The Late Medieval Era · c. 1400-1517 · England (documented case)
Late-Medieval Lay Parish Piety
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About This Movement
For most people in late-medieval England, Christianity was the parish. The mass seen from the nave, the yearly round of feasts and processions, the guild you joined, the light you paid to keep burning before an image, the church ale that funded the roof. It was not passive. Churchwardens — ordinary laymen, elected and accountable to their neighbours. Collected and spent the money, and their accounts show parishes rebuilding naves, raising towers, buying vestments and hiring carvers on their own initiative. Books of hours, soon printed by the thousand, put the same daily prayers into the hands of any household that could afford them, and sermon collections like John Mirk's Festial tell us roughly what the pew was hearing. Almost none of these people wrote about what they believed. What survives instead is the record of what they did with their money and their time — a different kind of evidence, and in some ways a more candid one.
Sources
- Churchwardens' accounts: Morebath (ed. Binney, 1904), All Saints' Bristol (ed. Burgess), Bassingbourn and kin (primary)
- Books of hours and primers: The Prymer or lay folks' prayer book (ed. Littlehales, EETS, 1895-97) and the mass-market horae (primary) — The ordinary household's actual prayer equipment, surviving in thousands of worn copies.
- Wills and gild records: bequests for obits, lights, and fabric; the 1389 gild returns; The Lay Folks Mass Book (EETS) (primary) — Practice documented at the moment of death and in fraternity - the two points where ordinary people wrote themselves down.
- John Mirk, Festial (ed. Powell, EETS, 2009-11) (primary) — The era's most-copied English sermon collection, written for parish priests preaching to lay congregations - the closest surviving proxy for what the pew actually heard.
- Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (Yale, 1992; 2nd ed. 2005), with The Voices of Morebath (2001) (secondary) — Duffy's revisionism is a position in a live historiographical argument, not a settled conclusion.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 15 'Sacramental life' (Rubin); cf. ch. 21 'Saints and pilgrimages' (Vauchez) (reference) — The parish's sacramental round is this chapter's ground. Its coverage ends in 1517, before this practice's continuation into Tridentine parish renewal, which a later volume would cover.