This paper examines the application at the local level of papal centralisation in the early fourteenth-century church. It traces as a case study the impact on English monastic communities of papal privileges and exemptions, the expansion of the papal judicial system, and the growth of papal appointments to benefices. It concludes that the reality differed from the high theory of papalist claims of immediate and universal jurisdiction: papal power ultimately depended on the consent of local actors and an increasingly assertive crown, and burgeoning administrative activity at the papal curia did not translate into increased power and influence.