Convocation: Taxes, Petitions, and the Quest for the Medieval English Church's Autonomy.

Convocation was the assembly of the clergy of medieval England and Wales and met from the late 1280s until the seventeenth century (before a rebirth in the nineteenth century). Economic historians have largely examined Convocation as a rubber stamp for stand-alone tax requests by the English kings or focused on small groupings of these demands—an examination of these requests and the evolution of how they were handled by the members of Convocation has not been covered. In this article, tax subsidy requests by the kings to Convocation are examined across three centuries in conjunction with clerical petitions to the monarchy allowing us to determine trends, including how the clergy went from ignoring requests to granting them with conditions. By placing these requests in their situational context, we can trace the efforts for self-rule and autonomy by the English clergy in the later Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]