The Church of England in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Two models leap to most people’s minds when considering the Middle Ages: feudal anarchy and the age of faith. Even historians sometimes find it difficult to escape the imaginative constraints which these twin constructs impose. The fourteenth-century English Church conformed to neither of them. It was, for its time, a well-ordered body, staffed at its higher levels by decent and competent clergymen who saw that the ecclesiastical machinery ticked over in broad accordance with canon law. This hierarchy, if it did not preside over some pre-Raphaelite idyll of devout landowners, leaseholders, and labourers, nevertheless knew of no principled challenge to its teachings, and of little active dissatisfaction with its pastoral provision. The educational attainments of the parochial and unbeneficed clergy were — and were admitted to be — far from ideal. The few graduates were concentrated in the upper echelons of the clergy, and were often occupying benefices without cure of souls which supported them in what they would have seen as their more important bureaucratic employment in Church or State.