6
R.N. Swanson
Introduction
In work on the economic and social history of medieval Europe, the church has a somewhat uncertain position. In England, certainly, its estate records underpin much of the analysis of rural social structures, landholding and farming practices; but the records are valued for their basic content, not for the fact of being church-derived. For such analyses what really matters is that the continuity of the recordkeeping provides unparalleled access to the histories of individual estates and their agricultural production, not the ecclesiastical and religious background to their creation in the medieval rural world.2
Yet there is another narrative of the church’s place in rural society in the Middle Ages, of the church in the specifically rural parishes that congealed and then developed further across Europe over the centuries here under review. Evolving from the early understanding of the whole diocese as the bishop’s parochia, by 1500 Europe – which essentially here means the Catholic Europe that acknowledged the papacy as its head (and so setting to one side the Orthodox structures in the Balkans and Russia) – was a Europe of parishes, local communities focused on their own church, with their own priest responsible for the local cure of souls and sacramental and pastoral provision. The evolution had occurred at varying rates across the continent; in 1500 it was still continuing. Organic growth in England was essentially frozen by the territorial liabilities set for a papal taxation of 1291, making subsequent changes difficult but not totally impossible. By contrast, in fifteenth-century Lithuania the process of Christianisation following the formal conversion from paganism to Catholicism in 1386 allowed parishes to be established for the first time, but in a somewhat erratic process that remained incomplete well beyond 1500.3 Strangely, in northern Italy, despite the long ecclesiastical history there, evolution had been slow. The early medieval system of extensive pieve, with a central baptismal church and several dependent territorial chapelries, remained in existence, only slowly disintegrating as centrifugal forces generated smaller independent parishes.4 The great variety among the parishes of western Europe makes a full survey impossible here. Discussion therefore concentrates on England, further limiting chronologically to the period roughly between 1291 (when a somewhat schematic map of English parishes can be constructed from the records of the papal taxation) and 1535 (the date of the Valor ecclesiasticus, a comprehensive survey of parochial arrangements in a Catholic England soon to disappear).5 Even so, it can do little more than outline some of the key aspects, with others left unaddressed.
As when reconstructing many other components of medieval societies, the availability of some types of detailed evidence masks serious deficiencies elsewhere. While significant amounts of sources survive, a full picture is always elusive. No records provide a full history or overview of the medieval rural parish; breaking through to its actuality in anything other than disjointed and episodic fragments is challenging. The character and quality of sources varies across the continent. In England, for instance, archival continuity to transcend the divide imposed by the Reformation is limited, whether in general or for specific places; it is found largely in records of diocesan administrations (if these survive in adequate quantities), or among the muniments of institutions and estates in existence from before the Reformation, or whose records were retained when the lands were transferred to new owners. This immediately funnels attention. Very few personal records survive from individual parochial incumbents, or from their assistant clergy. The parishioners, the laity, are equally poorly represented, although there are scattered churchwardens’ and guild archives and tranches of court material. Individual parishioners leave few personal documents, other than wills.
Parishes and parishioners: the challenge of definitions
Parishes existed in both town and country – London, as England’s capital city, had over a hundred; the much smaller Stamford (Lincs.) had eleven in 1535.6 A first task is to differentiate between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ parishes, which produces the first snag. Parishes as ecclesiastical units were components of an ultimately supranational church in which distinctions between urban and rural were basically irrelevant to the overriding goals of saving souls wherever they were. Yet the parishes existed in the real world. Some were obviously urban: wholly intramural, usually small, with no agricultural component to the benefice’s income. Many parishes were indisputably rural, with most of the revenue of the benefice derived from tithes of grain or other produce, and the central settlement too small to count as more than a village. A large number, however, challenge such crude categorisation. If a settlement with only 300 inhabitants (or even fewer) can count as a ‘small town’ in medieval England,7 there were innumerable parishes (their number constantly changing) that had such a settlement – or part of it – at their heart, alongside a strong agricultural component. In the early-sixteenth century Basingstoke (Hants) had around 1780 inhabitants and a clearly urban industrial sector; but the financial jottings of its vicar dwell repeatedly on the local sheep flocks and sales of malt produced from his tithe grain.8 Even intramural churches in places large enough to be definitely towns or cities often received some revenue from agricultural tithes in the surrounding fields, or in detached suburban portions of the parish, and the incumbent probably also had his own lands (his glebe). When Chaucer described the parish of his Parson in the Canterbury Tales, he depicted a situation that most of his contemporaries and audience would instantly have recognised as normal: a settlement – a toun – at the heart (but not always the geographical centre) of a fairly extensive territory, with a strong agricultural element whose specific composition would reflect specific regional factors.9 Tithes almost instinctively invoke a fundamentally rural and agricultural world, levied most profitably on sheaves (a range of crops, not just grains), lambs and wool. Even the multitude of ‘small’ tithes was essentially cropped, from teasels to saffron, honey to hemp, pollarded or coppiced willow to garlic and onions; but their cultivation meant that some might be as well produced in urban gardens as rural or suburban ones.10 However, the rural parish was not always exclusively agricultural: it could have a significant quasi-industrial element, through the exploitation of natural resources (such as the lead of the Peak District), or scattered clothmaking represented by the presence of fulling mills.11
This lead-in circles round the most glaring immediate problem, of fixing ‘the parish’. Parishes – all parishes – existed in many guises, whose differences are usually elided in scholarship either because the precise manifestation is presumed as a corollary of the issue under discussion, or to avoid overburdening the reader. In detail, however, the differences matter, especially when examining the parish in a context such as ‘the rural world’. Here, two contrasting approaches are especially important. One treats the parish as a territorial unit, a block (or blocks) of land that constitutes a somewhat impersonal jurisdictional and administrative entity. The other examines the parish as a community, a collection of people identified by their association with and subjection to a particular local church. Neither is wholly adequate, with the first perhaps leading to a focus on bureaucratic and disciplinary systems, and possibly concentration on the parish as a benefice in which the parishioners are a secondary issue. The second, however, by emphasising ‘community’, throws the focus on the parishioners, the lay members, while pushing the clergy into the background.
As a social unit, the parish certainly invites interpretation and analysis as a distinct form of community; yet to excise it from its wider context and place in rural society in that way may go too far. While capable of being mapped, as a single block or agglomeration of dispersed fragments, the parish was rarely as precisely identifiable or identified as a map may suggest. The presence of other mappable entities in the same space – manors, jurisdictions, villages, townships – also meant that the parish always existed in negotiation with those entities, overlapping but rarely uniting, and with its own dynamic that was nuanced (if not distorted) by integration into the totality of contemporary society.
Ultimately the parish must be approached on its own terms, as a fragment of the church. That, though, assumes that it can be extricated from the surrounding secular world, which is simply untrue. The sources invite compartmentalisation to segregate the parish from its wider environment and treat it as something unto itself, offering few overt links to other aspects of rural society. A segregated approach is also adopted here, to meet the structural needs of the volume. Yet interweaving with the secular world was unavoidable, in ways too numerous and complex to examine in detail, simply because this was a human organism. The parish’s leading lay personnel were often also the leading personnel of the manor, a dominant elite of fide dignos.12 Other interweaving appears in non-parochial (or non-ecclesiastical) records, like the manor court rolls of Alrewas (Staffs) and Bellerby (Yorks.). Among other overlaps, the former provide most of the available information about the ‘service of St Mary’, a subsidiary chaplaincy founded within the parish church in 1332, endowed and managed by the manorial lord and parishioners.13 The reduced run of extant Bellerby rolls is less informative, but between 1443 and 1471 records repeated complaints by the inhabitants about their parochial rector’s failure to maintain a chaplain in the local chapel despite having endowments for that purpose.14 This may be the only evidence for the chapel’s existence before a papal bull of 1474 that approved new arrangements for the chapel’s funding and support.15 Very different interweaving occurs in petitions submitted by clerics and churchwardens to the royal Court of Chancery, seeking aid in disputes the common law could not resolve. Numerous clerical petitions complained about the collapse of arrangements for leasing rectories, often involving (exaggerated) claims of violence. Meanwhile, churchwardens and parishioners – lacking formal legal personality – appealed for the enforcement of promised bequests against reluctant executors or feoffees to uses.16
The chief problem perhaps lies in addressing the parish as a unified territorial entity. An internal division of interests between incumbent and parishioners, which requires the benefice to be assessed as a separate unit in its own right, imposes an immediate barrier to unified interpretation. Similarly, assorted divisions among the parishioners (leaving aside further potentially conflicting interests of other parochial clergy) increase the challenges. The centrifugal force of subparochial units is one factor here, social divisions potentially another. However, some basic social divisions and categorisations were effectively homogenised into oblivion in formal representations of the parish. Serfdom mattered in the manor, and to some clerics as landowners, but seemingly had no obvious impact on the shared status of parishioners as subjects of their parish church. The geographical tensions will require further consideration, but of more immediate concern must be a nuancing even of the seemingly uncontentious and shared status of being a ‘parishioner’.
The functioning parish
Whether they are examined as territorial or social units, any generalised attempt to deal with rural parishes faces a basic problem: a standard or even typical parish did not exist. Each was unique for innumerable reasons, most of the key ones basically geographical (location, size, climate, natural resources), others institutional (jurisdictional arrangements, staffing). The full implications of such practical differences cannot be considered here. Internal arrangements are the main concern, but even there precise differences in detail mattered, especially in the structure and management of the benefice – the economic resources for the clerical cure of souls over the parishioners. The default position, and the starting point in evolutions, was that every parish was a rectory, the benefice held by a rector as occupant of the estate, receiver of the spiritual revenues and spiritual overseer of his parishioners. That generally remained the case throughout the period, although usually the rector was assisted – and often actually replaced during absence – by a salaried parochial chaplain whom he had hired for the post, with other assistant clergy. Over time, many parochial rectories (by 1535 about a third of those in England and Wales) were transformed by the process of appropriation. In its most widespread form, this transferred the rectory to an undying institution – usually a religious house (including ‘hospitals’ and nunneries), a collegiate church (institutions like St George’s Chapel at Windsor) or cathedral or an educational institution (colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, schools like Winchester and Eton). The institution became corporate and undying rector, receiving much of the income and resources, but spiritual oversight of the parish, the ministry associated with the cure of souls, was normally (but certainly not always) delegated to a subsidiary benefice whose own endowment and income were carved out of the original rectory resources. Designated ‘perpetual vicarages’, these subsidiary benefices thereafter had their own successions of incumbents, their own histories and evolutions. Time eroded some of the key features of the original model (notably rigid enforcement of the obligation to constant residence), to some extent blending them into a general class of beneficed parochial incumbents.17
Many rural parishes perhaps existed as territorial units more firmly delineated than the local manors, yet often contested and debated. Their bounds were annually traced in the Rogationtide processions in spring; they could also be indicated by physical markers, sometimes considered a nuisance by farmers cultivating lands that transcended that line.18 Elsewhere, however, the frontiers were much less clear, with uncertain boundaries and enclaves and exclaves to disrupt territorial unity. No contemporary maps of these pre-Reformation parishes exist to give authoritative delineations that overrode communal memory or unstable boundary markers. Pre-Reformation parishes did have boundaries, statements of which are occasionally encountered in various contexts; but these can be untrustworthy, and are often partisan pronouncements. In reality, boundaries were vague, blurred or contested. Yet they mattered, because they defined the territory and people (a) subject to the parish church and its incumbent for the receipt of sacraments; (b) liable for the fiscal dues that combined into the resources of the benefice; and (c) expected to contribute to communal obligations to maintain the church (apart from it chancel) and churchyard enclosure and provide additional paraphernalia for the parish’s communal spiritual life. Even when fixed, the boundaries could be confusing. The bounds of the lands that paid tithes did not necessarily match those delineating spiritual subjection, so parishioners who were sacramentally subject to one church by one definition of its parochial boundary might pay tithes to another because its tithable lands encompassed their place of residence. (Enclaves and pockets of alienated tithes further complicated this pattern.) Additionally, most tithes, levied on produce grown or originating in specific places or from industrial enterprises at a fixed site, were payable in the parish where they were generated. Their producers, though, might live elsewhere, and so not count for sacramental purposes as parishioners of the church (or churches) to which those tithes were paid. Contemporaries apparently made no formal distinctions here: all concerned, whether subjects sacramentally or only for tithing purposes, were identified simply as parishioners; yet for the purposes of technical analysis some formal distinction is obviously needed. ‘Sacramental’ parishioners can be considered as ‘primary’ parishioners, with those liable only for tithes or for payments to the church or churchwardens based on their landholding within the parish being counted as ‘secondary’ parishioners.
The economic element will dominate here, even though the parish was primarily an ecclesiastical and spiritual unit. That function provided its basic rationale, in a ‘pastoral contract’ between incumbent priest – rector or vicar – and his parishioners, directed to the worship of God and salvation of souls. The contract was a binary relationship, a union of two sets of rights that could easily clash (and often did). The duality, and inherent tension, is encapsulated in definitions produced by the priest and inhabitants of a Sussex parish in the fifteenth century, as they jointly mounted a vigorous attempt to prevent the subjection of their church, and themselves, to a neighbouring parish. The rector asserted that his parish church was sufficiently constructed and endowed for the
support of a rector in order to celebrate vespers, matins, masses, and other divine offices in that church across the year, and for the administration of ecclesiastical sacraments and sacramentals, and to sustain the burdens whatsoever and howsoever incumbent upon the rector and the church,
using the fruits ‘to maintain themselves and their [households] and their obligations’. Meanwhile, the parishioners asserted that the ‘right to hear vespers, matins, and masses and other divine offices, and to receive ecclesiastical sacraments and sacramentals in that church … pertains and should pertain in the future to the parishioners of that church singly and together’, with the right to receive such service from the rector or his substitute.19
The parish’s spiritual side, with its complex disciplinary relationships between clergy and laity, was not specifically open to differentiation between rural and urban parishes, and will not receive much attention here. Pastoral care was pastoral care, whoever provided it; masses were masses, wherever they were celebrated. While the overall quality of spiritual provision varied between parishes, dependent on the wealth of the living, the character of the clerics and the behaviour and demands of the laity, it is virtually impossible to identify a characteristic ‘rural’ quality. There might, though, be a distinctive difference in the logistics of pastoral care: distance possibly made the practicalities more problematic in a rural than an urban parish, especially in urgent cases (notably of last rites) – but almost identical anxieties on such matters arose in both contexts. It is in the economics that differences begin to be visible.
A rural parish’s economy can be considered under three headings. First there is the benefice as an estate, the landed endowment of the rectory. Then there are the revenues of the cure of souls; mainly tithes, but also the payments literally for services rendered. Finally there is the parishioners’ economy, stimulated primarily by their obligation to fund the fabric of their allocated section of the church and the maintenance of the churchyard. From the thirteenth century, it was the usual English practice that the rector had financial responsibility for the upkeep of the chancel, the holiest segment of the church containing its high altar, and the rectorial complex, essentially a home farm. The parishioners were generally required to maintain the rest of the church, usually treated in shorthand as ‘the nave’, and to repair the churchyard enclosure – needed to demarcate the consecrated ground, and more practically to exclude unwelcome animals (especially pigs) that might disturb the dead buried there. This amounts to a division between a clerical and lay economy, but the terminology is a matter of utility rather than precise reality.
The real distinction is between the rectorial economy and the parishioners’ economy. The parish existed to fund the cure of souls, channelling revenue to the rector which would then be spent as required, including on provision of other clergy. The potential revenues and financial obligations were clearly defined in canon law. The parishioners’ economy was much more evolutionary, in resources and expenditure, and beyond the incessant spending on basic upkeep becomes more challenging to deal with in general terms.20
The rectory
One understanding of the benefice was that it existed ‘for the support of a rector’ – it was, on one side of the financial equations, a means of payment for services rendered, literally a living. The revenues were not solely those handed over by the parishioners as specific obligations; the most fundamental and secure endowment was the church’s land, its glebe. Basically, the rectory was a landholding, a farmstead intended to be managed as a functioning agricultural enterprise. This glebe could be extensive, and was not necessarily confined within the limits of its holder’s own parish. At Cherry Hinton (Cambs), the rectorial glebe amounted to slightly over 109 acres, some of it located in the neighbouring parishes of Fulbourn and Teversham. Like other estates, the glebe was not necessarily a single block; if there were dependent chapelries some of the glebe might be located there, used to provide for the resident chaplain. A chunk might be excised at appropriation, to provide a much smaller estate for the vicarage. When rectories were leased out (whether appropriated or not) it is a reasonable presumption that they were active agricultural concerns.
At times these estates were almost lordly; the rector of Hanbury (Staffs) had his own park.21 Even if not exactly lordly, they were seigneurial: although the evidence is scanty, it seems likely that rural rectories were at least originally manors, and many remained such throughout the late medieval period. However, rectories as manors have received scant recognition from economic historians: the leading scholar of seigneurialism in England deems them only ‘quasi-seigneurial’.22 There were some aspects that were perhaps distinctive (it is unlikely that rectorial or glebe manors included common lands, with the rectors maintaining their flocks and herds on the common lands of adjacent manors), but these had no impact on their seigneurial character.
As far as can be seen, rectory manors carried the full panoply of seigneurial rights. The almost complete lack of evidence for manors of unappropriated parishes (essentially the product of archival discontinuity) is worrisome, but can perhaps be compensated for by material from appropriated rectories, at least until the practice of widespread farming introduced further disruption. The rectories had their courts, their customary works, mineral rights, the heriots levied as secular death duties (in addition to the mortuary paid to the church by all parishioners in recognition of spiritual subjection) and serfs and their servile dues. (Serfdom is almost invisible in unappropriated rectories, and perhaps affected only one or two families before its erosion.23 It may have lingered later in parishes where the appropriators held both the main local secular manor and the rectory.) The customary works may have been part of the package in a rectory farm, even if not always explicitly included in the lease. That may have encouraged their commutation into monetised payments that allowed the tenant to use the actual labour himself.24 The manorial jurisdiction was perhaps less often farmed, but where it was its conveyance probably produced a significant shift in the power relations among the local elite.
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While the lands were important as endowment, the bulk of a rectory’s income usually came from other sources. Most of these were characteristic of all rectories, with little to mark rural parishes from urban ones. Fees for services and voluntary offerings were ubiquitous; a parish’s rural character perhaps appears only in the offering of livestock as mortuaries, and the tithing of agricultural produce. Tithes were the more significant factor, but mortuaries cannot be overlooked.
Mortuaries were due at death, almost as a funeral tax (and sometimes actually handed over at the funeral). Local custom varied, but cultivators usually had to hand over their second-best beast (the best went as heriot to the lord). Mortuaries could be demanded for spouses and children, but maybe not normally as livestock. The payment of an essential piece of capital agricultural equipment was potentially a heavy burden, especially if doubled for a heriot, and might sometimes be the deceased’s sole animal. Here it is the implications of the practice for the payers, not for the recipients, which is critical. The actual fate of the beasts is rarely noted, although they were often sold, which might have other ramifications in a farming community.
Tithes usually provided the bulk of a rural rectory’s income. At a notional 10% of produce, tithes were a significant factor in the personal economies of both incumbent and parishioners. They could establish the incumbent as one of the wealthiest men in the parish; they pushed at the profit margins – at times the subsistence margins – of the parishioners; they were always potentially contentious, and were regularly contested. In contrast to rural parishes, strictly urban ones, lacking such income, were often impoverished. Their inhabitants (like the inhabitants of rural parishes) did pay ‘privy’ tithes, levied on the profits of trade and industry, but these were perhaps easily avoided and problematic to assess and collect.25
Most discussions of rural tithing in England focus on agricultural produce. Generally most significant were the grain and wool tithes, whose marketability usually made them the segment of rectorial rights that appropriators were most keen to control. The less easily managed tithes of other animals, poultry, crops and produce (down to gathered nuts, or the tithe on pannage payments due to a manorial lord for allowing pigs to forage in his woods) were frequently (but not automatically) allocated to the vicar when a parish was appropriated and its revenues split to fund two benefices.26 Even if not significant in scale, these miscellaneous tithes mattered to both payers and recipients, as fragments of their produce and income; both sides would check carefully on liability and payment. Moreover, the balance between types of tithe was variable, and changed over time. The fixed divisions of early appropriations often became outdated, especially with the increased pastoralism of later medieval England, which made some vicarages more valuable than the rectories from which they had been carved. There were also numerous small-scale fluctuations, as quarries and similar enterprises came into and went out of production,27 or the balance of specific crops altered due to climatic change or the demands of the market. The latter may be indicated by the expansion of saffron cultivation in East Anglia in the fifteenth century – with occasional disputes over whether the appropriator or vicar should get the tithes of that valuable crop.28
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Tithe administration and collection had its own rules, but practice varied. Essentially, the aim was to gather all that was due; actually securing it could be difficult. The tithing of the main grain crops were perhaps fairly straightforward, unless resisted by the payers; ecclesiastical and secular courts could be used to enforce claims and reduce resistance. The fifteenth-century manor court rolls of Cottenham rectory (Cambs) list the amercements due to the rector over the harvest period from all inhabitants of the parish (not just his own lordship) for incursions by animals into the imminently tithable crops.29 Rural tithe cases, about liability and collection, are legion in the records of the church courts;30 innumerable other disputes were settled by compromise and arbitration that would only rarely find its way into the records.31 Some of these cases reflect other difficulties surrounding tithing, including the distinction between the boundaries of a parish’s tithable lands and those of its spiritual authority (the tithes due from neighbouring Fulbourn All Saints were a regular problem at Cherry Hinton (Cambs.)).32 In many parishes, small parcels of tithes had been alienated to regular institutions, or to free chapels (the latter often actually sited within the parish) before the parochial system had fully congealed. That repeatedly caused difficulties as incumbents claimed the tithes or parishioners resisted payment. Tithes from livestock and poultry were inherently problematic. They obviously did not reproduce in neat tens, but that difficulty was partly resolved from the thirteenth century (for lambs, fleeces and calves) by complex arrangements for cash payments to balance out the production of more or fewer than five units.33 Cattle and sheep were also moved regularly across parish boundaries, raising questions about where their tithes fell due and forcing incumbents and their agents to keep a close eye on whose animals were where and when.34 Here local compromises perhaps reigned, but might take time to emerge. Cambridge’s incumbents struck an accord in 1274 about the payment of tithes on sheep pastured in the fields surrounding the town, which was seemingly still in force in the fifteenth century.35 That applied to lambs, fleeces and (sheep’s) cheese; its existence firmly demonstrates the insecurity of any blunt distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ parishes. By contrast, the complex arrangements to be used at the nearby parishes of Fen Ditton and Horningsea, where sheep movements both between the two parishes and into them from others were an issue, were clarified only in 1412.36
Rectory management
As a benefice, a parish was only temporarily in its incumbent’s charge. In most parishes this meant that he received the rectory as office and living from the bishop, and the resources and property reverted to the bishop when the benefice next became vacant. (This did not happen where the rector was an undying corporate body, but then the vicarage reverted.) The bishop’s residual rights of ownership and oversight conferred authority to intervene if circumstances required, even in neglected appropriated parishes, to ensure that the pastoral contract was maintained and the rectory (or vicarage) preserved undamaged for succeeding incumbents.
As a benefice, and an amalgam of obligations, the rectory and its resources had to be managed. The obvious equivalent model is the manor and its demesne, but with the added layers of tithe collection and spirituality income. Actual practice varied considerably, with no universal pattern. Appropriation, and the creation of perpetual vicarages, often meant the division of resources, with the vicar allocated a portion of tithes and other income that had to be managed separately from that remaining to the rectory. The glebe could indeed be managed as an agricultural holding, its management left in the hands of a bailiff if not undertaken directly by the incumbent himself – but details only rarely become visible. Tithe collection was often complex and laborious, and often resisted or at least contested. It required hired labour and a hands-on approach that could become confrontational (especially if a priest used his spiritual power to enforce his rights, as when Easter communion was denied until tithes were paid). Here again, there was no single universal pattern: tithing practices and collection arrangements (including obligations for transporting of delivering the produce) were often affected by local custom. Other spirituality income – particularly the offerings associated with church services and sales of wax – was often accounted for by the parochial chaplain. At this level, sources are generally limited. The most revealing evidence is provided by complaints and court cases between clerics and parishioners (or, indeed, between rival clerics laying claim to the same dues). This is extensive, but not necessarily representative; it reveals specific disputes generated in specific (but usually undisclosed) contexts, without illuminating generalised attitudes. While minor infractions may have been endemic, and precise calculation was always a challenge (on both sides) it remains the case that tithes were generally paid: resistance was not to the general principle, but to the specific demand – or the person making it.
Considered as a specific type of landed estate, a parochial benefice required effective management if it was to be properly sustained and produce its anticipated revenues. In many instances, perhaps at some points in most, management was direct: the incumbent personally oversaw the agricultural round, managing his labourers and his animals, and marketing the produce – sometimes (to his parishioners’ annoyance) being thereby distracted from his spiritual obligations. Tithe collection added complexity, but generally such management was much like that of any other agricultural enterprise. Personal involvement might be most common in vicarages, where smaller endowment allowed closer engagement. In rectories, the estate’s size perhaps made management through a bailiff more suitable (as it would certainly be in those appropriated rectories that were kept in hand, no matter how far away they were).
There were always some rectories managed directly by their rectors, but inadequate sources leave this an obscure area. Over the centuries many parishes, perhaps most, experienced periods (even centuries in appropriated parishes) where most if not all of the rectorial revenues were leased out, ‘farmed’. Such leasing has been much studied for manors in late medieval England; the history of the equally ubiquitous but more complex leasing of rectorial resources has been strikingly ignored except as a factor in landlordly management, without detailed consideration of the process, the people, and the social and economic implications of the practice as a whole. Here only a tentative sketch is possible.37
Leasing was an obvious managerial tool for rectorial resources. The church’s own canon law prescribed complex terms and conditions to regulate the practice, with variations to address differing contexts. Broadly speaking, rectors of unappropriated parishes leased the whole benefice to cover medium-length absences (although often with extensions), during a distant pilgrimage, or while attending university. Leasing might also prove necessary if a rector was too old or decrepit to manage the parish in person. In appropriated parishes, leases only affected the appropriated tithes and rectorial complex (the vicar took care of the cure of souls and generally received the spirituality income together with his allocation of other resources). The leasing of unappropriated rectories (and, in time, the leasing of vicarages) has a shadowy history yet to be excavated in detail. Most of the surviving information relates to appropriated rectories, but usually amounts to little beyond the actual leases and entries regarding rent payments in accounts. Detailed insights into the realities within the parishes are only rarely provided, usually only when things went wrong.38
As a management tool, leasing was adaptable, and not always of whole parishes. Its adoption reflected strategic choices by both parties, the lessor needing to set a rent that met expectations while leaving the lessee with some assurance of an adequate profit and sufficient leeway to cover bad years. The strategic approach is evident in the managerial history of the three Cambridgeshire parishes appropriated to Peterhouse, Cambridge, by 1400, although this provides merely an indication, not a template.39 Peterhouse lay in St Peter’s parish, which was kept in direct management apart from the leased grain tithes: all of the income went immediately to the college coffers. Thriplow, some eight miles away, was always leased. In between, at just under four miles’ distance, Cherry Hinton lay on the cusp: neither sufficiently distant to make leasing the prime option, nor close enough to put it beyond consideration. While the parish was usually leased between 1400 and 1535, for an extended but uncertain period it was managed under a hybrid regime. The glebe was all leased out to a single holder, constituting a substantial farm in its own right. Meanwhile the college collected the grain tithes, which provided raw material for malt-making on an almost industrial scale. This system was abandoned in 1511; the new farmer of the whole rectory had previously been farmer of the glebe; whether he continued the malting operation is unknown.
The sale of that malt points to the marketing opportunities inherent in tithes, as primary products and foodstuffs with significant advantages over market rivals in production costs and viable profit margins.40 That doubtless explains the attraction of farming to the farmers, with ramifications in the wider rural society. Where the farmer was not the local vicar, effectively reconstituting the parish as a united benefice, rectory and tithe leasing provided significant economic opportunities, not least (as leases came to be held dynastically, and for extended terms) to allow families to entrench themselves in the local pecking order. While many farmers were outsiders to their leased parishes, others were local men (and women), well placed to benefit both economically and socially from their tenancies.
The lay parish
On the nave side of the chancel arch, England’s parishioners maintained their own version of the parish and their own ecclesiastical economy.41 This reflected their particular imperatives and obligations, its practicalities shaped by local contexts and resources. Sources here are as problematic as those for the benefices. The main lay-generated records are churchwardens’ accounts, but very few parishes leave substantial pre-Reformation runs, and those that survive provide incomplete coverage of the parish in its totality and variation. Interpreting this material provokes its own debates.42 The most useful additional sources are probably church court records, imposing discipline and settling disputes. As with the benefices, there is a challenge in singling out rural parishes as a specific class, but again the significance of the agricultural sector provides a key identifier. One point suggested to resolve that issue focuses precisely on the parishioners’ parochial economy, arguing that by the late middle ages lay parochial activity in English rural parishes was funded more by the ‘living’ than the ‘dead’. In this view urban parishes amassed considerable amounts of real property, largely from bequests, which was rented out to meet the churchwardens’ main responsibilities, reducing the active involvement of the parishioners as a whole. By contrast, rural parishes were still largely dependent on ad hoc collections and levies paid directly by the living, which stimulated greater involvement in parish affairs.43
This argument holds some truth, especially if attention is concentrated on the financial regime maintained specifically by the churchwardens. However, that may overlook the revenues of other wardens if they were not routed through the main officers, whether exercising specific tasks associated with the parish church or administering the accounts of subsidiary chapels. Here there are innumerable lacunae in the records, which challenge effective reconstruction of this lay economy. A few points are clear. First, that much of this hidden economy was indeed sustained by the living – their rent charges funded parochial chantries like that at Alrewas, their levies paid for additional church furnishings and major building work, their gifts purchased images and other liturgical and devotional aids. Second, that much was also funded from the dead, but not from bequests of tenements and readily listed buildings. There were certainly some lands, bequeathed to endow parochial chantries or simply to increase the wardens’ income (if not managed independently), or whose rents funded obits and anniversaries managed likewise. Other monetary bequests also contributed, perhaps particularly in funding short-term contracts (possibly adding up to long-term employment) for subsidiary clergy. Also significant were ubiquitous bequests (alongside gifts by the living) of long-term income-producing stock – sheep, cows, beehives and more (like Hartlebury’s cauldron) – which was hired out to both produce income and assist others lacking such resources.44 No balance can realistically be struck here; the lay parochial economy (urban or rural) rested fundamentally on the laity’s desires and what they actually needed to provide. What, after all, did the parishioners of rural Eton (Bucks) need to do, when King Henry VI’s generosity to his newly founded college there imposed a church they could not afford to maintain and a liturgical regime far beyond their means, but then relieved them of having to pay for it?45
***
As a social entity the rural parish, like its urban equivalent, essentially conformed to contemporary social norms. Inevitably gendered, it appears as male-dominated, with women evidently active but not usually prominent. The sphere where they may have played a significant role, private devotion, leaves few traces to permit gendered analysis – although rural women may have had less leisure or fewer opportunities for active devotionalism than the urban and gentle women who leave most of the available evidence.46
Self-sustaining as a community that aspired to be a Christian community but was never solely or exclusively a church-based one, rural parishioners integrated the demands and expectations of Catholicism into their lives as moral and disciplinary imperatives. Here again, there is little to distinguish obviously between rural and urban parishes. The parochial celebrations of ‘Plough Sunday’ and ‘Plough Monday’ at the start of the agricultural year were more rural than urban.47 Some ecclesiastical regulations possibly impacted differently according to context: the ban on manual labour on Sundays and other holy days perhaps had particular rural consequences. Treated as holidays, these days were welcome breaks from labour,48 although perhaps welcomed more by labourers than employers. In some circumstances agricultural urgency trumped ecclesiastical duties: gathering the harvest or an approaching storm might take priority over relaxation or attending church, leading to a summons before the church courts and subsequent penance. Accordingly, in 1442, three men from Wentnor (Shrops.) admitted reaping on St Bartholomew’s day (25 August); their penance was to be beaten around the parish church, each carrying a sheaf of wheat or oats to symbolise his fault, and with a threat of a 20s. fine for subsequent offences.49 Rigidity was not universal; some incumbents appreciated their parishioners’ dilemmas. Moreover, as the ban on labour applied to clerics’ own fields they also sometimes ignored the rules and were taken to court. In 1472 the rector of Kinnersley (Shrops.) was charged with permitting his parishioners to work on a feast day (a charge he denied); while in 1381 the rector of Withybrook (Warws.) was accused of requiring two men to mow on Sundays over four years.50 Ironically, as Sundays and feast days guaranteed large church attendances, churchyards were good places for trade and marketing, and so drew traders away from their own churches. Yet there may always been something furtive or potentially underhand about such absenteeism, at least in the eyes of the churchgoers and clergy: absenteeism allowed nefarious activity that challenged community, unwitnessed by the worshippers.
Tension and fragmentation
A major problem particularly for rural parishes was the threat – often reality – of fragmentation, perhaps not unlike the equivalent fragmentation of Italian pieve into several smaller parishes. The virtual freezing of English parochial boundaries in 1291 did not freeze social and economic evolution. New settlements arose with their own spiritual needs; old settlements eroded and decayed, with some parishes so reduced (or consolidated into so few landholdings) that they became effectively redundant. Reduced parishes could be (but were not always) united with others – as happened in both towns and countryside.51 Overpopulated parishes, or those where new or growing settlements sought to assert their own identity, were challenged by more localised loyalties. A significant feature of many rural parishes is the proliferation of chapels, notably those founded to serve secondary or subsidiary settlements.52 Some were considered rectorial responsibilities, the rector required to pay the chaplain. Others were a local responsibility, with the rector allowing the inhabitants to engage a stipendiary chaplain and maintain their own chapel. Hanbury (Staffs) had one of each, respectively at Marchington and Newborough.53 In both cases, matching the general pattern, the chapel remained subject to the parochial mother church. The inhabitants of the chapelry were usually required to contribute towards the maintenance of the mother church’s nave and churchyard enclosure, worship there on specific feast days, and (most significantly) receive their Easter communion there. A chapel might have many of the characteristics of a parish church – including a graveyard and a font, and regular celebration of masses – but it remained a dependency, a ‘chapel used as a parish church’, as some in Yorkshire were described in 1547.54
Powerful centrifugal forces threatened to fracture these multisettlement parishes.55 Localities – of their own volition, or prodded by interested parties – would claim greater spiritual autonomy, even total independence. Common justifying tropes were that the mother church was regularly made inaccessible by raging torrents that blocked access, and that distance made the transport of corpses for burial unnecessarily difficult. The latter is probably true, the former (like other justifications) more a rhetorical device. The outcome could be a lengthy war of attrition, intermittently revitalised in succeeding generations if the aim was not speedily achieved.56
Whatever the force and validity of the desire for autonomy, it had real consequences as played out. Rarely did it actually result in a new parish, but the chapelry did often secure greater freedom and sacramental rights, loosening ties to the parochial mother church. That had implications for the benefice, and for the churchwardens and inhabitants who had previously incorporated the dependency into the budgetary expectations of the parish church. A split benefice, or the requirement that the incumbent pay for the chaplain, would reduce the rector’s wealth in an era of economic uncertainty. Greater local autonomy would mean reduced funding for maintenance of the parish church. Incumbents may have had to accept the fait accompli; the parishioners were possibly less complaisant. It may even have been they who most forcefully resisted the pushes for autonomy; they did sometimes engage in rearguard action. That allegedly happened at Terrington St John (Norf.), whose inhabitants turned to the papacy in 1402 for confirmation of their parochial independence from Terrington St Clement when its parishioners continued to demand contributions to the maintenance of their parish church despite episcopal confirmation of St John’s separate status – although the narrative is questionable.57
Conclusion
The archival compartmentalisation that bedevils the effective reconstruction of medieval English rural life poses as many challenges for the imagined community of the parish as it does for that of the manor. Arguably, it also reinforces a conceptual or perceptual division that belied reality. The varying overlaps between manors, vills, parishes and chapelries, can suggest difference and even tension; but thereby mask the integration of all these variables into a single mix.58 That integration is perhaps exemplified in England when manor court fines were split between the lord and the church fabric, or a single item satisfied both lordly expectations of heriot and clerical demands for mortuary.59 Within the parish tensions, even active hostility, certainly existed, and it would be wrong to downplay them. The key requirement, even if generalising, is to appreciate each parish as a unique entity, a distinct and discrete unit in which a complex and almost incomprehensible (because irrecoverable) array of forces was at play. This creates an interpretative tension that seems irresolvable. Generalisation is a methodological necessity; yet so different, so unique, is the amalgamation of factors in each and every parish that generalisation becomes questionable not because it oversimplifies, but because it necessarily excludes far too many individual cases as ‘anomalous’. If that must be said simply of England and Wales, how much more does it apply as the field of vision expands to survey everywhere from northern Scandinavia down to Sicily, or from western Ireland and Portugal across to Poland and Croatia?
The rural parishes of late medieval catholic Europe did have some common characteristics – not least the active lay engagement in management of resources to maintain the church, and the universal similarities derived from the church’s shared (but not identically shaped) administrative and organisational structure. Parishes normally provided the church’s foundational layer for bureaucratic purposes, even where subsidiary units existed. These parishes existed in conjunction, sometimes competition, with alternative means of structuring rural society – manors, lordships and communes, buffeted by the incessant impact of social and economic change. The parochial structure was explicitly an ecclesiastical structure, but one explicitly not divorced or alienated from the other sectors of the rural world. Full and effective integration of the parish into analyses of rural life is problematic, essentially because the appropriate sources do not easily coincide with those of the secular world; but its potent place in and impact on rural society emphatically challenges the validity of analyses that ignore it.
Notes
1. This article was completed while holding a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (MRF-2012-016: ‘The English Parish, c.1290-c.1535’), and draws extensively on work undertaken for that project. I am deeply grateful to the Trust for its support.
2. E.g. B. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1977); C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: the Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Cambridge, 1980).
3. D. Baronas and S.C. Rowell, The Conversion of Lithuania: From Pagan Barbarians to Late Medieval Christians (Vilnius, [2015]), pp. 462–75 (and maps between pp. 523/557).
4. D. Hay, The Church in Italy in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 22–4.
5. Taxatio ecclesiastica Angliæ et Walliæ, auctoritate P. Nicholai IV, circa A.D. 1291 (London, 1802); Valor ecclesiasticus, 6 vols (London, 1810–34). For a useful comparison of English and continental experiences, B. Kümin, ‘The English Parish in a European Perspective’, in K.L. French, G.G. Gibbs, and B.A. Kümin (eds), The Parish in English Life, 1400-1600 (Manchester and New York, 1997), pp. 15–32.
6. M.D. Lobel (ed.), The British Atlas of Historic Towns, Volume III: The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c. 1520 (Oxford, 1989) [map]; Valor ecclesiasticus, 4, pp. 143–4.
7. C. Dyer, ‘Small Towns, 1270-1540’, in D.M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume I: 600-1540 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 505–6.
8. A. Dyer, Decline and Growth in English Towns, 1400-1640 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 64; R.N. Swanson, ‘Profits, Priests, and People’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2002 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 14 (Donington, 2006), pp. 157–8.
9. L.D. Benson (ed.), The Riverside Chaucer, revised edn. (Oxford, 2008), p. 31.
10. All of these occur in the pre-Reformation accounts for the suburban Cambridge parish of St Peter without Trumpington Gate: Cambridge, Peterhouse Archives, Computus rolls, 1–58.
11. R.N. Swanson, ‘Economic Change and Spiritual Profits: Receipts from the Peculiar Jurisdiction of the Peak District in the Fourteenth Century’, in N. Rogers(ed.), Harlaxton Medieval Studies, III: England in the Fourteenth Century, Proceedings of the 1991 Colloquium (Stamford, 1993), pp. 184–5; R.N. Swanson, ‘Economic Survival in Late Medieval Derbyshire: The Spirituality Income of the Dean and Chapter of Lichfield, c.1400 to c.1535’, in R. Goddard, J. Langdon, and M. Müller (eds), Survival and Discord in Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Christopher Dyer (Turnhout, 2010), p. 100; R.N. Swanson (with D. Guyatt), ‘The Visitation Court Book of Hartlebury, 1401–1598’, in Noble Household Management and Spiritual Discipline in Fifteenth-Century Worcestershire, Worcestershire Historical Society, n.s., 24 (Bristol, 2013), pp. 182, 193, 207.
12. I. Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2005), p. 212.
13. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office: references are scattered through the court rolls at D(W)/0/3/, with others in the complementary series of prebendal manor court rolls at D783/5/1/. The foundation charter is at D(W)/0/3/15, m. 7d.
14. Northallerton, North Yorkshire County Record Office, ZFW 5, see especially m. 3r.
15. J.A. Twemlow(ed.), Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Papal Letters, 1471-1484, Vol. XIII – Part 1 (London, 1955), pp. 383–4.
16. For the suitability of Chancery (and other equity courts) as a legal forum for parochial cases, K.L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), pp. 39–42.
17. For general outlines, A.H. Thompson, The English Clergy and Their Organization in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1947), ch. 5. To undermine generalisation, numerous appropriated parishes did not acquire such vicarages, but were served by salaried clerics who lacked the secure tenure of an incumbent.
18. Swanson and Guyatt, ‘Hartlebury’, p. 236; R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 34–5.
19. Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 54, f. 193r.
20. The main study is B. Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c.1400-1560 (Aldershot, 1996).
21. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, LD412/116, f. 11v.
22. B.M.S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250-1450 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 41.
23. Attempts to uphold it appear in Peterhouse, Cherry Hinton Rectory, Manor court rolls/1, the only court rolls I know from an unappropriated rectory which predate the Black Death and the immediately following decades now argued as the real turning point in serfdom’s decline (see M. Bailey, The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England: From Bondage to Freedom (Woodbridge, 2014)). Later erosion and disappearance is traceable in the annual but ineffectual attempts noted in the fifteenth-century Cottenham rectory manor court rolls to recall nativi de sanguine living off the lordship without licence being finally abandoned under Henry VIII: Ely, Cambridgeshire Record Office, P/50/3/1-3.
24. Alienation of works appears in Cambridge, Peterhouse Archives, Computus rolls, 31, 33–40 (to the farmer of the glebe lands). Enforcement seemingly continued in fifteenth-century Cottenham: Ely, Cambridgeshire Record Office, P/50/3/1-2.
25. For privy tithes, A.G. Little, ‘Personal Tithes’, English Historical Review, 60 (1945), pp. 67–88 (now somewhat outdated).
26. Swanson and Guyatt, ‘Hartlebury’, pp. 224, 226 (nuts); Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, e.g. D(W)/0/3/117-18, 125–6 (pannage, Alrewas, Staffs.).
27. E.g. M.E. Briston and T.M. Halliday (eds), The Pilsgate Manor of the Sacrist of Peterborough Abbey, Northmptonshire Record Society, 43 (Northampton, 2009), no. 193.
28. Cambridge, Peterhouse Archives: Computus rolls, 26; Registrum vetus, p. 89; Triplow A6.
29. Ely, Cambridgeshire Record Office, P50/3/1-2, passim, the relevant ordinance set out in P50/3/1, m. 28r; P50/3/2, m. 1r. Something similar is suggested in the equivalent Cherry Hinton records, e.g. Cambridge, Peterhouse Archives, Cherry Hinton Rectory, Manor court rolls 2, mm. 3r, 4r-d.
30. Broad discussion in R.H. Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, Vol. 1: The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s (Oxford, 2004), pp. 440–65.
31. E.g. Hereford, Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, HD4/1/92, p. 51.
32. Negotiations and litigation are mentioned in Cambridge, Peterhouse Archives, Computus rolls, 14, 16, 19, 21–4, 26.
33. R.N. Swanson, ‘A Universal Levy: Tithes and Economic Agency’, in B. Dodds and R. Britnell (eds), Agriculture and Rural Society after the Black Death: Common Themes and Regional Variations, Studies in Regional and Local History, 6 (Hatfield, 2008), pp. 97–8.
34. See, e.g. the notes for early sixteenth-century Basingstoke in Cambridge University Library, MS Ll. 2.2, ff. 1v–4v, 257r–259r.
35. Peterhouse, Registrum vetus, p. 89 (copied in the C15).
36. Cambridge University Library, EDR, G/1/3, ff. 127v–128v.
37. See also Swanson, ‘Universal Levy’, pp. 102–8.
38. The discussion in R.C. Palmer, Selling the Church: The English Parish in Law, Commerce, and Religion, 1350-1550 (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 2002), ch. 4–5, is valuable, but needs to be used with caution.
39. The rest of this paragraph draws on evidence mainly derived from Cambridge, Peterhouse archives, Computus rolls 1–58 (incompletely covering 1374–541).
40. Swanson, ‘Universal Levy’, pp. 108–16.
41. For brief comment on a European scale, R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe c.1215-c.1515 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 244–8.
42. The best available list is in Hutton, Rise and Fall, pp. 263–93. The key statements of debate are C. Burgess, ‘Pre-Reformation Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Lessons from London and Bristol’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), 306–32; B. Kümin, ‘Late Medieval Churchwardens’ Accounts and Parish Government: Looking Beyond London and Bristol’, English Historical Review, 119 (2004), 87–99; C. Burgess, ‘The Broader Church: a Rejoinder to “Looking Beyond”’, ibid., pp. 100–16.
43. C. Burgess and B. Kümin, ‘Penitential Bequests and Parish Regimes in Late Medieval England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), pp. 610–30; reinforced in Kümin, Shaping of a Community, pp. 109–20.
44. For the cauldron: R.N. Swanson (with D. Guyatt), ‘The Visitation Court Book of Hartlebury, 1401-1598’, in Noble Household Management and Spiritual Discipline in Fifteenth-Century Worcestershire, Worcestershire Historical Society, n.s., 24 (2013), pp. 243, 253 (see also p. 219).
45. Eton College Archives, ECR 39 64 A.
46. K.L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia, PA, 2007).
47. Hutton, Rise and Fall, pp. 16–7.
48. R.N. Swanson, Church and Society in Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), p. 195.
49. Hereford, Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, HD4/1/88, p. 43. Such symbolic carrying is also known elsewhere (Swanson and Guyatt, ‘Hartlebury’, p. 173), and in at least one manorial context (F.R.H. du Boulay, The Lordship of Canterbury: An Essay on Medieval Society (London, 1966), p. 189).
50. Hereford, Herefordshire Archives and Record Centre, HD4/1/96, p. 6; E.G. Kimball (ed.), Rolls of the Warwickshire and Coventry Sessions of the Peace, 1377-1397, Dugdale Society Publications, 16 (London, 1939), pp. 96–7.
51. Swanson, Church and Society in Later Medieval England, pp. 44–5.
52. N. Orme, ‘Church and Chapel in Medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 6 (1996), pp. 75–102; N. Orme, ‘The Other Parish Churches: Chapels in Late Medieval England’, in C. Burgess and E. Duffy (eds), The Parish in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 2002 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 14 (Donington, 2006), pp. 78–94.
53. Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, LD412/116, ff. 12v–14r.
54. E.g. W. Page (ed.), The Certificates of the Commissioners Appointed to Survey the Chantries, Guilds, Hospitals, etc., in the County of York, 2 vols, Surtees Society Publications, 91–2 (1892–93), 1: 152, 2: 375.
55. R.N. Swanson, ‘Fissures in the Bedrock: Parishes, Chapels, Parishioners and Chaplains in Pre-reformation England’, in N. Lewcky and A. Morton (eds), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England – Essays in Honour of Professor W.J. Sheils (Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2012), pp. 77–95.
56. R.N. Swanson, ‘Parochialism and Particularism: The Disputed Status of Ditchford Frary, Warwickshire, in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in M.J. Franklin and C. Harper-Bill(ed.), Medieval Ecclesiastical Studies in Honour of Dorothy M. Owen (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 241–57; C. Lutgens, ‘The Case of Waghen vs. Sutton: Conflict over Burial Rights in Late Medieval England’, Mediaeval Studies, 38 (1976), pp. 145–84.
57. W.H. Bliss and J.A. Twemlow (eds), Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, vol. V, A.D. 1396-1404 (London, 1904), p. 591. There is no confirmation of Terrington St John’s claims; all other evidence shows it as a chapelry of Terrington St Clement through to the nineteenth century.
58. An integration asserted from the parochial perspective in S. Hindle and B. Kümin, ‘The Spatial Dynamics of Parish Politics: Topographies of Tension in English Communities, c.1350-1640’, in B.A. Kümin (ed.), Political Space in Pre-industrial Europe (Farnham, 2009), pp. 151–61.
59. W.O. Ault, ‘Manor Court and Parish Church in Fifteenth-Century England: A Study of Village by-Laws’, Speculum, 42 (1967), pp. 53–67; one set of rules for heriots/mortuaries appears in J. Birrell and D. Hutchinson, ‘An Alrewas Rental of 1341’, A Medieval Miscellany, Collections for a history of Staffordshire, 4th ser., 20 (2004), pp. 77–8.