Medieval Mortuary Rolls: Prayers for the Dead and Travel in Medieval England

Abstract

Many hundreds of medieval mortuary rolls both complete and fragmentary survive from across western Europe. These rolls consist of a letter reporting a death, most often that of the head of the house dispatching the roll, and requesting prayers for his or her soul; together with the responses (tituli) to that request written by the religious houses visited by the roll-bearer on his journey to collect those responses. This journey was often extensive, with one late-fifteenth-century Durham roll visiting 637 houses on its circuit. This article examines the surviving materials from Durham Cathedral Priory associated with the practice of dispatching mortuary rolls, and shows how these can be used to discuss in detail the journeys made by a succession of Durham roll-bearers between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in search of prayers. An appendix lists the surviving documents from Durham together with transcripts of previously unpublished extracts from the Almoner's accounts relating to the dispatch of mortuary documents by Durham.

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