The Foundations of Medieval English Ecclesiastical History: Studies presented to David Smith

This is a distinguished collection of essays. It begins with appreciations by Christopher Brooke and Christopher Webb of David Smith's achievements as scholar and archivist, working in and from the Borthwick Institute at York, and ends with a bibliography of his printed works. Smith is justly renowned for his energy and accuracy in productive and acute research among the sources of the English medieval church, and for his abiding spirit in research of modesty and generosity. His achievements relate especially, as every medievalist is aware, to the editing of episcopal acta (of the Lincoln diocese and as General Editor of the English Episcopal Acta series) and the provision of highly-valued guides and aids—to bishops' registers, to the heads of religious houses, and to the collections of the Borthwick, notably the outstanding records of the York archiepiscopal court. This is the merest sketch of his career-long works of dedication: he has not recoiled from the strenuous demands of major projects. The essays following the appreciations are, in a special way, pièces justificatives. Drawing upon their long association with the English Episcopal Acta series, Julia Barrow, Christopher Harper-Bill and Philippa Hoskin present diagnostic papers, in the nature of progress reports, on three major features of the editing work: the forging of episcopal charters (above all, it appears, by the Benedictine abbeys founded soon after the Conquest and especially in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries), the use of acta for the understanding of otherwise relatively unknown bishops' lives (in this case Walter Suffield of Norwich) and the study of episcopal households (the unusual continuity of the familia at Durham). Turning, in the main, to bishops' registers, Nicholas Bennett illustrates, from the deaneries of north-east Lincolnshire in 1290–1340, how fully and closely the attributes of the beneficed clergy can be studied in that period, Donald Logan explores the working of the court of Arches from a register of inhibitions from this court which now forms part of one of Bishop Martival of Salisbury's registers and Alison McHardy provides example upon example of the use of registers for many kinds of political history. From the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sources of ecclesiastical courts, Janet Burton draws illustrations of the relations of monasteries with the communities outside their cloisters and Richard Helmholz demonstrates striking antecedent characteristics of Tudor charity legislation. Building on established foundations and pointing the way to future work, Brian Kemp, from the level of parish organisation, edits a selection of the earliest known, and relatively rare, acta of rural deans; Jane Sayers, from the level of the Vatican archives, recounts the vagaries and successes of the calendaring, and editing, of papal registers, with the Calendar of Papal Letters (vols. 1–19, 1893–1998) yet to reach the Reformation, and Charles Fonge, from the intermediate levels of an interlacing of patronage, secular and ecclesiastical, opens up the world of collegiate churches—those, that is, that have been overshadowed for too long by the collegiate cathedral churches. It is a mark of the success of this collaborative endeavour that each one of the essays deserves more analytical comment than can be offered here. However much has been achieved, since, for example, the opening of the papal Archivio Segreto in 1883, only now are the firmest of foundations being laid for an appreciation in its many hues of the vibrant world of the late-medieval English church, with its extraordinarily rich and diverse caches of sources.

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