Canterbury

Upper house

The upper house of the Canterbury convocation has always consisted of the archbishop and his suffragans, the diocesan bishops of the province. In the middle ages there were seventeen of these, including the four Welsh bishops, whose dioceses were not politically subject to the king of England until 1283. It was always possible for the bishops to meet in an episcopal synod, and indeed this had been the norm for church councils since ancient times. In England, however, they were comparatively rare, and in the period covered by these records, there were only two of them - in 1346 and a century later, in 1446. The general rule was for the bishops to meet in conjunction with the lower clergy and representatives of the religious orders, and thus to constitute the upper house of a bicameral synod or convocation.

It was also customary to include the ‘mitred abbots', that is, the heads of the major monasteries who were ordinaries within their own jurisdictions and summoned to the house of lords. They disappeared when the monasteries were dissolved in 1538-40, and so the upper house reverted to being coterminous with the original episcopal synod. Suffragan bishops were not included until 1970, when they were allowed to elect representatives of their number to sit with the diocesans.

Attendance in the upper house seems to have averaged about half the bishops, but only a small number of the mitred abbots. More might attend on special occasions, or when the convocation overlapped with parliament, but as sessions of convocation grew longer, attendance fell off after the first few days and only a handful would stay the course. The archbishops presided ex officio, but they frequently appointed substitutes to preside in their place, which could cause problems at times, because these substitutes (or ‘commissaries’) could not assent to legislation or do anything else which might be interpreted as a usurpation of the archbishop's personal jurisdiction.

Lower house

The lower house was an English innovation which had no counterpart elsewhere. It came into being essentially because, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the episcopal patrimony was partially alienated and assigned to cathedral chapters for their maintenance. Because this property was still liable to tax, the cooperation of all those expected to pay had to be sought, and thus the lower clergy came to be summoned to appear in tax-granting assemblies.