ABSTRACT
However, despite their essential role in the pre-Reformation Church, this bedrock was not as stable as it sometimes appears. The map, the stratum, had its fissures and crannies, its gaps and weaknesses. As a stratum within the Church, the parish layer was not granite, but perhaps sandstone, or even some form of conglomerate, and as such, more easily affected by elemental forces of erosion and fracture. Many parishes comprised not a single township, but a group of settlements which were required to recognise one of their number as their head. Parish boundaries were sometimes uncertain, frequently complex, and occasionally disputed; while ‘membership’ of the parish was of necessity something that changed over time, by generational succession or simply the movements of a life cycle. Many parishes contained not merely subsidiary townships, but what might be considered subsidiary ecclesiastical units, through the presence of a host of chapels of various kinds, ranging from private domestic chapels to free-standing endowed chantries, as well as formally established chapels of ease which catered specifically for the inhabitants of a defined geographical segment of the parish.
