Museum; another later one, of particular beauty, is at Cambridge in Trinity College. Its miniatures show Norman characteristics superimposed on the earlier continental and Saxon ones.

The Norman conquest of 1066 marked the end of this beautiful Anglo-Saxon art, which was soon supplanted by an entirely new style, introduced already mature from the continent; indeed in architecture the change had already occurred before the conquest, since the church of Edward the Confessor at Westminster was a Norman and not a Saxon building. But immediately after the conquest a whole series of cathedrals, abbeys and churches began to be built, and although most were not completed until the 12th century, the years around 1075 represent one of the most active periods of building that England has ever seen. Many of these new buildings are of exceptional artistic level, but it suffices to recall Durham, which is not only large and very beautiful, but also interesting as the first example of the use of the pointed arch vault to cover the main nave.

Naturally this was one of the characteristic features of the Romanesque style, but Durham bears the oldest example of the actual use of such a vault on a large scale; it dates from 1093. There were pauses in this great wave of building, due to lack of money or to the anti-ecclesiastical policy of some king, such as William II, but, in general, building continued throughout the 12th century, and in this period an Anglo-Norman style developed, which combined in itself the currents of the continent and the essential English ones. With the passage of time the tendency of the ancient English tastes to resurface manifested itself again, and the interplay of these tastes and currents was at the basis of English medieval art from its very beginning. Thus, in the final analysis, the conquest served as a spur to national artistic development and did not merely mark the introduction of a new foreign style, as it seemed at first.

The most important manifestations of the Anglo-Norman style occurred in architecture, and there is hardly a church in the country that does not preserve some trace of that time; with architecture is joined a decided development of architectural sculpture: figurative sculpture was of lesser importance, and there are only a few monuments, here and there, that can in any way be compared to the splendid works produced in France during the 12th century. The great south porch at Malmesbury is the most important of them. Textiles, metalwork, carvings and ivory sculptures were moreover very beautiful; wall paintings were executed and manuscripts were illuminated in the principal monasteries. Indeed the ancient Saxon heritage is more evident in painting, and the beautiful figure of St. Paul at Canterbury, dated to the first half of the 12th century, is as much Saxon as Norman. It is also difficult to establish to which period some books can be attributed, and the similarities are perhaps accentuated by the penetration, which occurred at the beginning of the 12th century, of a new wave of Byzantine influences. Saxon art was, in many cases, profoundly influenced by Byzantine art; the same happened in the field of painting on the part of early Norman art, but the ancient Anglo-Saxon gentleness gave way to a more decided and strong manner, and the draped fabrics, characteristic of the Winchester school, were replaced by garments of a more rigid appearance, tight around the bodies. There survived, however, the sensitivity for elegance of line, which can already be glimpsed in the production of Canterbury in the Saxon era, and which became one of the principal English characteristics, as can be seen throughout the development of the history of the art of England; whether in the Gothic era, as in the drawings of a Matthew Paris, as in the Elizabethan era, as in the crisp elegance of portraits and miniatures, and finally, in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the drawings of a Rowlandson and in the illustrations of a Charles Keen.

The dawn of the 13th century was nevertheless marked by the evolution of a new architectural style, known by the name of Early English and characterized by tall and narrow pointed windows and by simple and precise moldings. Worthy of note are the cathedral of Salisbury and the transepts of York, the latter particularly for the great north window, placed later and known by the name of "The Five Sisters." It is a simple, rather austere style, where the effect is given by proportion and line rather than by decorative elements, but in some cases figurative sculpture was also used, as, for example, in the west front of Wells, becoming moreover more important in the subsequent phase of the development of English architecture, that known by the name of "Decorated." Worthy of mention are the angels placed high in the tympana of the arches of Westminster Abbey or in the "Angel Choir" of Lincoln. All these sculptures are undoubtedly very important, although on the whole figurative production was never, in the Gothic period, of a value comparable to that of French sculpture, and there is no building in Great Britain that can boast a decoration as rich and complete or as splendid as that of Reims or Amiens.

The Decorated style developed at first along lines strictly parallel to those followed by French architecture, but with the passage of time English architects demonstrated greater originality and instead of a development of Gothic forms to their logical conclusion, the Flamboyant style, as happened in France, there was a return to a style of a simpler and more austere character where straight lines dominated. The exuberant curves and spirals of French Flamboyant Gothic were replaced, in England, by the vertical ornaments and the composed moldings of the Perpendicular style. This style was conceived in the 14th century, but ca. fifty years after its birth beautiful works in the Decorated style were still being produced and only in the 15th century did the Perpendicular become the predominant style in architecture, and it survived throughout the 16th century, to be finally replaced by the new Renaissance fashion brought from Italy by Inigo Jones and his disciples. The first example of the Perpendicular style, and in a certain sense one of the most perfect, is the choir of Gloucester, whose rebuilding began in 1330. The great east window, the largest in England, was finished in 1330, and the superb choirs were added between 1351 and 1412. With the 15th century the new style was universally adopted, and buildings of the greatest importance must be recalled, such as the chapel of King's College at Cambridge and the chapel of King Henry VII at Westminster. The last example of this style and the last truly beautiful Gothic work in England is the staircase of Christ Church College in Oxford, from the second quarter of the 17th century.

The perpendicular style on the whole was simple as regards ornamentation, but in funerary monuments sculpture was widely employed. Noteworthy are the celebrated Nottinghamshire alabasters, produced in great quantity for export, and also the beautiful metal tomb figures of the various members of the royal family in Westminster, among them that of Henry VII. Ivory works were also executed, and the finest are those of the 14th century. Particularly noteworthy are a fragmentary Crucifix and a diptych depicting Christ and the Virgin with the Child, both in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These two works are decidedly English, but other works are closer to France, and it is still debated whether the finest of these, the Wilton diptych in the National Gallery dated ca. 1395, is the work of an English or a French artist. However, other paintings of the period are more decidedly English, and with the 15th century numerous schools flourished; that of East Anglia is perhaps the most important: both panel paintings and frescoes have suffered serious damage; the decorations of manuscript codices are better preserved. Fully illuminated pages are often very beautiful, but the best work perhaps consists in the initials and the borders at the beginning of chapters, where vivacity and humor frequently appear, particular characteristics of English art in that period. The Dyson Perrins and the Luteral Psalters should be remembered, and one must not forget the stained glass, since from the 12th century onward there was an excellent production of it, in no way inferior to the French; but it was much devastated by the iconoclasts, so that only a few fragments remain.

The golden age of religious art in England was brought to an end by the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, and a final blow was dealt to it by the Puritanism of the revolution. But church building resumed again with the Restoration, and a good opportunity presented itself when London was rebuilt after the great fire of 1666. The great architect Christopher Wren took advantage of this circumstance, and the city churches, beginning with St. Paul's Cathedral, constitute a worthy succession to the Gothic monuments of two or three centuries earlier. The spirit is different, however, because these churches reflect the soul of English Protestantism, just as the buildings of Vignola reflect that of the Counter-Reformation in Italy. But, with the exception of these churches of the 17th and 18th centuries, religious art manifested itself little, and although many of the great artists of the 18th century, such as Reynolds, Hogarth and Constable, attempted religious painting, orienting themselves more or less in the direction of the Italian Renaissance, English painting of the 18th century reached its highest peaks in the field of portraiture, landscape and genre compositions. In these fields, as in that of portraiture, the works of Ramsay, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn and others, in genre painting the pictures of Hogarth, as the landscapes of Wilson, Constable and Turner represent perhaps the best artistic work produced in the country. Considerable is the influence of Constable on subsequent development, especially in France. Again in this period the minor arts excelled, and the ceramics of Wedgwood and other factories, like the furniture of Chippendale, Sheraton and Happlewhite, are all of excellent quality.

At the end of the 18th century religious architecture had a revival with the introduction of the so-called neo-Gothic style, and many of the churches in this style are not devoid of beauty, although the attempt to revive the spirit of the Gothic age was destined to fail at a time when society was developing in a completely opposite direction, toward a vast industrialism. And so in the field of painting, the movement known by the name of Pre-Raphaelite, although it had to its credit works of notable interest, was too dominated by the past, and lacked the spirit of the great avant-garde movement of the continent, Impressionism. From then on, despite the production of some artists of genius, such as Augustus John and Sickert, and despite the construction of some beautiful building, the rise of a great style has no longer manifested itself, and on the whole one can say that art marks time, until a new creative epoch arises also in the artistic field like the Anglo-Saxon one, or the Gothic one, or that of the 18th century.

Davide Talbot Rice

V. SCHOOL SYSTEM.

The charter of youth of 1942 develops at length the law of 1918 and the "Carnegie Trust", and establishes that the personality of the pupil is sacred and that his needs must be the basis of education. Every pupil has the right to be housed, fed, clothed and has the right to supervision and medical care. All pupils have equal possibilities of approaching the sources of knowledge and must be left the necessary time to devote to study. All have the right to religious instruction.

This charter of youth is an attempt at the unification of English teaching, characterized until now by the very broad freedom of teaching. From the origins of English education there have been few interventions of the State in the school field. In 1867 the "Elementary school act" established that elementary teaching was to be compulsory and free; in 1870 the "Forster educational act" introduced religious tolerance also in the school field, limiting the predominance of the Anglican Church and giving Catholics the faculty of founding their own schools. In 1899 the "Board of education" (Ministry of Education) was founded. The said Ministry had only the task of favoring the diffusion of culture and of enforcing the "Code of regulation". Scotland possesses its own "Education department", to which belongs the right of inspection and the education of teachers in the "training colleges". In 1925, because of the financial subsidies on the part of the State, frictions arose between the "established presbyterian Church" and the Catholic Church, which found their solution in the law of 1928, with which the "Forster educational act" was confirmed and the founding of Catholic schools was permitted.

In 1902 the "Educational act" established the control of private schools. In 1918 the "Fisher education act" introduced uniform norms in each English school organization and established the complementary education of young people from 14 to 18 years of age.

Instruction is divided into preschool and school. Preschool takes place in the "nursery schools" or in the "nursery classes", where the Montessori system finds its widest application.

School instruction, on the other hand, takes place in the elementary schools, where teaching is strictly individual and is based on the experimental psychology of W. Mac Dougall. The elementary schools comprise: 1) the "provided council schools", which could be considered almost state schools and where religious instruction is compulsory according to the faith of the pupils; 2) the "non provided voluntary schools", which belong either to the Catholic Church or to the "Church of England". Both are divided into "infantschools" from 5 to 7 (8) years, into "juniorschools" from 7 (8) to 11 years, into "seniorschools" and into "modern-schools" from 11 to 16 years. The latter in turn are divided into: rural, commercial, industrial and domestic.

Secondary education comprises: "selective central schools" of a mixed type, where pupils are encouraged to follow their own inclinations; "non selective central schools"; "senior classes specially"; "technical trade schools"; "day schools" (middle schools); "college" and "State aided secondary schools". At the age of 16 one may take a "first schools examination" and may attend university. If one has not attended middle school, one may be admitted to university only after passing a matriculation examination.

In English middle schools, attention is given to the formation of character: loyalty, sincerity with oneself and capacity for initiative, more than to general instruction itself. For this reason, a great part of the discipline of the school itself falls to the pupils. Order is entrusted not only to the teacher but also to the pupils, who by turns assume the role of "schools prefect". Every secondary school, and particularly "boarding schools" or "girls schools", are divided into "houses". Each "house" is presided over by a "master" who has "house prefects" under his authority. All public schools are divided into literary, scientific and musical circles, at the head of which is a specialized teacher.

Higher education is imparted by the university. The universities are independent of State control, and no minister may exercise control over their activity. They have freedom in the choice of teachers, in the selection of subjects of instruction and in the method to be followed. Attached to the Universities of Oxford, founded in the year 1168, and Cambridge, founded in the year 1209, are men's and women's "colleges", where personal education is imparted. There also exist the Universities of St. Andrews, founded in the year 1411, Glasgow, founded in 1455, Aberdeen, founded in the year 1494, Edinburgh, founded in the year 1582, Wales, founded in the year 1903, London, founded in the year 1825, Durham founded in the year 1657, Manchester, founded in the year 1851, Birmingham, established in 1900, Sheffield, founded in 1590, Belfast, founded in 1849.

The education of primary teachers takes place in state colleges under State control and lasts two years; that of secondary school teachers takes place in government schools or in free schools that are subject to the university. According to the law of 1944, there is no difference between the teaching of the two categories. The education of the Catholic clergy takes place in 15 colleges, in 2 college-seminaries, in 3 seminaria plena, in 4 major seminaries and in 4 minor seminaries. There also exist the Collegium Lisbonese in Portugal and the Collegium a Sancto Beda in Rome. - See plates CXVIII-CXXII.