With the publication of volumes 43 and 44 in the internationally-recognised English Episcopal Acta series, the project's work on the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield is complete. The volumes draw together for the first time modern, scholarly editions of all the known documents issued by six bishops. They enable academics to see the work of the bishops of this large see in a broader chronological context and elucidate areas of their economic and social activity. They also deal with the bishop's political activities: at national level in the events of the civil war of the 1260s, and locally in their dealing with their own chapters and the struggle to reconcile the conflicting claims of the monks of Coventry and the canons of Lichfield. The volumes reveal men whose episcopates were ones of academic learning as well as those whose concerns were principally those of landed lords. The implications of the documents are discussed in a full introduction. In addition, appendices include the first full itineraries of the bishops and editions of the known documents issued by the bishop's officials and commissaries, thus allowing a fuller consideration of the working of Church administration in this period.
The documents of the bishops of Coventry and Lichfield in the thirteenth-century reveal snapshots of everyday life in medieval Lancashire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire, from the monks who lost their books in a fire to the men who struggled to carry bodies for burial through floods and snow.
