Northern Ways? Pilgrimage, Politics and Piety in the Fourteenth-Century Administrative Records of the Archdiocese of York (original) (raw)

The Church and Northern English Society in the Fourteenth Century The Archbishops of York and their Records, 2024

Abstract

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.

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