CHAPTER IV - Chantries

Summary

Of all the institutions that grew up in the medieval church, there is probably none concerning which our knowledge is so indefinite as the chantry. Beautiful chapels like those in Winchester Cathedral remain to remind us of the important part played by the chantries in the religious life of the Middle Ages, and many individual chantries have been fully described in the histories of the churches to which they belonged; but the enquirer looks in vain for an English monograph on the subject as a whole, or even for adequate treatment of it in the histories of the English church. Rock, in his Church of Our Fathers, does indeed devote several pages to the medieval chantry, but in this part of his work he appears to have consulted no manuscript sources, and at the time when he wrote there was not sufficient material in print for a satisfactory study of this subject. Moreover, his religious enthusiasm led him, unconsciously perhaps, to paint an idealistic picture which, when examined in the light of the fuller evidence now available, is easily seen to be a most unfaithful likeness. Among the more recent writers who have described medieval chantries, the late Canon Westlake is the most instructive, but he was concerned only with those chantries which were maintained by the guilds, and there are, therefore, many aspects of chantry history with which he did not attempt to deal.