 Now? Oh, yep. Yep. I can hear that. Thank you to each of our speakers for three very interesting papers, particularly fascinating to think about the informal networks, the conversations, the relationships that are happening below the surface of those, or behind the production of these formal documents that we can study. And also some very exciting projects to look forward to you all very busy. So we now have about 30 minutes for questions. So if you're in the room, please raise your hand if you are joining us online, please use the chat function. Any questions? Thank you to all the speakers for some really interesting papers. My question is for Sam because I sort of vaguely work on your period. So you mentioned a little bit about bishops working as chancellors. So in the Chancery and I believe some of them also worked in the Exchequer at various points as well. And I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about how they squared this sort of worldliness, I suppose, with with working in the church itself. I can, although I don't want to talk for the entire half hour question period. On that point. There were undeniably tensions that bishops felt between their royal offices and their ecclesiastical responsibilities. And some of them sort of observes these more than others. It says there had been a long series dating back to biblical times no man conserved to masters for him neglect the one, etc. This was the work of in the previous century of thinkers like Robert Gross test had dwelt on this. It's also in the Canon Law. So John Granderson, if I mentioned the Bishop of Exeter in his copy of the Canon of the Apostolic Cannons. I'll try to say. He specifically marked the copy which people shouldn't take public office. They may neglect the cure of souls. But that said, there was another school of argument, which is that many Old Testament figures Samuel Ely and so on had balanced these and had sort of both spiritual and temporal offices. There was a line argument which said that you were able to counseling the king is what is what clergy should do and the importance of the king having proper counsel. And yeah, so there were lines on both sides. This I think that one of the times the tensions between these views was most explicit was with John Stratford in 1341, where he said in action December 1340 to his congregation at Canterbury. He spoke with tears in his eyes and said that he neglected the cure of souls has been so bound up in worldly affairs. But he then said in the self-same speech that I'm going to fight for the rights of the church in Parliament and the reason why the church is so abused is because the king isn't having counsel from clergymen like me, but from people and unwise laymen who aren't equipped to fight him for counsel. So the church is being oppressed because he's not listening to churchmen, but also I've been giving him too much time and therefore the church is oppressed because I'm not doing enough. So I think to cut a long story short, I think there were valid arguments for both and ultimately you can't involve yourself in government to the extent that your personal responsibilities are completely overlooked, but also bishops had responsibilities to do at least some involvement in government. They swore when their temporalities were stored to them that they would be attended to the King's Council and quite how you balanced those I think was up to the individual clergyman to justify to himself to his flocks and to God. Any other questions? Thank you. Sam, I'm sorry to give you yet another question, but actually I did have a point which slightly follows on from that question. I just wondered and forgive me if this is a slightly ignorant question because I'm not an expert in this period by any means. But I just wondered if you could sort of set the clergy in this era into a kind of wider European context. And I just wondered whether, you know, for church men their role as members of, you know, a pan European Catholic church creates a tension with their role in English politics as it were. I think the tension comes less over to necessarily being pan European per se and more with the consequence of that that they are normally under people authority. Because throughout Europe in many countries, church men being ultimately one of the relatively small portion of the population that are literate, they are used in writing offices quite widely. However, they're, and thus they do have many of these roles in France and in other areas, but yes, being under, there are tensions or can be at least between Royal and Papal authority. The bus stop isn't quite as bad as we see in the 1530s, but we do see it in periods in Edward III so in the good Parliament of 1376 and in the 1370s over attempted papal taxation. There's lots of anti-papal rhetoric and there's complaints by the Pope that senior ecclesiastics are not allowing papal bulls asking for taxation to enter the kingdom. There's also the statutes of provisors and prime and jury, which, well they've inspired an enormous literature so I won't attempt to go into them in great depth, but to put it crudely there, they limit arguably more in paper than in practice but that's subject to debate. The role of the Pope in appointing to benefits is and in sort of appeals to the hearing and so on. So yes, that to cut a long story short, there's plenty of incidents where that where tension can be identified between papal authority and the experiences of both the Church and the political community in England. However, while these tension surface again and again, the normal state of affairs was not one of crisis of conflict. For the most part, people were able to balance and forge these responsibilities and whether that strictly adds up to a logically pure way of balancing that I think is open to question, but certainly on a day-to-day basis in practice. The role of the Pope, who after all was far away compared to the King, can be safely balanced. Can I invoke directors privilege to ask two questions and to bring in our contributors on Zoom. So, first of all, to Elizabeth, I found the whole sort of historical detective story there absolutely fascinating in terms of using those English records to recover some of the stories that were destroyed by the the Four Courts Fire of 1922 during the Irish Civil War. Looking at those Exchequer payments, Elizabeth, there were some interesting variations in the names and I know that you were saying that ethnicity is very difficult to kind of pin down there, but it looked to me like amongst your recidivists, amongst the people who weren't paying what they should have been paying to the English Crown. There were obviously Gaelic Irish names, but there were also it looked to me some sort of Anglo-Norman names and I wondered if that's the Old English community. I wondered if that's the sort of beginning of that process of Gaelicization of those Old English nobles sort of going AWOL and sort of casting off their allegiance to the English Crown to some extent. So that was that's the question for you. And then the question for John is about the social cachet of being a sheriff in Tudor England, in the sense that obviously this is a position that's still worth lobbying for. Sheriffs are going to have an awful lot of work to do and probably be out of pocket. So why are they doing it? I mean there must be some, it must improve their kind of social positioning within county society. So those are the two questions. John, shall I go first? Yes. In answer to the question, yes, absolutely. I think what's interesting about the edges of English Ireland here is that you see people with English names, question mark, pushing themselves away from English control. It was not as straightforward as you know, the settlers are definitely for royal power. Yes, we asked that. I think Thomas DeClaire, who is one of those names, absolutely does end up very strongly associated with the local Irish communities. So, yes, well, I think we're seeing at the edges is we're seeing people accommodating themselves, whatever they see as the prevailing political power in the area. So if Thomas DeClaire can get away with not paying rent to the English checker, he's absolutely going to do so. Just as the, you know, the Obrian Lord will, if you can't for the same area. So yes, and that process obviously massively picks up force in the later 14th and 15th centuries as English control in Ireland rains dramatically. Thank you, John. It's really nice to see you again, and that's a great question. Yeah, so the Shrevelty did, of course, increase the social clout of sheriffs. Something interesting I thought was under the Sumterial Laws, a sheriff was allowed to wear a slightly longer rank than other members of the gentry, so for one year he gets a slightly better robe for the time he's doing that office. Whether or not people want to do it, I think as a mixed bag, you find many records of people seeking the office, but you also find many, if not more, records of people seeking not to do the office. So I think it depends, it all depends on the individual case. Something that historians have assumed in the past is that if somebody, if somebody wanted to be a sheriff, there must have been some like, there must have been some malign reason for it. Somebody was probably trying to, because we, as I talked about sheriffs and panel juries, so was a gentleman seeking to become a sheriff trying to exercise, trying to exercise his influence for a friend and exercise undue influence over a jury or something like that. One of the things, in the book, although I don't want to be naive and say that never happened, but I also want to be realistic, so I sort of come down in the middle somewhere, so obviously corruption did happen, but it wasn't a systemic feature of the shrieval system, so I think that's all I have to say on that, thank you. So we have two from online. The first one is for John. How did the role of the sheriff differ in the Tudor period from that in the earlier medieval period, and how did it change within the Tudor period? Yeah, so that's another great question. It's funny, I have a couple of pages in the introduction explaining why I chose the Tudor period, because actually the question is as early a medieval period, but if you're talking about the later medieval period, there are many consistences in what sheriffs had to do and so on, but there were differences, so I talk about several reforms in the book. Some of them were technical, so the county court, for example, the county court started offering jury trials, widespread jury trials in the Tudor period, so that was like a modernisation of court procedure. Previously all trials at the county court had been wager of law, so a compagation, so you could prove that you didn't owe something just by getting your mates to come into court and say no, he doesn't owe anything, so there were technical reforms like that. There were also widespread reforms of the Shrevel Revenue collection, so as I mentioned, I think I mentioned, the Shrevel T was very expensive. Actually it was John that mentioned that wasn't, so the Shrevel T was very expensive, you had to pay all these traditional revenues, but sometimes it was difficult to levy those from the county, so sometimes the sheriff had to make that up from his own pocket. So Parliament starting in 1543 introduced reforms to the system of revenue collection and audit to make it easier to claim discounts for revenue which wasn't collected. So yeah, something I say in the book is that it was, Tudor governments didn't, Tudor governments kind of solve problems as they came along, although they sometimes did have overarching policies, a lot of policy is kind of just fixing leaks as they happened. So there were just lots of small reforms to the Office of Sheriff, but in aggregate all of those small reforms together did involve important changes to the office. Thank you. The second question is for Elizabeth. You touched on the difference between receipts from different countries, and I know the research is not complete, but can you comment on differences over the time period? Also, is there evidence of loans in the crown in the records or only rent tax and penalty receipts? I'll take the second question first. Yes, there are loans. And interestingly, you have to get payments for loans that were raised and that were involved with England. So the merchants of the looker and particularly the RTIRD who are major wine merchants whose network structures across the Mediterranean, they're constantly paying in money in Dublin for a loan that had been taken from them by the king in England. So you get to move cross I would see payments of loans. You don't see the same kind of loans from the political community in the Exchequer records that you might, if you were looking at the English records for the same period. And in terms of the question about differences between counties, this is where it gets interesting because it's because the patterns are really, really fuzzy. But what I would say is that you see much more from Dublin in the surrounding areas, so Kildare, Carlo, up into Meath. You see very little from Roskerman at all. That's an area which is under heavy military intervention and you just don't see very much from there at all. You see a lot that seems to be tied to the mercantile centres. So a lot from Wexford and Waterford, the cities. You see Quix City a lot. You see, and then you see a lot from Dragheda just to the north of Dublin. So what I'd say we see in terms of differences is areas that will become the hold out areas of English power in the later 14th and into the 15th centuries. You see a lot from in this period. You see a lot from the mercantile centres and particularly the cities. Someone has made this, Bruce Campbell has made the suggestion recently that what we're seeing in Ireland in this period economically is that Dublin has been drawn into the mercantile networks in England and that the other cities in Ireland are not being towns and cities aren't being drawn to Dublin. I'm not sure that's what we're seeing in receipt rolls, but it's an interesting way of trying to conceptualise what's going on economically. So in turn, sort of try and bring that into a petty answer. What I think we're seeing is counties with a very strong established settler government and that's strong local control. So the people like the sheriffs that John's been talking about in the Irish, in the English context, in the Irish context, you've got a strong local sheriff and you've got a strongly mercantile economic base. You will get usually more receipts going to Dublin, so that would be the area around Dublin and then the cities on the south coast. Thank you. Hi, yeah, thank you for three really, really amazing papers. I've got a question for John. How much do we know about the sort of investiture ceremonies of sheriffs? And was there any change sort of with the reformation? John, you're muted. Sorry, thank you for that. Yeah, so there was an important ceremony in London, as you might be aware. So sheriffs after, just after, just after sort of swearing that oath, the sheriffs would ride to the exchequer and to open their account. And it was kind of like, it was considered to be a really important civic ceremony because even during plague years, the ceremony continued. It's something one of the reviewers for the book asked. They wanted me to say, why did they want to keep this ceremony even during the plague years of the 1560s? And my only answer is, I have no idea. I don't know why this ceremony was so important. It might have been a legal thing because the ceremony, for the London sheriffs, the ceremony was planned by the Orderman rather than by the Privy Council. But yeah, is that what you were thinking of? Is that what you mean? Yeah, sort of. But also, well, I suppose it was sort of constrained by evidence. But in sort of the localities, whether sheriffs were given a sort of local investiture ceremony or whether there was any kind of local ceremony of any kind. Or possible. The main evidence I've seen is from municipal sheriffs. So in York, I believe there was a big feast. So the sheriff had to, when the sheriff became sheriff, he had to throw a feast for the other worthies of the city. In the counties, the closest thing, I think, is the first county court of a sheriff's term in office. So at the first county court, you had to announce your undersheriff in the common view of the county. That's when you were given a writ of assistance as well, which was just like a technical procedure. But I don't think it was a big ceremony. I think it wouldn't have been as exciting as the sheriff's writing in London. It wouldn't have been as fun as the feasting in York, for example. So that's all I know about that. Irish bishops politically involved in English affairs as the English. I think this question is for Elizabeth. What's really interesting about Irish bishops actually is how not involved they are. So in contrast to the things that Sam's been talking about in terms of very strong political involvement by English bishops. Irish bishops, you get a very marked divide between bishops based in areas that are largely gay like Irish and bishops that are the bishops of Dublin, for example. So you see Irish bishops in settler areas a bit, but not as much. So the bishops of Osary and Dublin turn up as treasers of the Exchequer, for example, or as just the CEOs or kind of major administrative and best political roles. But you also get a very strong contingent of bishops who are absolutely in no way engaged with the English system. And one of the things that struck me most is someone who did a lot of work on the English-Exchequer relationship with the church from my doctorate. And then the book that followed is that we're not seeing bishops clerks turning up in the Exchequer the way I would expect to see them in England. So it's a very different pattern of engagement. And specifically because of the divide between settler and Irish communities, the bishops stay much more out of political affairs, for whatever reason. I hope that answers your question. I afraid I offhand, apart from non-resident bishops, non-resident Irish bishops, I can't think of any that again falls specifically in English affairs, so I'm assuming your questions about Irish bishops in Ireland. The one who isn't resident, Irish bishops who gets involved in English politics really in the 14th century is Alexander Bickner, who gets involved in negotiations in Edward II's reign between the Lancastrians and the Crown. So that's Elizabethan on probably no more than me, but that's basically it in a substantive sense. There are some English bishops who go over to Ireland like Thomas Charlton Bishop of Herodford, but again that's Elizabethan's domain rather than mine. Bickner is a really interesting example because he's essentially trying to play the Lancastrian dynastic game and falls on his face and that sets off all sorts of administrative and political repercussions. But yes, he's everybody else maybe seems to take his lesson and stays far away, I think.