ABSTRACT
As in Gloucester, there were ten parish churches in late-medieval Worcester, as well as a number of non-parochial chapels. The obvious difference between the towns, however, was the way in which the Worcester parishes were dominated by the cathedral. In Gloucester, it was the Crown that had originally been the patron of at least four and perhaps more of the parish churches, St Peter’s Abbey anciently possessing only St Mary de Lode; of the city of Worcester’s ten parish churches (excluding St John in Bedwardine), apparently as many as nine had originally been dependent upon the bishop or the priory, or would become so. Only St Alban’s seems never to have come under the cathedral’s authority.
