In 1624 a London printer issued a broadsheet in memory of Dr Thomas Sutton, the godly young lecturer at St Saviour, Southwark who had been drowned the previous year travelling from Newcastle to London. The central panel of the broadsheet shows Moses and Aaron presiding over tablets of the law, with the Lord’s Prayer and the Articles of Belief squeezed in above the image of Sutton with verses in praise of his spiritual leadership (figure 1). The panel has two outer leaves with engravings explaining the two dominical sacraments and the ritual practice of their rites of passage under the old and the new law. The whole image is headed with a note that this ‘Christians Jewell’ should adorn the home of every Protestant, and that it had been ‘taken’ from St Saviour’s church during Sutton’s lectureship. An act of imagination is required to move from the engraving to whatever was ‘taken’ from the church. But we can establish that some sort of Decalogue Board was located there in a prominent position. The enlargement of John Stow’s Survey of London, undertaken by Anthony Munday in the 1630s, remarks on ‘an extraordinary fair and curious Table of the Commandments’ set up, possibly on the screen at the West door, in 1618.

The years between the early fourteenth and the mid sixteenth century are of considerable interest in the history of the prelate. In some respects, this era might be regarded as a golden age of prelacy, culminating in the appearance of great ecclesiastical dignitaries across much of Europe, such as Wolsey, d'Amboise, Cisneros, Lang and Jagiellon. In terms of their political weight, their grandeur and their wide-ranging cultural patronage, these early sixteenth-century ‘cardinal-ministers’ arguably represented a high point in prelatical influence. Nor should they be regarded as wholly distinct from their clerical contemporaries: recent studies of Renaissance cardinals and the early Tudor episcopate indicate that the next rank of senior churchmen were no less concerned to express the importance and dignity of their office. However, the period c. 1300–c. 1560 also witnessed a developing critique of prelacy – not unconnected with these eye-catching assertions of ecclesiastical status and power – with complaints about senior members of the Church hierarchy a commonplace in the literature and preaching of the day. To these criticisms were added attacks on the very concept of the prelate, which was rejected as unscriptural by John Wyclif and his followers: a critique which would be taken up enthusiastically by sixteenth-century reformers in England and Europe.

This volume has grown out of a conference on ‘The Prelate in Late Medieval and Reformation England’, held at the University of Liverpool in September 2011. All the papers delivered at that conference are published below, apart from those given by Natalia Nowakowska and Brigitte Resl. The volume also includes a chapter by Cédric Michon, offered subsequent to the Liverpool conference. I would like to thank the contributors to both the conference and to the volume, all of whom have been stimulating and good-humoured collaborators throughout this project.

I would also like to acknowledge gratefully the work and expert guidance of all those at Boydell & Brewer and York Medieval Press who have been involved with this volume and especially Caroline Palmer, Rohais Haughton and Professor Peter Biller. The Liverpool conference was funded partly by a British Academy Research Development Award, and partly by financial contributions from the department of History of the University of Liverpool and the Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, without all of whose generous support the event could not have taken place. This publication has also been made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research, acknowledged here with gratitude.

The archbishop and his printer

Matthew Parker, Elizabeth's first archbishop of Canterbury, was in love with antiquities. He was also more than half in love with the political and cultural power of printing. Print offered him the possibilities of winning friends and influencing people, promoting the interests of the fledgling Church of England, and displaying his personal engagement with early British history. Elizabeth Evenden's study of John Day, the Protestant printer, has revealed how crucial it was for this erudite archbishop to have the resources of the press at his command. Their relationship evolved in the 1560s and was consolidated by Day's printing of Ælfric's A Testimonie of Antiquitie (1566 or 7) and his development of Anglo-Saxon characters for this and for William Lambarde's edition of early law codes, Archaionomia (1568). Parker financed the new font necessary to print these works, but it was Day whose technical skills ensured their effective presentation, the general accuracy of the print and hence much of the authority of these evidences from the distant national past. The success of these projects encouraged Parker to become a more active patron of the printer, explicitly deploying Day's books as artefacts in the struggle to win active support for the Protestant bishops.