ABSTRACT
This volume has sought to elucidate the tenurial, administrative and ecclesiastical organization of the diocese of Worcester between the late ninth and late eleventh century. It has shown how the church of Worcester handled documents attesting its own history and that of its estate and how successive bishops and members of the cathedral community saw the preservation and interpretation of that past as integral parts of their mission, not as something separated from their religious and pastoral work. In particular it has investigated the role of tenth-and eleventhcentury bishops in implementing new monastic ideals. The investigation has shown that those members of the community who took monastic vows during Oswald’s pontificate were mostly clerics in higher grades and tended to refer to their clerical rank rather than their monastic standing when witnessing charters. Those who did refer to their monastic vows in such attestations were those monks who did not pursue a senior clerical career. This study has confirmed that the monastic reform proceeded gradually at Worcester and that in its first phases it did not even require renunciation of private property. Several leases of Oswald were issued in favour of individual members of the cathedral monastic community who were interested in preserving the landed interests of their kin. This means that the new course introduced at Worcester was not too dissimilar from other experiments of uita communis which interested several other cathedral communities before the Norman Conquest. As has been noted by Julia Barrow, secular and monastic cathedrals shared an interest in implementing practices which had already been trialled (or were being trialled) on the Continent, and scholars should look at the practices introduced in English secular and monastic communities as parallel phenomena.1
