The Case of St. Albans Abbey in 1490

Abstract

The character of abbot William Wallingford of St. Albans (abbot 1476–92), the state of the abbey under his rule, and the issue of his controversy with archbishop Morton in 1490, provided matter for a lively controversy at the beginning of the present century which has recently found an echo in a posthumous work of the late Dr. G. G. Coulton. Despite considerable research, much has hitherto remained obscure, and the so-called ‘St. Albans case’ has remained an obstacle in the path of all students of the last phase of pre-Reformation monasticism. The present writer some years ago, in the course of other work, attempted a review of the problem, but subsequently put aside what he had written, as Dr. Coulton had declared, both in print and in conversation, that he intended to give a full treatment of the case in the last volume of his Five Centuries of Religion. This, when at last it appeared in the autumn of 1950, was found indeed to contain two chapters on Wallingford and St. Albans, but these, when carefully considered, appeared neither to give a final judgment nor to provide a clear presentation of the sequence of events and of the difficulties of interpretation presented by the documents. Coulton's pages, in fact, so far from speaking the last word, give the impression of being a series of notes never fully resolved into an ordered narrative or argument and, in addition, there is more than one omission or misplacement in important footnote references, possibly due to uncorrected slips in the typescript of the book, which leave the reader at a loss.