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The movement or “transfer” by members of monastic orders between religious houses has generally been discouraged by ecclesiastical authorities.1 In the case of monks, transfer to another monastery technically contravenes the vow of stability made at profession and thereby requires not only the formal permission of the current superior but also a second profession at the new house (“change of stability”). However, there survives abundant evidence that monks and regular canons in medieval England and Wales did indeed move between houses. This paper will examine the question of movement between Cistercian monasteries in late medieval England and Wales, based upon an ongoing prosopographical study of English and Welsh Cistercians between c. 1300 to c. 1540, and in particular the suggestion, made by a number of historians, that Cistercian monks who bore a surname (or, what will hereafter be termed monastic byname)2 that was also the name of another Cistercian abbey had some previous association with that other abbey. In addition, the paper will also consider the related topic of the promotion of monks as abbots of other monasteries.

This article evaluates ordination lists preserved in bishops' registers from late medieval England as evidence for the monastic orders, with special reference to religious houses in the diocese of Worcester, from 1300 to 1540. By comparing almost 7,000 ordination records collected from registers from Worcester and neighbouring dioceses with 178 'conventual' lists, it is concluded that over 25 per cent of monks and canons are not named in the extant ordination lists. Over half of these omissions are arguably due to structural gaps in the surviving ordination lists, but other, non-structural factors may also have contributed.

Chapter 12 Whereas the importance for the study of eleventh-century English history of William the Conqueror's great land survey known, since the twelfth century, as ‘Domesday Book’ hardly needs stating, its value as a source for the history of Wales during the same period is perhaps less self-evident. True, Welsh historians from Sir John Lloyd onwards have drawn on the survey for their historical reconstructions, but most of these studies have tended to ‘sample’ Domesday Book in order to supplement information drawn from their other – main – primary sources. While there are notable exceptions to this rule, a thorough analysis of Wales and Welshmen in Domesday Book per se remains to be undertaken. My purpose in the present paper is to make a contribution towards redressing this historiographical deficiency, by offering a prosopographical analysis of the Welsh individuals who occur in Domesday Book and especially those who occur before the Norman Conquest – that is, tempore regis Edwardi, or TRE as it is usually indicated in the text itself. The starting point is the data presented in Table 12.1 below: that is, a total of seventy-nine entries from Domesday Book (both TRE and for 1086) which may be considered in some way to refer to Welshmen. The criteria for compiling this list are onomastic and geographical, though as might be expected neither is straightforward and both require some preliminary comment.