Bernard Hamilton Essay Prize
“Articuli Inquisicionis de crucesignatis”: Late Thirteenth-Century Inquiry into English Crusaders

I wish to record my gratitude to Manchester Metropolitan University for the award of a Vice-Chancellor PhD Scholarship (2016–19), during which this article was researched and written as part of my PhD. A shorter version of this paper was given at the inaugural Northern Network for the Study of the Crusades Conference and at the 24th Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2017. I would like to thank Professor Helen Nicholson and Dr. Thomas W. Smith for their comments on my transcriptions. I am also very grateful to my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Kathryn Hurlock, and to Professor Kurt Villads Jensen for their comments on the draft text.

Abstract

Using the hitherto-overlooked articles of inquiry concerning the Holy Land and those signed with the cross in the episcopal and priory registers of Richard de Swinfield, bishop of Hereford (1283–1317), Oliver Sutton, bishop of Lincoln (1280–99), and the dean and chapter of Canterbury Cathedral, this article examines the contribution these inquiries can make to our knowledge of how the Church and the papacy accounted for crusaders, their votive obligations, and what they owed to the Holy Land subsidy. The articles of inquiry are dated to between 1283 to 1291, and the present article highlights that the three recensions of this text reflect differing stages in a cumulative process of inquiry that reached its apogee in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. Based on the substantially differing construction of the Canterbury lists to those in Hereford and Lincoln, the case for the Canterbury lists being part of a third round of inquiries between 1283 and 1291 is argued. The present article first traces the historiography of the lists, then provides an analysis of their manuscript context. An examination of the process of the inquiries, and finally the content of some of the questions follows. Appended to the article is the first comparative edition of the three recensions based on the manuscript registers.

Notes

I wish to record my gratitude to Manchester Metropolitan University for the award of a Vice-Chancellor PhD Scholarship (2016–19), during which this article was researched and written as part of my PhD. A shorter version of this paper was given at the inaugural Northern Network for the Study of the Crusades Conference and at the 24th Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2017. I would like to thank Professor Helen Nicholson and Dr. Thomas W. Smith for their comments on my transcriptions. I am also very grateful to my doctoral supervisor, Dr. Kathryn Hurlock, and to Professor Kurt Villads Jensen for their comments on the draft text.