The preceding four chapters have examined different types of chapel in detail; this chapter will bring those analyses together to consider broader issues. There are three key questions: first, how much impact did the Church have on local devotional organisation? This is, first and foremost, an issue of standardisation versus localism, that is to say, how far the Church was able to influence church organisation at a very local level. Secondly, can any Scandinavian influence on church organisation be identified in the three dioceses – Sodor, Galloway and York – with Scandinavian settlement or conversely can influence from the British Isles be identified in Bergen diocese? The former three dioceses experienced varying densities of Scandinavian settlement, and consequently it is possible that church organisation was modified by these settlers and their descendants. Thirdly, we will consider whether, particularly in the better-documented areas such as the East Riding of Yorkshire, chapel abandonment was caused by the population decline of the fourteenth century that resulted from the Black Death, famine and climate change. Did the fall in population lead to the abandonment of chapels or, conversely, did an increase in popular piety among the survivors ultimately encourage the foundation of new chapels?

The Church and local devotional organisation

Dedications

Following the reform movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Latin Christendom became increasingly focused both institutionally and culturally on Rome and the papacy. This meant that the popes had progressively more power over how the Church operated throughout western Europe, which brought uniformity to some aspects of the Church, in particular to liturgical practices. The resultant sharing of forms of religious devotion meant that across Europe the same saints were venerated in similar fashions. The saint who appears most commonly across all five dioceses is, unsurprisingly, the Virgin Mary, but other universal dedications such as Christ, Michael and Peter also occur, as do dedications to international saints such as Nicholas, Margaret and Catherine; in our case-study areas only Galloway had none of the latter.

However, the universal dedications are only one element in the fluctuating, complex patterns of chapel dedications across these dioceses, which also incorporate local and national saints. Those in the archdeaconry of the East Riding of Yorkshire, for instance, were predominantly focused on universal and international saints such as the Virgin Mary and St Nicholas, with a few chapels dedicated to national saints such as Edmund and Cuthbert.