ABSTRACT
John Blair has recently described the late Anglo-Saxon diocese of Worcester as the most conservative region in England in terms of ecclesiastical organization, as it shows the highest degree of continuity between pre-Viking minsters and parochial mother-churches of c.950-1200. As he puts it, the West Midlands ‘remained an abnormally stable region, neither overrun by the Vikings, nor subject to undue pressure from the West Saxon court’.1 Thanks to the evidence provided by surviving charters, Domesday Book and physical remains of Anglo-Saxon churches, many ecclesiastical centres, usually called ‘minsters’, have been identified within this area.2 For several of them, that is, those which by the mid-ninth century had come under the control of the cathedral see, it is also possible to reconstruct in detail the tenurial history of their landed endowment, as shown in the previous chapter. What seems to be more difficult, however, is the identification of the actual role that these institutions (and the people who manned them) played in the delivery of pastoral care, both at the time of their foundation and later on, when they had to face competition from newly founded local churches.
