''“…. in origin the chantry can therefore be seen as the answer to what was essentially a monastic problem: how to continue effectively to intercede for an army of the dead whose ranks were already growing uncontrollably even before the official recognition of Purgatory had drawn fresh attention to their predicament. It was a privatised means of salvation devised to cope with an increasing demand for intercession with which the established monastic corporations could not cope …… the chantry may well have satisfied, in a way acceptable to the Church, the deep-rooted desire for a religious establishment under private control which, in its grosser forms, had been stamped out by the reforms of the twelfth century. Its flexibility in terms both of endowment and of duration enabled it – unlike the monastic foundation – to be adapted to the means of all ranks of society, so that what had begun largely as a form of seigneurial piety came in time to be adopted by the new squirearchy of the later middle ages and by self-made men like wool-merchants, who could identify with a parish church in a way that they perhaps could not with an old-established monastery of royal or baronial foundation …. “''