English Episcopal Acta. Vol. XXXI

The publication of English episcopal acta under the auspices of the British Academy has been making rapid progress, and the first volume devoted to the bishops of Ely, dealing with Hervey, Nigel, Geoffrey Ridel and William de Longchamp, has now appeared. It contains 173 entries, a figure which includes forgeries and mentions of acta no longer extant. Ely was the last see to be established in the province of Canterbury prior to the Henrician Reformation. In the substantial Introduction, Nicholas Karn convincingly unravels the complexities of its foundation and endowment under the first bishop, Hervey, which involved a division of lands between the abbey of Ely and the new see. The editor also considers the changes made subsequent to these arrangements. The Introduction as a whole is a significant contribution to the history of the diocese and cathedral of Ely in the twelfth century, with sections on archdeacons, rural deans, parishes and parochial clergy, ecclesiastical patronage and appropriations, each bishop and his household, relations with the monks of Ely, and the honour court of St Ethelreda. Given the prominent role played in national politics by bishops such as Nigel and William de Longchamp, the section on the bishops is of much wider than purely local interest. Finally the Introduction provides an analysis of the diplomatic of the acta, including the external features of those which survive in the original. In the discussion of the intitulatio, the editor defends the curious phrasing on an act of Nigel (‘Nig(ellus) Dei gratia Elyensis ecclesie’) printed as number 53 from the Liber Eliensis (see also p. ccxxvi). It seems to me more likely that ‘ecclesie’ is simply a mistake for ‘episcopus’, made by the scribe of the earliest extant manuscript of the Liber Eliensis or its exemplar. The reading of the Ely Cathedral cartulary of c.1300 known as ‘Liber M’ (EDR, G3/28, p. 152) is ‘episcopus’

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