Webinar, Thursday 9 October 2025, 7pm via Zoom

Jessica Holt, Lincoln Record Society, Nigel Burn Memorial Postgraduate Student, University of Lincoln

Episcopal Authority: Visitation during the Episcopate of Bishop Thomas Bek (1342-1347).

In 1342, Thomas Bek returned from Avignon to the diocese of Lincoln, his appointment to the bishopric confirmed. Now, alongside his staff and clergymen, he had the momentous task of shepherding every soul in his diocese towards salvation. It was essential for Thomas to ensure that his ecclesiastics properly administered pastoral care. It was the responsibility of bishops to hold these individuals to account; ensure that they provided the laity with adequate guidance; and assist those who struggled to access spiritual direction. Visitation was one method employed by bishops, and their officials, to instigate pastoral reform and supervise the morals and behaviour of the laity, the religious, and the clergy. This paper examines the hitherto unexplored visitation records of Bishop Thomas Bek (1342-1347) and considers how he attempted to exert his episcopal authority for the betterment of his diocese. Ultimately, the contents of Bek’s visitation documents indicate that he was willing to act as an arbiter to settle longstanding disputes, regardless of their apparent severity. Despite his diligence, his episcopate was not entirely free from challenges to his authority, up to and including armed resistance from former priors and other issues as detailed in this paper.

(Jessica Holt (she/her) is a Lincoln Record Society funded PhD student working on the episcopal registers of Bishop Thomas Bek of Lincoln (1342-1347). Her interests include bishops’ registers, ecclesiastical politics, and diocesan management. She completed her MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Lincoln. She continues to be based there and is supervised by Professor Louise Wilkinson and Dr Michele Vescovi.)

Dr Martin Roberts, Postdoctoral Research Associate, School of Humanities and Heritage, University of Lincoln

Meeting the Challenges Head On: Confronting Obstacles to Effective Administration of Justice in An Early-Sixteenth-Century Diocese

Covering more than 7000 varied square miles, and stretching from the Humber to the Thames over one-sixth of the English kingdom, Lincoln Diocese, just as it had for several centuries, posed a huge and constant administrative challenge in the early 1500s. Concentrating upon the bishop’s audience court, one of the two senior diocesan courts dispensing ecclesiastical justice around the diocese, this paper is concerned with obstacles to the authority, effectiveness, and long-established record-keeping practices and procedures within its borders created by its size, its diverse and often difficult landscape environment, the death of Bishop William Atwater and, in 1521, the elevation of his more politically motivated successor John Longland, and caused by other changes within its community of court personnel. As well as examining the wills of ecclesiastical lawyers and their contemporaries and other sources to explore the materiality of travel, and providing an analysis of that court’s known movements between November 1514 and March 1530, by focussing especially upon one journey undertaken by its Commissary-General, Anthony Draycott, in October 1528, this paper considers the ability of judges, professional lawyers, and those accompanying them to successfully face up to and overcome such challenges, creating its essential records as they did so, and all the while working to preserve and enhance the authority of the Church’s justice.

(Martin retired early from legal practice in 2013 and obtained his doctorate from the University of Nottingham in 2020. Generously funded by the Lincoln Record Society’s Nigel Burn Memorial Research Grant Scheme, he is currently undertaking a two-year postdoctoral research project where he is especially working towards publication of an edition of unpublished records created during the first six decades of the sixteenth century in the Bishop of Lincoln’s Audience Court.)

To book a free place on this webinar, please contact Dr Andrew Walker by Thursday 2 October at [email protected].