The convocation records of the Churches of England and Ireland are the principal source of our information about the administration of those churches from middle ages until modern times. They contain the minutes of clergy synods, the legislation passed by them, tax assessments imposed by the king on the clergy, and accounts of the great debates about religious reformation; they also include records of heresy trials in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many of them connected with the spread of Lollardy. However, they have never before been edited or published in full, and their publication as a complete set of documents provides a valuable resource for scholarship.
This volume contains a full account of the convocation controversy in its first phase, making use of the act books of both the upper and the lower house, as well as of eye-witness accounts which have survived from other sources. Most of this material has never been published before or is available only in rare eighteenth-century editions which invariably reflect a partisan stance and therefore reproduce only part of the evidence. An appendix gives a complete bibliography of the controversy.