York and Northumbria- Prebends, The Chapter of York Minster 1066-1300
Before 1093 archbishop Thomas (1070-1100) had brought about a total reorganization and rebuilding at York, based on his experience in Normandy. He had been clerk of Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and canon and treasurer of Bayeux cathedral, where by 1093, Odo presided over a large chapter, with nine dignitaries and over thirty canons. York has had a Christian presence from the 300s. The first church on the site was a wooden structure built hurriedly in 627 to provide a place to baptise Edwin, King of Northumbria. There was a series of Benedictine archbishops, including Saint Oswald, Wulfstan, and Ealdred, who travelled to Westminster to crown William in 1066.
Hugh d'Avranches, 1st Earl of Chester (died July 27, 1101) was one of the great magnates of early Norman England. Hugh was the son of Richard Goz, viscount of Avranches, in the far southwest of Normandy, and inherited from his father a large estate not just in the Avranchin but scattered throughout western Normandy. Hugh became an important councilor of William, Duke of Normandy. He contributed 60 ships to the invasion of England, but did not fight at Hastings, instead being one of those trusted to stay behind and govern Normandy. Hugh spent much of his time fighting savagely with his neighbors in Wales. Together with his cousin Robert of Rhuddlan he subdued a good part of northern Wales. However in 1081 Gruffydd ap Cynan king of Kingdom of Gwynedd was captured by treachery at a meeting near Corwen. (Mont St. Michael) In the summer of 1098 Hugh joined with Hugh of Montgomery, 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury in an attempt to recover his losses in Gwynedd. The situation was changed by the arrival of a Norwegian fleet under the command of King Magnus III of Norway, also known as Magnus Barefoot, who attacked the Norman forces near the eastern end of the Menai Straits.
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A sign of the influence of Bayeux is the way in which at York until 1218 the second place in chapter was occupied by the treasurer rather than the precentor: this unusual arrangement was the custom at Bayeux in the last years of the eleventh century, but was superseded by the middle of the twelfth. A second change in cathedral organization involved the division of chapter lands into individual prebends. Thomas I of York's father was a priest named Osbert, and Samson, bishop of Worcester from 1086 until his death in May 1112, was his brother. Owing largely to the generosity of Odo, bishop of Bayeux, Thomas studied in France, Germany and Spain and became known as a scholar; then he became one of Bishop Odo's officials and after 1066 one of William the Conqueror's chaplains, or secretaries. In England these were the minsters and in Normandy the collégiales. There are clues that at some cathedrals in both countries division into prebends had begun to take place before 1066: in England at St Paul's cathedral, London, and in Normandy at the cathedral of Coutances.
After 1066 the prebendal system on the Norman style was gradually adopted in both English and Norman cathedrals. At Bayeux in or after 1074 bishop Odo divided newly acquired land. In 1071 both archbishops travelled to Rome for their palls and while there Thomas wished Pope Alexander II to decree the equality of the sees of Canterbury and York. At York before c. 1090 archbishop Thomas divided some of the waste estates into individual prebends, thus abandoning the common life that he had earlier sought to encourage by rebuilding the refectory and dormitory. According to Hugh the chanter, 'The canons had long lived in common, but the archbishop, after taking advice, determined to divide some of the lands of St Peter's which were still waste into separate prebends, to leave room for a growing number of canons; in this way each of them might be eager to build on and cultivate his own share for his own sake.' This is the first unequivocal evidence from an English cathedral of a bishop dividing estates into individual prebends, and there are documents recording the creation of four, perhaps six, prebends before 1114. In a charter of [1105] relating to one of these prebends, Laughton, Henry I refers to 'the customs of the older prebends' of York.
Of the thirty-six prebends that were finally to be formed for the canons of York, only a quarter of the estates had not been in the possession of the archbishop or the canons at the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086. Four prebends originated from the royal demesne and five from great secular honours. In all cases, whatever the origin of the land, it was the archbishop who created the prebends. At York, as elsewhere, the establishment of territorial prebends was largely finished by the second half of the twelfth century. The two that were certainly created by Thurstan were to be held by the priors of the Augustinian houses of Nostell and Hexham: respectively Bramham, c. 1126 × 1129, and Salton, perhaps about the same time. Of the five prebends mentioned in the charters of archbishop Roger (1154-81) none was newly founded. Only one, Botevant, never had land. As time went on, most prebends received increases of property: in some cases early prebends were virtually reconstituted and had to be renamed, through augmentation or division in the thirteenth century. The only dignitary to have a prebend annexed to his office was the treasurer, who held Newthorpe from before the end of the twelfth century; a second prebend, Wilton, was created and added to his rich benefice in 1242. The last prebend to be founded at York was Bilton in 1294. This brought the total to thirty-six.
In the same way that the archbishop was responsible for the establishment of the prebends, he maintained a large measure of control over them. Before 1140 archbishop Thurstan issued regulations concerning the revenues of deceased canons. The archbishop's power to divide prebends in order to increase the number of canons was confirmed by pope Nicholas IV in 1289. His powers of visitation, however, were restricted by an agreement between archbishop John le Romeyn and the chapter in 1290. One of the archbishop's most visible powers was that of patronage: it was he who, in normal circumstances, appointed all the dignitaries (the dean only excluded), archdeacons and canons. On many occasions candidates who had been proposed by either the king or the pope were actually collated by the archbishop. When the see was vacant, the patronage fell directly to the king. The lists below show how frequently the regalian right was exercised in the Minster, especially in the thirteenth century - in the vacancies of 1212-15, 1255-6, 1258, 1265-6, 1279, 1285-6, 1296-7 and 1299. Prebends and collegiate churches in England were dissolved by Henry VIII in 1547 as part of the Reformation by the Act for the Dissolution of Collegiate Churches and Chantries. However, the title Prebendary was still retained by certain dioceses (with the Dioceses of Lichfield and Lincoln being two examples) as an honorary title for senior parish priests.
Throughout the twelfth century, the archbishop exercised the right to appoint the dean, and in the vacancy after the death of archbishop Roger, this patronage fell to the king, who appointed first Hubert Walter in 1186 and then Henry Marshal in 1189. The next appointment to the deanery was the subject of dispute between archbishop and king in 1193, and for the first time the canons claimed to elect: their candidate, Simon of Apulia, was eventually nominated and invested by the pope the following year. But the canons' right to elect their dean was not established in practice until much later. The king maintained the right to appoint during the vacancy in 1214, and it may be that notwithstanding the Fourth Lateran Council's decree in 1215 that cathedral deaneries were to be elective, in normal times the archbishop continued to appoint, as he quite certainly did in 1258 and most probably also in c. 1262. The first dean who is known definitely to have been elected by the canons, Master Robert of Scarborough, in 1279, survived challenges to his election, but fell foul of the archbishop and was finally deprived by him. It was only at the end of the period, in 1298, that the canons were successful in securing their choice, William of Hambleton, and even then, after a dispute over a papal reservation, William had to be provided by Boniface VIII in 1300.
The only other dignity that attracted notable royal and papal interest was the treasury, which was one of the most valuable benefices in England, and at York second only to the deanery in wealth. Of eighteenetreasurers in the period, seven were certainly appointed by the kings. There were four in succession from 1256, their names a roll-call of royal favourites and pluralists - John Maunsel the elder, Amaury de Montfort, Edmund de Mortimer, and Bogo de Clare. Before Bogo died in 1294, John de Colonna was provided by the pope, the first papal nominee of a series that stretched down to the middle of the next century. The archbishops were more successful in maintaining a large measure of control over appointments to the archdeaconries. Walter de Grey demonstrated the archbishop's authority over chapter and archdeaconries when he separated the treasury from the archdeaconry of the East Riding in 1218.
By the end of the thirteenth century the king's interventions sede vacante were eclipsed by those of the pope acting in the plenitude of power. From the earliest times there had been a strong link with Rome through the necessity for the archbishops to receive the pallium. Of the seventeen archbishops listed below, ten collected the pallium from the pope in person, either in Italy or in France, while the remaining seven received it in England. Thirteen made costly visits to the Curia. Five of these (Thurstan, Henry Murdac, Godfrey of Ludham, William de Wickwane, and Thomas of Corbidge) were actually consecrated by the pope. Disputes over archiepiscopal appointments encouraged contact, involving both archbishops and members of the chapter in attendance at the papal court - notably the cases of William Fitz Herbert and Geoffrey Plantagenet. Walter Giffard was provided after the pope had quashed the canons' election of William de Langeton (who had royal assent) and had accepted the resignation of the first papal provisee, Bonaventura. All four of Giffard's immediate successors were provided after disputed elections. In 1286 John le Romeyn was elected at the Curia by nine canons of York appointed as electors by the pope. Until the last years of the thirteenth century the majority of appointments to the dignities of York were made by the archbishops. Even where such appointments are not specifically recorded in surviving documents, it is clear from the careers of dignitaries that they owed their advancement to archiepiscopal patronage.
During the thirteenth century the number of prebends occupied by papal appointees, most of them foreigners, increased from three in the first decade to six in the 1220s. It rose to eight by 1250. Archbishop Giffard (1266-79) wrote to cardinal Ottobono that he could not confer a prebend on the cardinal's clerk, Master Aunerus, because as 'quasi medietas prebendarum nostrarum sit sub manibus alienis' he could scarcely find benefices for his own clerks. This was only a slight exaggeration, as in Giffard's time the archdeaconry of Cleveland and at least nine prebends were certainly in the hands of foreigners, and possibly three more, and there were disputes over two others. The number of foreign- held prebends on archbishop Romeyn's death in 1296 was eight, representing about a quarter of the chapter. The proportion rose during archbishop Corbridge's pontificate, so that at Greenfield's succession in 1306 it was one in three, and it increased still further under archbishop Melton.
Romeyn had complained of the plundering of the church for the sake of the 'Romans', yet he was of Roman descent himself, and had been elected in the Curia by nine canons of whom only one was English, while three were already cardinals and four others were papal officials. When in 1280 archbishop Wickwane was assaulted by the archdeacon of Canterbury for carrying his cross erect in the Canterbury province on his return journey from the Curia to York, he was able to address his complaints to no fewer than six high-ranking papal officials - three of them cardinals - who were also either members or relations of members of the York and Southwell chapters; in the following yeare his proctor in the suit, Hugh of Evesham, was promoted to the cardinalate. But in 1290 there was a concession to the archbishop: the pope waived his right to provide to the chapel of St Mary and the Holy Angels in the Minster, which had been held by Master Percival of Lavagna who had died at Rome, and ordered archbishop Romeyn to confer it on an Englishman. The value of the York prebends, being higher than at any other English cathedral, was usually the prime consideration in the placement of papal nominees.
Although many of the dignitaries and canons of the Minster had notable careers outside York, in royal, papal or archiepiscopal service, the chapter and its members exercised a formative influence on the development of the city. With their associated corporations, the Vicars Choral (whose services made possible the high level of absenteeism among the canons) and the hospital of St Leonard, they dominated landownership and the market in land, especially in the central area. From the property notes at the head of the lists below, it will be seen that prebendal houses clustered round the Minster. The records of the Vicars Choral are particularly important in revealing the landed interests of individual canons: among several series of documents, a valuable example is the collection of fifteen charters relating to property at the corner of Petergate and Stonegate that was acquired by Master Simon of Evesham, who was successively precentor, archdeacon of the East Riding and archdeacon of Richmond. As in most cathedral chapters, certain families were prominent at York over a lengthy period of time. Perhaps the most conspicuous was the family that was introduced into the chapter by archbishop Walter de Grey. A nephew of bishop John de Grey of Norwich (1200-14), Walter had three nephews in the chapter of York: William de Langeton (alias of Rotherfield), who was successively succentor, archdeacon of York and dean, and whose election as archbishop was quashed by the pope in 1265; and Walter de Grey and Walter le Breton, both canons of York. William de Langeton's successor in the archdeaconry of York, John de Langeton, was presumably another relative, as his soul was remembered in William's chantry in the Minster; a second chantry, for William's soul and that of archbishop Walter de Grey, was founded by William de Langeton the younger, the elder William's nephew and heir; and another nephew was Walter de Langeton.
The name of Langeton appears also with three canons - Walter de Langeton, a second John de Langeton and a second William de Langeton. It is not clear whether these three were kindred of archbishop Grey. The toponym Rotherfield, however, must indicate a relationship to Walter de Grey, as the manor in Oxfordshire called Rotherfield Greys was held by members of the Grey family. It occurs as the name of two other members of the chapter of York: William of Rotherfield, archdeacon of Richmond, and another William of Rotherfield, treasurer. Another remarkable family at York was that of le Romeyn, Romanus. The elder John le Romeyn, who was already a canon before 1217, perhaps as early as 1201, must have come to England from Rome before 1199, as he endowed a chantry for the soul of Richard I, who died in that year. His parents, Giovanni and Maria, had died when he was so young that some had thought he was illegitimate. He became, successively, subdean by 1228, archdeacon of Richmond by 1241, and treasurer of York by 1253; he died in 1255. He had nephews called Peter and William who appear at York, and two others, Daniel and James Judici, who were clerks. He was the father of John le Romeyn the younger, who was precentor of Lincoln by 1278, and was collated to a prebend in York in 1279. The younger John became archbishop in 1286 at a notable election that took place at the Curia. Among the series of thirteenth-century York archiepiscopal registers, Romeyn's is one of the most informative on the composition of the chapter and on the career of this active archbishop.
The York registers, although they start a few years later than those at Lincoln, are probably the most complete and informative series for any English diocese in the thirteenth century. All were edited and published by the Surtees Society between 1872 and 1940. They are usefully listed and surveyed by David M. Smith, Guide to Bishops' Registers of England and Wales (Royal Historical Society, Guides and Handbooks no. 11, 1981) pp. 232-36. The originals are kept in the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at York. The registers used in this volume of Fasti are those of Walter de Grey (1215-55); Walter Giffard (1266-79); William Wickwane (1279-85); John le Romeyn (1286-96); Henry of Newark (1298-99); Thomas of Corbridge (1300-04); William de Greenfield (1306-1315); and William Melton (1317-40). Late Medieval Ages