The case of the chapel of Sutton outside the medieval town of Hull in the parish of Wawne (medieval Waghen) raised key questions for local inhabitants about parishes, burial practices and tithes. The chapel was the focus of a court case at the York Consistory Court between February 1429 and February 1431 about its relationship with Wawne and the right to burial. The witnesses for the chapel of Sutton asserted that it was a parochial church with the usual rights of baptism and burial, and accordingly possessed a font and cemetery. Furthermore, they claimed that it had distinct boundaries that separated it from Wawne. On the other side, the vicar of Wawne, Robert Tyas, complained that the chapel had been converted into a collegiate church with a master and five chaplains in 1347, and that the current master had violated an agreement between his predecessor and the vicar of Wawne that only the inhabitants of Sutton who freely chose to be buried at Sutton should be interred there. It was further alleged that the chapel owed oblations to Wawne, which they refused to hand over. Sutton lost the case, although the issue would rumble on for another twenty years.

The dispute between Sutton and Wawne illustrates some of the issues that chapels raised. They potentially threatened the rights and income of their parish churches, and they changed or multiplied the religious focal points in their parishes. The need to understand the nature of the parish and the parish church in relation to chapels was borne out in Chapter 1, as the development of parishes and their subsequent shape and size did not follow a homogeneous trajectory across the three countries under study. A parish could range in size from the roughly 15.5 sq km (6 square miles) of Carnaby parish in the East Riding of Yorkshire to around 700 sq km (273 square miles) in the case of Selje parish in Bergen diocese. The Norwegian parishes were considerably larger than the East Riding parishes but much more sparsely populated, which may be part of the explanation for their size. In order for parishes to be economically viable, some had to be huge in order to generate sufficient income.