Part 1 - 1. The Sources

By the standards of what is known of most men and women in the middle ages a great deal is known about the English clergy. Most information, however, tends to survive for those who either rose in the clerical hierarchy, such as bishops, deans and archdeacons, or who attracted the unfavourable attention of contemporaries. The vast mass of the medieval clergy, especially the unbeneficed, are less well served by the records; frequently they remain almost hidden from the historian, appearing only briefly in such records as the late fourteenth-century clerical poll tax. This series of experimental clerical subsidies from the late 1370s provides details of many clergy including substantial numbers of unbeneficed auxiliary clergy.(1) Particularly valuable, however, are the ordination lists which exist in many late medieval bishops' registers. They add substantially to our knowledge of men entering the church and have been an under-used source for local population studies of the clergy.

This information, therefore, has considerable potential, but much of it is relatively inaccessible. Its potential was recognised almost a century ago by the historian T.F. Tout:

One is tempted to prepare statistics as to the relative proportion of clerks and regulars but to do so for one diocese would not be very interesting or important. When the work of the Canterbury and York Society has gone on a little longer and made more medieval registers accessible in print, an attempt to generalise as to the status of the ordinands in different dioceses and at different periods may be commended to students of ecclesiastical antiquities as a useful piece of research, never, so far as I know, systematically attempted.(2)

Despite the many registers made available by the Canterbury and York Society and other local record societies in the century since Tout wrote this, only a proportion of episcopal registers have been edited. Even where ordination lists have been edited they are not easy to use and successive editors have struggled to present the material in a helpful fashion. The bulk of ordination lists remain unedited and must be searched in the often closely written folios of the bishops' registers. Even when available in print the extraction of details of clergy who fit particular criteria can only be achieved by the tedious process of combing through the lists. What now facilitates the exploration recommended long ago by Tout has been the development of modern technology. Computers allow historians to exploit fully the potential of ordination lists. With their fairly regular format, providing information about many thousands of ordinands, the ordination lists have proved amenable to computerisation.

This book and CD-ROM make available – in machine-readable form – the contents of all the surviving London diocese episcopal ordination lists from 1361 to 1539. From the disk, all information concerning either named individuals or specified groups may be extracted: for example, information about a particular group of clergy such as all the monks of one religious house; or all the men from the dioceses in the north of England ordained in London; or all the vicars-choral of Chichester cathedral.(3) The material for the diocese of London for the fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries consists of just over 30,000 records of secular and regular clergy which can be found on the accompanying disk. Each record consists of a single ordination of a single individual. Two-thirds of the entries are for secular clergy and the remaining third relate to members of religious orders. The date range was chosen to cover the period from the earliest surviving London lists to the short-lived Henrician re-organisation of the diocese in 1540. Ordination lists continue beyond that date and the current database project on The Clergy of England 1540–1835 is making use of them.(4) Viewed as a whole, the lists allow examination of trends in clerical demography and of clerical mobility, in particular migration into London from elsewhere in the country. From the perspective of researchers pursuing the history of particular individuals, the lists allow rapid access to see whether a man was ordained in London diocese in this period and, if so, when it occurred and the man's means of support at his point of ordination.

The medieval diocese of London encompassed the City of London, the counties of Middlesex and Essex and the Hertfordshire deanery of Braughing.(5) Episcopal registers survive for this diocese from the episcopate of Ralph Baldock in the early fourteenth century, but the earliest to contain details of clergy being ordained come from the vacancy preceding Simon Sudbury's episcopate, beginning in 1361. Henceforth the lists continue until the 1540s (and beyond) with two major gaps. The whole register of William Courtenay, bishop 1375–82, is missing, and the register of Thomas Kempe, bishop 1450–89, has lost its ordination section.(6) These losses are particularly regrettable because they prevent trends in clerical demography being followed throughout the century. Despite this, the London registers provide an important corpus of ordination material, the interest of which is not just local but relevant to the history of secular and regular clergy from across much of England and Wales.

These lists of the men being ordained recorded in the bishops' registers detail information such as the date and place of ordination, the ordinand's diocese of origin and perhaps his place of origin and whether he had a degree. If the candidate for ordination was a member of a religious order, usually his order and the house from which he came are listed. The information is valuable for those studying the early careers or history of individual members of the clergy. Every member of the clergy ought to be included in the ordination lists as he became in succession an acolyte, subdeacon, deacon and priest. The same information should be available for everybody, whether they later became an archbishop or found themselves scratching out a living as an under-paid vicar or an unbeneficed mass priest. Although each entry in an ordination list provides only a little piece of information about an individual member of the clergy, the substantial quantities of information provided by the ordination lists viewed en masse are a valuable resource for those embarking upon either clerical prosopography or clerical demography.

(1) P.R.O. E179. For published clerical poll tax records, see in particular A.K. McHardy, Clerical Poll Taxes of the Diocese of Lincoln 1377-1381 (Lincoln Record Society 81, 1992) which has a very good introduction to the subject as well as printing the surviving Lincoln lists. On London, see the same author's The Church in London 1375–1392 (London Record Society 13, 1977) which prints the surviving poll tax records for the city of London and for the archdeaconry of Middlesex. London poll tax records are further discussed in A.K. McHardy, 'The Churchmen of Chaucer's London: Seculars', Medieval Prosopography, 16 (1995), a special issue on the late medieval English church. Some of the poll tax returns can be matched with the ordination lists which shed further light on the men involved. Thus, for example, thirteen of the seventeen canons of the Augustinian House of Holy Trinity at Aldgate who are listed paying the poll tax in 1379, can be found in the ordination lists, which by indicating their dates of ordination sheds light on the age structure of the house.

(2) T.F. Tout, 'Introduction' in The Register of John de Halton, Bishop of Carlisle 1292–1324 (Canterbury, York Society, 12 (1913)), 1, p. xxxix.

(3) See Part II for examples of other sample queries.

(4) This project began in October 1999, funded by the AHRB under the direction of Kenneth Fincham, Stephen Taylor and Arthur Burns and is due to be published on the Web in 2004. A brief outline of the project is given in King's College London, Humanities Computing News, February 2000.

(5) The Ordinance Survey Map of Monastic Britain, Southern Sheet shows the boundaries of the diocese. Parish boundaries for the City of London itself can be seen in M.D. Lobel (ed.), The British Atlas of Historic Towns, 3: The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c.1520 (Oxford, 1989), map 8.

(6) Kempe's lengthy episcopate stretched from February 1450 until March 1489; his surviving register consists primarily of institutions and collations. Ordinations exist for the sede vacante period April–September 1489 (London Guildhall Library, MS 9531/7) but the main ordination register must have been kept separately and has not survived; see D. M. Smith, Guide to Bishops' Registers (Royal Historical Society, 1981), p. 141. Full details of the surviving London registers are listed in Appendix 1.