Extollagy!

 Just published!

Westbury-on-Trym: monastery, minster and college by Nicholas Orme and Jon Cannon, Bristol Record Society, 2010.

The story:
…http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba114/feat4.shtml

The hard info:
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/History/bristolrecordsociety/publications.htm

… The ideal Christmas present for all your Anglo-Saxon crypt-hunting, fifteenth-century death-related art-and-patronage loving, medieval polygonal apse-spotting, west country/lesser collegiate architecture-grooving friends.

We have: John Carpenter, an intriguing late medieval bishop, with an enlightened approach to education, and a certain artistic flair when it comes to his own death;  the doughty (if rarely actually there) canons/priests of Westbury, who from c.800 to 1540 beat off threats from monk-loving saints (Oswald and Wulfstan) vikings and heretics; and one of the more intriguing (and now better-understood) of England’s lesser collegiate communities.

The latter, by the way, is more interesting than you might think. The collegiate church – loosely-affiliated communities of priests – is the institutional mammal of the medieval church, scampering around busily while the dinosaurs we call monasteries lumber across the landscape, only to take over the planet when the comet of Reformation struck. Where do you think cathedrals/universities/many modern corporations come from? Places like this.

Not bad for a slightly up-itself Bristol suburb.

And £15 works out a 0.35p a footnote. Buy it now!  From selected outlets.