ABSTRACT
Many of the extant bishops’ registers, and even more the surviving court books of the ecclesiastical courts, contain mandates for the payment of such offerings or proceedings to secure them from recalcitrant parishioners. The renewed dispute was touched off by the parish clergy, when they prosecuted a certain Robert Wright of the parish of St. Edmund Lombard street, who had refused to pay oblations on a number of festivals. The city’s case at Rome was delayed because the orators, for no reason that has been recorded, were detained on their way by the archbishop of Cologne. The initial success of the curates in obtaining their bull may well have been the result of Wright’s, and the city’s, case going by default, in consequence of the detention of the orators at Cologne. The controversy between the civic authorities and the parsons broke out afresh in 1472, when the modus vivendi was broken by the action of the curates.
