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It is well known that the Tudor monarchs exerted highly effective control over the financial resources of the English Church, particularly in the years after the Henrician Reformation. So marked a feature of the sixteenth century were the demands which the Crown, followed by the rest of the leading laity, made upon the Church in order to gain easy profit, that the period has on occasions been characterized as the ‘ age of plunder ’ The dissolution of the monasteries, and its economic and social consequences, have long been the subject of scholarly attention and debate. The fortunes of the secular church, in contrast, have roused relatively little interest, except as a background to the Laudian revival. This is, of course, in part because the crisis which the parochial clergy, cathedral chapters and bishops, experienced, was less dramatic than that of the monks and chantry priests, and, perhaps partly because demands upon the secular church were often for taxation rather than for outright gifts of lands. None of the Tudors showed the slightest inclination to disturb the fundamental tithe relationship within the parishes, and there were very few, even among the most ardent advocates of reform, who spoke openly for the old Lollard concept of making tithe dependent upon the quality of the incumbent.

The great chapel of Saint George within the royal Castle of Windsor, founded by King Edward IV for the most honourable and noble Order of the Garter, stands immediately to the west of the original chapel of the Order, formed by King Edward III within the older building of King Henry III.

John Fromond's chantry chapel stands in the garth of the cloisters at Winchester College, and is now commonly known to the inmates of the college by the brief name of ‘Chantry’ (pl. XXI, fig. 1).The college was founded by William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, in 1382: its buildings were first occupied by the warden and scholars in March 1394; and on St. Kenelm's day (17 July) 1395, the college chapel, and the cloisters which lie on its south side, were consecrated by Wykeham's suffragan. Simon, bishop of the Irish see of Achonry. The cloister garth, which was included in this consecration, was intended to be the college cemetery. John Fromond, who died on 20 November 1420, and his widow Maud, who died in or before April 1422, were buried, as he had desired, in one grave in the middle of the garth, and the chantry was afterwards built over their grave by his executors.

The Deed exhibited this evening by Mr. Joseph Jackson Howard has appeared to me sufficiently interesting to justify a few remarks on its contents. It bears date the 7th of August 1456 (34 Hen. VI.). By it Richard Acreman granted to John Oudene, master of the fraternity or guild of St. George of the Men of the Mystery of Armourers of the city of London, to John Ruttour and William Terry, the wardens, and to the brothers and sisters of the same guild the advowson of or right of presenting a chaplain to the chantry which Joan, formerly the wife of Nicholas de Wokyndon, Knight, founded at the altar of St. Thomas the Martyr in the new work of the cathedral church of St. Paul, London, viz. on the north side of the same church; which altar was, at the time of this grant, placed in the chapel then commonly called the chapel of St. George within the said church, in which chapel the said guild was then lately founded and established by King Henry VI.: this advowson the said Richard Acreman had of the grant of Thomas Coburley and Thomas Burghille, who had it (inter alia) of the gift of Richard Bastard of Bedford and Isabella his wife, who was kinswoman and heiress of the said Nicholas de Wokyndon. The deed was witnessed by William Marwe, the Mayor of the city of London, and John Yonge and Thomas Ouldegreve, the Sheriffs.

O_ ur knowledge of the medieval English borough, like that of the medieval manor, has been much influenced by the legal preoccupations of its first historians. Today we possess many learned studies of burgess status and burgage tenure, of borough 'customs', borough courts, and the law merchant, and many published collections of borough charters and custumals. But although some boroughs have published large and varied selections from their records rangeing far beyond charters and custumals, we still know little of the social and economic realities behind the legal formulas of the origin of the burgesses, for instance, of how they made their living, and of the economic functions of urban communities in the life of the community as a whole. The prevailing approach to borough history, as shown even in some of the best recent histories of English towns, and in the general plan adopted by the Victoria County History, is that of fragmentation, with separate sections on topographical, constitutional, and ecclesiastical developments, and in conclusion perhaps, quite unrelated to the rest, an isolated 'social and economic' section, often anecdotal and much less scholarly in character. But the inhabitants of the boroughs were not themselves thus fragmented. They were at one and the same time occupiers and sometimes builders of houses and shops, suitors at the borough courts and perhaps members of its governing body, and parishioners attending, regularly or irregularly, one of its churches; and for the greater part of each week most of them were concerned with the humdrum job of earning a living. In old age and retirement they were, perhaps, founders of a chantry or inmates of a local hospital. If we would understand any part of their history we must look at it as a whole and be prepared to consider their ordinary avocations, commonplace as the subject may seem. Nowhere, probably, is our ignorance greater than in the case of those smaller English boroughs, founded after the Norman Conquest, which are often regarded as being distinguished from villages merely by the different legal status of their inhabitants a difference which seems sometimes to have neither purpose nor meaning. It may therefore be of interest to look briefly at the formative period of one of them one which today is better known and more sought after by visitors from all parts of the world than any other, since it was Shakespeare's birthplace. The Domesday Survey of Io86 found no burgesses at Stratford-on-Avon, but only a small rural settlement, as in early Saxon days, close to the 'streetford' where the Roman road crossed the Avon.1 This settlement, however, would 1 0. E. 'Straetford', i.e. ford by which a Roman road crossed a river. All the Stratfords are on Roman roads, and in this case the reference is to an important cross-road linking Fosse Way, via Stratford-onAvon, with Ryknield Street at Alcester.

So much has been written about the abbey church of Westminster and the historical monuments wherewith it is filled that to most people it may seem superfluous to write anything more about it. But as a matter of fact the Abbey and its church are still an architectural and archaeological mine that has really been little worked scientifically, and it is for that reason that I venture to lay before the Society of Antiquaries, which has always had a special interest in Westminster Abbey, some notes upon the funeral, the tomb or monument, and the chantry chapel of King Henry V.

Medieval Archaeology, 3, 216-258

Macaulay paid every schoolboy the compliment of attributing to him an omniscience which a man of learning might well envy; in what I am about to say this afternoon I fear that I may be going to the opposite extreme and expounding as new, facts with which some of my audience may have been familiar from their youth up. But if I make this mistake, I must plead in extenuation the way in which the medieval chantry has so far been treated. For, whilst almost every other aspect of medieval life has been studied as, at least to some extent, a European phenomenon, the chantry, though its prevalence throughout western Europe has been well known and its importance in the life of the later middle ages generally recognized, has been studied as a matter of local, or at most of national, history, and in many cases antiquarian or genealogical interests have been allowed to obscure the broader ecclesiastical and constitutional questions which it raises or helps to elucidate.

When the Commissioners came to investigate those foundations dissolved under the provisions of the Act of 1547, there were in County Durham six institutions which could be described as collegiate churches. Of these, four were constituted in the ordinary way with a dean and prebendaries; Darlington, Chester-le-Street, Lanchester, and St. Andrews, Auckland; one was a chantry college attached to Staindrop Hospital; and one (Norton, near Stockton) preserved the antique constitution of eight portionaries amongst whom the endowment was equally divided.

Biver Paul, Howard F.-E. Les «chantry-chapels» anglaises. In: Bulletin Monumental, tome 72, année 1908. pp. 314-347.

The appearance of a joint paper more than ten years after the death of one of its authors demands a few words of explanation. Our late Fellow, Herbert Chitty, read before this Society on 21st May 1925 a paper on ‘Fromond's Chantry at Winchester College', printed in the 75th volume of Archaeologia. It was his intention to offer to the Society a companion paper upon the other chantry in the college, that of Warden Robert Thurbern, and from 1926 onwards he devoted time to research into its history, and to the collection of a series of lantern slides, made for him by the late Sydney Pitcher. Other occupations forced Chitty to lay aside this project, and it remained unfinished at his death on 28th December 1949. The basic materials survived him, however, as well as the collection of slides. Meanwhile, the years 1950–60 have seen momentous changes in the appearance of Thurbern's Chantry, adding a new chapter to its history. These functional, architectural, and decorative changes are now complete, and this seems a suitable time to present the results of Chitty's researches, followed by some account of recent happenings.

It has long been a truism that the chantry priest, rather than the monk, friar, or member of a large collegiate church, is the most significant figure if we wish to understand how organised religion affected the lives of most citizens of most medieval English towns. Miss Wood-Legh, in her recently published and long-awaited Perpetual Chantries in Britain, has however been the first to provide a detailed demonstration of the sustained interest taken by founders, prelates, parishioners, and corporate bodies in the effective administration and continued welfare of the perpetual chantry. Miss Wood-Legh justifiably describes her work as the ‘first detailed study in English of the chantry as an institution’ and its publication ought to lead to a long-overdue investigation of the exact social and economic, as well as religious, role of the medieval chantry. The hope expressed by Professor Hamilton Thompson almost sixty years ago, ‘that the student of chantry history may possess a more complete and compact apparatus for his work than is at present within his reach’, has been largely unfulfilled, not least in York itself.

Richard P. Veler, ed. Papers on Poe: Essays in Honor of John Ward Ostrom. Springfield, Ohio: Chantry Music Press at Wittenberg University, 1972. 236 pp. $5.95.

Germain de Maidy Léon. Les «chantry-chapels» en France. In: Bulletin Monumental, tome 73, année 1909. pp. 130-133.

Mayeux Albert. Les «Chantry-Chapels» en France. In: Bulletin Monumental, tome 72, année 1908. pp. 517-520.