This book is a study of the parishes and their religious life in a medium-sized city in the middle ages. When I embarked on it I thought that the majority of the work would have been done by others, since the Durham archives are so incomparably good, but I was almost completely wrong. There is no history of the life of the medieval lay Christians in the city and their parishes. The history provided by Margaret Bonney in her Lordship and the Urban Community is immensely useful for understanding the secular organisation of the city and its secular life. I have relied on it very heavily and have used the thesis on which it was based, especially the maps of the tenements and the lists of their successive holders. But it almost ignored the religious side of lay life and did not use many of the sources which would have explored it. Barrie Dobson's excellent Durham Priory was intended to be a history of the monastic community and its concerns. Though it succeeds in being much more, it was never intended to consider the life of the city parishes, several of which in any case were not owned and managed by the monks. So instead of being a synthesiser I found myself often being a pioneer.

The parishes of Durham city were of course part of the universal church and it does not do to think of them as closed worlds uninfluenced by the wider church and the state. The discipline which governed the church institutions which I have described was administered by a series of ecclesiastical authorities putting into practice the canon law of the church. At its heart was the Roman curia with its courts and legal system and its power to grant graces and favours. In theory, appeal to this was possible even by the most humble parishioner. The hierarchical church with its canon law, however, placed many authorities between the ordinary parishioner and the pope. Very probably the clergy who impinged most upon the lives of the laity were the parochial priests serving under the vicar or rector. But they were in theory subject to their rectors and to the bishop of the diocese, who administered his authority over his clergy and laity largely through his archdeacons who visited and held courts to discipline both lay and clergy. The bishop of course could visit parishes but seldom did so in person. The bishop's consistory was the diocesan court for all laity and clergy who were not exempt. Appeal from it was possible either to the provincial court (the metropolitan or archdiocesan court), or even, if litigants could afford it and were sufficiently tenacious, to Rome itself, sometimes by-passing the local altogether.

Observance of canon law must have made court officials and even litigants aware of the papacy and its rules, and we have seen ordinary parishioners actually appealing to Rome in the fourteenth century. There were, however, many other ways in which the papacy made itself felt in late medieval Durham.

The upper echelons of the local church would have been aware of the pope not only as a law-giver but also as a demander of money. How far this was felt by the parishioners unless they were made aware of it is hard to tell. The church in Durham was of course subject to taxation from the papacy; the accounts of all the monastic obedientiaries show regular payments for the churches in their charge. These include papal taxation as well as payments for papal legates and nuncios. In the fourteenth century, for instance, there were payments for the procurations (maintenance payments) of cardinals coming as legates. For instance in 1344–5 the hostillar's accounts show 8d paid for this, out of €2 owed, and in 1357–8 procurations to cardinals were recorded. In 1374–5 two payments went ‘to the messengers of the cardinals’ and further payment in 1375–6. It does not, of course, follow that any of the ordinary parishioners in Durham knew anything about any of this, though those who worked for the bishop and the priory would know of it.

Because Durham parishes have left no churchwardens' accounts it is more difficult to reconstruct some aspects of the activities of lay people in its parishes than it is in some other parts of the country. To try to reconstruct lay concerns from churchwardens' accounts alone, however, may lead to serious misjudgements and wrong emphases. The laity were not responsible for the whole church. What is left in churchwardens' accounts is an edited version of what was presented; there were other officials apart from the churchwardens; and many gifts, for instance, may never have come into the accounts at all. In Durham one has the opposite problem. The parishes belonging to the priory accounted through a procurator to the obedientiary who ‘owned’ them. The procurator only included items for which he had to answer to the rector (the obedientiary and ultimately the prior). Thus lay concerns, for the nave of the church or for many gifts for instance, were not included, nor, usually, were parish festivities which would have been financed by the laity. These can sometimes be discerned, usually when the prior authorised an unusual payment for them. Nonetheless it is possible to say something about the role and activities of the laity in the ordinary church life of the city.

The parishes had churchwardens and sometimes, though rarely, we can give names. We can take it that they oversaw the parts of the church for which the laity were responsible according to church law, including the nave.

The people who are studied in these pages lived in six parishes, some with subordinate country chapels: St Oswald's with its three chapels at St Margaret's in the city, Croxdale (St Bartholomew) and Witton Gilbert, St Giles, St Nicholas, Sts Mary the Less and the Bow and St Mary Magdalen.

The size of the population of later medieval Durham is of course unknown to us but some estimate of it in 1548 comes from the returns of the parishes made to the royal surveyors of chantries and such institutions. These were of ‘houseling people’ or those over the age of about 12 years who would be required by church law to go to confession and receive communion at Easter time. One would therefore have to add a multiplier to achieve a total population figure from these, allowing for under-age children. The numbers are St Margaret, 547, St Oswald, 680, St Nicholas, 720, the North Bailey, 240, and St Giles, 420. These figures may have been based on the number of communion hosts which the churches accounted for at Easter, which were often found enumerated in the procurators' accounts for St Oswald's and St Margaret's. The numbers were probably rising by 1548. In 1447–8, 800 hosts were bought for the parishioners of St Oswald's and Croxdale for the Easter communion. In 1467–8 the numbers for St Oswald's were 500, rising to 600 in 1479–80.

Once the parishes were in place in Durham city and the arguments about them were settled, from about 1200 onwards, the merchants and clergy of the city below the highest ranks devoted themselves to their parish and very soon began to found chantries. There is no evidence that any below the upper ranks of society ever looked to the monks for specific prayers for individuals, or if they did, the requests were not recorded. The monastery certainly prayed for its founders and benefactors and made provision for some to have confraternity and even, in very special cases, burial and a chantry in the cathedral, but most of those involved with these monastic endowments were not Durham city residents. Ordinary citizens seem always to have looked to their parishes for prayers after their deaths, probably from the bede (bidding prayer) rolls at the mass, where deceased benefactors would have been prayed for (we know nothing about this in Durham), and sometimes from specific provision for masses, particularly by founding chantries and other forms of special prayer for their souls. The origin and development of chantries have roused great interest, and from Durham's history much can be gathered, because for some of the chantries there is the rare phenomenon of a continuous history from foundation to dissolution. As with parishes, so with chantries: Durham's history may give some further insight into why chantries began to be founded.

Those who wished to go beyond the prescribed religious duties which were compulsory in the late medieval church often joined a confraternity or guild which comprised a group who joined together to perform a particular devotion or task, which could include supporting a chaplain to pray for the souls of deceased members. The usual method of finance was from endowments but there was often a subscription for members. Durham apparently had very few religious guilds which were more than parish-based. The only one which we can be certain was city-wide was the very important Corpus Christi guild, and one which was more than city-wide was the guild of St Cuthbert.

The feast of Corpus Christi was certainly celebrated in Durham from at least 1338, which is twenty years after its first known arrival in England. It was probably celebrated in the city earlier but at that point for the first time the bursar of the priory spent 4s for the players connected with the feast. By 1403, if the record is correct, plays were performed, organised by the craft companies of the city. The oldest known information about this, the butchers and fleshers' ordinance of 1403, specifically mentions their duty to perform their play and to take part in the Corpus Christi procession, referring to this as a long-standing duty. The Corpus Christi guild seems to have been the coordinating body for this celebration, as well as being a chantry for its members.

As far as the evidence will allow, we must acknowledge that the religious institutions of Durham city were flourishing on the eve of the Reformation. Institutions of course are by no means everything in religious matters but there is no evidence that the people of Durham were finding them out of date or unhelpful. The voluntary aspects of religion, such as founding of masses for the dead, seem to have continued right to the end. The chantries show remarkable health, many of those still in existence at the Dissolution dating from the thirteenth century, even though new ones were not founded after about 1420. It is probable that the citizens realised that strengthening an existing chantry was more sensible than founding a new one, as well as being cheaper. The crisis for the local chantries had come in the fourteenth century rather than in the sixteenth and was apparently dealt with by Hatfield. This probably reflects the economic effects of the plague and does not seem to have inhibited the founding of further chantries.

The records show lay people making use of the church courts when they could probably have used secular ones. Quarrels over tithes seem neither frequent nor fierce. There is very little evidence of heresy nor of widespread non-attendance at (compulsory) services. The account that we can give of the clergy suggests that there was a good supply of resident lower clergy to satisfy the needs of the laity and there is not much evidence that they were conspicuously either negligent or immoral.