The main original endowment of Lincoln College consisted of the rectorial revenues of the intramural Oxford parishes of All Saints, St Michael at the North Gate, and St Mildred (the last immediately absorbed into St Michael’s). Until the 1540s, the College was directly responsible for pastoral and sacramental oversight of the two remaining parishes, with the revenue and expenditure recorded in unusual detail in the annual bursar’s accounts. Those records offer a rare opportunity to analyse the operation of the parishes from the ‘clerical’ perspective, and gain a sense of the interdependent relationship between the College and the parishioners. Drawing on the accounts, on other documents among the archives of Lincoln College, and other records elsewhere, this talk will unlock Lincoln not as an academic institution but as the undying rector of the two churches, dealing with the responsibilities, liabilities, and challenges of that role within the complex ecclesiastical and spiritual landscape of pre-Reformation Oxford.

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