This is a list of Collegiate churches in England.
In Western Christianity, a collegiate church is one in which the daily office of worship is maintained by a college of canons; consisting of a number of non-monastic or "secular clergy" organised by foundation statutes into a self-governing corporate body or chapter, presided over by a dean, warden or provost.
All medieval collegiate churches or chapels would have been endowed by their founder with income-yielding property, commonly rents or parochial tithes. Under these statutes, each canon would be provided with a distinct income for his personal subsistence; and in England this might be achieved in one of three ways; where each canonry had separate endowments these canonries were termed 'prebends'; where the endowments were pooled and each canonry derived a fixed proportion of the annual income, they were termed 'portioners'; and where each canonry was provided in the statutes with a fixed stipend income conditional on maintaining prayers for the repose of the founder's family, they were classified as 'fellows' within a chantry college.
Prebends were specific to collegiate and cathedral churches; but priests serving churches without a formal collegiate constitution could still be 'portioners' (if there were several of them, sharing the rectoral endowments of tithe and glebe); and equally, almost all larger late medieval parish churches housed numerous chantries, whose priests might be organised into a 'college' even though the parish church itself might never have been legally 'appropriated' for collegiate use. Consequently, there may now be uncertainty in respect of smaller chantry colleges and portioner churches, whether they were indeed collegiate in the medieval period; an uncertainty that is often present in contemporary accounts, as non-collegiate churches with multiple clergy often adopted the forms of worship, terminology and modes of organisation of fully collegiate exemplars.
Pre-Conquest collegiate churches commonly developed out of Anglo-Saxon minsters or monasteries, and with the division of England into parishes during the 11th and 12th centuries, most then became parish churches and remain so with the college dissolved. Later collegiate foundations could appropriate an existing parish church, or otherwise might construct their own dedicated chapel or church. The academic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities (which developed out of chantry colleges) initially tended to conduct collegiate worship in parish churches in the town, subsequently moving into dedicated chapels.
Most English collegiate churches were dissolved by Edward VI in his Abolition of Chantries Acts of 1547. A few survived the Reformation, specifically the academic colleges, those under the jurisdiction of the monarch, and others who by one device or another escaped the terms of the Tudor legislation. With the exception of Roman Catholic collegiate churches established after the Reformation, these latter continued until abolished, alongside other sinecures, by the Cathedrals Act 1840. The Commissioners for suppression appointed under the Chantries Act 1547 were empowered to apply tithes, pensions and annuities to establish vicarages in former collegiate churches to provide for cure of souls and maintain parochial worship. Where a collegiate foundation's statutes already provided for a parochial vicar, these continued; but otherwise portions of the tithe sufficient for a competent vicarage were abstracted from the collegiate endowments, the rest being sold to lay impropriators.
(Text) CC BY-SA
