INDEX OF CLERGY

LISTING OF CLERGY OF ENGLAND
from the 12th century to 1500

Over the years I have accumulated a very great many names of English clergy and members of religious houses. These will be put into this database over the coming months. I hate to think about how many tens of thousands of parish and other priests existed in this period. More are being recorded almost daily and will be added regularly. The spelling of both personal and place names has been rendered in their original form. However, in such instances where I hope I have identified the modern rendering of place names, I add these in brackets. This will facilitate use of the search engine. It would obviously not be practical to attempt to do this with personal names.

The cathedral clergy are covered in Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, which is available online. The clergy database of from 1540 to 1835 can also be accessed online. The various Epispopal Registers of course will give a great deal of information, but many of these have not been published. Perhaps this will eventually go some small way to augment what information is available.

I have added but a few of those referred to as clerks. I believe the majority probably were clerics, but a good number may have been secular clerks, and without the scope of this database. I do however add chaplains, a rather ubiquitous group of clerics.

There are the inevitable problems with identifying certain letters in the original script, given that much of what follows has been taken from manuscripts written in Latin. There are a great many different hands, the writing of some scribes being invariably better than others. The identification of the letters t and c is often a problem, as is that of n and u. I have tried to make an educated guess, and given time as the same names occur, it may be possible to finesse the spelling of such personal names.

Sources are given in brackets, the county or county town where the name occured appearing before these. References commencing KB27 and CP40 are taken from the plea rolls of Court of King's Bench and the Common Pleas, and are accessible online, thanks to Prof Palmer's excellent AALT website. The letters f and d denote the front and dorse of the membrane.

Other references will be explained shortly. This page will be further developed over the coming weeks.

Kenneth Jacob

INDEX of Personal Names