The Convent and the Community: Cause Papers as a Source for Monastic History

Summary

Among David Smith's many contributions to making known and making accessible the archives held at the Borthwick Institute, his two volumes of lists and indexes to the cause papers generated by the Consistory Court of the archbishops of York are of special interest for historians working in a number of different fields. First designated ‘cause papers’ by Canon Purvis, who was responsible for their earliest listing, the files are a rich source for the church's jurisdiction in matters concerning ecclesiastical dues (the payment of tithes and other offerings), matrimonial cases, defamation, and testamentary business, and the workings of the church courts. The York cause papers consist of 252 files from the fourteenth century, and 308 from the fifteenth. They have been used by Richard Helmholz in his studies of medieval marriage and of medieval charity law, and by Jeremy Goldberg to illuminate many aspects of the lives of medieval women, through childhood and adolescence, work, and marriage, to old age and widowhood. Less well investigated has been the potential of cause papers as a source for monastic history, and it seems appropriate here to salute David Smith's achievements as a scholar and his service to the Borthwick Institute, by offering these preliminary observations on how cause papers illuminate monastic life in the later middle ages, and in particular how they allow us to see medieval monasteries as part of the social fabric of town and countryside, interacting with the local community.

By their very nature, the cause papers that involve members of the religious orders – other than those in which the religious appear as witnesses – are likely to be those that concern their ecclesiastical liberties and rights. Thus we find cause papers relating to tithes, when religious houses are plaintiffs demanding payment, or defendants claiming the right to exemption; there are cases concerning parish churches appropriated to monasteries, or where monasteries held, or claimed, the right of advowson; and cases concerning the provision of chapels and chaplains. Some cause papers comprise a single document, such as the libel, or statement of the plaintiff's case, like that made by the proctor of the prior and convent of Holy Trinity, York, described as ordinis Maioris Monasterii (‘of the “order” of Marmoutier’), in a case against John, rector of Adel church, for the payment of an annual pension of ten marks (CP E. 241).