The Business of the Southern Convocation in 1462

Summary

Our knowledge of what went on in the church councils of the provinces of Canterbury and York in the fifteenth century is patchy. There were no equivalents to the parliament rolls and the statute rolls, which provided official records of the proceedings and the legislation of a parliament. Most of what is known derives from bishops’ registers, and these have been combed by Gerald Bray for his multivolume edition Records of Convocation. The entries in episcopal registers were, however, skewed towards the procedural elements of convocation: principally, the relaying of writs of summons, the certification of elections, and the collection of subsidies. Hence these entries tell us more about things done before an assembly had met and after it had concluded than about what had happened during its meeting. For day-to-day reporting of the business of the southern convocation, we are reliant chiefly on the registers of the archbishops of Canterbury, whose assembly it was. The extensiveness of the entries varied not only between successive meetings but also between archbishops. The register of Henry Chichele (1414–43) is much more informative than that of Thomas Bourgchier (1454–86), the longest-serving archbishop of the fifteenth century. Only three of the thirteen meetings held under Bourgchier were recorded in the archbishop’s register: the convocations of 1460–1, 1463 and 1481–2.

This discrepancy may have influenced modern assessments of how the business of convocation changed over the century. Eric Kemp observed that ‘In the second half of the fifteenth century although judicial and legislative acts still occurred from time to time taxation again resumed its dominance’. In the first half of the century, several major issues – the confrontation with lollardy, the re-establishment of papal authority after the schism, and the countervailing effect of the conciliar movement – had engaged convocation to an extent that they would not have done later on. Bourgchier himself made taxation more important to convocation’s business by reviving the practice of an archbishop obtaining a ‘charitable subsidy’ from his clergy. In the crown’s eyes, taxation had always been the reason for calling convocation into being. From 1435 until the end of the century, every assembly was summoned in response to a royal writ; an archbishop of Canterbury did not convoke a church council on his own initiative again until 1509.