Episcopal registers can be frustrating hunting grounds for historians of pilgrimage. These registers contain, largely, documents concerned with the administrative machinery of the diocese, with the property rights of the Church and with personal title to ecclesiastical office. Pilgrimage, on the other hand, is usually seen as a personal devotional matter largely in the realm of ‘popular religion’, albeit one that could be trammelled or encouraged by ecclesiastical authorities. Yet diocesan records often provide the only evidence for the existence of a local pilgrimage site, either through attempts to control an unsanctioned or politically unsavoury cult, or through the granting of indulgences to devotional focal points. As this chapter will show, the registers do provide some evidence of official approval or disapproval of pilgrimage sites, whether through indulgences or enjoined penitential pilgrimages, and occasionally of the condemnation of unapproved cults. Yet historians should be wary of interpreting these as evidence for trends in the actual practice of pilgrimage. Rather we should see episcopal interventions as part of a contested landscape of pilgrimage, a point at which ecclesiastical and secular politics interact with personal and communal religious practice.

The landscape of medieval England was filled with places of religious significance, from holy wells and boundary crosses to the massive cathedrals towering above their cities. Throughout the Middle Ages cults sprang up at sites across the country: they flourished and declined, in some cases they were revived or renewed, in other cases they were all but forgotten. This constant process of cult creation around new holy figures, newly discovered relics or newly miracle-working images and statues, characterised and energised the landscape of medieval devotion. Long-established cults, such as those centred on bishops in England's major cathedral churches, may have had the authority of the Church and the weight of history on their side, but they could not take the affections of the laity for granted. We should not mistake the mere existence of a cultic site, however august, and however garlanded by dignitaries of the Church, as evidence for its wider popularity.

When dealing with pilgrimage, it is important to be clear what is meant by that term.

Throughout much of the early Middle Ages, chroniclers and other writers used narratives of sexual impropriety to highlight an individual's moral failings and undermine their authority. This chapter seeks to explore one such episode, namely, the narrative claiming that, during the course of his own coronation feast, King Eadwig departed the assembled company of leading magnates to have a sexual escapade with two women – Ælgifu, his wife, and Æthelgifu, her mother. First recorded some fifty years after the event, whether or not this actually happened is less important than what the story tells us about Eadwig's reign and its legacy. That the story was written, and what it represents in terms of the political climate of the tenth-century English court, is key to understanding why sex was used to discredit Eadwig and Ælgifu. Their marriage was too politically disadvantageous for his rivals, whose heirs were on the throne by the

time the incident was first recorded, and so it had to be discredited. Using the five main texts which describe the coronation scene alongside contemporary charters, this chapter will demonstrate the crucial roles that appropriate and inappropriate sexuality played in the record to denigrate Eadwig's reign, Ælfgifu's role as consort and, to a lesser degree, Æthelgifu's position as the king's wife's mother. It will also explore how the same story benefitted (then) Abbot Dunstan and the court factions surrounding Eadwig's brother Edgar, including Eadwig's and Edgar's grandmother Eadgifu. Following an overview of the political situation of the mid-tenth century and a discussion of contemporary ideas of appropriate sex and sexuality, the following pages will consider the implications of the story of Eadwig's threesome for the king, his wife, her mother, and Abbot (and later archbishop) Dunstan. Eadwig's threesome is more than an amusing aside filling space in the historical record, regardless of the story's veracity, either in whole or in its more salacious parts. That this episode was written is crucial in understanding why it was written, and how dangerous sexuality was critical to breaking the king's authority and reputation.

The existence of an oath of loyalty to the king in Anglo-Saxon legal texts has important corollaries for our understanding of King Edmund and his policies. In Edmund's Colyton Code, probably promulgated c. 946, there exists the following injunction:

This code has the earliest surviving text of an oath of loyalty to the king in the Anglo-Saxon corpus, and indeed is the first time the existence of such an oath is referred to so explicitly. Yet Edmund's oath has often been seen by historians, most notably Patrick Wormald, as simply an echo of an oath of general loyalty supposedly alluded to in the first clause of Alfred's domboc and subsequently referenced in Edward and Æthelstan's legislation. This assertion deserves re-examination. Wormald seems to have tried to interpolate certain societal conceptions of disloyalty into the early tenth century in order to explain later royal policies of land forfeiture. Yet if one bases oneself squarely within the evidence then the interpretation of certain clauses in the legislation of Alfred, Edward and Æthelstan referring to an oath of general loyalty is far more uncertain than is implied by elements of the current historiographical narrative. This in turn would suggest the singularity of Edmund's oath, which prompts questions about why such an oath might have first appeared in Edmund's reign, and what it might indicate about the concerns and ruling strategies of this king.

In the preparatory papers to his Making of English Law, Patrick Wormald turned to the supposed ‘oath of loyalty’ present in Alfred's law-code in order to eventually explain why such a large amount of land was forfeit in England on a wider variety of pretexts than on the continent.

The Second War of Independence began in 1332 with the invasion of Scotland by Edward Balliol, son of King John Balliol (1292–96). His invasion was supported by Edward III of England, who joined the war in 1333 at the siege of Berwick and funded Balliol's campaigns. In exchange, Balliol granted Edward the southern sheriffdoms of Berwick, Dumfries, Edinburgh, Peebles, Roxburgh and Selkirk, to hold as part of his dominion, and performed homage for the Scottish kingdom. His homage acted as a recognition of Edward III's overlordship of Scotland, while his grant of the sheriffdoms annexed these lands ‘a sa roiale dignite et a son roialme Dengleterre et severez de notre reale dignite et de notre corone Descoce’ (‘to his royal dignity and his realm of England, and severed [them] from our royal dignity and our crown of Scotland’). Therefore, the conflict was a civil and Anglo-Scottish war waged by the two Edwards against the supporters of David II (1324–71), son of Robert Bruce. The Treaty of Berwick in 1357 represented the end of this conflict, ushering in a period of peace for a quarter of a century, although it reached no formal settlement between Edward III and David II. On the contrary, after Balliol renounced the throne to Edward on 20 January 1356, the English king's claim to Scotland was strengthened, and large swathes of the Scottish March remained in English control. Despite the significance of this conflict and the vast territory the two kings controlled for much of the 1330s and 1340s, which spanned from Whithorn to Perth and occasionally farther north, little is known about their administrations of Scotland between 1332 and 1357. While several studies have discussed the governance of Scotland in this period, the two administrations are often discussed in isolation, leading to confusion about which offices belonged to which territory and about the personnel involved. A consequent blurring of offices and roles has meant that the full scale of the two kings’ administrations has not been realised.

By comparison, various aspects of the English administration during the fourteenth century have been well studied by historians.

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.

In the past much scholarship based on diocesan registers concentrated on what their records revealed about the lives and careers of male clergy. The voluminous entries concerning institution, induction and/or collation to ecclesiastical benefices, together with the fullness and continuous nature of the ordination lists in some registers, allowed the analysis of clerical recruitment patterns and qualifications. David Lepine used the information concerning institutions of canons to examine the relative influence of pope, king, bishop or exchange over the making of appointments. Kathleen Major asked how resignation deeds contained within the episcopal registers for Lincoln diocese can inform us about the personal history of the clergy. Gordan Dunstan has identified trends of increasing parochial stability in Exeter diocese by using the information in Bishop Lacy’s register to trace changes in the number of exchanges of benefice. These studies (and many more) have all used episcopal registers for qualitative and quantitative research with a focus on the details pertaining to the male clergy, who were the central figures in the registers.

Nevertheless, although created within an almost exclusively male environment and worldview, episcopal registers, and the administrative and legal framework in which they were compiled, frequently brought women within their compass. Women were, of course, as much subject to ecclesiastical administration as men, and were, for example, the subject of visitations, patrons of benefices, subject to agreements and disputes relating to marriage and divorce, swearers of oaths (vowesses and anchoresses) and their conduct might be addressed through specific mandates relating to such issues as pregnancy, co-sleeping and their enclosure. While it is important to use these records with care, acknowledging that they will reflect the perspective of the Church, episcopal registers can be read both with and against the archival grain to highlight aspects of secular (and monastic) women’s lives and experiences. The appearance of secular women in episcopal records can reveal much about their roles and positions in medieval society, their relationship with and responsibilities to the medieval Church, their own attitudes and values and how the Church viewed both them and their action.

As the following essays show, the middle decades of the tenth century have been unjustly neglected in the historiography of the early English kingdom. This has been the case for, arguably, over 1000 years. Eadred's and Eadwig's reigns were subject to a damnatio memoriae almost as soon as they were over, as many scholars have noted. This chapter will further examine the earliest historiography of the 940s and 950s. It will consider how the most prominent voices in the surviving sources – those of radical monastic reformers – were motivated to condemn or ignore Eadwig and Eadred. These views were not shared by all members of the political elite, or even by all Anglo-Latin or Old English writers: some contradictory viewpoints can be found briefly in a few sources. Nevertheless, monastic reformers’ control of libraries and scriptoria meant that their viewpoints came to dominate not just in the texts they created but also in the texts that they copied – and edited.

Good Monks, Bad Kings

The surviving annals and narrative sources give the overwhelming impression that the late 940s and early 950s were a time when little of import happened – apart from decay and decadence. Those years are dealt with in a few lines in most of the pre-Conquest chronicles. In particular, the reigns of Eadred and Eadwig were given much shorter entries than those of Æthelstan, Edmund, and Edgar. In some cases, the 950s were covered more briefly even than the two-year reign of Edward the Martyr. This can be seen in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts that seem to have been begun in the pre-Conquest period: MS A (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 173); MS B (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius A VI); MS C (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B I); and MS D (London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B IV).

In addition to chronicles, in the late tenth century there was a flowering of hagiography, monastic manifestos, and other religious texts that recounted recent histories. However, hagiographies from the later tenth century often omit mention of Eadred and Eadwig – or at least some of the key developments of their reigns – even when discussing churchmen who knew and worked with those kings.

The eight fourteenth-century archbishops from William Greenfield (1306– 15) to Richard Scrope (1398–1405) were conspicuous in their service to the Crown and, often, the person of the king. They occupied senior administrative posts in the secretarial and financial departments of government – principally the Chancery, Exchequer and royal Wardrobe – over long periods, before their elevation to the archiepiscopate and thereafter. Embroilment in secular government and finance was controversial. Service to the Crown and membership ex officio of the royal Council could impinge drastically on a senior churchman's time and dedication to spiritual and pastoral care in his diocese. Archbishop John Thoresby (1353–73), for example, did not take up residence in York until 1356, almost three years after his preferment, while serving as Edward III's chancellor at the height of his successful continental campaigns; Thoresby left his diocese to the care of his vicar-general Master Thomas de Bucton in the interim. Deputisation of many official duties, particularly while in active governmental service, was naturally a keystone of the efficient functioning of royal administration, and, to some extent, politic in this period, as Sarah Rees Jones outlines in her chapter in this volume. Nonetheless, convocations often decried clerical involvement in secular politics, and John Wyclif predicated some of his criticism of the established Church on the ecclesiastical hierarchy, famously questioning, ‘What on earth is an archbishop doing as the king's chancellor, an office which is the most secular in the kingdom?’5 For Wyclif it should have been impossible to serve a secular as well as the spiritual master. Whether deliberately or not, however, Wyclif overlooked the fact that the chancellorship had distinct ecclesiastical responsibilities: as well as keeping the great seal, the primary means of communicating and authenticating royal will across a wealth of business, the chancellor acted as overseer and approver of the elections of heads of religious houses; he also visited all royal hospitals and free chapels; and he presented to all benefices valued at twenty marks or less that were in the king's gift, a not insignificant bolt in an otherwise bulging quiver of patronage.

For those with even a passing familiarity with the reigns of Edmund (r. 939–946) and Eadred (r. 946–955), the former is remembered primarily for the circumstances of his death and the latter for his eating habits, described in the quotation above by the author (known only as B) of the earliest vita of Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury. Edmund evokes images of a warrior-king while Eadred is remembered neither as a military leader nor a great ecclesiastical patron2 – roles often associated with other tenth-century English rulers. Yet, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reveals, both Edmund and Eadred used military force to maintain West Saxon hegemony against a repeatedly rebellious Northumbria. The active military leader found in the Chronicle does not seem to fit with B's description of Eadred's chronic ill health and possible gastrointestinal disease. B wrote his vita several decades after the king's early death at no more than 32, yet his account is generally considered trustworthy. The accuracy of B's description of Eadred's growing incapacity is bolstered by Eadred's unexpected absence from the witness lists of multiple charters dated to 953–955, the last two years of his reign, the only surviving examples of a king not attesting charters issued in his name. Thus, my discussion of Eadred's reign begins with the assumption that B's description was based on a true situation while allowing for hagiographical exaggeration. Eadred's illness raises questions concerning care for the royal body and, by some extension, care of the realm. This chapter explores familial obligation and social expectation of care for a member of the royal family in mid-tenth-century England and what effects they may have had on the role of mother of the king at court.

So complained an unidentified mid-thirteenth-century cleric, perhaps at the time of the ‘Taxation of Norwich’. If the clergy thought things were bad in 1256, they were going to suffer much more towards the end of the century. Edward I demanded tax after tax, based on the 1291 valuation, known as the Taxatio of Pope Nicholas IV, culminating in 1294 in the imposition of a moiety, or half, of clerical revenue. As Archbishop Greenfield was consecrated in York in 1306, and even into the episcopate of Archbishop Melton (1317–40), royal officials were still pursuing arrears of these taxes.

As this complaint from the clergy indicates, clerical taxation was initially levied by successive popes, ostensibly for Crusading purposes. Between 1305 and 1333, seven papal taxes were imposed: seven tenths in 1305; four tenths in 1309; six tenths were decreed in 1312 at the Council of Vienne, called to discuss the fate of the Templars, and attended by both Archbishop Greenfield and Bishop Halton of Carlisle; one in 1317; two in 1322; four in 1330; and six in 1333. In the event, only fourteen papal tenths were actually collected and almost all the receipts were handed to the English king.

The 1317 papal tax was exacted when the Northern Province was complaining of devastation caused by Scottish incursions after Bannockburn. As early as July 1317, Edward II instructed the archdeacon of Richmond to reassess the value of the benefices in his archdeaconry. This archdeacon was Roger Northburgh, the keeper of the king's wardrobe, who had been captured at Bannockburn and so was in a good position to catch the king's ear about the difficulties of the province.