Metadata
Title
Visitation
Description
A visitation document records the presence of a church official, such as the Bishop of Hereford, at a specific location under his jurisdiction. These visits, which were carried out regularly, were not social but, as Ian Forrest notes, an “investigation” of the operation of local parishes. Forrest cautions that surviving visitation records were often used in jurisdictional disputes and other legal matters, but those not as carefully preserved likely carried less political import.