The more things change the more they remain the same: the most recent Anglican debate on eucharistic sacrifice also concerned 'what the ancient Church understood thereby' .2 Such a focus is unavoidable, even necessary, in an ethos which has so often presented itself as walking right humbly in the paths of Christian antiquity. But it does seem odd that modem Anglican scholars have devoted so little study to the way in which the question of eucharistic sacrifice was handled in their own tradition, particularly during that century between the Armada and the Glorious Revolution which so often passes for the classical age of Anglican divinity. It is as if scholars feel they have exhausted what the Elizabethan and Stuart Church of England understood thereby once they have noted the ceaseless efforts to demonstrate how 'the sacrifices of Masses ... were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits' . I should like to argue that English doctrine was somewhat more 'obscure, intricate and perplexed' than this flat negation suggests. For even as they repudiated 'the sacrifices of Masses', English divines canvassed sacrifices in the Lord's Supper.