Catalogue description Professions of obedience

These are professions of obedience made by bishops to the archbishop and Church of Canterbury Mostly, with one exception, DCc-ChAnt/C/115/153, which is by the head of a religious house. Bunce catalogued this material as 4 separate items, DCc-ChAnt/C/115, DCc-ChAnt/C/116, DCc-ChAnt/C/118 and DCc-ChAnt/C/119. J B Sheppard pasted the documents onto sheets of paper. The professions were combined as one item, DCc-ChAnt/C/115, and were given their present numbering system by William Urry, cathedral archivist, in 1950. They were mounted into the present volume in 1971. With the exception of DCc-ChAnt/C/115/153, these professions have been transcribed in M Richter, Canterbury Professions (Canterbury and York Society, 1973). Richter has collated the documents with enrolled and registered versions in DCc-ChAnt/C/117 and DCc-Register/A, and in BM Cotton MS Cleopatra E i. He also gives texts taken from these rolls and registers for which originals have been lost. DCc-Register/A, ff211r-260r, includes professions dating from the 9th century to 1420. A list of professions made from entries in archbishops' registers is included in I Churchill, Canterbury Administration, vol ii (London, 1933), pp133-40. These are dated between 1353 and 1523. The documents bear stitching holes at head and foot and were presumably stitched together to form a roll. Fragments of thread survive on some. They are now attached at one side to paper. Unless otherwise specified, evidence for dating is taken from Richter, as below; E B Fryde, D E Greenway, S Porter and I Roy (eds), Handbook of British Chronology (London, 1986); and the Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae volumes. In a number of cases there are discrepancies between the dates given in these volumes. The dating of some of these documents is problematic. Many of the documents bear endorsements giving the dates of the bishops' consecrations. In a number of cases these dates are contradicted by other sources and can be assumed to be incorrect. In the case of some of the earlier documents, confusion is caused by the problem of not knowing what system of dating was being used, ie which day was taken as the beginning of the year of grace. For his Chronicle, Gervase of Canterbury began the year at Christmas (p257), and it seems that this is system used for the earlier endorsements. Consecrations were supposed to take place on a Sunday or an important festival (see Handbook of British Chronology, p226). This can be useful for establishing a date for a document. The palaeography of these manuscripts is discussed in Richter and in N R Ker, English manuscripts in the century after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1960). Ker suggests that some documents were written some time after the professions were made (p18). Because experts have not assessed each of these documents in such a way, dates given in these catalogue entries are those for when the bishops made their professions. Most of the professions bear endorsements. For a discussion of the palaeography of these, see Richter, ppxxxiii-xxxvi.