Where is the historian who has not felt, at least while immersed in protracted labours, that his or her favoured subject has hitherto been strangely neglected? Avoiding the obvious question of how many feel much the same even after publishing, it will tempt more than a few wry smiles to suggest that this all too familiar lament has a certain justification where the medieval college is concerned. In the half-century or more since Alexander Hamilton Thompson laid down his pen, few English historians have done much to continue the work he pioneered delineating the constituent parts of the medieval ecclesiastical establishment – and, most notably, those foundations giving shape to the secular Church. While it is to Hamilton Thompson’s lasting credit that the deep-seated prejudices of contemporaries failed to deter his inroads on sensitive areas, the sea-change presently reconstructing attitudes to the pre- Reformation Church surely demands further restitution in our understanding of its component institutions. In subjecting the medieval college to scrutiny, this essay pays homage to, and builds upon, the work of a pioneer; in so doing, it relies on bold strokes to cut away the obstacles that impede our understanding and to shed more light on the purpose and effects of collegiate foundation. It therefore dwells, first, on three broad themes concerning, in order, perception, development and, finally, connotation: exploring these is to expose a series of distortions that has, cumulatively, hindered assessment of England’s late medieval colleges. Next the essay considers the opportunities implicit in the collegiate form that rendered it particularly attractive to contemporaries. The third section outlines the more conspicuous conditions that impinged upon and, in many respects, shaped English affairs during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, having the consequence of repositioning colleges in the vanguard of contemporaries’ priorities and investment. The misconstructions that have worked, however, to frustrate appreciation also mean that this recovery has been largely unacknowledged. As a result, its implications for the condition and character of the Church in England on the eve of the Reformation have been for the most part missed.

I

The first theme concerns what might be termed historical opinion which, as suggested, has tended to exclude collegiate institutions from assessments of the late medieval Church. On the one hand, when discussing the two hundred years following the advent of the Black Death and preceding the Reformation, historians habitually tend to draw attention to individuals, like Walter Hilton or Julian of Norwich, setting them up as spiritual beacons.