Some Aspects of the History of Chantries in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Macaulay paid every schoolboy the compliment of attributing to him an omniscience which a man of learning might well envy; in what I am about to say this afternoon I fear that I may be going to the opposite extreme and expounding as new, facts with which some of my audience may have been familiar from their youth up. But if I make this mistake, I must plead in extenuation the way in which the medieval chantry has so far been treated. For, whilst almost every other aspect of medieval life has been studied as, at least to some extent, a European phenomenon, the chantry, though its prevalence throughout western Europe has been well known and its importance in the life of the later middle ages generally recognized, has been studied as a matter of local, or at most of national, history, and in many cases antiquarian or genealogical interests have been allowed to obscure the broader ecclesiastical and constitutional questions which it raises or helps to elucidate.

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