ry picturesque, too, must have been the
miracle-plays at Easter, Christmas, and Epiphany; the great fairs; the
solemn processions, especially at Rogation-tide, when the relics of the
Saint were borne in state by representatives of the greater tenants of
the church, and attended by the sanctuary-men carrying staves with
banners. It is probable that once a year (perhaps at Whitsuntide) the
church was visited by clergy and laity from the whole of that division
of the diocese to which Ripon was the mother-church. Such annual
visitations were the especial privilege of mother-churches, and were a
great source of profit.

Underneath all this pageantry, however, there was much that was
unsatisfactory in the internal affairs of the college. In the thirteenth
century even more than afterwards, the great difficulty in the working
of secular colleges was non-residence. The Canons were often pluralists,
or foreigners appointed under pressure from the Pope or the king, who
provided in this way for prominent civil servants. A canon would often
leave his prebend in the spiritual charge of a vicar engaged by the
year, or under the administration of a proctor, or would even farm it
out--sometimes to a layman. Sometimes a canon was suspected of being a
layman himself, or a married man. The proctors or lessees dismissed or
appointed vicars at their pleasure. The prebendal houses fell into
disrepair, and in some cases a plot had been assigned, but no house had
been built. Some canons at this period resigned their stalls after an
extremely short tenure, or changed from one stall to another.

=Archbishop Thomas de Corbridge= (1299-1303) addressed himself to the
reform of these evils. He ordered the Canons to look to their prebendal
houses. He tried to control their acceptance of benefices in plurality.
He forbade them to farm their prebends to any but brother-canons except
with his licence. It was he who gave the prebends their territorial
names. Most important of all, he decreed in 1303 that the cure of souls
in each prebend was to be entrusted to a vicar-perpetual. The collegiate
system was indeed breaking down, and the Vicars henceforth were almost
as important a body as the Canons, whom they relieved of all
responsibility for the parochial work and the performance of the
services. Except the Vicar of Stanwick, they all lived at Ripon, and in
1304 one Nicholas de Bondgate provided them with a common residence,
which became known as the Be