Claire Cross is currently Professor of History at the University of York, where she has taught since 1965. A Cambridge graduate, she was county archivist of Cambridgeshire from 1958 to 1961, and Research Fellow at Reading University between 1962 and 1965. Her other books include The Puritan Earl: The Life of the Third Earl of Huntingdon (1967) and The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (1969) and she has edited The Letters of Sir Francis Hastings (1969), York Clergy Wills 1520-1600 (1984 and 1989), with N. Vickers, Monks, Friars and Nuns in Sixteenth Century Yorkshire (1995) and a collection of essays, Patronage and Recruitment in the Tudor and Early Stuart Church (1996).