Canterbury Chapter

The cathedral chapter of Canterbury, which holds the endowment, the precinct, the archive and the fabric, and runs two almshouses and a grammar school. Its remaining authority is that it can consecrate ground in a form the whole south accepts and certify in writing that a burial was properly done; it signed the Obedience in 3949, surrendering the island-wide ordering to Oxford.

The body of canons, a dean and officers that governs Canterbury's cathedral affairs by statutes written for a cathedral under a bishop. Its distinctive public authority is narrow: it consecrates ground in a form the whole south accepts and certifies that burials were properly done; it cannot attend, suppress or remedy troubled ground.

Named with it

• Precentor Hugh Barton · keeps the chapter act book
• Father Martin Vale · fields questions about goods brought home
• Copyist Judith Harbledown · works in the chapter archive
• Canon Alured Fen the Elder · canon, writing 4471
• Precentor Osbern · c. 4290
• Dean Cuthbert Barham · dean
• Almoner Ralph Sturry · almoner
• Roof-Warden Thomas Nackington · roof-warden, keeper of the fabric roll
• Hugh Barton (walks the precinct watch
• knows which jurisdiction owns a question)
• Chancellor Godwin of Canterbury · chancellor, c. 3951

Ties

• one of the five authorities sharing the government of Kent
• governs under the Bishop of Canterbury (See of Canterbury)
• questions of island-wide form go to Oxford
• its grounds are attended by the Brethren, with hired hands on the outer bound
• the Grey Nails have moved into the gap it cannot fill
• has never sought jurisdiction over the city corporation, which has never claimed entry to the precinct
• shares Canterbury with the city corporation, each barred from the other's ground
• lost the ordering of rite to Oxford in the Obedience War

In the chronicle

• c. 3733–3765 · The Granary Wolf
• 3949 · The signing of the Obedience, 3949
• 4271–4321 · The Long Refusal
• c. 4441–4481 · The Exclusion Writ
• 4491 · The Reed Cross anatomy agreement
• 4536 · The Cambridge–Oxford feast schedule of 4536
• 4544 · The chapter's refusal to certify, 4544
• 4574 · The search for the Four Grounds, 4574
• 4602 · The chapter's answer on the Black Stone spring
• 4602 · The chapter's refusal to certify, 4602
• 4620 · The north-side footing opening, 4620

At the table

The chapter refuses a great deal more than it grants, and on the strength of that record, and of nothing else, it is obeyed from Kent to the Solent; twice it has declined to certify for families powerful enough to ruin it, in 4544 and again in 4602. A burial certificate settles an inheritance, and for that reason it is forged; hence the chapter will confirm or deny any Canterbury certificate to whoever brings one, without fee, on any weekday of the year. Matters that would divide it are not put to the vote but deferred. Each year it enters in its minutes the Four Grounds, which is to say the burial grounds lost in the Obedience War, and each year, without remark, it refuses every application to break ground within a certain defined area outside the walls, where the candidate sites lie at Hackington and at Fordwich. Its archive is the best in the southern counties and is open on written application, though nobody is let read in it alone; the copyists of the city live by selling knowledge of what it holds, and among its papers, still unfiled, lies the Grey Nails' letter to a bishop. Shown a suspect object, the chapter asks first who carried it, and only afterwards what it is. Twice it has been asked to move the day of the crossing blessing, and twice it has declined. Jurisdiction in the city of Canterbury it has never sought, nor has it any force beyond its own precinct wall; its authority is made of a long record of being right, and of the power to refuse. Bands are taken on around the fabric works and to keep the night watch in the precinct, and by the precentor's standing instruction any party that varies its walk, or goes on working once something has been turned up, is dismissed.