LISTING OF MEDIEVAL CLERGY

LISTING OF CLERGY OF ENGLAND
from the 12th century to 1500

This database gives names of English priests, the church of which they were incumbents, as also the date/s in which their names occur. At present references are largely sourced from various Plea Rolls. I hate to think about how many tens of thousands of parish and other priests existed in this period. More are being recorded almost daily and will be added on a weekly basis. The spelling of both personal and place names has been rendered in their original form. However, in such instances where I hope I have identified the modern rendering of place names, I add these in brackets. This will facilitate use of the search engine. It would obviously not be practical to attempt to do this with personal names.

The cathedral clergy are covered in Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, which is available online. The clergy database of from 1540 to 1835 can also be accessed online. The various Epispopal Registers of course will give a great deal of information, but many of these have not been published. Perhaps this will eventually go some small way to augment what information is available.

There are the inevitable problems with identifying certain letters in the original script. There are a great many different hands, the writing of some scribes being invariably better than others. The identification of the letters t and c is often a problem, as is that of n and u. I have tried to make an educated guess, and given time as the same names occur again, it may be possible to finesse the spelling of such personal names.

Sources are given in brackets, the county or county town where the name occured appearing before these. References commencing KB27 and CP40 are taken from the plea rolls of Court of King's Bench and the Common Pleas, and are accessible online, thanks to Prof Robert Palmer's excellent AALT website. The letters f and d denote the front and dorse of the membrane.