ABSTRACT
Nowhere in English society were new departures more evident than in the latemedieval Church. Except as great landowners and, occasionally still, as builders, there will be little to report of the mighty possessioner houses which, in pre-plague years, had dominated the monastic Church. Yet this is not to say that the Church itself was unappreciated, or that its institutions were in a state of disarray. There had been, of course, many signs of religious unrest, with a stepping-up, early in the fifteenth century, of the crown's campaign against heresy. But the association ofWycli:ffe's Lollardy with the social discontents of the Peasants' Revolt, as with other lesser rebellions, had done nothing but harm to its supporters, and if, indeed, there were to be any turning-away from the traditional institutions of the Church, this would take the form of a realignment of allegiances within the existing fabric of the Church, not a search for new alternatives outside it. In staying away from the great religious houses which their ancestors had favoured and endowed, the devout men and women of late-medieval England were voting with their feet for something a little nearer in spirit to themselves. They found this something in the parish church and the friary, the hospital and almshouse, the chantry and fraternity, with the Carthusians standing out among their fellow monks as most deserving of patronage for remaining most consistently austere.
