The Register of John de Trillek, Bishop of Hereford

Description

John Trillek’s Bishops’ Register contains the documents Trillek created as bishop of Hereford between 1344 and 1361. These documents range in scope, and include mandates, grants, commissions, writ of summons, memoranda, and licenses. The register is written on parchment, and contains 257 folios. There are four major sections in the register: institutions, dispensations, licenses, and similar documents (6r-64v), diverse letters (65r-128v), royal writs (129r-175r), and letters dimissory and ordinations (178r-257v). The register is held in the Hereford Diocesan Records at the Hereford Archives. However, there is no finding aid record of it, and it has not been digitized for public access.
Because of the lack of access to digital versions of the original documents, scholars must utilize published transcriptions. Joseph Henry Parry, barrister-at-law and expert on medieval bishops’ registers, transcribed and edited Trillek’s register; he published it in two volumes in 1910 through Wilson and Phillips, printers in Hereford. Parry included an extensive introduction to John Trillek’s life and career, along with a dated transcription of each document (often in Latin, though occasionally in French) and a short description in English. He also included an appendix at the end showing benefices, people, and places relevant to the material, though it is unclear whether or not the appendix was featured in the same place, or at all, in the original manuscript.