The editors of this survey justifiably describe it as both ‘an unrivalled source for the investigation of social and religious life’ (pp. xxxiii) and (p. xli) ‘arguably the most detailed and interesting record of visitation proceedings to survive from late medieval England’. Preserved by beneficent neglect in the archives of Hereford Cathedral, it was first published (albeit incomplete) in the earlier days (1929–30) of the English Historical Review. Like so many such plums, still gathering dust in the Review's back catalogue, it richly deserves renewed scrutiny. As Christopher Whittick explains in his opening remarks, this particular plum is also the victim of a fifty-year saga of unfulfilled best intentions, beginning with Paul's Hair's monograph Before the bawdy court (London 1972), and only now brought to satisfactory completion. Far more extensive than Bishop Hooper's 1551 enquiry into the Gloucestershire clergy, and more specifically focused than Eude Rigaud's mid thirteenth-century Rouen visitation book, the nearly 1,400 individual responses here recorded from upwards of 250 parishes and vills inform us, firstly, of what could be reported of failings in the clergy's cure of souls, and thereafter of what the reporters made of the sins, and in particular of the sexual misconduct, of their neighbours. The reporters themselves were no doubt the senior (and in Ian Forrest's formulation the ‘trustworthy’) male heads of peasant households in each location. Emerging thus from lay testimony, albeit filtered through the Latin of Bishop Trefnant's commissary scribes, this supplies precious evidence of ‘popular’ religious experience. In the hands of a G. C. Coulton, goodness knows what conclusions might have been drawn from it. Take, for instance, the reported incontinence of at least three of the monks of Flaxley, including their abbot (nos 427, 431–2), or of the ‘prior of Hereford’ (presumably of St Guthlac's, although here not identified as such) said (no. 545) to have fornicated with at least five local women. As for the laity, and setting aside the extraordinary record of Alice ‘Brut’ of Eastnor, accused of intercourse with seven male neighbours, two of them married, we find the parish of Kingsland identified as a nest of vice (twenty or more local adulterers or fornicators): medieval Herefordshire's equivalent to John Updike's ‘Eastwick’. Given the likelihood of exaggeration and slander, Bishop Trefnant's visitation is perhaps even more significant for what it reveals of normative lay expectations, both of the clergy and of fellow parishioners. For instance, that laymen should not seat themselves at mass in a church's chancel (no. 900), and that women should sit towards the back of the nave (no. 899, both of these entries from the single parish of Huntington); that the clergy should not be drunkards, or gossips (no. 219, breach of the seal of confession), consecrate the sacrament more than once a day, or celebrate Sunday masses that ended after noon (nos 384, 596, here included in the subject index under ‘clergy, negligent’ but not under ‘eucharist’, where Anglican scruples have consigned an entry to letter ‘e’ perhaps more likely to be sought by non-Anglophone readers under ‘m’ for ‘mass’). There is a wealth of such material to be excavated here, extending from the absurd (the all-too appropriately named ‘Philipot Balls’, fornicator of Much Marcle) to the revealing (no. 257, complaints of the lack of sung liturgy at Monmouth), or the properly shocking: clergy demands for payments for the sacrament, ranging from a minimum halfpenny to take communion (no. 690) to as much as twelve pence for absolution (no. 844, specifically demanded for the repair of church books). Unlike Coulton, the editors here remain calm in the face of so much alleged scandal. They note, for instance, that in more than a fifth (59 of 253) of the places visited, the enquiry was told that ‘all is well’ (‘omnia bene’). They note too the total absence of accusations of heresy, and sorcery restricted to an isolated instance (no. 621, albeit with elements of superstition or ‘maleficium’ to such depositions as nos 187, 300 and 658). To this might be added the absence of accusations of sodomy, or indeed of incest beyond occasional instances, never here described as involving blood relationships closer than first cousinhood (a unique instance, no. 426, although note the willingness, again at the distinctly over-inquisitive Kingsland, nos 764–8, to denounce relationships between cousins as remote as the fourth degree, also elsewhere at nos 887, 893, 902, 924, 944, 946, 1245, 1273, 1304). All this in a county on the Welsh border where, two centuries earlier, Gerald of Wales had been especially scandalised both by sexual deviancy and by the tendency of partible inheritance to encourage liaisons between close kin. Here the editors are almost certainly correct to assume not an absence of offences, including Lollardy, but rather an unwillingness on behalf of the bishop's commissaries to grant semi-public airing to the most serious of accusations, best dealt with elsewhere ‘in camera’. They also note that the recorded punishments (most often public whipping, omitted from publication in the 1920s) are outnumbered by a wealth of accusations where no further procedure was specified, save for recommendations that certain cases be carried forwards, outcome unknown. As with the text and introduction more generally, it is hard to imagine an edition and translation better done. A reader might perhaps regret the absence of supplementary prosopographical details (for instance of clergy mentioned by name both here and in the episcopal registers). We might query the claim (p. xxxii) that the visitation worked to no initial ‘fixed’ list of questions’ equivalent to the ‘articles’ of the eyre. On the contrary, there seems to be a regularity of responses to particular themes (church fabric including books, clerical and parochial morals) underpinning the occasional outbursts of more specific indignation. For the rest, contextualisation, indexing and general arrangement are exemplary: a labour now triumphantly fulfilled, furnishing materials for all future investigations of the later medieval Church, English, Welsh and European.
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