Patronage or appointment to offices and benefices in the Church was exercised by a variety of persons: by the Crown, by lay magnates, by bishops and abbots, and by the country gentry.

The Crown exercised a vast amount of ecclesiastical patronage which was made up in various ways:

In the first place, there were the appointments made by the Crown in its own right, pleno iure, such as the advowson of Crown livings, the appointment to masterships of certain hospitals, and to the ‘Royal Free Chapels’. These last consisted of about a dozen collegiate churches, composed of deans and canons, such as St Martin-le-Grand, Wimborne, Bridgnorth, Wolverhampton, and Tamworth (which last reverted to the Crown in the course of the fourteenth century); to these were added two important new foundations, St Stephen's Westminster (1348) and St George's Windsor (1349), the creation and lavish endowment of which shows how much the king valued such ecclesiastical ‘pocket boroughs’. In some of these chapels the king only appointed the dean, in others he also appointed the canons.

Not all the Crown livings were filled by the king himself, for by ancient custom the Chancellor had the right to nominate to those benefices in the king's gift which were valued at twenty marks a year (£13. 6s. Sd.) or less; these were to be given to clerks of the Chancery, the Exchequer, and the Judicial Benches. We may even find the king asking the Chancellor to present particular persons to benefices nominally in his own gift.