Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Appreciations
- 1 ‘If I do you wrong, who will do you right?’ Justice and Politics During the Personal Rule of Henry III
- 2 The Coronation Oath in English Politics, 1272–1399
- 3 Local Government in Warwickshire and Worcestershire under Edward II
- 4 The Nature of Noble Service to Edward III
- 5 Local Politics and Ecclesiastical Patronage in Gentry Letters
- 6 Locality and Ecclesiastical Polity: The Late Medieval Church between Duality and Integration
- 7 Concepts of Kinship in Lancastrian Westmorland
- 8 Body Politic and Body Corporate in the Fifteenth Century: the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster
- 9 Manifestoes for Rebellion in Late-Fifteenth-Century England
- 10 ‘New Men’, ‘New Learning’ and ‘New Monarchy’: Personnel and Policy in Royal Government, 1461–1529
- 11 How Different It Was in Scotland: Three Earls, a Football and a Ghost Story
- A Bibliography of the Major Writings of Christine Carpenter, to 2015
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
5 - Local Politics and Ecclesiastical Patronage in Gentry Letters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Appreciations
- 1 ‘If I do you wrong, who will do you right?’ Justice and Politics During the Personal Rule of Henry III
- 2 The Coronation Oath in English Politics, 1272–1399
- 3 Local Government in Warwickshire and Worcestershire under Edward II
- 4 The Nature of Noble Service to Edward III
- 5 Local Politics and Ecclesiastical Patronage in Gentry Letters
- 6 Locality and Ecclesiastical Polity: The Late Medieval Church between Duality and Integration
- 7 Concepts of Kinship in Lancastrian Westmorland
- 8 Body Politic and Body Corporate in the Fifteenth Century: the Case of the Duchy of Lancaster
- 9 Manifestoes for Rebellion in Late-Fifteenth-Century England
- 10 ‘New Men’, ‘New Learning’ and ‘New Monarchy’: Personnel and Policy in Royal Government, 1461–1529
- 11 How Different It Was in Scotland: Three Earls, a Football and a Ghost Story
- A Bibliography of the Major Writings of Christine Carpenter, to 2015
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
The fifteenth-century English gentry have been characterised in different ways by historians in respect of their religion: as anti-clerical harbingers of the Reformation, as orthodox, integrated members of the parish community, and as increasingly privatised individualists pursuing their own self-centred brand of piety. Christine Carpenter's work has stood apart from these historiographical (and often confessional) fault-lines and has examined gentry religion in its social and political context, while still taking seriously the inner beliefs behind its outward manifestations. In particular, she has shown how the late-medieval gentry achieved ‘a highly satisfactory reconciliation of the demands of this world and the next’ through public manifestations of their religion, notably post-mortem provisions, in one of the centres of local social and political life, the parish church.
This interweaving of spiritual and material priorities represents in microcosm the tensions inherent within the medieval church as a whole. On the one hand, the English church represented an autonomous body under the pope's supreme jurisdiction, its personnel set apart from lay society by their special status as ministers of the sacraments. On the other hand, the landed wealth that made the church independent of lay power inevitably involved it in worldly affairs. In addition, clergy were inextricably woven into the fabric of English social and political life, not only providing spiritual services but also acting as civil servants, government ministers, landowners, administrators, educators and leaders of local society. The laity, too, stood in an ambivalent relation to the clergy, simultaneously utterly dependent on priestly mediation as the only path to salvation and yet also able to call the tune as employers and patrons, as clerics depended on them for employment in what was, as we shall see, a buyer's market. This essay will examine how these tensions played out in local political society by revisiting the theme of gentry religion and its interplay with the broader social and political priorities of gentry families, as highlighted in Carpenter's work, through one particular intersection of the spiritual and material in the medieval church: advowsons and disputes over them.
An advowson was the right of a patron to present a priest to a vacant benefice.
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- Information
- Political Society in Later Medieval EnglandA Festschrift for Christine Carpenter, pp. 93 - 112Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015