This quotation from Liber extra by Bernard of Parma (d. 1266) typifies universal Christian perceptions of female incapacity prevalent during the whole of the Middle Ages, when women were politically, socially, legally and culturally disadvantaged in comparison with men. While women were proscribed from formal learning, preaching and teaching they could find a voice in devotional and contemplative expression in the Church, in which they were held fully answerable for the morality or immorality, orthodoxy or heterodoxy of their own actions and proclamations. This gave them a personally responsible role to play not only in the salvation of their own souls but also, by example and statement, in saving the souls of others. However, they were considered prone to moral failings, chiefly vanity, inconstancy, quarrelling and seductiveness, and needed the close guidance and management of men if they were to demonstrate their inherent but hidden qualities of modesty, compassion, charity and piety, as exemplified by the Blessed Virgin. C. Annette Grisé assesses the behaviour to be expected of devout women thus:

In the anonymous fourteenth-century poem,The Pricke of Conscience, its author focuses in considerable detail on the miseries of this life, the torments of Hell and Purgatory, and the joys awaiting the saved in Paradise. In Part Four of this text, we are presented with a detailed and theologically informed treatment of the doctrine of Purgatory as it was developing during the later Middle Ages, including details of the ‘payns seven’ (2897) which a soul could expect in Purgatory after death. According to this author, too, the boundaries between this world and the afterlife were permeable, with those left on earth being able to affect the course of a soul's expiation of sin before its triumphant entry into Heaven. Moreover, that soul could, under some circumstances, return to warn the living of what lay in store for them and thus bring about a mutual deliverance:

Whilst Jacques Le Goff considered the purgatorial doctrine to have emerged at the end of the twelfth century, more recently, Takami Matsuda has argued that concerns about Purgatory only began to reveal themselves within an English literary context at the end of the thirteenth century, in which case the poem can be regarded as belonging to a new and innovative genre which sought to articulate a type of third space between Heaven and Hell in which a soul could atone for a range of earthly sins.

The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne remain curiously untouched. W. A. Pantin wrote an excellent article on them in 1944. David Hugh Farmer published an edition of the Latin text in the late 1950s, followed some forty years later by a Benedictine translation. But apart from this they seem to have shot beneath everyone's radar, only ever mentioned in passing as a relatively late example of an insular tradition of Latin meditation from which the vernacular mystics eventually triumphantly emerge. So, their Latinity has done them a marked disservice. However, there remains much more to say about these texts, not least with respect to their sophisticated content, passages of mysticism, and substantial size, and I would argue that they deserve to be written back into the master narrative of late-medieval devotional and mystical literature in a fairly prominent way.

This essay will offer a brief description of the texts themselves, followed by remarks on their position within a north-eastern tradition of Cuthbertine spirituality, their affinities with Richard Rolle's writings, and their use by the Durham Benedictines during the fifteenth century. The ‘Monk’ is a monk solitary from Durham Benedictine priory, living in a hermitage on the island of Inner Farne, off the north-eastern coast of England. Probably or possibly he is John Whiterig, who is known to have occupied the hermitage between 1363 and 1371.

We cannot, then, look at endowment of the Church without also considering what was being taken back and which rights were being defended and nurtured. This, after all, was what patronage was all about. What emerges too is that patronage was a dynamic thing, always needing to be exercised in order to be a reality, and always benefiting from refreshment in the form of new endowments.

Studies of ecclesiastical patronage have tended hitherto to focus on particular families or regions, or to address long time periods. The present study is different because it has focused on a larger, but still discrete, social group, and has examined patronage rights in the special and very important political circumstances of the later thirteenth century. This has made it possible to combine the evidence from a variety of sources to give depth and context to our understanding of the nature of patronage and how it operated. This brief conclusion draws together the main points and suggests where further study would be fruitful.

Until the middle years of the century, advowson rights, unless they were actually granted out (nearly always to an ecclesiastical institution), usually descended with land. They were not normally severed from estates as a consequence of estate transfer. The same is broadly true of patronage rights in religious houses, although with respect to these there was a tendency for upward mobility, with rights sometimes being acquired by overlords, especially when estates were divided up. But from the later years of Henry III's reign, the necessary attachment of patronage to land was being questioned as never before.

Most of the evidence we have about magnates presenting to benefices comes from bishops' registers. This is in itself an indication of the extent of canonical authority in relation to clerical appointments. When a bishop instituted a clerk to a church, he was upholding his own spiritual authority, and it was his duty to assure the quality of local clergy by checking on the character, education and eligibility of the man presented to him. This, after all, was a moment when he might give real meaning, within his own diocese, to the drive for pastoral reform which characterised the thirteenth-century Church.

The making of canon law was one thing; putting it into effect was another. The bishop was at the sharp end of relations with lay patrons, some of whom were highly influential people, and he was also upholding the right of the patron. Canon law required that he must only admit the individual who had been presented by the true patron; and that he should do this was essential to the way in which advowson litigation was conducted in the secular courts. The assize of darrein presentment was based on who had last presented to a church and it was frequently the action used to determine advowson disputes. By exercising the right of presentation, a patron established his possession of it. At a time when being given seisin – being put in possession of property or rights – was of the utmost importance in establishing ownership, exercising the right of advowson was essential.

In this chapter, we look at the implications for magnates of the efforts by the Crown to extend the patronage in its control. Here we start with a familiar theme: Edward I's acquisition of magnate estates and the increase in the later thirteenth century of the amount of royal ecclesiastical patronage. The two were necessarily linked. Many years ago K.B. McFarlane exposed Edward I's acquisitiveness of magnates' estates, which, as he saw it, amounted to a ‘policy’ towards the earls: Edward acquired their estates by dubious legal procedures (the earldom of Derby or Ferrars), putting pressure on magnates to allow him to acquire their estates (the earldoms of Aumâle, Devon and Norfolk) and by the normal rules of inheritance (the earldom of Cornwall). Michael Prestwich has offered a refinement of the picture, although he has concurred in the view of Edward's limited generosity as far as grants of land were concerned. Ann Deeley showed that the Crown was pushing more forcefully for its patronage rights in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly in the context of a growing number of papal provisions. And the expansion of royal ecclesiastical patronage in Edward's I's reign and afterwards, as demonstrated by Philip Saunders, was in large measure due to the acquisition of magnate estates as well as to more intense exploitation of wardship patronage. What is called for now is a consideration of whether Henry III and Edward I systematically targeted the ecclesiastical interests of the magnates – and, if so, what effect this may have had on the relationships between land and patronage rights.

Exactly why lay patrons valued their patronage rights so much is revealed when we look at the clergy who held livings in their gift, and exploring the connections they had with those who had presented them. It is not possible to explain the reasons for every presentation made by a magnate to a benefice, but a number of very clear interest groups emerge. In examining the records relating to these groups, we are able to see the complexity of the relationships involved, for prominent clerks tended not to rely on just one patron for advancement. Having looked at the qualifications of clergy from the point of view of the Church, we need now to look at the considerations that prompted magnates to advance them.

In the first place they had their relatives. It is well known that noble families put their members into the Church as a way of providing them with a livelihood without drawing on the resources of the family estates. In 1282 Edward I wrote to the pope about Aymer de Valence, then a younger son of William de Valence, who was making a career in the church. The king's letter said that it was usual for magnates' younger sons to hold a plurality of benefices. That the king should openly say so to the pope begs two questions: whether it was in fact ‘usual’ and whether the Church tolerated pluralism on the part of noble clerks.

Ecclesiastical patronage was an essential part of the social and political cement of western Christendom. It was the only way in which the laity were permitted to exercise rights in the Church and its property. This work studies the deployment of such patronage by the higher nobility of later thirteenth-century England. It is about the nature and extent of patronage rights, how they were identified and used, why and for whom they were valuable, what challenges lay patrons faced, and how these patrons looked to the future in the ways in which they made gifts to the Church. This book is not primarily about lay piety, although the piety of individuals will be encountered as a motive for making the endowments which resulted in the exercise of rights. But the main concern is with patronage rights as property that had to be defended and as resources to be managed.

The term ‘patronage’ is, therefore, being used in a very particular sense. Patronage in general terms involves an inherently unequal relationship between a dominant party which chooses to offer favours and opportunities to a recipient who is more or less beholden and dependent. The nature of what is offered will vary according to circumstance, but the significance of patronage for the medieval political and social historian can hardly be over-stated. The use or abuse of patronage was a key factor in the success or failure of kings; it determined the character of office-holders; it underpinned the growth of factions; it was the driver of social mobility.

Magnates were still the most important lay patrons. Individually, they were patrons of many churches, not just one or two. They had patronage rights in religious houses, some of them of great wealth and importance. And their influence over clerical appointments extended well beyond their formally constituted rights, reflecting their standing and their connections with prelates and the Crown. We need now to look at how that influence played out when issues relating to patronage were at the forefront in politics. We know very well that the later thirteenth century was a formative period in Church–State relations, particularly in terms of papal provisions, the so-called ‘alien priories’ and the taxation of the clergy. All of those had implications for the patrons who had endowed the ecclesiastical institutions which were affected by them. The magnates were called upon to play an active part in relation to these matters and the evidence enables us to infer what their views may have been. Did the Crown manage to harness the support of the magnates in its policies towards the Church? And, if so, why was that support forthcoming?

The first point to establish is whether or not the magnates were involved in the formulation of royal policies. Clearly, from 1258–65 during the baronial reform movement and civil war there had been occasions on which certain magnates had dominated royal policy and had compromised the king's decision-making powers.

The Statute of Mortmain of 1279 was a response to the concern which had been growing since the early part of the thirteenth century about the passing of lands and rights into the hands of the Church. But how did lay patrons regard the new controls, and how did they react to them?

‘Mortmain’ was a pejorative term for free alms or frankalmoign tenure, for, when land was given to the Church to hold in free alms, the services and feudal incidents hitherto rendered to the lord by the donor were lost or weakened. The concerns about such losses and the legislation designed to control the passing of land into mortmain have been discussed fully by other scholars, particularly Sandra Raban, so that there is need here only to summarise what foreshadowed the 1279 statute. First, Clause 32 of the 1217 reissue of Magna Carta forbade the alienation of so much land that the remainder was insufficient for performance of the services due. Clause 36 forbade grants whereby the donor was re-enfeoffed as the ecclesiastical donee's tenant, so that the donee became mesne between the donor and his lord. Then in 1258, the Petition of the Barons included a request that religious should not be allowed to enter the fees of earls, barons and others in such a way as to cause loss of customs, marriages, reliefs and escheats. Accordingly, in some texts of the Provisions of Westminster of 1259, it was laid down that religious should only enter lands with the consent of the chief lord of the fee, although it is not known whether this clause was included in the Statute of Marlborough of 1267.