Pilgrimage is universally recognised by historians as a principal feature of medieval popular religion, if by ‘popular’ we mean something in which the ordinary laity fully participated. While we can be confident of the fact of this participation, accurate measures of its scale are less easy to come by, while putting names to the thousands of humble participants is less easy still. Narrative sources, such as chronicles and hagiographies, tend to describe the pilgrimages of the great and good (and also of the not so good), and even when, especially in and after the fourteenth century, pilgrims themselves begin to leave accounts of their journeys for their own satisfaction, or for the edification and information of others, they can be seen, almost by definition, as standing somewhat apart from the nameless masses because they are either literate themselves, or addressing a literate pilgrimage ‘public’.

The task of putting not merely names, but faces, to ‘ordinary’ pilgrims is not quite hopeless, however, although the materials which make it possible vary in their availability and abundance at different times and places. Use has been made of monastic cartularies to trace at least fragments of the biographies and family histories of members of the knightly classes whose participation in pilgrimage, it has been argued, helped to foster the crusading movement. A little later, the records of English royal government reveal the names of numerous pilgrims who sought royal licence and safe-conduct for their travels, registered the appointment of attorneys for the duration of their absence, or, as witnesses at inquisitions post mortem, remembered births and deaths by the year in which they themselves, or kin or friends, went to the Holy Land, to Canterbury, Compostela or elsewhere. Some at least of these names are those of men (and women) who occur elsewhere in surviving records and about whose lives and connections it is therefore possible to know at least a little. From all over Christendom, too, there are wills, made by intending pilgrims as a necessary part of their preparations.

Early in March 1554 the three English reformers and later Oxford martyrs, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the former bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, and the bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, were transported to the supposedly safe location of Oxford to expedite their trials. Their stay in Oxford, however, turned out to be a long one, lasting until their execution by burning outside the Northgate there: Latimer and Ridley on 16 October 1555; Cranmer on 21 March 1556. During the time they spent in Oxford – between nineteen and twenty-four months – they were usually confined apart from one another, in a number of locations, by the municipal officials responsible to the crown for their safekeeping: the mayor and the two bailiffs of Oxford. Cranmer, the most important and politically the most sensitive of the prisoners, appears to have spent most of his long confinement in the Bocardo, the local prison over the town's Northgate next to St Michael's church. Latimer and Ridley, on the other hand, spent considerable time privately boarded in the houses of, respectively, the bailiffs and the mayor, and Ridley, in particular, seems to have been able to maintain regular written and personal contact with their supporters and sympathisers. Their confinement must have put the three reformers, all of them Cambridge graduates, into a variety of contacts with local residents, but records for only two of those relationships have survived, and from diametrically opposite sources.

Religious politics in Scotland during the middle decades of the seventeenth century have always attracted much historical attention. The conflict of the Covenant, the tensions of the Cromwellian occupation and the troubled Restoration period have understandably drawn scholars like moths to the flame. Many heroes have been discovered, ranging from Alexander Shields at one extreme to Archbishop James Sharp at the other, some of them with an apparent significance, intellectual or political, far beyond the supposedly purblind world of Restoration Scotland. But no contemporary has emerged more enhanced in the eyes of subsequent scholarship, nor more frustrated in his own time, than Robert Leighton – ‘the outstanding bishop of the period’ – bishop of Dunblane from 1661 to 1672 and for two more years the most reluctant archbishop of Glasgow ever to wear the mitre. A number of historians have trawled the evidence of a career which oscillated between failed attempts at accommodation between Episcopalians and Presbyterians and periods of disappointed withdrawal. His moderation and humanity, chief among the qualities noted by intimates such as Gilbert Burnet and opponents including Robert Wodrow, have inevitably loomed largest in most subsequent assessments of his actions. A few later scholars, particularly those strongly sympathetic to the Covenanters, have taken the opposite tack, regarding Leighton's excessive posthumous reputation as sufficient excuse for sometimes perverse contradiction. And yet the evidence offered by the celebrated library founded by the bishop in Dunblane has never been properly weighed. How far do the volumes accumulated during his lifetime and bequeathed to the Bibliotheca Leightoniana cast light upon its founder's philosophical interests? And do they help explain those peculiar responses, a remarkable commitment to both public reconciliation and private retirement, with which Leighton approached Scotland's troubled religious situation? These are the intertwined questions with which this essay is concerned.

In December 1845 Bishop Michael Russell of Glasgow and Galloway wrote to a keen young Episcopalian layman, Alexander James Donald D'Orsey, a teacher at the High School in Glasgow, suggesting ordination. Conscious of the growing numbers of immigrant Episcopalians in the western suburbs of Glasgow, the bishop's intention was to stimulate a new congregation for ‘the wants of the poorer class there’. Evidently D'Orsey was already known to the bishop for he mentions him as pleading ‘with your usual eloquence’ the cause of the Episcopalian Church Society, which would raise part of the £80 stipend. Russell envisaged that D'Orsey would work in this new congregation for a year or two until something more worthy of the young man's talents came up. D'Orsey wrote stating that the proposal was attractive, not least because it was a congregation which would primarily be comprised of the ‘humbler classes’. He would continue in his present work and undertake the congregational duties part-time. His present income made it preferable to refuse the stipend, suggesting that it should go to augment the livings of poorer clergy. As a new priest D'Orsey went on to create the congregation that eventually became St John's, Anderston, and to become embroiled with Russell's successor, Bishop Walter Trower, over ritualism in the parish. The deposit of D'Orsey's correspondence with these two bishops in the National Library of Scotland provides the opportunity for a localised insight into the emergence of Episcopalian ministry to the poor in nineteenth-century Scotland's most industrialised city, and to the connection of such ministry with ritualism.

Alien priories, the small dependencies of foreign religious houses established in the years following the Norman Conquest, were partly thank-offerings for military success and partly civilising centres and reminders of home for England's new rulers. Their foundation in the newly-conquered lands mirrored the success of the Anglo-Normans in colonising the British Isles, since later examples were planted in southern Scotland and in Ireland too. In England their establishment dated from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries. They passed out of existence over a time-scale which was almost as long, for from the late thirteenth century, during periods of Anglo-French war, they were under attack from the crown as alleged nests of spies and as exporters of wealth to the enemy. The consequent seizure of these small houses by the crown and their vigorous exploitation by the exchequer reduced monastic life in all these houses and extinguished it in many, so that the mother houses found it advantageous to sell smaller properties while some of the larger priories were prompted to seek denization. Such solutions are evident from the last two decades of the fourteenth century. Apparent landmarks in this process of disintegration and change prove, upon close inspection, to be illusory; neither the ‘expulsion’ of 1378 nor the Act of Dissolution of 1414 were such decisive moments in the history of these houses as was once thought. Instead, we may suggest, each of these small houses must be examined separately, for the later history of each was distinctive. The religious life was entirely extinguished in some, which had become merely manors, by the later fourteenth century. Courtiers under Edward III and Richard II acquired a number which they used for the endowment of new religious houses; the Carthusian order was an especial beneficiary. Henry V endowed his new foundation of Sheen with alien priories, while some others were used to augment the endowments of existing monasteries and even hospitals. Pontefract (Yorkshire), thanks to the good offices of John of Gaunt, became denizen in 1393.