Acknowledgements
It gives me pleasure to thank the many people and institutions who have helped
me to bring this volume to completion. Work on this project has necessitated
consultation of manuscript materials in numerous libraries and archives, and I am
grateful to the staffs of these establishments for assistance. I should like to thank
the Bodleian Library for permission to publish a new edition of the obit book of
Hereford Cathedral, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B. 328 fos. 1-54r.
Many debts of a more personal nature have also been incurred. The deepest of
these is to Diana Greenway for inspiration and encouragement, for the generous
donation of information, for reading over drafts of the text and making corrections,
and for proposing that this compilation should be accepted for publication in the
IHR Fasti series. I should furthermore like to thank Jane Winters and Olwen Myhill
of the IHR for their skill and patience in preparing this book for publication. I am
also very grateful to the librarians and archivists at Hereford Cathedral over the
last twenty years, the late Penelope Morgan and Meryl Jancey and their successors,
Joan Williams, Marion Roberts and Rosalind Caird, for their unfailing kindness
and help. The current volume had its origins as an appendix to my doctoral thesis,
and I should like (not for the first time, and certainly not for the last) to express
my gratitude to my supervisor, Pierre Chaplais, and my examiners, C. N. L. Brooke
and Henry Mayr-Harting. Further work on the Hereford Fasti proceeded in tandem
with the edition of English Episcopal Acta, VII: Hereford 1079-1234, and everyone
who helped me with that publication has in some way assisted with this. The
inspiration for the final attack on the Hereford Fasti was provided by fellow
members of the editorial committee for Hereford Cathedral: A History (Hambledon
Press, 2000), edited by the late Gerald Aylmer and by John Tiller, and I am indebted
to them and to the other contributors to the volume for motivation and instruction.
J.S.B.
2001