On 8 October 2020 Yorkshire poet Ian McMillan took to Twitter to comment, in verse, on the news that swathes of northern England were to enter Tier 3 lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic:

McMillan, ‘the Bard of Barnsley’, neatly captures that cultural and political dissonance of long standing in England (or at least a perception thereof) between the centre, the capital, and those areas at geographical removes. In some senses, he is reaching for that ‘Grim up north’ trope beloved of playwrights and screenwriters. Principally, of course, his is a furious response to the government's perceived mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, its lack of empathy for, and experimentation on, communities with large pockets of deprivation where the Conservative Party had made significant gains in the General Election of December 2019. It conveys a sense that the North is seen as an amorphous mass whose economy, culture and communities have again been thrown to the wolves. Since then, of course, the abandonment of the northern extension of the High Speed 2 railway into Yorkshire and Greater Manchester has driven another nail into improved connectivity between north and south and east and west. That is a far cry from the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda espoused by former Conservative chancellors George Osborne and Philip Hammond that built on the civic regionalism developed under the Blair government, which itself contained many who would describe themselves as ‘northerners’, and aimed (perhaps still aims) to achieve a connected, competitive economy and transport infrastructure alongside a focus on education and skills. Ian McMillan, though, also taps into the centuries’ old debate about the place of ‘the North’ and what constitutes northernness and northern identity.

This collection of essays takes us back to a formative period for both the North and the kingdom of England as political-cultural entities: a century during which northern England was exposed to Scottish raids (causing the northern Church to mobilise material supplies, soldiers and bureaucrats), famine, epidemics (human and animal) and widespread poverty, as attested by higher rates of remission of government and papal taxation.

The registers of the fourteenth-century archbishops of York are among the best preserved episcopal registers in the United Kingdom, both in terms of their survival as a series and in terms of the range of their contents. David Smith's survey of both surviving and lost materials remains the fullest account of the range and location of the manuscripts. While the majority are now housed in the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, some strays are to be found in the British Library and some copies of lost materials are in York Minster Archives. Further small quantities of material relating to the archbishop's jurisdiction, especially ordinations, can be found in the diocesan archives at Carlisle and Durham.

By 1304, the archbishops of York were endowed with many powers and responsibilities in the spiritual administration of both the diocese of York and the Northern Province, and in the secular administration of their temporal estates. However, they did not usually exercise this authority in person. Their surviving registers provide a detailed record of the ways in which their powers were delegated to many other officials who exercised authority and provided spiritual services on their behalf. Indeed, the selection of records for registration became fundamental to the process through which archbishops delegated power and yet retained authority. Registered records provided evidence of entitlement to office, a framework for consistency of governance and enabled officials to be held accountable. These registered records were, however, far from the totality of records produced by members of the archbishop's administration; there were many other series of court records and papers to which they contributed, as will become clearer as this chapter progresses.3 Many administrative records that emanated from the archbishops’ household (familia) can be found as originals and copies in other archives, with the largest concentration being in TNA. Other archiepiscopal acta from the period survive in the cartularies and archives of other institutions with whom the archbishops corresponded and conducted business, such as other diocesan archives and those of religious houses and borough governments. It is on such survivals that the distinguished series of publications of episcopal acta for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are based.

Professor Mark Ormrod is among the leading historians of the later Middle Ages in Britain. His contributions to the field are enormous: over his career he has published extensively and he has also fostered the field through the creation of funded projects that have brought previously hard-to-access archival resources into much wider public use, through the supervision of research students and through mentoring early career researchers. He has provided leadership at the highest level, both within his own institution, the University of York, and through his service to a number of national research councils and scholarly societies and, in particular, The National Archives.

Mark completed his doctorate in 1984 at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor James Campbell and then held a number of temporary and part-time positions at the Universities of Sheffield, Evansville (British Campus), and Queen's University Belfast before holding a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Cambridge from 1987–90. From there he moved to a lectureship at the University of York in 1990 and was promoted to full Professor in 1995. His experience of what is now widely known as ‘precarity’ in this early phase of his career always informed his later nurturing of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, whose careers were always at the forefront of his mind in the creation of the many funded research projects that he so successfully established.

At York, Mark found a very happy home in both the Department of History and the interdisciplinary postgraduate Centre for Medieval Studies where his co-supervisors and co-teachers included Jeremy Goldberg, Jon Finch, Richard Marks, Nicola McDonald, Alastair Minnis, Linne Mooney, Sarah Rees Jones, Felicity Riddy and Craig Taylor. He was Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies 1998–2001 and 2002–3, and was Head of the Department of History in 2001 and 2003–7. He also struck up a very close working relationship with the Borthwick Institute for Archives, working with colleagues including Philippa Hoskin, Chris Webb and Gary Brannan. It was little surprise to his colleagues when he was appointed as the first Dean of the newly created Faculty of Arts and Humanities at York in 2009, a position that he held until his retirement in 2017.