The civic and ecclesiastical communities of medieval York have been widely studied, but it is perhaps worth reviewing here the make-up of the ecclesiastical capital of the North. In addition to its Minster, sixty-odd parish churches, and small guild chapels such as the one dedicated to St Anne on Foss Bridge, medieval York hosted a number of houses of the endowed and mendicant religious. Just outside the walls was the huge Benedictine Abbey of St Mary. Benedictines also lived in Holy Trinity Priory in Micklegate, an alien dependency of Marmoutier near Tours. There was a small house of Benedictine nuns at St Clements and a house of Gilbertine canons at St Andrew's. Of the hospitals, St Leonard's was of considerable size and there was also a leper house, St Nicholas, just outside Walmgate Bar. Beyond this there were around thirty small endowed maisons dieu. For the mendicant orders there was a Franciscan friary near the castle, a house of Dominicans at Les Toftes, a Carmelite priory at Hungate, and a house of Austin Friars in the city centre. Considering how many established religious houses there were in York, one is forced to conclude with Maud Sellers that ‘the rarity of allusions [in the civic records] to those who held office or dwelt in them is remarkable’.

It is almost as difficult to establish how the thriving commercial sector in the city regarded its clerical neighbours. As we saw in Chapter 1 above, there is a very good survival rate for the wills of men in the aldermanic class during the period when the cycle was first evolving. Just as it was interesting to see them following devotional fashions such as making various bequests with a sacramental focus, what is also remarkable about them is how little they leave to the religious institutions with whom they lived cheek by jowl.