The eight fourteenth-century archbishops from William Greenfield (1306– 15) to Richard Scrope (1398–1405) were conspicuous in their service to the Crown and, often, the person of the king. They occupied senior administrative posts in the secretarial and financial departments of government – principally the Chancery, Exchequer and royal Wardrobe – over long periods, before their elevation to the archiepiscopate and thereafter. Embroilment in secular government and finance was controversial. Service to the Crown and membership ex officio of the royal Council could impinge drastically on a senior churchman's time and dedication to spiritual and pastoral care in his diocese. Archbishop John Thoresby (1353–73), for example, did not take up residence in York until 1356, almost three years after his preferment, while serving as Edward III's chancellor at the height of his successful continental campaigns; Thoresby left his diocese to the care of his vicar-general Master Thomas de Bucton in the interim. Deputisation of many official duties, particularly while in active governmental service, was naturally a keystone of the efficient functioning of royal administration, and, to some extent, politic in this period, as Sarah Rees Jones outlines in her chapter in this volume. Nonetheless, convocations often decried clerical involvement in secular politics, and John Wyclif predicated some of his criticism of the established Church on the ecclesiastical hierarchy, famously questioning, ‘What on earth is an archbishop doing as the king's chancellor, an office which is the most secular in the kingdom?’5 For Wyclif it should have been impossible to serve a secular as well as the spiritual master. Whether deliberately or not, however, Wyclif overlooked the fact that the chancellorship had distinct ecclesiastical responsibilities: as well as keeping the great seal, the primary means of communicating and authenticating royal will across a wealth of business, the chancellor acted as overseer and approver of the elections of heads of religious houses; he also visited all royal hospitals and free chapels; and he presented to all benefices valued at twenty marks or less that were in the king's gift, a not insignificant bolt in an otherwise bulging quiver of patronage.