Cathedral and Diocese

Although there is some evidence, archaeological and historical, for Christianity in London in the fourth century (Restitutus, bishop of London, attended the council of Arles in 314), the visible history of the church in London really begins with the establishment in 604 of St Paul's Cathedral, probably on one of the two low hills where the Romans built this city.John Schofield and Derek Keene, ‘Before St. Paul’s,’ in Keene et al (eds), , pp 2–4.  St Augustine's mission had landed in 597, commanded by Pope Gregory to establish sees at London and York and seven years later Æthelberht of Kent built the cathedral for London's bishop, Mellitus, the friend of Augustine. Æthelberht's death brought a reversion to paganism and Mellitus' exile however, and the see of London was not re-established until late in the century by St Erkenwald (acceded 675), called St Paul's second founder, whose relics in the Middle Ages were the cathedral's greatest treasure.Joyce Jeffries Davis, ‘Ecclesiastical History Part I – To 1348,’ and ‘Part II – From 1348 to 1521,’ , pp 171–245, esp pp 172–3; and Pamela Taylor, ‘Foundation and Endowment: St. Paul’s and the English Kingdoms,’ in Keene et al (eds), , pp 8–9. 

In the ninth century the Viking attacks of 842, 851, and 871, and the occupation of London, must have had an effect on religious life in the capital but the evidence is scarce. The lives of the great bishops of the tenth century, however – Theodred (acceded between 909 and 926) and Dunstan (between 957 and 959) – provide more evidence. Dunstan in particular is associated with monastic reform and specifically with the reform of the Westminster community. His successor Ælfstan (between 959 and 964) was responsible for rebuilding St Paul's within a year after a great fire in 962, the first of many that were to mark its history., p 174. 

Edward the Confessor's transfer of the royal capital from Winchester's Old Minster to London's Westminster contributed to the importance of St Paul's and of its bishop. Edward appointed the first two Norman bishops of London, Robert of Jumièges (1044) and William (between 1051 and 1075), the latter subsequently regarded as instrumental in the royal grant of a charter to London and for this reason commemorated in a mayoral procession to St Paul's as late as the seventeenth century., p 175. 

The second of the cathedral's three great fires, in 1087, produced a significant rebuilding of the cathedral begun by Bishop Maurice. It was perhaps largely finished by 1175, dedicated in 1240, and finally completed in the 1320s.Derek Keene, ‘From Conquest to Capital: St. Paul’s c. 1100–1300,’ in Keene et al (eds), , p 20. Bishop of London Gilbert Foliot's claim, in 1169, to metropolitan status for himself and London, and his refusal of subordination to the archbishop or church of Canterbury, must have been to some extent connected with the growing physical pre-eminence of the cathedral and perhaps also with the translation to it of St Erkenwald's relics, which had taken place in 1148., pp 177–8. (The saint's two feasts were re-established by Bishop Robert Braybrooke in 1386 and the alliterative poem on the saint's life may have been composed at that time.)

Writing of the late twelfth century, Keene notes, 'The bulk of the church ... rose well above the city walls and all houses in the city, while its elegant and sumptuous spire, perhaps the tallest in Europe, rose higher than any building in London before 1964.'Keene, ‘Conquest,’ p 20.  The cathedral's physical fabric has regularly risen and fallen: besides the fires of 962 and 1087 already mentioned, there were conflagrations in 1136 and in 1445, after which the spire was not repaired until 1462, when a copper and gilt weathercock, originally erected in 1421, was replaced. The third great fire occurred in 1561 when the 500' spire was struck by lightning: 'a smoke was espied.... But sodeinly after, as it wer in a momente, the flame brake furth in a circle like a garlande ... within a quarter of an howre ... the crosse & the Egle on the toppe fell downe vpon the south crosse Ile.'Bishop James Pilkington, (London, 1561; : 19930), sig A3. Pilkington recounts the event of Wednesday, 4 June 1561, printed 10 June; see also Simpson, , pp 135–6. The chapter house and cloisters were damaged and part of the roof was burned. Although the roof was rebuilt before the end of the year with Yorkshire timber, the spire was not re-erected.  The subsequent collection of funds, like the national collection begun seventy years later in 1631 to respond to general decay of the building, was controversial, since from Elizabeth's accession onward the form of the building, even its existence, was strongly tied to approval or disapproval of differing religious positions.

From the twelfth century St Paul's central role in London spectacle was established, not only in religious procession within the cathedral and its precinct, but in the secular space to the north, in Cheapside, which became the principal section of the route for royal entries and for reception of visitors from abroad. At least by the early fifteenth century, besides the mayoral election procession on 28 October there were seven other days, all in winter, when the mayor, aldermen, and guilds ceremonially attended St Paul's, while the days after Pentecost were filled with long-established archidiaconal processions. The symbolic closeness, even identity, of civic and religious authority is shown by the ceremonial on six special feasts when mayor and aldermen heard vespers at St Paul's, standing in ranked order along the choir, the mayor next to the dean's stall.H.T. Riley (ed), , vol 1, Rolls Series (London, 1859–62), 28. 

The cathedral served both city and kingdom and its importance not only in civic but in national life was underlined by the celebration of royal victories (Henry VII after Stoke), royal marriages (Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon), and royal political alliances (James I and Christian of Denmark) which took place within its walls. As the cathedral provided the great stage for these moments of national affirmation, so too it was the venue for the display of clashing religious beliefs, particularly after the death of Henry VIII when for the rest of the century the entire kingdom struggled with the violent realities of religious change. Especially relevant were the conflicts centred on St Paul's liturgical observance, an important index to the country's theological shifts. At the cathedral the simplifying of religious observance under Edward, the reinstitution of traditional ceremony under Mary (including the feast of St Erkenwald), the Elizabethan completion of the Reformation, and the Laudian liturgical reform reflected in condensed form the events taking place in the country at large. That convocation met regularly at St Paul's meant that these visual statements were regularly accompanied by theological ones.Gerald Bray (ed), , vol 19, Church of England Record Society (Woodbridge, 2006), 297, 299–303, demonstrates that from the time of Edward III (1327) through 1555 the convocation of Canterbury met almost exclusively at St Paul’s.  It was the 1563 convocation of the southern province whose first session met at St Paul's for instance, which produced the doctrinal consensus embodied in the Thirty-Nine Articles.

Though the cathedral and its precinct were important civic spaces, they were famously disorderly ones where commercial, legal, and personal business was conducted with all of its inherent possibilities for conflict. Because the north and south walls were pierced by opposite doors, about the middle of the nave, a shortcut might be taken through the centre of the cathedral, called Paul's Walk. In 1562/3 Bishop James Pilkington of Durham, wrote, 'The south alley for vsurye and Poperye, the north for Simony, and the Horse faire in the middest for all kind of bargains, metinges, brawlinges, murthers, conspiracies, and the font for ordinary paimentes of money are so well knowen to all menne as the begger knowes his dishe.'Bishop James Pilkington, (London, 1563; STC: 19931), sig G5. Simpson, , p 235, calls Paul’s Walk, ‘the common lounge of the idler, the Fop’s Alley of the day.’  Bishop Braybrooke's 1385 attempt to regulate behaviour in St Paul's is the earliest of many such injunctions.See the register of Robert Braybrooke, bishop of London (GL: MS 09531/3, f 330), cited in , p 216. 

Not only the cathedral building itself but the enclosing precinct provided the stage for activity liturgical, political, and sometimes simply dramatic. The precinct's walls, gates, and to some extent buildings seem to have been largely in place by the twelfth century.Carol Davidson Cragoe, ‘Fabric, Tombs and Precinct 1087–1540,’ in Keene et al (eds), , pp 127–42, provides an overview of the precinct’s evolution.  Sparrow Simpson asks how many people resided in the precinct and a recent assessment suggests it might have housed as many as 300, a number equivalent to the communicants in 'a middle-sized city parish.'W. Sparrow Simpson, ‘The Personal Staff of the Cathedral in 1450,’ in , p 36; and Caroline M. Barron and Marie-Helene Rousseau, ‘Cathedral, City and State 1300–1540,’ in Keene et al (eds), , p 34.  The precinct was the locale for many of the dramatic occurrences presented in this volume: for instance the plays in the almoner's house under Sebastian Westcote (attendance at which required negotiation of at least one, perhaps two, gates), the boy bishop's visits to clerical houses, and the spectacles and sermons offered at Paul's Cross (see Erler (ed), , Figure 1, p xxxix) The cathedral precinct, sheltering its important cross and pulpit, thus offered the same mode of churchyard with a cross found on a smaller scale in many London parishes.

Located in the northeast corner, near the site of the ancient folkmoot, the cross was first mentioned in 1216. Its enclosing structure was shown by nineteenth-century excavations to have been 37' across.Cragoe, ‘Fabric, Tombs and Precinct,’ pp 141–2.  The much-reproduced Gipkyn diptych (c 1620) shows various modes of audience response to this especially important public space, the site of public penance (including that of the cross-dressing Mary Frith, see Consistory Court Act Book, 1611–12), abjurations (John Purvey in 1401), book burnings (repeatedly), even executions (after Wyatt's rebellion and the Gunpowder Plot), as well as the popular sermons whose theological messages varied so widely.A useful chronological survey of events at Paul’s Cross, garnered from Foxe, Hall, Strype, Stow, and manuscript sources, is provided by W. Paley Baildon, ‘The Chronicle of Paul’s Cross,’ 8 (1906), 115–23, 184–92, 282–90; 9 (1907), 145–50, 225–30, 302–9; and 10 (1908), 69–73, 150–5, 311–14.  It was also the venue for several influential attacks on the stage made in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.Millar MacLure, , pp 18–19. MacLure prints the Gipkyn picture as his frontispiece. It is reproduced in colour in Keene et al (eds), , p 49.  Sermons were not preached at Paul's Cross after 1633 though the cross lasted for ten years more.

Parishes

The remarkable number of London parishes has been universally noticed. William Fitzstephen, writing in the 1170s at the end of the period during which the parishes were taking shape, says London and its suburbs had thirteen greater conventual churches and 126 lesser parochial churches, and Christopher Brooke judges that before 1250 this 'seems to have been the record in Western Christendom.'J.C. Robertson (ed), ..., Rolls Series 3 (London, 1877), 3; and Christopher Brooke, ‘The Central Middle Ages 800–1270,’ in Lobel (ed), , pp 34–5.  The familiar line of development from minster to parish, beginning in the Anglo-Saxon period and largely completed by 1200, has been traced in London by Brooke, who notes the early existence of St Gregory's and St Faith's parishes as probable off-shoots of St Paul's. (St Faith's dedication comes perhaps from the ninth century.)This generally accepted pattern of development is outlined by John Blair, ‘Introduction: from Minster to Parish Church,’ 950–1200, Oxford University Committee for Archaeological Monograph No 17 (Oxford, 1988), 1–19, esp 1.  Brooke also observes the early appearance of parishes in the northwest, with the extramural churches of St Andrew Holborn, recorded in a mid-tenth-century charter, and St Bride's, built on an ancient Roman cemetery possibly in the tenth or eleventh century.Brooke, ‘Central Middle Ages,’ p 36. A detailed treatment of St Bride’s history is found in W.F. Grimes, (London, 1968), 182–97. St Dunstan in the East, late tenth century, is another early parish. 

Focusing on eastern London Jeremy Haslam has posited a slightly different pattern of evolution: an intentional creation of new minsters in the restoration of London after the ninth-century Viking raids, of which the first and oldest would be All Hallows Barking, 'covering much if not most of the eastern part of the City.'Jeremy Haslam, ‘Parishes, Churches, Wards and Gates in Eastern London,’ in Blair (ed), , pp 42–3. On p 39 Haslam suggests that the creation of sub-minsters at an early stage in London’s development would explain the large size of ‘parishes of churches near its gates in the later medieval period.’ 

Founded mostly between the tenth and twelfth centuries, with a proliferation of tiny parishes in the eleventh century, the roster of London parishes was largely complete by around 1200. As in other English cities these many small parishes were served by small churches, though the four churches of the friars offered large interiors. Parish boundaries did not follow those of the wards, being often determined by ownership of land, and Brooke concludes that 'we must be looking at the outlines of the tenements and messuages of groups of neighbours who formed the early parishes.'Brooke, ‘Central Middle Ages,’ p 36. 

In London the ties between parishes and the religious houses were close. Thirteenth- and fifteenth-century lists of London parishes survive, with valuations; in the earlier list the city's ninety-two churches are annotated as in the patronage of either a religious house or a private person.The first list comes from St Paul’s ‘Statuta Maiora,’ GL: MS 25509 (formerly St Paul’s Press Mark WD 9), f 48v. The second list is dated 5 May 1428; see Reginald R. Sharpe (ed), (London, 1911), 71–5 (from Letter-Book K, ff 53–3v). Both are cited in , p 190.  In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries there were lawsuits, some of which the bishop of London joined, to relieve some parishes of these payments to institutions. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the appropriation of several parishes to monasteries: for instance St Mary Graces appropriated All Hallows Staining, and the female abbey of Barking in 1385 appropriated the parish of All Hallows Barking.For St Mary Graces see R.C. Fowler (ed), , The Canterbury and York Society 34, pt 1 (Oxford, 1927), 83–6, from LPL: Reg. Sudbury, ff 105v–106v. For All Hallows Barking see (London, 1900), 43, cited in , p 204.  At the end of the fourteenth century St Paul's Cathedral held the advowson of nineteen parishes.Barron and Rousseau, ‘Cathedral, City and State,’ p 36.  This closeness took another form when at the Dissolution of the London religious houses in 1539 four monastic churches became parochial., pp 274–5. 

The middle of the fourteenth century saw several important developments in parish life. Perhaps most central was the emergence of churchwardens and their various duties, beginning with fiscal responsibility for the fabric but developing rapidly in other directions as well. Beat Kümin's list of Peterborough wardens' duties is almost comically comprehensive: they 'administered, bought, and sold property, organized collections on certain feasts, lent out money and various church goods, received testamentary bequests and contributions by local guilds, staged entertainments and demanded fees for bell-ringing or burial, while spending money on church maintenance, ornaments, salaries, subsidies, bridge-building, legal matters, priests and ceremonies.'Beat A. Kümin, (Aldershot, 1996), 23. He does not give a date. 

The earliest English churchwardens' accounts come from Bridgwater, Somerset, in 1318.Kümin, , p 267.  In London the earliest accounts belong to St Mary at Hill c 1420 (there are inventories, preserved in the accounts, from earlier dates). St Peter Westcheap follows in 1431, and a cluster of parishes have records from the 1450s: All Hallows Barking and St Nicholas Shambles, 1452; St Michael Cornhill, 1453; St Andrew Hubbard, 1454; and All Hallows on London Wall, 1455. These men (I have not found any female churchwardens in the London accounts) belonged to what has famously been called, in the seventeenth century, the 'middling sort.'Keith Wrightson says that ‘from the 1620s references to the “middle sort of people” in both town and country become, if not common, then at least more frequent,’ though he traces the earlier, sixteenth-century appearance of the term and mentions William Lambarde’s characterization of a Kentish jury in 1594 as ‘you that be of the middle sort.’ (‘“Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England,’ , Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (eds) (New York, 1994), 28–51, esp 44–5. Kümin (, pp 37–8) refers to ‘the broad middling status’ of office-holders and cites their frequent administrative experience elsewhere, for example, in parish guilds.  The 1486 pyramidal diagram from St Mary at Hill printed by Clive Burgess, which places the wealthiest parishioners near the top, provides a visual statement of the realities of parish economics since against each name is entered the expected contribution to the parish clerk's wage.Clive Burgess, ‘Shaping the Parish: St Mary at Hill, London, in the Fifteenth Century,’ , John Blair and Brian Golding (eds) (Oxford, 1996), 256–7. The diagram comes from GL: MS 01239/2, where it is bound in at the end. Burgess (pp 254–5) provides a photograph (Fig 12.1a) and a transcription (Fig 12.1b). 

The development of chantries within London parishes was also a feature of the mid-fourteenth century.The standard works on this topic are K.L. Wood-Legh, (Cambridge, 1965), and Alan Kreider, (Cambridge, MA, 1979).  Chantries had both negative and positive effects for the parish: the increase in staffing they produced was recognized both as a financial problem (since the original endowment was sometimes inadequate) and a pastoral desideratum (since the lightness of chantry duties made possible richer parish liturgical, musical, and educational services). Indeed it has recently been claimed that the 'managerial and liturgical demands' imposed by these testamentary arrangements for long-term commemoration were responsible for parish growth in administrative, musical, and liturgical complexity.Burgess, ‘Shaping the Parish,’ pp 269–76.  Nevertheless as early as 1345 the mayor complained to the dean and chapter of St Paul's that there were too few priests to sing at the cathedral in proportion to the number staffing the chantries., pp 206–7. See also Reginald R. Sharpe (ed), (London, 1904), 124. The document, dated 8 July, is translated by Henry Thomas Riley (ed), (London, 1868), 224–5, from Letter-Book F, f ciii. 

Finally this period also saw the growth of the parish brotherhoods whose popularity continued strong until their abolition by the Chantries Act in 1547.Guild records however go back to the tenth or eleventh centuries, with five guilds having pre-1100 records (none of them in London). Gervase Rosser, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Gilds,’ Blair (ed), , p 31.  Between the middle of the fourteenth century and sixteenth century, 176 such London fraternities have been counted.The count is Caroline Barron’s in ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London,’ , Caroline Barron and C. Harper-Bill (eds) (Woodbridge, 1985), 13–37. Classic work on parish guilds includes George Unwin, (London, 1908), and Herbert F. Westlake, (London, 1919). More recently see Ken Farnhill, ‘Guilds, Purgatory and the Cult of Saints: Westlake Reconsidered,’ , Simon Ditchfield (ed) (Aldershot, 2001), 59–71, who charges that Westlake overemphasized fraternities’ roles in intercession for the dead. Farnhill stresses instead their connection with parish piety, particularly devotion to saints.  In addition to the brotherhood property and possessions listed under parish holdings, the Chantry Certificate of 1548 shows that ten London brotherhoods were wealthy enough to file returns separate from those of the parish.Kitching has edited TNA: PRO E301/34 in .  At least three of these parish fraternities owned halls and in one of them, Trinity Hall at St Botolph without Aldersgate, playing took place.

Attempts to use parish space, both in churches and churchyards, for non-religious purposes began very early. Bishop of London Fulk Basset's mid-thirteenth-century strictures against plays and wrestling in churches and chapels may be considered just a few of many attempts to regulate the non-religious use of parish sacred space (see Synodal Statutes of the Bishop of London, 1245–59). In 1303, for instance, the rector of St Bartholomew the Less was reproved by the archbishop of Canterbury for allowing his parishioners to use the cemetery as their marketplace for timber, hay, and other merchandise.Rose Graham (ed), , vol 1, The Canterbury and York Society 51 (Oxford, 1952), 464. The document is dated 13 July 1303 from LPL: Reg. Winchelsey, ff 291v–2, quoted in , p 199.  Open space connected with parish churches had a myriad of uses, yet it may be that in the heyday of parish playing these spaces were being reduced. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries many London churches were engaged in extensive building and decorating, a process that, according to one historian, 'converted a small Romanesque box of the eleventh or twelfth centuries into a complex rectangle of aisles and chapels,' accentuated in the fifteenth century by the addition of towers.Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Later Middle Ages: 1270–1520,’ in Lobel (ed), , p 48, discusses church enlargement and mentions late building at St Andrew Undershaft (largely 1520–32) and St Giles without Cripplegate (1545–50).  The gain in beauty and comfort may have come at the expense of disposable open space outside the church.For the sixteenth-century building campaigns of London churches see the "Parish Rentals" section in Drama, Music, and Ceremonial Customs. Nonetheless London's dramatized Palm Sunday liturgy, with its costumed and wigged singing prophets, took place mostly in the churchyard where the churchyard cross was the destination of the festal procession. Parish fund-raising plays took place here as well, the most notable being the summer-long plays licensed by the city.

Early population is a controversial subject and medieval historians differ as to the size of London before the Black Death.Christopher Brooke at one point refers to ‘the population of medieval London, whatever that may have been’ (‘Central Middle Ages,’ p 32).  Based on a study of property-holding in five parishes at the eastern end of Cheapside, Derek Keene suggested that in 1300 population might have been as high as 100,000 people or more. Using tax returns and trade figures Pamela Nightingale has opted for a more conservative figure of about 60,000, suggesting that different parts of the city experienced different patterns of growth.Derek Keene, ‘A New Study of London before the Great Fire,’ (1984), 20; and Pamela Nightingale, ‘The Growth of London in the Medieval English Economy,’ , Richard Britnell and John Hatcher (eds) (Cambridge, 1996), 96.  After the several fourteenth-century episodes of the plague however, 'the population of London was in 1400 probably only half what it had been in 1300,' and Keene has suggested that the city did not regain its pre-plague size until 1600.Caroline M. Barron, ‘London 1300–1540,’ , vol 1, P. Clark (ed) (Cambridge, 2000), 397.  The estimates of 50,000 people in 1500 and 70,000 in 1550 offered by Roger Finlay have become widely accepted.Roger Finlay, (Cambridge, 1981), 51, Table 3.1. Finlay’s work is used as a basis for research on population by Steve Rappaport, (Cambridge, 1989). In Rappaport see p 61, n 1, for a summary of Finlay’s numbers.  The latter figure depends on the crucially important population marker of mid-century, the chantry returns of 1546–8 which counted the number of communicants parish by parish.Kitching (ed), , p xx.  Despite uncertainty regarding both the number of parishes comprising 'London' and the ratio by which the population counted in the chantry certificates should be enlarged (its numbers are agreed by all to be low), Vanessa Harding's range of figures for 1548 is not dissimilar: 56,450 to 69,000 (rounded).Harding points out that London has been variously defined as comprising ninety-seven parishes (those inside the walls); 113 parishes (ninety-seven plus sixteen extramural parishes and precincts north and south of the river lying within city jurisdiction, sometimes called the city and liberties); and 122 or 123 parishes (113 plus nine parishes in Middlesex and Surrey listed in the 1625 Bills of Mortality or, in 1647, ten such parishes). See Vanessa Harding, ‘The Population of London 1550–1700: a review of the published evidence,’ 15 (1990), 111–28, esp 112.  By the time of the 1582 lay subsidy Steve Rappaport calculates the city's size (excluding Southwark) at 102,600, and by 1600, the end of the century, at 150,000.Rappaport, , p 166, n 14, and p 61, n 1.  Harding's estimate for 1600 is about the same for the middle range: 131,000 to 152,000.See Harding’s Table 1, in which she reproduces and endorses the estimates of Ian Sutherland, ‘When was the Great Plague? Mortality in London 1563 to 1565,’ , D.V. Glass and R. Revelle (eds) (London, 1972), 287–320. 

Religious Houses

The most important monastic foundations in the London area were two: St Paul's, discussed above, and the Benedictine abbey of St Peter, Westminster, whose dramatic records will be treated in , forthcoming in the REED series. Besides these earliest seventh- and eighth-century foundations, the capital had at least twelve hospitals, six for the sick and six for the poor; two houses of Austin canons (Holy Trinity Priory and St Bartholomew's Priory); two or three establishments of the military orders; houses of the four orders of friars plus other fraternal orders, and the minoresses. St Helen's Priory, along with Westminster, was the only Benedictine house, and St Mary Graces the only Cistercian foundation. The major houses and hospitals spread out around the city's edge like a fan, enclosing it west to east. (In fact several houses commonly thought of as London ones, like the Charterhouse, St Mary Clerkenwell, Sheen, and Syon, lay in Middlesex.) The mendicant orders – Austin friars, Blackfriars, and Greyfriars – were established before the end of the twelfth century inside the walls while Whitefriars lay just outside to the west. From these two dozen or so religious houses (not counting St Paul's and Westminster) dramatic records are found at four: Holy Trinity Priory, founded c 1108; St Mary within Cripplegate or Elsyng Spital, in 1331; St Helen's, in the early thirteenth century; and St Mary Graces, in 1350., pp 465–75 (Holy Trinity), pp 535–7 (St Mary within Cripplegate or Elsyng Spital), pp 457–61 (St Helen’s), pp 461–4 (St Mary Graces). 

Ecclesiastical Courts

A myriad of church courts with interlocking jurisdictions sat in London.The following account of ecclesiastical court procedure is principally indebted to Richard M. Wunderli, (Cambridge, MA, 1981), Chapter 1; and also to Martin Ingram, (Cambridge, 1987), 37–9; and Colin R. Chapman, (Dursley, 1992).  Sadly much of their rich material has perished, that of both the elevated courts and the lower ones. (Details of the survival of various kinds of court records are given in the Documents section, pp xcviii–xcix.) At the highest level was the archbishop of Canterbury's court of Audience. The appeal court of the province of Canterbury, the court of Arches, has been called, 'the most important ecclesiastical court in England in the Middle Ages.'F. Donald Logan (ed), , The Canterbury & York Society 95 (Woodbridge, 2005), xix. It met at St Mary le Bow and was presided over by the archbishop's official. London had thirteen peculiars as well, in whose parishes judicial matters were referred to the archbishop rather than the bishop of London; the dean of the peculiars was the rector of the parish of St Mary le Bow (St Mary of Arches); these records have perished.

Moving downward from the metropolitical court of Audience, appellate court, and court of peculiars, we come to the courts of the bishop of London. At the higher level, the consistory court, the judge was the official principal: this court heard material from the entire diocese, primarily civil suits though also criminal and testamentary cases. Attached to this court were the bishop's registrar and a group of apparitors who delivered court summonses. Pleas and actions were written and each step required a separate appearance in court, so cases were often carried over several terms. Its complexity meant that professional help was needed, with proctors to represent defendants in court and advocates to plead the case. Court procedure had three phases: 'litis contestatio' or presentation of the charges; 'probatio' or trial; and 'sentencia' or judgment. The deposition books (known as examination books before 1611) record the sworn statements of witnesses. This court convened at least weekly in the long chapel of St Paul's Cathedral.

In the bishop's lower court, the commissary, the judge was the commissary general. This court's power was exercised over the city of London and the deaneries of Middlesex and Barking; its mandate included both crimes and testaments, and its volume of business was larger than that of the consistory court. Summary proceedings were given 'viva voce'; litigants were generally not represented and the case was decided by the judge on the basis of compurgation – that is, the defendant produced three or four witnesses of good repute to swear to his innocence. If complications arose the case was referred upward to the consistory court. A brief record of appearances and pleadings was kept by the court scribe, usually contained within a single short entry. Sexual matters were frequently presented here and after the Reformation, sabbatarian ones.

Below the bishop's commissary court were the courts of the four archdeaconries of the London diocese, London, Middlesex, Colchester, and Essex. Richard Wunderli observes that the jurisdiction of the first two overlapped with that of the bishop's commissary court. He suggests a division of responsibility in which the archidiaconal court oversaw the physical condition of the parish fabric, since 'no such cases appear in either consistory or commissary court records,' while London churchwardens' accounts do occasionally record various responses to the archdeacon – the figure to whom the wardens were responsible, rather than to the bishop's officials.Wunderli, , p 17. 

The level at which judicial process most closely touched ordinary people's lives was that of the visitation. Held usually every three years by the bishop, often interspersed with archidiaconal visits and occasionally metropolitical ones as well, the questions from these occasions survive from the middle of the sixteenth century when they began to be printed, though Richard Arnold's (Antwerp, c 1503; STC: 782) gives two sets of visitation articles administered at his own parish of St Magnus, from the end of the fifteenth century.‘Triennial visitations appear to have been held regularly during the fifteenth century’ (, p 234, n 233). See also Francis Douce (ed), (London, 1811), 273–6. These visitations at St Magnus, in 1495 and 1498, are mentioned in the accounts of St Mary at Hill, GL: MS 01239/1, pt 1, ff 121v, 154. The earlier is Bishop Richard Hill’s (1489–96), the later Bishop Thomas Savage’s (1496–1501).  But the visitation articles are questions to which we do not have replies since the churchwardens' answers have universally perished. Sometimes in serious matters those answers, which had been given to the diocesan registrar, were submitted to the chancellor for legal action, and the resulting court cases appeared in the archidiaconal act books.The call books surviving as GL: MS 09537/1–9 for Elizabeth’s reign have been surveyed by H. Gareth Owen, ‘The Episcopal Visitation: Its Limits and Limitations in Elizabethan London,’ 11 (l960), 175–85. They contain lists of those summoned and in attendance, and of licences and instruments.  Replies to these questions, if we had them, would take us very close to parish playing.

The source of these interrogations was, in the Stuart period, the 141 canons passed by the convocation of Canterbury in 1604, a revision in the charge of Bishop Bancroft of London. It was 'the first complete and coherent codification of English ecclesiastical practice' though Gerald Bray writes that its character 'as an unsatisfactory hotch-potch has long been recognized.'Fincham, , p xvi; and Gerald Bray (ed), 1529–1947, Church of England Record Society 6 (Woodbridge, 1998), lx.  Bancroft's 1598 articles as bishop had been influential but his metropolitical articles, compiled for ten dioceses in 1605, were 'the most widely imitated of any in the early Stuart Church' and were dominant through 1637.Fincham, p xvii. In 1640 Peter Heylyn devised new articles for the London diocese, giving the authority for each question, and these were officially commissioned as the standard set, used throughout the southern province thereafter. (Though James I's 'Book of Sports' in 1618 allowed various old pastimes, including May games and Whitsun ales, the ecclesiastical articles continued to forbid these practices).For the ‘Book of Sports’ (STC: 9268.9), its social effects and intentions, see Leah S. Marcus, (Chicago, 1978), 106–39.