A Consistory Court in the Middle Ages

Abstract

Some years ago Professor Powicke wrote of the possibility that a study of the surviving records of the medieval church courts would ‘reveal unexpected possibilities of insight into the daily lives of men and women in a pre-Reformation diocese as subjects of an active jurisdiction, parallel to that of the common law. That this jurisdiction existed we already knew, but the prospect of seeing it at work is exciting’. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the exploration of the working of the church courts would throw light on the whole relationship between Church and People in medieval, and indeed post-medieval, England. Unfortunately, the records, although quite voluminous, have survived only in a haphazard and intermittent way, and it is, as yet, impossible to form any general conclusions about the subject as a whole. In the hope of contributing to this process, I propose to examine the working of the consistory court in the diocese of Lincoln, one of the largest and most populous dioceses in pre-Reformation England.