Overview

The reign of Henry VII was one of administrative consolidation on many different levels, and the convocations were also affected by this. The first part of the reign was little more than a continuation of the pattern established under Edward IV, but from 1489 a change can be observed, particularly in Canterbury. The inefficiency of the traditional tax system was by now too obvious to be ignored, and the king had to deal with the exemption culture which had mushroomed in the previous decades. Instead of demanding the traditional tenths, he began to experiment with fixed sums, which the clergy were then left to raise in whatever way they could. This pattern was not extended to York, however, even though the problem of nonpayment was proportionately greater in the north. There, the old pattern was preserved throughout the reign, perhaps because the sums involved were too small to justify the disruption which serious change would have involved.

The first decade of the sixteenth century witnessed some curious phenomena in the history of the convocations. First of all, the king permitted a papal subsidy to be levied for defence against the Turks, the first (and last) time that such a request was actually acted upon. He also encouraged the convocations to engage in liturgical experiments, asking them to devise a liturgy of prayer for his own health. This was a new departure for the convocations, which had never dabbled in liturgical experimentation before, but in later times it would become an enduring part of their raison d'etre. Finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, Henry VII stopped asking the convocations for money, and the decade was to be among the most tax-free in their history.

With respect to source material, the reign of Henry VII suffers from the disappearance of the Canterbury records after 1489. Fortunately, a good deal can be reconstructed from what has survived in the registers of the suffragan bishops, but what happened to the central records remains something of a mystery. It has been surmised that they were kept in St Paul's cathedral, where they were supposedly burnt in the great fire of 1666, and this may be correct.