Surveying the registers of the fifteen bishops of Bath and Wells from 1264 to 1559, Robert Dunning pulls out plum after plum from what are often and complacently regarded as the routine leftovers of medieval English episcopal administration. The envy of anyone writing church history elsewhere in medieval Christendom, where even monastic visitation records are hard to come by, let alone full lists of ordinations or the registers’ rich lumber of cause papers and royal mandates, in reality the English registers supply a uniquely detailed insight into the functioning of the medieval Church. Long into the nineteenth century, they remained scandalously neglected. A campaign of publication began only in 1872, with James Raine's edition for the Surtees Society of the earliest registrations from the archdiocese of York. From 1873, for the Rolls Series, Thomas Duffus Hardy followed suit with a complete Latin edition for Durham, joined, a decade later, by a far from definitive selection from the register of John Pecham, archbishop of Canterbury. Only in 1904 was the Canterbury and York Society established to extend this campaign nationwide, at first in collaboration with county record societies beginning with the registers of Lincoln and Hereford. Meanwhile, local efforts at Winchester (from 1896), Worcester (from 1897) and especially at Exeter (from 1889), have rendered the names J. W. Willis Bund and F. C. Hingeston-Randolph notorious for slapdashery and general editorial incompetence. The diocese of Bath and Wells, coterminous with Somerset and extending to the southern Bristol suburbs, was fortunate, as early as 1887, to recruit the comparatively reliable services of Edmund Hobhouse, disgraced as first bishop of Nelson in New Zealand, and since his retreat homewards already experienced in publishing (1880) one of the earlier registers of the see of Lichfield. Hobhouse's efforts for the Somerset Record Society were thereafter carried forward by Thomas Scott Holmes (chancellor of Wells) and Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte (long-serving head of the Public Record Office). Hobhouse and Maxwell-Lyte both sprang from the Somerset squirearchy into which Holmes was married as son-in-law of Edward Augustus Freeman. Their work, completed by 1940, has since been crowned by Dunning's own work on Bath and Wells Ordinations, 1465–1526 (Somerset Record Society xcix, 2021). Now standing back to admire this wider achievement, Dunning's survey follows in the tradition of J. R. H. Moorman, C. R. Cheney or Nicholas Orme: a reminder of quite what riches can be mined from seams supposedly routine. At a national or even international level, the Somerset registers significantly supplement our knowledge of the Black Death, Lollardy (especially in Bristol), the Hundred Years War (the retirement of the earl of Huntingdon, England's admiral, before Crécy; 900 local militia recruited by the bishop for home defence during the Agincourt campaign; the death in captivity after Castillon of the last English captain of Bordeaux), the Lancastrian and Tudor successions (indulgences for the chapel at Battlefield, built to honour those slain at Shrewsbury in 1403; the political eclipse of Bishop Stillington after Bosworth Field), or the Conciliar Movement (prayers in 1441 for the unity of Churches). A list of indulgences for those contributing to ransom payments (p. 118) extends such international coverage to the otherwise obscure Robert Brent (captured both in Spain in 1412, and again by the pirates of Saint-Malo in 1418), Sir John ‘Sthaurarchii’ (‘nobleman of Constantinople’, ransomed with his mother and sisters following the Ottoman conquest of 1453), or Robert Molyneus, captured before 1448 fighting for the king of Hungary and the prince of ‘Moureyt’ (presumably Thomas Palaeologus, titular prince of the Morea/Achaea). At parish level, Dunning's spotlight illuminates all manner of local features, from the minster origins of the churches of Crewkerne, Keynsham and Taunton, via the slow decline of the town of Ilchester, or the ruinous state of Athelney Abbey, to such local but no doubt hard- fought disputes as that over the regulation of the bells of Bath by the clock of St Mary Stalls (first reported 1408, not resolved until 1424), the excommunication of those who bathed naked in Bath's spa waters, or the licence granted in 1318 to a rector of Swainswick, to absent himself from his parish for two years ‘on account of the ill-will of some of his flock’. A corollary to Nicholas Orme's Going to church in medieval England, Dunning's gem-like distillation of three hundred years of diocesan life serves as a reminder both of the heroic contribution made by the English county record societies, and of the ways in which, even now, various of their publications, even the more obscure, continue to rival in significance the output of the greater university or commercial presses.
No CrossRef data available.