Abstract
Two models leap to most people’s minds when considering the Middle Ages: feudal anarchy and the age of faith. Even historians sometimes find it difficult to escape the imaginative constraints which these twin constructs impose. The fourteenth-century English Church conformed to neither of them. It was, for its time, a well-ordered body, staffed at its higher levels by decent and competent clergymen who saw that the ecclesiastical machinery ticked over in broad accordance with canon law. This hierarchy, if it did not preside over some pre-Raphaelite idyll of devout landowners, leaseholders, and labourers, nevertheless knew of no principled challenge to its teachings, and of little active dissatisfaction with its pastoral provision. The educational attainments of the parochial and unbeneficed clergy were — and were admitted to be — far from ideal. The few graduates were concentrated in the upper echelons of the clergy, and were often occupying benefices without cure of souls which supported them in what they would have seen as their more important bureaucratic employment in Church or State.
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Notes
Dorothy M. Owen, Church and Society in Medieval Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1971; History of Lincolnshire 5), pp. 140–1.
W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1955), p. 4.
W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (New Haven, CT, and London, 1990), pp. 136–7.
A. B. Cobban, The King’s Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 251–8.
E. W. Ives, ‘The reputation of the common lawyer in English society, 1450–1550’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal 7 (1959–60), pp. 130–61, esp. pp. 131–5.
W. T. Waugh, ‘The Great Statute of Praemunire’, English Historical Review 37 (1922), pp. 173–205, esp. pp. 200–4.
See also G. L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort (Oxford, 1988), pp. 214–18.
David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (3 vols, Cambridge, 1948–59), II, p. 258.
J. I. Catto, ‘Religion and the English nobility in the later fourteenth century’, in History and Imagination, ed. H. Lloyd-Jones et al. (London, 1981), pp. 43–55, at p. 50.
Christine Carpenter, ‘The religion of the gentry in fifteenth-century England’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 53–74, at p. 63
Nigel Saul, ‘The religious sympathies of the gentry in Gloucestershire, 1200–1500’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 98 (1980), pp. 99–112.
C. L. Kingsford, The Greyfriars of London (Aberdeen, 1915), pp. 70–133.
C. H. Lawrence, The Friars (London, 1994), pp. 2–4, 8–10, and 102–8.
Jennifer R. Bray, ‘Concepts of sainthood in fourteenth-century England’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 66 (1983–84), pp. 40–77. For Grosseteste and Dalderby, see Owen, Church and Society in Medieval Lincolnshire, p. 126.
See also S. Walker, ‘Political saints in later medieval England’, in The McFarlane Legacy, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 1995), pp. 77–106, esp. pp. 78–9.
F. R. Johnston, ‘The English cult of St Bridget of Sweden’, Analecta Bollandiana 103 (1985), pp. 75–93.
M. Rubin, ‘Corpus Christi fraternities and late medieval piety’, Studies in Church History 23 (1986), pp. 97–109, at p. 103. See also her ‘Small groups: Identity and solidarity in the late Middle Ages’, in Enterprise and Individuals in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. J. Kermode (Stroud, 1991), pp. 132–50; and of course her Corpus Christi (Cambridge, 1991).
R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1970), pp. 62–83; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, pp. 45, 115, and 238–48
For a refreshing challenge to cosy notions of medieval community, see R. M. Smith, ‘Modernization and the corporate medieval village community in England: Some sceptical reflections’, in Explorations in Historical Geography, ed. A. R. H. Baker and D. Gregory (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 140–79.
G. J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety from Relics to the Eucharist (Leiden, 1995).
Michael Hicks, ‘Chantries, obits, and almshouses: The Hungerford foundations, 1325–1478’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society, ed. C. M. Barron and C. Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 123– 42, at pp. 141–2.
Beat Kumin, The Shaping of a Community (Aldershot, 1996). See pp. 148–9, and 152–9 for the points about lights and guilds.
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© 2002 Richard Rex
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Rex, R. (2002). The Church of England in the Later Middle Ages. In: The Lollards. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-21269-5_1
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