¹ Wood, Frances, Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking: My Part in the Cultural Revolution (London, 2000), 45Google Scholar.

² Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, translated anonymously into Prose from the First Recension of Guillaume de Deguileville's Poem, Le Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, ed. Avril Henry, EETS o.s. 284, 292, 2 vols (Oxford, 1985–8), 1: 6.

³ Gee, Henry and Hardy, William J., eds, Documents Illustrative of English Church History, compiled from Original Sources (London, 1921), 275–81, at 279Google Scholar.

⁴ As, e.g., in Nicholas Orme, Going to Church in Medieval England (New Haven, CT, 2021), 357–9.

⁵ Clark, Andrew, ed., Lincoln Diocese Documents, EETS o.s. 149 (London, 1914), 29–30, 35Google Scholar.

⁶ Ibid. 30.

⁷ See Cox, J. Charles, The Parish Registers of England (London, 1910), 236–9Google Scholar.

⁸ Fuller discussion in Swanson, R. N., ‘Town and Gown, Nave and Chancel: Parochial Experience in Late Medieval Oxford’, in Harry, David and Steer, Christian, eds, The Urban Church in Late Medieval England: Essays from the 2017 Harlaxton Symposium held in Honour of Clive Burgess, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 29 (Donington, 2019), 301–31Google Scholar.

⁹ Representative entries extracted in Clark, ed., Lincoln Diocese Documents, 29–34. For an overview of the ecclesiastical ceremonial of life-cycle rites of passage, see Orme, Going to Church, 302–49; for a broader social assessment, see French, Katherine L., The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion after the Black Death (Philadelphia, PA, 2008), 50–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ As with an unnamed ‘man from London’, whose funeral is mentioned in both the benefice and churchwardens’ accounts for St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford, in 1475: Swanson, ‘Town and Gown’, 326.

¹¹ Others, with less informative chancel accounts, are noted in Swanson, ‘Town and Gown’, 328–9 n. 122. More may await detection.

¹² The Hornsea accounts are discussed and edited in Peter Heath, Medieval Clerical Accounts, St Anthony's Hall Publications 26 (York, 1964), 5–11, 25–59. These are now at York, BIA, CP.F.306.

¹³ The closest match to the Oxford accounts is Salisbury, Salisbury Cathedral Archives, FA/2/1-24 (others undated in FA/2/2), from St Thomas's Church, Salisbury. Very similar are those for Scarborough, now at Kew, TNA, E101/314/31-2: see Heath, Medieval Clerical Accounts, 3–4; the calendrical statement of liturgical income for 1435–6 is translated in R. N. Swanson, ed., Catholic England: Faith, Religion, and Observance before the Reformation (Manchester, 2014), 151–7.

¹⁴ Oxford, Lincoln College Archives [hereafter: LCA], Bursary Papers, Miscellaneous Bundles, 1–3 and Charters 39.

¹⁵ Totals in some of the Durham proctors’ accounts (see n. 17 below) have the validating comment: ‘ut patet in papirum computantis’ (‘as is shown in the accountant's paper’).

¹⁶ For Hornsea, see n. 12 above; for Topsham, see Exeter, Exeter Cathedral Archives, 4647.

¹⁷ For sample material from Great Yarmouth and Bishop's [now King's] Lynn (both Norfolk), see Swanson, Catholic England, 157–63; for discussions, see idem, ‘Standards of Livings: Parochial Revenues in Pre-Reformation England’, in Christopher Harper-Bill, ed., Religious Belief and Ecclesiastical Careers in Late Medieval England (Woodbridge, 1991), 151–96, at 164, 168, 190; idem, ‘Urban Rectories and Urban Fortunes in Late Medieval England: The Evidence from King's Lynn’, in T. R. Slater and Gervase Rosser, eds, The Church in the Medieval Town (Aldershot, 1998), 100–30, at 108, 110, 122–3. Totalling at an intermediate point appears in the proctors’ accounts for the churches at Norham (Northumberland) and St Oswald and St Margaret, Durham, all appropriated to Durham Cathedral Priory: Durham, Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections, DCD-St Mar. acs; DCD-St Os. acs; DCD-Norh. acs.

¹⁸ For example, [John Caley and Joseph Hunter], eds, Valor ecclesiasticus, 6 vols (London, 1810–34), 3: 180–1, 268–9; 5: 57–61, 213–15; 6: xlii–xliii.

¹⁹ Thompson, John S., ed., Hundreds, Manors, Parishes and the Church: A Selection of Early Documents for Bedfordshire, Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society 69 (Bedford, 1990), 125, 145–69Google Scholar (esp. 145–6, 161–3; also mention of ‘th'Eyster book’ at 144).

²⁰ Heath, Medieval Clerical Accounts, 27–8. Several of the accounts name no accountant, so could have been compiled by the vicar.

²¹ For example, BIA, CP.G.247 (from 1536), discussed in R. N. Swanson, ‘Fissures in the Bedrock: Parishes, Chapels, Parishioners and Chaplains in Pre-Reformation England’, in Nadine Lewycky and Adam Morton, eds, Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils (Farnham, 2012), 77–95, at 90–1. See also [Caley and Hunter], eds, Valor ecclesiasticus, 3: 269. Distribution may be suggested by references to chapels ‘used as a parish church’ in the Yorkshire chantry surveys of the 1540s: Swanson, ‘Fissures’, 83, 87; see also 84, 90. St Margaret, Durham, was an autonomous chapelry of St Oswald (see n. 17 above).

²² TNA, E101/517/27, fols 1^r, 2^r, 3^r–^v, 4^v–5^r, 6^r.

²³ London, BL, Add. Roll 32957. The totals entered in this account cannot be converted into separate events. Income from baptisteria appears in the proctors’ accounts for the churches of St Oswald and St Margaret at Durham, and at Norham (see n. 17 above); what they mean is uncertain, but they may indicate payments for chrisom cloths used at baptism. (See also below, p. 151 [at notes 30–1].)

²⁴ The credibility of proofs is debated. Despite doubts about their detailed reliability, they are plausible guides to contemporary practice at a general level. For varying assessments, see Walker, Sue Sheridan, ‘Proof of Age of Feudal Heirs in Medieval England’, Mediaeval Studies 35 (1973), 306–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenthal, Joel T., Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (University Park, PA, 2003), 1–62Google Scholar; Holford, Matthew, ‘“Testimony (to Some Extent Fictitious)”: Proofs of Age in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century’, HR 82 (2009), 635–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ French, Good Women, 57–8; Joyce Youings, ed., The Dissolution of the Monasteries (London, 1971), 139–40, at 140.

²⁶ French, Good Women, 61–3. For evidence from proof of age proceedings, see L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge, 1991), 122 and n. 28.

²⁷ See BIA, CP.G.222 (duplicated at CP.G.240), for an illicit purification celebrated at a chapel. Purifications are among those actions specifically banned at one chapel in Philippa M. Hoskin, ed., Robert Grosseteste as Bishop of Lincoln: The Episcopal Rolls, 1235–1253 (Woodbridge, 2015), no. 1871, ‘nisi in articulis necessariis’ (‘other than at the points of urgent need’), but allowed at another (no. 2062), with licence from the parochial rector and vicar.

²⁸ Stillbirths cannot be detected because such children could not receive baptism and full funeral rites. The collocation of a child's funeral and the mother's purification (linked by shared surname) allows for the assumption of a neonatal death, without actually establishing it. For example, among the accounts for the two Oxford parishes, we have: 1495 – funeral of Asley's child (February) and his wife's purification (March) (LCA, Computus 1, Calc. 7, p. 1); 1509 – purification of Hugh Hynd's wife and child's burial (February) (ibid., Computus 1, Calc. 9, p. 1). The proximity of funerals for a child and wife also suggests the deaths of a newborn and its mother, for e.g., in 1507, the funerals of Schappe's child and wife (April) and Collyn's child and wife (June) (ibid., Computus 2 Calc. 4, pp. 4, 5). For a firmly neonatal funeral, see n. 47 below.

²⁹ See n. 40 below. The reduction may reflect the fact that the mass penny was ‘saved’ by celebrating a single mass for the two rites.

³⁰ Poos, Rural Society, 123–4. No mention appears in Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: the Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c.1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996).

³¹ French, Good Women, 63.

³² Swanson, Catholic England, 151–6; Heath, Medieval Clerical Accounts, 28–30, 35–6, 42–3.

³³ For example, LCA, Computus 1, Calc. 8, pp. 8–9; Computus 2, Calc. 4, p. 6.

³⁴ Muliercula carried such associations in classical Latin: J. N. Adams, ‘Words for “Prostitute” in Latin’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie n.f. 126 (1983), 321–58, at 354. The few citations in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (online at: <http://clt.brepolis.net/dmlbs/>, last accessed 19 January 2022) do not extend the meaning that far. One associates the word with paupercula, but without clear sexual imputation. Paupercula appears as the feminine form s.v. pauperculus, likewise without the negative sexual connotations. Pauperculus is applied to some men in LCA, Computus 2, Calc. 4, pp. 5, 7.

³⁵ Exeter Cathedral Archives, 4647, fol. 1^r. A servant's purification, with no husband named, may be another: ibid.

³⁶ J. S. Purvis, A Mediaeval Act Book, with Some Account of Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction at York (York, [1943]), 38. Priests were expected to ask about paternity when baptizing the child of an unmarried mother: David Wilkins, ed., Concilia Magna Britanniæ et Hiberniæ, 4 vols (London, 1737), 2: 132.

³⁷ For example, at All Saints, Oxford, 1477, Philip Glover's burial (February) and his widow's remarriage (September): LCA, Computus 1, Calc. 3, pp. 1, 3.

³⁸ R. H. Helmholz, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1: The Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s (Oxford, 2004), 523–4, 531. For clandestine celebrations, see, e.g., Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, eds, The Visitation of Hereford Diocese in 1397, CYS 111 (Woodbridge, 2021), nos 252–3, 306. A secular link between church marriage and conferral or confirmation of rights of dower reinforced its public significance: Sir John Baker, Collected Papers on English Legal History, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2013), 3: 1371–5.

³⁹ For ‘completion’, see Stafford, Staffordshire Record Office, LD30/3/3/1, fol. 7^r. For attempted validation, see Forrest and Whittick, eds, Visitation, nos 306, 1014, 1071, 1076. See also Helmholz, Oxford History, 531.

⁴⁰ BL, Add. Roll 32957. A couple of entries in the Topsham accounts record receipts for purification and marriage (in that order) in eadem die (‘on the same day’): Exeter Cathedral Archives, 4647, fol. 3^v; similar entries without that precision at ibid., fol. 1^r, and purification after or at the wedding (post nupcias or in nupciis) at ibid., fols 3^v, 8^v.

⁴¹ Swanson, ‘Town and Gown’, 311.

⁴² Canonically, any priest could confer extreme unction on anyone qualified to receive it who appeared to be at the point of death (in articulo mortis), although it was normally expected to be conferred by the incumbent or his stand-in as a component of the spiritual jurisdiction of the parochial cure of souls. Alleged breaches of that prerogative sometimes feature in cases in the ecclesiastical courts, with chaplains accused of acting without authorization, or of usurping occupation of a subsidiary chapel. For examples of court cases, see BIA, CP.G.222 (duplicated at CP.G.240); Margaret Bowker, ed., An Episcopal Court Book for the Diocese of Lincoln, 1514–1520, Lincoln Record Society 61 (Lincoln, 1967), 4–6: in both, the accused chaplain claimed that he acted in articulo mortis.

⁴³ For cases illustrating some of the tensions and critical points, see n. 50 above.

⁴⁴ BL, Add. Roll 32957. The ‘nythewax’ payment may include a mass penny, without actually saying so.

⁴⁵ [John Wallis], ed., The Bodmin Register (Bodmin, [1838]), 37 (in the context of a dispute with the vicar over his financial claims on the parishioners). The quotation is followed by the words quoted below, n. 69, which do relate to post-funeral commemorations. Reference to ‘dirige’ with the mass prompts association with the funeral (Orme, Going to Church, 341), but may not be conclusive.

⁴⁶ None are obviously visible at Hornsea; only a few at Topsham (Exeter Cathedral Archives, 4647, fols 1^v, 4^r–^v), most of them in a distinct cluster.

⁴⁷ LCA, Computus 2, Calc. 7, p. 8.

⁴⁸ For cases, see n. 50 below.

⁴⁹ Thomas M. Izbicki, ‘The Problem of Canonical Portion in the Later Middle Ages: The Application of “Super cathedram”’, in Peter Linehan, ed., Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Cambridge 23–27 July 1984, Monumenta iuris canonici, Series C: Subsidia 8 (Vatican City, 1988), 459–73. For receipts from the canonical quarter at Bishop's Lynn, see Swanson, ‘Urban Rectories’, 120–1. The friars aggressively defended their own claims to perform funerals and burials, resisting the claims of parochial clergy in the courts of their own papal conservators: R. N. Swanson, ‘The “Mendicant Problem” in the Later Middle Ages’, in Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson, eds, The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life, SCH Sub 11 (Woodbridge, 1999), 217–38, at 221–4, 238; BL, Add. MS 32089, fols 108^v–110^v.

⁵⁰ For relevant disputes, see Forrest and Whittick, eds, Visitation, no. 179; R. N. Swanson, ‘Parochialism and Particularism: The Disputed Status of Ditchford Frary, Warwickshire, in the Early Fifteenth Century’, in M. J. Franklin and Christopher Harper-Bill, eds, Medieval Ecclesiastical Studies in Honour of Dorothy M. Owen (Woodbridge, 1995), 241–57; idem, ‘“Liber de practica advocatorum, non utilior in Anglia”: A Canonist's Compilation from the Fourteenth-Century Court of Arches’, forthcoming in Travis Baker, ed., Christian Culture and Society in Later Catholic England (Leiden, 2023); Ian Forrest, ‘The Politics of Burial in Late Medieval Hereford’, EHR 125 (2010), 1110–38.

⁵¹ LCA, Computus 3, fol. 53^r. The ultima vale of a fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, appears in the Peterhouse accounts of 1464–5 ‘because he died within our parish’ (St Peter without Trumpington Gate): Cambridge, Peterhouse Archives, Computus Roll 25.

⁵² For example, David Dymond, ed., The Churchwardens’ Book of Bassingbourn, Cambridgeshire, 1496–c.1540, Cambridgeshire Record Society 17 (Cambridge, 2004), xlvi, xlix–lvii, 292 s.v. ‘burials’; Reginald C. Dudding, ed., The First Churchwardens’ Book of Louth, 1500–1524 (Oxford, 1941), 3–6, 45–6, 48–51, 60–3.

⁵³ Swanson, Catholic England, 152, 155.

⁵⁴ Swanson, ‘Town and Gown’, 311 and n. 49.

⁵⁵ See general discussion of funerals and burials in Sally Badham, Seeking Salvation: Commemorating the Dead in the Late-Medieval English Parish (Donington, 2015), 187–97, 209–14, 241–3.

⁵⁶ J. Charles Cox, Churchwardens’ Accounts from the Fourteenth Century to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1913), 27. It has not been possible to consult the original accounts, now London, City of Westminster Archives Centre, SMW/E/1/1.

⁵⁷ Dymond, ed., Bassingbourn, 94; William Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, extending from the Year 1475 to 1640; Extracted from the Act-Books of Ecclesiastical Courts in the Diocese of London, Illustrative of the Discipline of the Church of England, ed. R. W. Dunning (Edinburgh, 1974), 95.

⁵⁸ As in Dudding, ed., Louth, 39, 45.

⁵⁹ For ceremonies in parish churches, see, e.g., Warwick P. Marett, ed., A Calendar of the Register of Henry Wakefield, Bishop of Worcester, 1375–95, Worcestershire Historical Society n.s. 7 (1972), nos 874–983 (intermittently); John C. Bates, ed., The Register of William Bothe, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1447–1452, CYS 98 (Woodbridge, 2008), nos 317, 320, 336–9, 342.

⁶⁰ For such ordinations in parish churches, see, e.g., R. C. Fowler and C. Jenkins, eds, Registrum Simonis de Sudburia, diocesis Londoniensis, A.D. 1362–1375, CYS 34, 38, 2 vols (Oxford, 1927–38), 2: 10, 27, 63; G. R. Dunstan, ed., The Register of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter, 1420–1455: Registrum Commune, CYS 60–3, 66, 5 vols (Torquay, 1971), 4: 80–229, for numerous examples. For discussion of these minor orders, conferred before the major, holy, orders and known as ‘first tonsure’ (by this period usually conflated into a single ordination rite), which infused a potentially lifelong clerical ‘character’ without requiring celibacy, see R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), 40–3; David Robinson, ‘First Tonsures in England in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century’, JEH 73 (2022), 505–24, esp. 505, 507, 510, 520, 523–4.

⁶¹ LCA, Computus 2, Calc. 3, p. 7; Computus 4, pp. 48–9.

⁶² LCA, Computus 3, fols 94^v–95^r (and elsewhere in the full run); cf. Peterhouse Archives, Computus Rolls 24, 25.

⁶³ The situation with ‘collective incumbencies’, exercised by colleges of secular priests, nuances this statement. Funerals of individuals within the undying collectivity might then appear in the benefice accounts, as they do for the Fellows of Lincoln College, Oxford.

⁶⁴ Lincoln, Lincolnshire Archives, Bp. Accts/6; Add.Reg.7, fols 135^r–136^r, 139^v, 140^v, 142^r, 143^r. The incomplete recording has numerous possible explanations, which need not be detailed here.

⁶⁵ There is no comprehensive general survey of the practices of post-mortem liturgical commemoration of the dead in pre-Reformation England. Badham, Seeking Salvation, 135–62, offers a useful indicative summary.

⁶⁶ Such ambiguity is evident in Lincoln College's Oxford parishes: Swanson, ‘Town and Gown’, 318–20.

⁶⁷ Some appear in BL, MS Add. 34786 (not consulted in person): references in Orme, Going to Church, 457 n. 234). Orme, ibid. 347, seems to treat the week's and month's minds as alternatives. Badham, Seeking Salvation, 150, adds the ‘sennight (15^th day)’, without references. I am not aware of having encountered it.

⁶⁸ Clive Burgess, ‘A Service for the Dead: The Form and Function of the Anniversary in Late Medieval Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 105 (1987), 183–211; Badham, Seeking Salvation, 150–4.

⁶⁹ At Bodmin, in 1525, it was said that the vicar claimed 6d. ‘for ev[er]y monyth mynde and twelfe monyth mynde’: [Wallis], ed., Bodmin Register, 37.

⁷⁰ A. N. Galpern, ‘The Legacy of Late Medieval Religion in Sixteenth-Century Champagne’, in Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, eds, The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion: Papers from the University of Michigan Conference, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Thought 10 (Leiden, 1974), 141–76, at 149.

⁷¹ Swanson, ‘Town and Gown’, 56.

⁷² A composition at Oxford for wedding dues from 1507 was still owed in 1517: LCA, Computus 3, fol. 69^v.

⁷³ Charles Drew, Early Parochial Organisation in England: The Origins of the Office of Churchwarden, St Anthony's Hall Publications 7 (York, 1954), 15–18; for a later case (from 1399), see R. N. Swanson, ed., Calendar of the Register of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York (1398–1405): Part 1, Borthwick Texts and Calendars: Records of the Northern Province 8 (York, 1981), no. 669. See also Arthur Brandeis, ed., Jacob's Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man's Conscience, Part 1, EETS o.s. 115 (London, 1900), 19.

⁷⁴ For survival, see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997), 210–12, 348–9, 459–60; John H. Pruett, The Parish Clergy under the Later Stuarts: The Leicestershire Experience (Urbana, IL, 1978), 82, 90, 94, 100.