The White Book of Southwell is an exceptional cartulary in size, contents and chronological coverage. Besides royal, papal and archiepiscopal acta, and many deeds of lesser people, it includes archiepiscopal statutes, transcripts of manorial and ecclesiastical court proceedings, Quo warranto enquiries, rentals, custumals and terriers; the contents stretch from c 1100 to 1460. It is the principal surviving record for medieval Southwell Minster, with Beverley and Ripon one of the three non-cathedral collegiate foundations belonging to the archbishopric of York. The cartulary was begun c 1347, and further quires were added to the end of the fifteenth century. Marginal annotations show it continued to be used for Chapter business down to the eighteenth century. Southwell itself was an exceptional institution: there are signs of separate prebends already in Domesday Book, the number being augmented in the next two centuries. It hardly ever had a dean, being run apparently by ad hoc arrangements among those prebendaries who actually resided; and despite various attempts at suppression, the Chapter survived until 1841. The prebendaries were frequently archiepiscopal or royal clerks and Southwell was rarely the centre of their attention – William of Wykeham was one, and he had ten other prebends in 1366. Most of the day-to-day work was done by the vicars choral, one per prebend, who were paid by the prebendaries but who also had a common fund by the mid-thirteenth century. The White Book well illustrates the development of chantries: ten were founded from the early thirteenth century onwards. Between 1380 and 1415 both the vicars choral and the chantry priests were housed in colleges built for them, quadrangular structures since demolished, but of which engravings and plans are published here. A fabric fund was begun before 1230 – producing a sheaf of documents in the cartulary – to support the new work at the east end, but after 1300 was used for maintenance and furnishings. The famous Chapter house was apparently financed by a levy on the prebends.

Editing this manuscript was a formidable undertaking. The contents are presented in manuscript order, in extenso, in French as well as Latin, with English summaries. There is some unevenness of treatment of obvious errors by these apparently slapdash scribes, and some mistakes, inevitable in an edition on this scale by several hands. There again, the work benefits greatly from the combination of expertise among the editors, whose individual presence can be detected behind the introduction and commentaries covering archiepiscopal acta and statutes, the legal material, the language of the many minor place names and the families and individuals whose lives are charted with encyclopedic knowledge of local society. There are very full indexes, essential with such a disorganised manuscript, and a useful fasti of the prebendaries. The edition is dedicated to the memory of Sir Frank Stenton, whose connections with Southwell and its region were close and of long standing. In size, breadth of coverage and depth of expertise it is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest British historians of the twentieth century.