The Quest for One's Own Front Door: Housing the Vicars Choral at the English Cathedrals

Abstract

Recent work at all nine colleges of vicars choral at England's medieval cathedrals is reviewed. At York, the vicars' buildings developed from thirteenth-century, quasi-monastic structures to a close of individual houses, with individual front doors, by c.1400, and a search is mounted for similar sequences of development at the other eight colleges. At Lincoln, a hitherto misunderstood vicarial building is reconstructed and interpreted as a probable early communal dormitory, but at most other colleges, the documentary and archaeological sources provide only hints that the individual houses of the late Middle Ages were preceded by earlier types of dwelling. Nevertheless, it is suggested that the surviving collegiate houses at Chichester, Hereford and Wells, might have replaced earlier, short-lived, building types. Finally it is proposed that changing building types reflect, quite precisely, both the developing demarcation between different grades of vicar within cathedral hierarchies, and the rising status of the most senior members of those hierarchies who latterly became known as 'vicars choral'.