4 - ‘Not a thing for a stranger to enter upon’: The selection of monastic superiors in late medieval and Tudor England

Summary

Medieval England is not known for democracy. Indeed, it has been remarked that the selection of heads of autonomous religious houses by their communities comprised ‘the only consistently “free” and comparatively democratic elections in late medieval England’. To a certain extent, the freedom of late medieval English monasteries to elect their own heads serves as an indication that these institutions were no longer of central importance in the political life of the kingdom. This right had only sporadically been allowed to their Anglo- Norman forbears at a time when the heads of major abbeys occupied a position of much greater public significance; and the nomination of bishops remained tightly controlled by the monarchy throughout the medieval period and beyond. Nevertheless, the ability freely to select their own heads – in accordance with monastic rules and canon law – was a privilege far from universally enjoyed among the monasteries of later medieval Europe. Institutions which controlled so much wealth and patronage were always vulnerable to external interference, both lay and ecclesiastical, and English monasteries were fortunate in their comparative immunity from institutionalised lay involvement in elections, papal provision and commendatory abbots in the later Middle Ages.

Studies of monastic elections in later medieval England, focusing in particular on the form and ceremonial of these occasions, have concluded that the majority seem to have been canonical and uninhibited. It is true that little evidence of overt interference can be found in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, but the possibility that bishop, patron or some other external authority might exert influence behind the scenes cannot be discounted. Levels of informal interference will always remain mysterious, but one potential index of outside involvement in monastic elections is available to historians: the frequency with which monastic superiors were taken from other religious houses. This is evidently a rough indicator, since communities might willingly elect a head from another institution, whereas external agencies might intervene in favour of an internal candidate (as was relatively common in the late 1520s and the 1530s).