The secular clergy were among the most influential and powerful groups in European society during the central Middle Ages. Yet they have received almost no attention from scholars, unlike monks, nuns, or secular nobles. In The Secular Clergy in England, 1066-1216, Hugh Thomas aims to correct this deficiency through a major study of the secular clergy below the level of bishop in England. Secular clerics kept the Church running in the world beyond the cloister wall, with responsibility for the bulk of pastoral care and ecclesiastical administration. They assumed a major role in the rise of royal bureaucracy and were instrumental to the intellectual and cultural flowering of the twelfth century, including the invention of universities.
Hugh M. Thomas specializes in the history of medieval Europe and of England. He is the author of Vassals, Heiresses, Crusaders, and Thugs: The Gentry of Angevin Yorkshire, 1154-1216 (1993); The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066 - c. 1220 (2005); and The Norman Conquest: England after William the Conqueror (2007) and has held fellowships at the University of Miami's Center for the Humanities, the University of Pennsylvania, the National Humanities Center, All Souls College, Oxford, and Princeton University. He has also received funding from the ACLS and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
