If dependent chapels were public buildings for community use, then private chapels were the opposite. These were buildings or rooms whose use was restricted to a specific small group of people, and it is precisely because of this restriction that I have chosen to use the term ‘private chapel’. There is some merit in Rawlinson's term ‘household chapel’, but ‘private’ seems to suit my categorisation better, in sharp contrast to the public dependent chapels. Nicholas Orme has defined them, including those spaces called oratorium or oratories, as places of private prayer, unconsecrated and not for Mass or other services, though, as Orme acknowledges, licences were granted in the later Middle Ages for portable altars and for Masses to be said in oratories too. Two types of private chapel have been identified: secular private chapels and monastic grange chapels (i.e. those sited on farms owned and run by monastic communities). This chapter will consider how both types were regulated, where they were built and by whom, and who made use of them. It will also assess what rights a private chapel might obtain. Some gained permission for baptism, marriage and, in a few exceptional cases, burial. These are the key issues for understanding how private chapels fit within the ecclesiastical landscape.

It is important that we distinguish between private chapels and chantries. Pounds's definition is valuable: an oratory or private chapel was employed ‘for the devotions of a family or other small group’, whereas a chantry was a chapel reserved for Masses for a specific purpose, usually ‘the repose of the souls of its founder and his family’. Chantry chapels could be present within another chapel structure and it is possible that some private chapels were effectively chantries. As Simon Roffey highlights, a chantry was technically ‘a service rather than a physical entity’, so the chantry Mass could take place in any church, and chantries could be either permanent or temporary. Consequently, this chapter is primarily focused on private chapels, though there will be some discussion of the evidence for chantries within private chapels.

Licensing a private chapel

Licences for the celebration of Mass in private chapels are an important source of information on their locations, functions and users, because such places of worship were, according to canon law, required to have a licence from the local bishop.