AS HE APPROACHED his seventy-fifth birthday during the summer of 1498, the venerable Thomas Rotherham, 'alia nomine vocatus Scot' (bishop of Rochester from 1468 to 1472, bishop of Lincoln from 1472 to 1480, and archbishop of York since 1480), embarked upon the arduous business of composing what was to prove his final will.1No one who now reads that will can have much doubt that his long and turbulent career at the service of the Yorkist and early Tudor court led the archbishop to leave little to chance when confronting the imminent judgement of the 'court of heaven' itself. As well as making strict instructions that his many previous wills and testaments should be annulled, Thomas Rotherham took particular pains to begin the composition of this last will on his favourite feast day, the Translation of Jesus (6 August), and to conclude it on the feast of St Bartholomew, his own birthday. Preoccupied, or so he alleged, with the fearsome danger that the Lord Jesus might not pardon his many sins the archbishop not only asserted himself to be a 'true Christian' (who could have doubted it?) but also enlisted the whole heavenly company of angels, apostles, confessors and virgins in his support. Thomas Rotherham clearly believed that it would also do his prospects of eternal salvation' no harm if his 'putrid corpse' was to be buried where its remains still survive in the north aisle of the chapel of St Mary within his metropolitan cathedral church of York. 2 However, when faced with the perilous uncertainties of the next life, Archbishop Rotherham (who in fact died at Cawood Castle nearly two years later, at dawn on 29 May 1500) could make a more positive and unusual claim for divine favour. Amidst his many other bequests to the cathedrals and colleges "associated with his long and distinguished career he placed much the greatest emphasis upon his foundation of a peculiarly elaborate College of Jesus at Rotherham, no! far from where he had been baptized seventy-five years earlier. Here was the greatest testimonial the archbishop believed he