Episcopal registers can be frustrating hunting grounds for historians of pilgrimage. These registers contain, largely, documents concerned with the administrative machinery of the diocese, with the property rights of the Church and with personal title to ecclesiastical office. Pilgrimage, on the other hand, is usually seen as a personal devotional matter largely in the realm of ‘popular religion’, albeit one that could be trammelled or encouraged by ecclesiastical authorities. Yet diocesan records often provide the only evidence for the existence of a local pilgrimage site, either through attempts to control an unsanctioned or politically unsavoury cult, or through the granting of indulgences to devotional focal points. As this chapter will show, the registers do provide some evidence of official approval or disapproval of pilgrimage sites, whether through indulgences or enjoined penitential pilgrimages, and occasionally of the condemnation of unapproved cults. Yet historians should be wary of interpreting these as evidence for trends in the actual practice of pilgrimage. Rather we should see episcopal interventions as part of a contested landscape of pilgrimage, a point at which ecclesiastical and secular politics interact with personal and communal religious practice.

The landscape of medieval England was filled with places of religious significance, from holy wells and boundary crosses to the massive cathedrals towering above their cities. Throughout the Middle Ages cults sprang up at sites across the country: they flourished and declined, in some cases they were revived or renewed, in other cases they were all but forgotten. This constant process of cult creation around new holy figures, newly discovered relics or newly miracle-working images and statues, characterised and energised the landscape of medieval devotion. Long-established cults, such as those centred on bishops in England's major cathedral churches, may have had the authority of the Church and the weight of history on their side, but they could not take the affections of the laity for granted. We should not mistake the mere existence of a cultic site, however august, and however garlanded by dignitaries of the Church, as evidence for its wider popularity.

When dealing with pilgrimage, it is important to be clear what is meant by that term.