‘Sobriety and restraint are not fashionable today.’ So Claire Cross chose to introduce her first major work, The Puritan Earl: the Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536-1595, completed in the King’s Manor at York in September 1965. Over thirty years, and many, many publications later, the relevance of that sentiment for her own distinctive qualities as a historian of the sixteenth-century Church seems more obvious than ever. Claire’s many admirers are, of course, well aware of how prepared she can be to abandon restraint herself when confronted with either blatant scholarly inaccuracy or serious injustice to the academic causes she holds most dear. Nevertheless, Claire Cross’s exceptional influence as a historian throughout her many years at the University of York has probably owed more than anything else to the value she sets upon the exercise of what she once called the ‘deliberately unexciting’ virtues. As she herself suggested, Hastings and his fellow godly peers may well have had a more enduring effect upon English life and English moral standards than did their more obviously dazzling Elizabethan contemporaries. If so - and who would find it altogether easy to deny the force of that argument? - how hard it is to resist the thought that Claire’s own contributions to English Reformation Church history may well outlast those of many of her own contemporaries. In a field of scholarship noted for the brilliance and iconoclasm of its recent practitioners, Claire has long been the mistress of those who know.

Born at Bridlington in 1136, William of Newburgh was educated at Newburgh, an Augustinian priory a few miles north of York, where he became a canon. William probably lived at Newburgh for the rest of his life, for the only instance of him travelling outside Yorkshire is one visit he paid to Fínchale. He died between summer 1199 and autumn 1201, leaving three extant writings. This outline of his life is based on John Gorman’s introduction to the only writing by William which has received a modern critical edition, his commentary on the Song of Songs. William’s other writings are sermons, and the Historia rerum Anglicarum (hereafter History). Yorkshire Cistercian patronage envelopes two of the works. The commentary on the Song of Songs is dedicated to Roger, Abbot of Byland, while the History is prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Ernald, Abbot of Rievaulx (1189-99), which states that Ernald had requested the work.

In addition to dealing with its income from tithes and property, the Church in the Middle Ages, as today, recognized its responsibility for raising money for good causes by urging upon the faithful the need for charity. The collectors of such contributions, or pardoners (as they were known from the inducements which they were able to offer to pious donors) sometimes earned for themselves a bad name for rapacity and fraud, as a study of the Pardoner with his ‘pigges bones’ in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales will show. But the process of collection seems generally to have been carefully organized and supervised, as a study of the system in the province of York under Archbishop Melton indicates. A good bishop clearly regarded the supervision of fund-raising as an integral part of his responsibilities. He worked not only through his archdeacons and clergy, with a final right of citation before himself in person, but also through trustworthy laymen with experience in business.

The canonist John of Ayton was described by Maitland as being ‘a little too human to be strictly scientific’. His best-known work, the commentary on the legatine constitutions of Otto (1237) and Ottobuono (1268), was dubbed a ‘grumbling gloss’, which often became ‘a growl against the bad world in which he lives, the greedy prelates, the hypocritical friars, the rapacious officials’. But this, while it may not make him the ideal canonist, is precisely what makes a study of his view of society rewarding.

History in a very religious or ideologically inspired society is always liable to become a victim of propaganda. A concern for what is right takes precedence over what actually happens, and the justification of events replaces the accurate recording of them: there is what may be termed virtuous reality. In such a climate evidence has not only to be rigorously tested and questioned, but close attention has also to be given to what is not recorded or omitted. At no time in English history is this more true than the years around 1400, when justification of a new government required the condemnation of the reign that had gone before. It is well known that the domestic chronicles of the period are a striking example of Hobbes’s dictum that in an intolerant society ‘imagination and memory are but one thing’. Despite the long centuries of struggle within virtually all medieval kingdoms for supremacy between laity and clergy, the contest of regnum and sacerdotium, which reached a climax in England during the fourteenth century, the sources - and therefore modern historians -have concentrated upon an alternative, purely secular interpretation of events. The drama of the later 1390s, which saw the deposition of both Archbishop and King, is treated as if it were all a straightforward contest between absolute and limited kingship, in which a feudal aristocracy sought justice against a tyrannical ruler, and this has served to obscure the overriding significance of the crisis as a matter of ecclesiastical history.

The present-day hamlet of Wycliffe stands on a small spit of level ground on the south bank of the river Tees, some seven miles east of Barnard Castle, at a point where the north bank rises in a high cliff; the churchyard stretches almost to the river bank. The claim that John Wyclif takes his name from the village cannot, unless further documentation is discovered, be finally proved; but it seems a reasonable one. Robert Wyclif, a clerk in the diocese of York, acted on behalf of John in 1371 in regard to tithes from an alien priory granted to the latter by the king, and again in 1376 to pay part of the annates claimed by the papal collector Arnald Gamier for the prebend of Caistor, a prebend from which Wyclif was displaced by the appointment of the papal provisor Philip Thornbury.

Money provides the sinews of religion no less than of war. Since their emergence, parishes have been and remain fundamental to many ecclesiastical financial regimes. In pre-Reformation England, their revenues not only supported the incumbent, but might be diverted to many other purposes. The process of appropriation transformed a monastery, collegiate church, or other institution or office into the perpetual rector, entitled to receive the revenues in full. The ordination of a vicarage would then normally divide the income, the rector usually taking the lion’s share of the spoils, while the vicar received a small portion. Parishioners then found their parochial payments being used not in the locality, but perhaps hundreds - occasionally thousands - of miles away, for purposes over which they had no influence. At the same time, the perception of the parish as milch cow might lead the appropriators to ignore the cure of souls, whilst exploiting the finances to the full.

The development of testamentary jurisdiction by the English Church authorities has already received considerable attention, and it is generally held that by the close of the thirteenth century the basic probate procedures had been well established, even if some administrative practices continued to be refined. This paper aims to look at the practical evidence of the York archiepiscopal records from the thirteenth century to the Reformation from an archival and administrative viewpoint - the concern is not so much with the canon law touching wills and testaments, or with the testamentary disputes and litigation in the archiepiscopal court, the Curia Eboracensis, or indeed with the contents of the wills proved before the ecclesiastical authorities, but with the routine practicalities of the exercise of probate and intestacy administrations.

The feast of Corpus Christi, as is well known, seems to have been widely and rapidly adopted from the time of its formal promulgation at the Council of Vienne. The feast was being celebrated in England from within a few years of the Council. Processions of the Sacred Host were invariably the focus of these celebrations, and these appear sometimes to have been accompanied by Corpus Christi Plays in the form of Creation to Domesday drama cycles. Such are recorded for the first time at Beverley in 1377 and, indirectly, at York a year later.

Amongst the very fragmentary collection concerning elections of deans of York, now in the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York, is a file of the surviving papers for the election, in 1503, of Christopher Bainbridge, ‘capellanum et consiliarium’ to Henry VII. In it there are two examples of humanistic script - an autograph subscription to a letter written for the prebendary of Botevant, John Colet, and a letter written by Peter Carmelian, prebendary of Ampleforth. The occurrence of this script is rare, possibly unique, in the archbishops’ archives.

The four volumes of Robert Surtees’s great History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, which were published between 1816 and 1840, included a series of engraved plates of episcopal seals. They started in the eleventh century, with the seal of William of St Carilef, and ended in the sixteenth century, with Cuthbert Tunstall. According to a note in the late volume, written by Surtees’s friend, helper, and literary executor, James Raine, in 1839, five years after the author’s death, ‘The Seals of the Bishops of Durham, after Tunstall’s period, are so devoid of taste and character, that Mr Surtees did not consider them worthy of being engraved.’ While the aesthetic judgement that explained this decision may be understandable, historical and iconographie interests now make it regrettable. For it was precisely at this time, after the death of Cuthbert Tunstall in 1559, that reforming dictates began to have an impact on episcopal seal-making. And, as was realized by G. C. Gorham less than twenty years after Raine’s note, changes in ecclesiastical seals reflect wider issues in church affairs, and may be revealing of their owners’ opinions.

All too often neglected and overgrown, holy wells still dot the AA English countryside. Many more are merely a distant memory: names recorded by dead antiquarians, folklorists, and topographers and since forgotten, sites marked on Ordnance Survey maps soon to be obliterated by the encroaching urban and industrial world. Despite the heroic efforts of a group of local historians, this aspect of British heritage is in rapid decline. Those which have survived represent only a tiny fraction of the vast number that were scattered across the rural landscape on the eve of the Henrician Reformation. Wells were an integral part of the late medieval geography of the sacred, a matrix of ancient holy places where ordinary people could approach and invoke the divine. Casual weekend visits by ramblers and picnicking families are almost all that remains of the thriving culture of pilgrimage to such hallowed spots.

Thanks to the work of Claire Cross and others, the multiplicity of sources available for the study of early sixteenth-century clergy has been used to yield information about many facets of clerical lives and careers. One source, however, has hitherto been largely neglected. The clerical subsidy of 1523-8 has, despite some printed versions for some places having been available for many years, been overshadowed by the Valor ecclesiasticus. This essay will try to show, from evidence relating to York City, that the subsidy was an important precursor to the Valor, and that, combined with other sources, it is an invaluable repository of information about the clergy just before the medieval church was dismantled.

Two miles west of Nottingham, where the road to Derby crossed the river Leen, stood Lenton Priory, its lofty spires easily viewed from the ramparts of Nottingham Castle. Indeed, the first constable of the royal castle, William Peveril, was also the founder of the priory, a fact which would not have escaped any visitor to the town in the twelfth century. Peveril, the archetypal Anglo-Norman grandee, was entrusted with the extensive Honour of Peveril as a reward for his services. Lenton was its liturgical showpiece. Founded between 1103 and 1114, it was a Benedictine house placed under the supervision of Cluny and dedicated to the Holy Trinity. It had the specific duty to pray for the souls of the first three Norman kings, along with those of Peveril and his family, an obligation still being carried out by five ‘needy men’ in the associated Hospital of St Anthony in 1535.

The monastic cathedrals of England had for centuries led a double life. On the one hand, each was the seat of a bishop, and the centre of a diocesan administration. On the other, it was the home of a cloistered community, usually Benedictine, which was in theory withdrawn from the world. In principle, the community, which actually owned the cathedral and its precincts, should have elected the bishop, in which case he would probably have been one of their own number, and relations could have been expected to be harmonious. However, in practice, bishops were royal servants, and were appointed by the king with papal connivance. There were numerous quarrels between kings and popes over such appointments, but disagreement never resulted in a canonical election, which would almost certainly have produced a candidate acceptable to neither. In consequence, the bishops of monastic cathedrals were almost invariably outsiders, and usually seculars.

Above the entrance doorway at Carnasserie Castle in mid-Argyll there is a finely carved panel containing the coat of arms of Archibald Campbell, fifth Earl of Argyll, and his first wife, Lady Jean Stewart. Along the foot of the panel, in the script employed in Gaelic manuscripts, there is a motto which reads: ‘DIA LE UA NDUIBH[N]E’ or ‘God be with Ó Duibhne.’ The designation Ó Duibhne referred to the fifth Earl of Argyll as chief of Clan Campbell. The inscription and its setting provide a perfect illustration of the different cultures and traditions which the fifth Earl combined in his personal and public life and permitted him to be both a Protestant earl and a godly Gael. The short Gaelic phrase of the motto was the first post-Reformation inscription within the Gaidhealtachd or Gaelic-speaking area, which covered the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

In 1630 Robert Jenison, then a lecturer at Newcastle, wrote a treatise on the second part of the first verse of Psalm 127: ‘Except the lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ Drawing on the experience of his work in the city since 1614, he specifically addressed the respective roles of magistrates and ministers in creating a godly town. He chose to dedicate his tract to the Lord Mayor of London. But The cities safetie or a Fruitful Treatise (and useful for these dangerous times) had an application to the civic leaders of all towns and cities, for he called upon them to ‘promise and afford your best pains, and do your utmost endeavours, with heart tongue and hand, to seek the good, and procure the welfare of God’s church: to dig about it, and to dung it, and so to do whatsoever duty is contained under these phrases’.