| Description | The Sede Vacante Visitation Rolls constitute a small series of records created during, or in connection with, periods when there was no archbishop in the Canterbury see. They are generated by visitations of monasteries and parishes conducted on archiepiscopal authority, attest the findings of these visitations and record the measures taken to put right that which was found to be wrong. The information given about the local churches and people examined provides a picture of social and religious life that is intimate and detailed, and similar to that found in records of the church courts. Indeed, several of the rolls are actually records of courts set up to pursue matters detected during visitation, and they, as well as the visitation rolls proper, describe an overtly jurisdictional and coercive function. The Visitor had the power of citing clergy and parishioners to submit to visitation in their churches; he could ask questions, hear replies and impose punishments. The rolls' ability to illustrate these processes is enhanced by the manner of their composition - contemporaneously with the action - and their pragmatic style. The articles or allegations were copied out first; the answers given by the examinees were added later; usually in a different hand; often compressed; and sometimes even forced onto the dorse of the roll by lack of space.
While the process of composition may be transparent enough, not so are the reasons why just these 21 rolls were preserved out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands of visitation records for Canterbury diocese there must once have been. As Woodcock points out (Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts, p.26) diocesan visitation was a routine function of the archdeacon's official, normally carried out once or twice a year. Yet none of the records produced by this long-established activity survive: the archdeacon's medieval archives have suffered extensive losses. The rolls at Canterbury have a different provenance and owe their preservation to more unusual circumstances. They were added to the Christ Church archives during vacancies of the archiepiscopal see in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when the monks were seeking to establish control of sede vacante rights in the teeth of determined opposition. One of the rights they claimed and exercised was visitation, and the rolls we have are records of visitations carried out by commissaries-general appointed by them.
The visitations carried out on the monks' authority were based on tenuous and debateable claims. In such circumstances proof of possession was a powerful argument, and this was possible only by means of written evidence. The 1278-9 and 1292-4 vacancies produced a long-running lawsuit over sede vacante jurisdiction between the prior and chapter and the archdeacons of Canterbury, and the monks collected court records then to demonstrate they had controlled the presidency of the Canterbury Consistory and Court of the Arches: two other functions of the archiepiscopal sede vacante jurisdiction. The series of Ecclesiastical Suit Rolls and Sede Vacante Scrapbooks contain many such records (see the Introduction to the ES Rolls catalogue). It is probable that the visitation rolls were meant to prove the exercise of yet another sede vacante function by the monks: diocesan and provincial visitation.
The title of the series Sede Vacante Visitation Rolls suggests that the rolls had a common origin or provenance. It is true that they are all connected in some way with visitation and with sede vacante jurisdiction. But within that broad characterisation lie several distinct groupings. The majority are not records of the visitations but of the legal proceedings or chapters held to follow them up [Nos 8, 9/1, 9/2, 11-16, 17A]. The visitation rolls proper [Nos 1-7, 17, 19] include two [Nos 1/1 and 1/2] created at vistitations of churches within the Exeter diocese by the official appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury to administer the vacant see there. Several other rolls apparently originated in visitations held by the archbishop in the Canterbury diocese [Nos 1/1, 1/2, 11, 12, 14-16, 18]; another is a record of chapters held in archiepiscopal peculiars in the diocese of Chichester [17A]: these have no obvious connection with sede vacante jurisdiction or the dispute over it. There is, however, evidence that these date from late in the pontificates of John Pecham and Walter Reynolds respectively; and that they may, therefore, have outlasted the archbishops and been carried on by the monks. The points already made about the prior and chapter during the vacancies between 1292 and 1328 are meant to argue for their conscious preservation of the visitation rolls. It seems likely that this was done as part of a wider effort to collect sede vacante records. There is no indication that the rolls were separately preserved, as they are now, during the medieval period, although this possibility cannot be ruled out as long as knowledge of the Christ Church archive remains patchy.
Apart from the usual medieval endorsements indicating content, evidence for archival organisation of the rolls does not take the story back before C.R. Bunce. Endorsements describing content in his handwriting adorn most rolls. A numbering scheme, running from 1 to 17 with inexplicable prefix `vii', and still preserved (now without the prefix) is probably also Bunce's. If so, he must have been responsible for having separated the rolls from othere sede vacante material. He may have coined the title `Sede Vacante Visitation Rolls'. Many years later, probably after the Second World War, Mr. Jack Maple carried out valuable conservaion on all the rolls and repair work on some of them. Dr. William Urry produced a brief typescript list for the box, which has, until now, been the only available finding aid.
At some stage in the history of the collection's archival care, three more rolls were added, not at the end of the sequence but in the middle, linking them with already-numbered rolls, presumably to emphasis perceived similarities of theme or origin [Nos 1/2, 9/2, 17]. In the course of work to produce this new list, another visitation roll was found in a box of msicellaneous uncatalogued material [`DCc / Priory Sede Vacante'] and added to the series as Number 19. |