ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to explore lay participation in urban cults, and to re-examine Vauchez's divide between the sacred and the profane. For a large number of the new cults that developed in the later twelfth century, and many of the older cults that gained new interest, were located in towns. The nature of towns as central places in twelfth-century England has not been fully appreciated, even though towns were essential not only to the post-Conquest economy and to the work of conquest and governance, but also to ritual and cultural life. The chapter focuses on the cult of Saint William of York, but draws on comparisons with other English urban saints in the decades of pastoral reform shortly before and after 1200. In particular, it discusses the very different cult of Saint Kenelm of Winchcombe in Gloucestershire as a way of highlighting the spectrum of urban experience in two very different locales.
