The scope of the work

The councils and synods of the churches of England and Ireland have been the subject of serious scholarly inquiry at least since the seventeenth century, when Sir Henry Spelman (1563/4-1641) undertook the task of compiling the records of the pre-reformation church. His efforts were continued by Peter Heylyn (1599-1662) who collected what he could find in the archives for the period 1529-84 though he never published the work. Both these scholars had the advantage of being able to use the material in St Paul's cathedral, which housed the records of the Canterbury convocation from 1489 onwards until they were burnt in the great fire of London in 1666. The next person to take a serious interest in the subject was William Wake (1657-1737), successively dean of Exeter, bishop of Lincoln and archbishop of Canterbury. Wake's interest was aroused by the claims put forward by Francis Atterbury in 1697, to the effect that convocation was a clerical parliament going back to medieval times. This led him to make an extensive compilation of the surviving records, which are now deposited in the library of Christ Church, Oxford. In one sense, the Wake manuscripts have little independent value, since the originals from which they were copied almost all survive, but they remain an important collection of sources and as such they gave rise to two major works which continue to inform scholars today.

The first of these was Wake's own State of the church and clergy of England in their councils, convocations, synods, conventions and other publick assemblies (London, 1703), which attempted to list and classify every clerical assembly held in the country since the arrival of St Augustine in 597. The second was David Wilkins’ Concilia Magnae Britanniae etHiberniae (4 vols., London, 1737) which is best described as a revision of Spelman's work, supplemented by the findings of Wake, whose protege Wilkins was. Wilkins’ work has many defects, but in spite of these it has remained the standard source for most modern scholars and is still regularly cited as the authority for the convocations before 1717. Wilkins not infrequently abbreviates his material (without saying so) and many of the sources to which he refers are in fact wrong.