Going to Church in Medieval England - Chapter 7

THE LIFE CYCLE

Christian time embraces not only the year but the cycle of human life. The medieval Church cast its mantle over six events in that life and required or encouraged them to be blessed and validated by its rituals. Four of these rituals were classified as sacraments. Baptism or christening was administered at the very beginning of life and was compulsory. Confirmation came after baptism and was also obligatory, but not at a specified date. Marriage was recommended to take place at church although this was not insisted on, after which many married couples experienced the birth of children with further baptisms. Unction, or anointing, was offered to those gravely ill. Two further rites were not classed as sacraments. They consisted of the purification or ‘churching’ of women after childbirth and the funeral and burial of the dead, although both were made sacramental by including a mass before or afterwards. Events of life that had no special commemoration included the transitions from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, although marriage had a measure of significance in the latter respect. The following chapter examines these six events and their ceremonies, as well as explaining the lack of rites of passage for coming of age.

BIRTH AND BAPTISM

We have seen how baptism in Anglo-Saxon England varied between two practices: the ancient one of waiting until Easter Eve or Pentecost Eve and the newer one of christening soon after birth.1 As late as 1070 a Church council at Winchester still required baptisms to be celebrated only on the two traditional dates, unless there was danger of death.2 Yet in spite of this,

immediate baptism seems to have become almost universal by the twelfth century: on the day that a child was born. The Augustinian canon and miracle collector Peter of Cornwall (d.1221), who came from that county, did indeed claim that his uncle named Pagan, born in the early part of the century, was so called because he was not baptised until he was twelve, but such an oversight, if true, must have been unusual.3 Occasionally baptisms may have been delayed by a day or two to contact godparents and give time for them to arrive. The fourteenth-century English version of the romance Lay Le Freine imagines a knight’s wife giving birth to twins and a messenger being dispatched to a knightly friend some distance away to assist as a godparent.4 But most parents chose godparents from people close at hand, and even gentry families might call on servants to do the duty. A Church court in London in 1480 considered that a man who fathered an illegitimate child increased his sin by waiting for two days before he brought the infant to the font.5

The practice of baptising on the day of birth meant that the rite was also a naming ceremony. This feature has been lost in modern times when babies are born, named, and their names registered long before most of them are christened. The baby’s forename, almost invariably a single name,6 was pronounced by the senior godparent of his or her own gender at the beginning of the baptism service, and the significance of the name was such that it was repeated again and again in the service: sixteen times altogether.7 Some parents chose their children’s names and certain noble families had traditions in this respect.8 The de Vere earls of Oxford used Aubrey, the Arundells of Cornwall Remfrey, and the Digbys of Rutland Everard and Kenelm. Far more common was the custom by which the principal godparent gave his or her own name to the child. This practice explains the presence in families of two or more brothers or sisters with similar forenames, like those now known as John II and John III in the Paston family. It was so normal that there was sometimes surprise in the church when the godparent announced a different name.9

Godparents went back to Anglo-Saxon times: the terms ‘godfather’ and ‘godmother’ were in use by the year 1000.10 By the twelfth century the Church required there to be at least three of them: two of the baby’s own sex and one of the other.11 Parents could not fill the role but siblings could do

so.12 The words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ were significant. Baptism was meant to bring a baby into a long-term relationship with its godparents analogous to that with its parents. As we shall see, godparents undertook duties relating to a child’s spiritual development. A social and economic tie might also develop, in that some parents chose godparents of higher status in the hope of them giving the baby a christening present and patronage in the longer term.13 Most seriously, in the eyes of the Church, godparents and godchildren came into permanent spiritual kinship. This meant that a godchild could not marry its godparents’ children.14 In practice some godparents took their duties seriously while others merely attended the baptism. Many people, it was observed in 1556, did no more of their duty than ‘wash their hands before they departed from church’.15

The preference for immediate baptism reflected the fear of an infant dying without it and therefore losing eternal salvation. This meant that the Church had to depute the rite to a lay person in the emergency of a difficult birth that endangered the baby’s life. Parish clergy were told to instruct their parishioners how to baptise when necessary and to question them, when they had done so, to ensure that they had acted correctly.16 Ideally the rite was to be performed by a man rather than a woman, unless (no doubt with the thought of experienced midwives) a woman knew the words to say more perfectly. Parents should not do it unless there was no alternative, in which case it was not to prejudice their sexual relationship afterwards (the act did not make them into clergy).17 Emergency baptism required sprinkling water on the baby or immersing it in water once or three times, while repeating the following formula:

I christen [or baptise] thee [Name] in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

English must have been the commonest language to use, but Latin or French were allowed.18 No addition to these words, or subtraction from them, was permissible.19 A midwife in Kent, who baptised a baby in danger before it was fully born, did indeed reverse the phrases, but her words were still judged correct:

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, I christen thee Denys.

Sensibly in the circumstances, she chose a name appropriate to either sex.20 Robert Mannyng warned of the peril of using improper words. He told a story of how a midwife christened a child with a phrase of her own:

God and Saint John, Christen the child, both flesh and bone.

The child died. When it was brought to the churchyard for burial, the priest questioned the woman and learnt what she had done. He reproached her that the child’s soul was lost, and forbade her from ever again attending a childbirth.21 The anxiety to be correct, according to one late-medieval treatise, led some women at a birth to say the words together, presumably in the hope that at least one would get them right.22

The one exception to immediate baptism that was allowed and indeed encouraged after the twelfth century was the practice relating to Easter and Pentecost. As we have seen, the liturgy for the eves of these great feasts required the holding of ‘solemn baptism’, as it was termed. The Church preferred that babies born shortly beforehand should be brought to church for that purpose. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one encounters forenames like Anastasia (‘resurrection’) for women, Pascoe or Pascal (‘Easter’) for men, and Pentecost for both sexes, which may refer to baptisms in these circumstances. But immediate baptism was so common, and the Church’s teachings on the need to achieve salvation so compelling, that parents disliked the delay in those seasons. In 1237 a Church council for the whole of England, meeting at London, censured their fears and demanded compliance. It pointed out that the pope himself christened babies in this way and that the Church did so in other countries.23 But the disquiet continued, the obligation was apparently ignored, and in 1279 the Council of Reading, legislating for the province of Canterbury, modified the London pronouncement. Babies would now be held back only during the week before Easter or Pentecost, and not then if they were in peril of death. In the meantime all

could receive the first part of the baptismal rite, the so-called ‘making of a catechumen’ excluding baptism itself.24 It would have been understood that, in necessity, this final part could be done quickly and as an emergency. Even this compromise may not have been very effective. While some early manuscripts of the Sarum missal assumed the presence of a baby on Easter Eve, later versions of the early sixteenth century, as has been mentioned, abbreviated the ceremonies around the font before Easter and Pentecost unless a baptism was going to take place. This suggests that a town as large as Salisbury might produce no available baby.25

Normal baptisms took place in church, and any administered in an emergency had to be ratified there if the infant survived, with all the statutory prayers and ceremonies other than the baptism itself which could not be repeated. A church meant a church or chapel-of-ease with a font and baptismal rights; private chapels were forbidden to all except children of the royal family.26 As the rite was dependent on when the birth took place, it could be done at any time of day and we hear of one baptism at the time of vespers, in mid or late afternoon.27 The liturgy of the service is first fully recorded in the second half of the thirteenth century, and gained small additions during the later Middle Ages.28 It was to be found in the manual, the service book that contained the pastoral rites for lay people. This, like the missal, described cathedral practices but was easier to use in a parish church and offers a clearer guide to what happened there.

The liturgy began at the church doors. Baptism, like the services of churching and marriage, was a rite of transition that brought the recipient from outside to inside the church. One motive for building church porches in the later Middle Ages was to provide a shelter for the outdoor part. The baby was brought by the midwife, the mother being still in bed at home, accompanied by godparents and other family members or well-wishers. The priest began by asking the midwife if the child was male or female and if it had already been named and baptised from necessity, in which case the baptism itself would be omitted. A male baby had to be held at the righthand of the priest and a female at the left. The priest made the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead with his thumb, saying in Latin (the language of virtually all the baptismal rite), ‘I place the sign of the cross of our Lord Jesus

Christ, on your forehead’, and repeated this on the breast, saying ‘The sign of our Saviour Jesus Christ’. Then holding his right hand on the baby’s head, he said prayers.

This first part of the service outside the church was called ‘the making of a catechumen’, meaning ‘a candidate for baptism’. It consisted of a series of ritual actions to make the baby fit for baptism. In the usual circumstance of no previous baptism, the priest asked the name of the baby and the chief godparent announced it. The baptismal party brought with it some common salt.29 This the priest exorcised and put a tiny quantity into the baby’s mouth, saying ‘Receive the salt of wisdom that God may be propitious to you in eternal life’. The salt was followed by a series of prayers which differed in the case of a boy or of a girl: a practice that descended from early Christian times. The boy received five (later six) and the girl three (later five) prayers, both sets of which contained an exorcism of the Devil and the signing of a cross on the infant’s forehead. The prayers were broadly similar, with some variations. By the end of the Middle Ages those for the boy referenced Christ’s walking on the water and his rescue of Peter there, while the girl’s alluded to Daniel’s exoneration of Susanna and Christ’s resurrection of Lazarus. After further prayers, which from now on were identical for both sexes, three verses of the Gospel of Matthew came to be added describing how children were brought to Jesus for blessing.30

Having exorcised the baby from the powers of evil, the priest gave it the benefits of Christianity. First he spat into his left hand and used his right hand to touch the ears and nostrils of the baby with saliva, recalling Christ’s healing of a blind man in a similar way.31 Next the priest said the Paternoster and Creed, in later times adding the Ave Maria, and invited the bystanders to join in these prayers. In the earlier versions of the liturgy, the baby was now a catechumen and the priest led it and its attendants into the church, but later versions added further actions. In these the priest made the sign of the cross on the infant’s right hand, declaring, ‘I give you the sign of our Lord Jesus Christ in your right hand, so that you may sign yourself and repel yourself from the adverse part [the powers of evil], remain in the Catholic faith, and have eternal life and live world without end. Amen.’ Finally he blessed the infant with the words, ‘The blessing of almighty God, the Father,

the Son, and the Holy Spirit descend upon you and remain always. Amen.’

The priest then introduced the baby into church: taking it by the right hand, saying its name, and adding ‘Go into the temple of God, so that you may have eternal life and live world without end. Amen.’

Inside the church the party gathered at the west end where the font was usually located. Here, in late-medieval versions of the service, the priest addressed those present in English and told them again to say a Paternoster, Ave Maria, and Creed. Then he gave a charge in English to the godparents. They should ensure that the parents kept the baby from fire, water, and other perils until the age of seven.32 One version of the charge specifies protection ‘from water, from fire, from horse foot, from hound’s tooth, and that [the child] lie not by the father and by the mother until [it] can say Ligge outer [“lie further away”]’: in other words defend itself from overlaying in bed.33

The godparents should teach the child, or see that it was taught, the three basic prayers and ensure that it was confirmed, one of the versions of the charge requiring confirmation to be done ‘in all goodly haste’. A further instruction told the godmother (or senior godmother) to see that the child’s mother brought back the baby’s christening cloth when she came to the church for her churching or purification. The godparents were reminded to wash their hands before they left the church, in case their hands received any of the consecrated chrism: the mixture of oil and balm that was to be used in the baptism. The priest then said a Latin litany, asking for the blessing of the Trinity on the baby and for the intercession of a list of saints by name. These were mostly well-known international figures, but the Sarum rite included Swithun, Birinus, and Edith, while York had Cuthbert, Oswald, and Wilfrid.

The litany was followed by the consecration of water for the font, if that was necessary. Canon law, from the early thirteenth century, assumed that consecrated water would always be kept in the font in case of a sudden need for baptism. The water was to be renewed every week.34 Accordingly fonts were required to have covers with locks so as to guard against the use of the water for magical purposes (Fig. 20, p. 104).35 However the records of baptism that we shall shortly encounter – the so-called ‘proofs of age’ – often state that new water was brought for the baptism of children of the nobility, gentry, and other wealthy people, which obliged the priest to bless it as part

of the service of baptism.36 The blessing was greater than that for ordinary holy water and involved the saying of prayers accompanied by ritual actions. Fresh water having been poured into the font, the priest divided it with his right hand by making the sign of the cross. He used that hand to dash water from the font on all four sides of it. He breathed three times on the water in the shape of a cross. He dropped wax from a burning candle into the water in a similar manner. Taking a vase of holy oil from the parish clerk, he used a spoon to drop a small quantity into the water, and similarly from a vase of chrism. Eventually a third action was added: the dropping of a mixture of oil and chrism, perhaps to symbolise the Holy Trinity.

The infant was now brought to the font by the godparents, at which point they were required to make the baptismal vows for the baby in a dialogue with the priest. What follows is given in Latin in the liturgical texts and one hostile witness claimed in 1546 that godparents were obliged to make the vows in that language even if they did not know their meaning.37 In contrast another writer of the same period recommended using English, and this may have been done by some clergy.38 Whatever the language, a series of questions was asked. ‘Do you renounce Satan?’ ‘I renounce him [Abrenuncio].’ ‘And all his works?’ ‘I renounce them.’ ‘And all his pomps?’

‘I renounce them.’ The baby being held by one of the godparents, the priest anointed it on the breast and between the shoulders with holy oil, saying, returning to Latin, ‘I anoint you with the oil of salvation in Jesus Christ our Lord, so that you may have eternal life and live, world without end. Amen.’ After a prayer, the godparents were required to state their belief on the baby’s behalf. ‘Do you believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth?’ ‘I believe in him [Credo].’ ‘Do you also believe in Jesus Christ his only son our Lord, [who was] born and suffered?’ ‘I believe in him.’ ‘Do you also believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life after death everlasting?’ ‘I believe in these.’ Finally the priest asked the baby, through the godparents, ‘What do you seek?’ They replied, ‘Baptism.’ He asked, ‘Do you wish to be baptised?’ They responded, ‘I do [Volo].’

The priest then took the baby, was reminded of its name, and baptised it naked in the font. Saying ‘[Name], I baptise you in the name of the Father

and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, he immersed the child beneath the water three times, one for each of the Trinity (Fig. 46, above). By the end of the Middle Ages the first immersion was done by holding the baby on its side to face the north with its head to the east. The second involved turning the baby on its other side to face the south, and the third was done face downwards. Then the senior godparent took the baby from the priest’s hands and ‘raised it from the font’. The priest prayed, in translation, ‘Almighty God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has regenerated you with water and the Holy Spirit, and who has given you remission of all your sins’ – anointing the baby with chrism on the top of the head in the shape of a

46. Baptism. A male baby is baptised by the priest, watched by three godparents while the parish clerk holds the priest’s manual.

cross – ‘he anoints you with the chrism of salvation in the same, his son, our Lord Jesus Christ, into eternal life.’

At this point a white cloth was wrapped around the baby and the priest said ‘Receive your vesture, white, holy, and immaculate, which you will continue to wear before the judgment seat of our Lord Jesus Christ, so that you may have eternal life and live world without end. Amen.’ This cloth became known as the ‘chrisom’ or ‘chrisom cloth’ and was holy because of its contact with the consecrated chrism.39 It had therefore to be returned to the church in due course and could be used at other baptisms but not for secular purposes. Finally a lighted candle was held in the infant’s hand and the priest said ‘Receive the burning and blameless torch. Keep your baptism, observe [your] commission so that when the Lord comes to the marriage [a reference to Christ’s parable of the Wise Virgins],40 you may hasten to him together with the saints in the court of heaven, and thereby have eternal life and live world without end. Amen.’ The candle, it seems, was not gifted to the baptismal family but remained in the church.41

The baptism was now complete, but it became common to add two gospel readings. One was from Mark, chapter 9: the miracle by which Jesus cured a boy possessed by a spirit.42 An accompanying rubric in the Sarum manual states that this ‘may be said over the infant if it is desired, which according to teachers is of greatest value for the falling sickness [epilepsy]’.43 The other gospel was the familiar In principio of the mass.44 An account of a baptism that took place at Essendine, Rutland, in 1336 tells us that the boy’s godmother took him up to the high altar for the reading of this gospel.45 In another such description, relating to Kirby Bellars, Leicestershire, in 1357, the godmother was said to have carried the baby to the high altar of the church ‘and all the other altars there, in accordance with custom’.46 The intention may have been to invoke the protection of the saints to whom the altars were dedicated.

This and other information about baptisms comes from the historical records known as ‘proofs of age’, which begin to survive in the late thirteenth century. Heirs of property who were under the wardship of guardians were sometimes obliged to prove that they had reached the age of majority and had the right to resume their property. The proof involved calling a jury of

twelve men to attest to the date of a birth: not through written records (although these were sometimes appealed to) but by what they claimed to remember of the date in question. It follows that memories of baptisms played a large part in their testimonies. There are two problems with this evidence. First it relates chiefly to the nobility and gentry not to the mass of the population. Secondly it was designed to produce the result that the heir required rather than to be historically accurate. Witnesses alleged an array of unusual events that were supposed to have happened on the day of the birth and these events were sometimes repeated in different cases, as if the evidence in one had been copied from another, perhaps by clerks in the royal chancery. It is unwise therefore to regard the evidence as strictly correct, but it had to seem likely to have happened and it fills in the context of the baptisms of wealthy people’s children beyond what we learn from the liturgical texts.47

Some important families caused their servants to decorate the church before the christening. When a child of Lord de Ros was baptised at Belvoir in Leicestershire in 1406, the interior was adorned with cloths of silk and gold, while the font was hung with a cloth of gold lettered in red. In the following year Lord Darcy’s staff decked the high altar of the Yorkshire chapel of Temple Hirst with ten cloths of gold and placed silken hangings around the font. The baptism of Margery Holes at Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1417 likewise involved four cloths of gold round the altar and ones of white silk at the font.48 Family status was further proclaimed by making the procession of midwife, baby, godparents, and others to church as impressive as possible. The daughter of David Strabolgie, earl of Athol, was taken to Gainsborough church in 1377 under a red canopy held on poles by four servants. At other baptisms swords were carried before important adults like the earl of Northumberland and even the baby son of the earl of Warwick.49 Servants would be present in the procession or in the church through being sent with materials for the service, and (no doubt in society as a whole, not just among the wealthy) there would be relatives and friends. On two occasions we are informed of ‘a great concourse’ of people.50 Another practice was to carry candles or torches (large candles) to the church for use in the service, and a custom is sometimes mentioned by which these went to church unlit and were lit on the way back to the parental house or castle.51 Altogether a

christening among the wealthy might require much preparation and outlay. Sir William Stonor of Stonor, Oxfordshire, drafted plans for the service himself when his first son John was baptised in 1482. Two of his family would lead the child, two servants carry the salt and basin, three bring the christening gifts, and various others act as bearers of torches.52

The candles or torches were used at the baptism to give it more light and splendour. If resources allowed, four or even six men would stand with them around the font.53 A further refinement was to warm the water for the baby’s comfort. This may have been poured in from cans, but at one christening a red-hot rod of iron was brought from a smithy for the purpose and at another in Somerset at Ashbrittle in 1368, a man had the duty of lighting a fire beneath the font, which seems a rather drastic remedy.54 When the baptism was over, the priest and the godparents washed their hands for the reason already explained, using a basin, ewer, and towel brought for the purpose by servants.55 After this, refreshments were handed round to the family, godparents, and guests. These consisted of bread and wine, and silver jugs and cups might be used to serve them. We hear of hot loaves, ‘miller’s cake’, and various kinds of wine: bastard, claret, malmsey, osey, and rumney. On one occasion so much was drunk, it was later recalled, that people could hardly walk out of the church.56

The profusion of a wealthy baptism might continue with the scattering of money among the servants or curious bystanders. One witness testified to gold and silver being thrown; another mentioned only pence, but claimed that he gathered 3s. 4d. worth.57 There was gift-giving too: sometimes at the church, sometimes perhaps at the house afterwards. In high-status circles, these included presents for the baby and for the mother. Gold and silver plate is often mentioned, and it was customary to tip the nurse who, in the case of noble and gentle families, would suckle the baby.58 The euphoria of the occasion might extend further too, as the father or other members of the family handed out gifts to retainers – gloves, bows and arrows, or a greyhound – so that the occasion would be remembered. And finally there would be a feast at home for godparents and guests, with the purchase of such dainties as rabbits (then still a delicacy) and swans.59 All this relates to the wealthy. For most people, while a christening may have been a cause for joy, there were not the resources to make it a very special occasion.

A question arose with baptism as with all the services that sanctified the life cycle. Were they free, or could fees be charged? In England, since at least the Council of Westminster in 1125, clergy were forbidden to take money for baptism, confession, communion, the visitation of the sick, or burial, to which marriage was added later.60 The third Lateran Council of 1179 confirmed this policy, ruling out payment for burials, weddings, ‘or any other sacrament’.61 However in practice, at all the events, there were or might be customary payments or offerings.62 We shall encounter these in relation to the churching of mothers after baptism, weddings, and funerals, all of which included attendance at a mass where an offering was expected. Baptism, being unpredictable, was not conventionally linked with the mass, although it may sometimes have been followed by one. In consequence, records of church fees do not normally include any that arose from christenings, but in at least one parish – Kirkby Malham, Yorkshire – a halfpenny was expected, and similar customs may have existed in other places.63

CHURCHING

There was a sequel to baptism in the rite known by the Church as purification or, in popular speech by the mid fifteenth century, as ‘churching’.64 This was the formal return of the mother to her parish church after giving birth. Jewish law regarded such a woman as ritually unclean and barred her from holy places for a period of thirty-three days for a male child and sixty-six for a female, during which her blood was believed to be purified. When it ended she was required to visit a priest, make an offering, and be pronounced cleansed.65 The Christian Church inherited the custom of the visit, no doubt influenced by the belief that the Virgin Mary had made it, but the concept of impurity was played down and the period of absence from church became a voluntary one, standardised at forty days irrespective of the sex of the child. When they were completed the woman returned to the parish church, was formally received again into it, and gave back the chrisom cloth.66 There seems to have been a belief in some places that sexual intercourse could only resume after this, and that if it happened earlier, the woman should immediately place an offering on the church altar.67

The Church was at pains, from early times, to avoid suggesting that women had no right to enter the church during the forty days, nor did it discourage them from doing so.68 A rubric in the Sarum manual based on the canon law notes that, ‘women after birth may enter the church whenever they wish. They bear no sin, nor is entry to the church to be denied them lest their pain seem to be converted to blame. If, however, they wish to abstain for a period out of devotion, this is not improper’.69 One thirteenth-century diocesan statute, from Salisbury (1228–56), ordered women who had given birth to go to church ‘with candles burning’ to offer the chrisom of their infants, and the Sarum manual, as we saw, told godmothers to ensure that the chrisom returned to the church.70 But the topic of churching is notably absent from Church legislation, which suggests that it was a well-established practice needing no policing. Rather than being penitential, it was a celebration of safe delivery and one accompanied by some festivity. Opposition to it seems to have developed only with the rise of Puritanism after the Reformation.71

The rite of churching appears in Latin in the later editions of the manuals of Sarum and York. It was normally followed by mass, as we shall see, so that it would take place in mid morning before the principal mass in the parish church began at 8.00 a.m. or 9.00. The Sarum version is prefixed by the title, ‘An order for the purification of a woman after birth before the door of the church’. The woman, then, waited outside the church door: in the porch if one existed. By the sixteenth century it was customary for her to wear a veil, probably meaning a special kind of headdress, and to be accompanied by two matrons as well as her midwife.72 She carried a lighted candle, probably as a reference to the feast of Candlemas: the Virgin Mary’s purification. The priest and any other ministers recited Psalms 121 (‘I will look up to the hills’, affirming God’s protection) and 128 (‘Blessed are those who fear the Lord’, conveying his blessing of childbirth). The Paternoster followed, in which those present could have joined, with some versicles and responses between the clergy, after which the woman was aspersed with holy water and the priest led her into church by her right hand, saying in Latin, ‘Enter the temple of God so that you may have eternal life and live world without end. Amen.’73

The Sarum manual provides no further information but the York version continues to the effect that the woman should go to the place ‘where she

ought to sit’ until after mass. It seems likely that churching was always followed by attendance at mass, and this was still envisaged in the Reformation Books of Common Prayer. In certain churches there was a special ‘childwife’s pew’ for the woman to sit in.74 The York text is not specific about her part in the mass, but one may posit that she went up to the high altar at the offertory and handed over her chrisom. The candle was presented too, either to the priest or (in at least one Kentish church) to the image of the Virgin Mary,75 and an offering of 1d. or 2d. by the woman was customary, with halfpennies from her supporters. The wealthy might give more: church accounts sometimes record sums of several shillings, but the usual amount came to no more than a few pence.76 At the end of the mass, the York text brought the woman back to the altar where she knelt and received absolution from the priest. Some churches kept an ornamented cloth for churchings, possibly as a headdress or for kneeling on.77 When the holy bread had been blessed, she was the first to receive it.78

A little light is shed on the context of the rite from other sources. For a mother with status, it might be an occasion to wear a new outfit. Margery, apparently the mistress of the London merchant George Cely, sent him a message in 1482 to have ‘raiment – as a gown and other things – against her churching, as she had the other time’.79 The mother came to church with women friends such as the matrons already mentioned, who were very likely her neighbours, and (if she was of rank) no doubt with female servants.80 Margery Kempe mentions that she went to watch on more than one occasion.81 The predominance of women does not rule out the presence of men: a male servant appears in one account, and no pronouncement is known prohibiting a husband from coming unless custom forbade it.82 If resources permitted, there was a feast afterwards and the guests then included both women and men.83 Mentions are made of wine and lambs being bought by those of sufficient wealth to do so, and of music being performed.84 In an unusual intervention, more typical of the Reformation than the Middle Ages, the mayor of Chester in 1539–40 tried to limit the feasting in the woman’s house to her immediate family and her midwife, but there is no reason to think that such a restriction was common.85

CONFIRMATION AND COMING OF AGE

Some societies have religious rites to affirm the growing up of children or to mark their coming of age. The medieval Church had three that call for notice in this respect. Two of them related to functions within the Church. A boy could be tonsured at the age of seven: the accepted age at which infancy turned into boyhood. Some schoolboys and choristers received the tonsure, the shaving of the top of the head, making them technically ‘clerks’ under the jurisdiction of the Church. The seven-year-old schoolboy in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ is referred to as a ‘clergeon’ or little clerk, although some such tonsurings may have been done at later ages.86 Parish clerks would have been expected to have at least a similar status until about the early fifteenth century.87 At fourteen, the age of puberty for boys, a youth could be ordained as an acolyte – one of the minor levels of ordination, although by the fifteenth century this was received chiefly by intending clergy in their mid twenties, as part of the process of becoming priests. Neither tonsuring nor ordination as acolyte committed one to a life as a cleric, and each could be followed by lay careers and marriage afterwards. But both ceremonies were restricted to fairly modest numbers of the male sex alone.

The third, and by far the most common, rite received by children was confirmation: being ‘bishoped’, as it was often known. In England, from the Reformation onwards, its conferment was made conditional on a child understanding and mastering the basic Christian doctrines laid out in the catechism, implying that the rite should not be administered before the age of seven at the earliest.88 In medieval times, by contrast, there was usually no link with age.89 This was because confirmation evolved from the rite of baptism. Originally, after the washing with water, the presiding cleric laid his hands on the baptised person’s head and anointed the forehead with chrism. Later, by about the year ad 400, the service fell into two parts. Baptism was made the responsibility of priests (including the application of oil and chrism) but a further anointing with chrism was done separately by the bishop as the senior cleric of the neighbourhood, thereby becoming a sacrament of itself.90 Theologically confirmation reinforced the gift of the Holy Spirit given in baptism and gave one further spiritual grace. Legally it

represented the Church’s official validation of one’s Christian status. Socially the ceremony allowed bishops to meet the members of their flocks individually, which was usually the only time that they did.

When Christianity was re-established in England after 597, it is likely that baptism and confirmation often happened together. The early AngloSaxon bishops were missionaries. They travelled with an entourage of clergy who would often have baptised adults, after which the bishop immediately confirmed them. Adults would have been likely to bring children with them, for the same purpose. Anglo-Saxon pontificals, the service books of bishops, assumed that baptism and confirmation would be done at the same time. They provided for the immediate imposition of chrism on a baptised infant, if the bishop should be present. No minimum age for confirmation was officially laid down before the Reformation. Indeed images of the rite in the later Middle Ages show a bishop confirming a baby, as do images of priests conducting baptism (Fig 47, p. 322). But by the twelfth century, if not much earlier, the relative availability of priests and bishops diverged. Thanks to the growth of the parochial system, there were priests close to most communities, whereas England never acquired more than seventeen bishops. Even these were often absent from their dioceses in the employment of the king, or attending his court and Parliament. By about 1200, the Church authorities were becoming aware that many people were not receiving confirmation, leading to attempts to remedy the situation.

Accordingly bishops began to lay down rules on the subject during the thirteenth century. In the dioceses of Chichester and Worcester, baptised children were ordered to be confirmed within one year. In Exeter, Wells, and Winchester three years were laid down, and in Durham and Salisbury five.91 Diocesan statutes ordered negligent parents to be punished by fasting or exclusion from church, but this did not solve the problem. In 1213–14 the bishop of Salisbury envisaged children still unconfirmed at puberty, and in about 1322 the statutes attributed to Archbishop Reynolds of Canterbury could imagine ‘adults’ attending the rite, which amounted to the same thing.92

Meanwhile in 1281 the Council of Lambeth, representing the whole province of Canterbury, complained that ‘innumerable’ people grew old in evil ways without becoming confirmed.93 Bishops repeated their threats for

non-compliance. Parents would be denied entry to the church or be made to fast for neglecting the duty, and adults too if they failed to do it themselves.94

It followed that confirmation took place not at a particular age but when there was either some kind of ecclesiastical or social pressure (perhaps from clergy or godparents), or an opportunity to gain access to a bishop. People in London, whose bishop was often at hand, or those who lived near the manor houses where bishops stayed from time to time, may have had a good record in getting confirmed. Those in more distant places must have found it difficult. Some thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century bishops were active in touring their dioceses but they did not go everywhere, and others may have been as neglectful as Roger Longespee of Coventry and Lichfield, twice censured by the archbishop of Canterbury in 1281–2 for failing to confirm.95 It may have been easier to reach a bishop after the mid fourteenth century when they began to employ assistants or ‘suffragans’ to do the task on their behalf. Bishop Lacy of Exeter, for example, who was troubled by poor health, appointed suffragans to carry out confirmations in 1429, 1438, 1442, 1447, 1448, and 1454.96 Yet even supposing that such men worked methodically, it was still possible that years would pass before they met all the children and adolescents who needed the rite.

One writer in the fourteenth century approved the delay. William of Pagula in his treatise for the clergy, Oculus Sacerdotis, suggested that candidates for confirmation,

ought by right to be . . . of perfect age, i.e. twelve or fourteen years, and they should be warned to make their confession first, so that, being clean, they may be worthy to receive this gift of special grace. This is the case, except for the sick and those in danger of death. It is better for their safety that they be confirmed before the age of adulthood.97

William’s suggestion is a rare example of someone trying to make confirmation a rite of passage from childhood to adolescence or adulthood. But it had a weakness: how could a sick child be brought to a bishop? William’s successor John de Burgh, whose Pupilla Oculi circulated more widely as a work of advice to the clergy, recommended that children should be confirmed before they were adults because they would have more glory in heaven if they died.

He specified confession only for those who were twelve or fourteen.98 John Mirk in his Instructions for Parish Priests said that confirmation should happen within five years of baptism, and Lyndwood recommended it for ‘small children’ as soon as the bishop came ‘nearby’, explaining this as ‘within seven miles, as the common usage is’.99

Attending confirmation, once a bishop became accessible, involved a little preparation. As well as any parents who came with the child, it was necessary to enlist a sponsor: an adult of the same sex as the child who was not a parent, step-parent, or godparent. The choice mattered to the extent that sponsorship, like godparenting, set up a spiritual relationship with the child that might affect a subsequent marriage. Adults, as mentioned, should have made their confession beforehand, and each person to be confirmed had to bring a linen bandage. All must come having fasted.100 The rite might take place in a church, which had the advantage of being under shelter, but it could be done in the open air. The Life of St Hugh of Lincoln (d.1200) mentions a bishop who confirmed on horseback while he was travelling, with his mounted retainers around him and the children at risk from the horses’ hooves. Hugh, in contrast, always dismounted to do so, even when he was elderly.101 There may have been some disorder at crowded confirmations and parents had to be told not to bring their children more than once, presumably through a belief that the more often the better!102

The rite was simple. The bishop and his assistants exchanged some versicles and responses, after which he prayed to God to infuse his seven-fold Holy Spirit into the candidates. He asked the name of each person and it was permissible to change one’s baptismal name at this point, although the opportunity seems to have been taken very rarely.103 He then anointed his thumb with chrism and made a cross on the candidate’s forehead, saying in Latin,

I sign you [Name] with the sign of the cross and confirm you with the chrism of salvation. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

As soon as the chrism had been applied, the bandage was tied round the forehead to keep it in place. When everyone had been anointed, there was a

blessing and a prayer for them all.104 Those confirmed had to keep on the bandage, at least around the neck, until they got home, after which they were required to meet their priest in the parish church within an interval fixed variously at three or eight days. The priest then washed the forehead into the font, to remove any possible chrism, and the bandage was undone and burnt.105

Confirmation, then, was not necessarily a rite that had any relationship to growing up and coming of age. Nor originally was communion. In the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods, communion was given to children. Eleventh- and twelfth-century liturgical texts provided for bishops or priests to give it to newly baptised infants, saying in Latin ‘The body of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in eternal life’.106 This practice changed during the twelfth century, owing to the growth of belief in the Real Presence in the bread and wine which required both substances to be treated with great respect. The fear that adults might drop, spill, or even regurgitate the elements was just as great or greater where children were concerned, and there was a growing conviction among Church leaders that taking communion, like confession and marriage, required mature understanding. Such understanding was believed to come fully to human beings only at puberty, which gave them both the mental power and the physical capability to be virtuous or to sin.

The English theologian Robert Pulleyn (d.1146) still recommended communion for a baptised infant by the priest dipping his finger into the chalice and putting it into the child’s mouth. He censured a new procedure by which children were given unconsecrated wine at communion: a practice that soon spread to adults as well.107 But his views did not prevail. In 1215, when the Fourth Lateran Council laid down that all should confess and receive communion at least once a year, it added the rider that they must have ‘reached the age of discernment’.108 This implied the exclusion of those under the age of puberty. A belief grew up too that confirmation should precede communion. In 1281 the Council of Lambeth ordered that no one should receive communion unless confirmed, with the exception of those who might have been reasonably impeded from being confirmed or were at the point of death.109 William of Pagula included this instruction in his Oculus Sacerdotis, 110 and John de Burgh gave similar advice in the Pupilla Oculi. John believed that communion should normally follow confirmation

and that it should not be given to children and the insane because of ‘defect of judgment or reason’. On the other hand he was willing that ‘children, when they are near to adulthood, that is to say when they are ten or eleven and when signs of discretion and reverence towards the sacrament appear in them, may receive communion’.111 But textbooks are one thing, real life another. In remote areas it may have been impossible to enforce the restriction of confirmation before communion on teenagers, and there may have been children of high status who wished, or whose parents wished them, to receive communion, a desire to which the clergy had to defer.

47. A bishop confirms a baby boy, brought by his male sponsor, with holy chrism held by a clerk. A female sponsor waits her turn with a baby girl.

From about 1215, then, there was a more significant boundary between childhood and adulthood, as far as the Church was concerned. Adults were required to go to confession, receive communion, attend church, pay church dues, and observe Sundays, holy days, and fasting days. Puberty was recognised as the time at which these duties began, with some exceptions. Mirk thought that fasting should commence at fourteen, whereas Andrew Chertsey in 1502 deferred the age till twenty-one.112 Certain bishops expected adolescents to make monetary offerings like adults, although they fixed the rates at lower levels, while York diocese required them to do so only after the age of eighteen.113 But no Church ceremony developed to mark the transition to adolescence or adulthood.114 Confirmation, as we have seen, did not have that function. The likelihood is that at puberty, or perhaps before in certain cases following John de Burgh’s view of age, a girl or boy, their parents, godparents, or parish priest, suggested that they should attend the Lenten confessions. They would then participate in the services of Holy Week and Easter Day, including the taking of their ‘rights’ of communion.115 This made them in one sense adults, but they were not singled out as special in this process. They came of age, in the Church’s terms, merely by joining in the regular observances of their elders. If any further initiation took place, it may have happened when they joined the maidens or the young men of the parish – youths are notoriously fond of initiations – but no evidence about this seems to be known.

MARRIAGE

Marriage was something experienced by most adults as participants and by virtually everyone as an onlooker.116 It can be, and was, regarded as both a goal and a transition. A young adult, an adolescent, and even a child could look forward to it: it appears as a topic in the exercises written by boys in schools.117 It was attractive to men and women as a means of becoming independent or as a sign that one had done so. It required one to possess sufficient wealth to set up a household: from inheritance, after serving an apprenticeship, or through an employer allowing one to live separately rather than under his or her roof. One moved from the home of one’s parents or the

employer to one’s own home. Such a move had its counterpart in the Church. One ceased to be one of the maidens or young men of the parish, and joined the parish wives or a parish guild.118 The new householder – the husband or his widow after his death – became fully liable to pay the church’s offerings and tithes and to undertake church duties such as churchwarden.

Not everyone married, of course. Studies of the institution in the early modern period, when statistics may be compiled, suggest that the numbers who failed to do so varied markedly from time to time and reached as high as 16 per cent of adults in the 1680s, although the figures were generally lower.119 Until the Reformation some of these were clergy or nuns, while others spent their lives through choice or necessity as servants or as helpers of their parents. Marriages took place at every age. Even children could marry but, as we shall see, only provisionally. The aristocracy sometimes married definitively at or soon after puberty, like Mary Bohun and Henry of Bolingbroke (Henry IV) when they were about eleven and fourteen respectively. She bore a child within a year of this. Most people married for the first time when they were older: the wealthier often in their late teens (Margery Kempe was about twenty) and the mass of the population even later. Analysis of marriages in the mid sixteenth century suggests that the mean age for men was then twenty-nine, later falling by a year, and for women twenty-six.120 In addition there were many re-marriages of widowers or widows: perhaps as many as 30 per cent of weddings at that time.121

Most medieval marriages were not a matter for the partners alone. A marriage, as we shall see, required only the consent of both parties and could be sealed by a man and a woman themselves without any supervision. But in practice those seeking marriage needed to have their plans approved. The consent of parents was important both for emotional reasons and for economic ones.122 Among the wealthier classes the husband’s income or property and any dowry of money or property that the wife might bring were essential matters to consider. The husband had to assure the wife of a dower: an endowment to sustain her if he died. A father was recognised at a wedding as having the right to give his daughter to her groom. Other people were bound by law to get approval to marry. Some were the fatherless among the propertied classes who lay in wardship under a guardian. Others were in the state of

serfdom, where a serf father was bound to pay his lord a fine called ‘merchet’ for permission to marry his daughter. Finally the Church had to be considered, because the laws of marriage were laws that it made and administered in its courts. Its stress on marriage in church underpinned by social convention to the same effect is likely to have caused most marriages to take place there by the thirteenth century, although the practice was never universal.

As the Church established its presence in England, it set out to exercise an influence over marriage. It regarded the institution as a divine one: inaugurated by God for Adam and Eve at the creation of mankind, and affirmed by the presence and miracle of Jesus at the wedding at Cana.123 It included marriage among the seven major sacraments, because a marriage ought to accord with the law of the Church and be solemnised by the Church in a religious service.124 The Church inherited from Hebrew and Roman traditions ideas of who might marry whom and how married life should be led. By the twelfth century it was developing a legal system for adjudicating marriages, and it was this system – not one organised by the crown – that regulated the institution for the rest of the Middle Ages. At the same time, marriage was older than the Church. It was not arranged by the Church but by the bride and groom and their families; the Church became involved only when the arrangement was made. The central action of a marriage service, unlike the other sacraments, came from the participants themselves in making their vows, rather than from the Church which could only bless and affirm the fact.

The Church was effective in laying down rules about who could marry and there were detailed regulations on the matter.125 By the twelfth century it insisted that a definitive marriage should be entered into by choice and with understanding. This meant that the parties must have reached the age of puberty, twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, when full understanding was believed to begin as well as the ability to consummate a marriage physically. Child marriages took place, chiefly among wealthy propertied families, but they were provisional until the parties reached puberty and agreed to acknowledge them. In terms of blood ties, the Church, from the ninth to the twelfth century, prohibited marriage within seven degrees of kinship, counting from each partner back to a common ancestor.126 This meant in effect that no one could marry anyone with whom there was any memory of a blood

relationship. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 reduced the number of degrees to four.127 This still excluded unions between first, second, and third cousins, although in practice only those of first cousins were absolutely forbidden. Second and third cousins able to afford the cost could gain a papal dispensation to marry or to regularise a marriage that they had contracted in ignorance of the restrictions.128 But kinship was not the only issue. Affinity mattered as well, ruling out a marriage to a close relative of a former spouse, and there was the concept of spiritual kinship, forbidding marriage with the children of one’s godparents or sponsor at confirmation.129

The Church had less success in controlling when and where a marriage should take place. At first, after the Norman Conquest, an effort was made to enforce the holding of marriages under priestly supervision. The Council of Winchester in 1076 forbade any man to give his daughter or female relative in marriage without the blessing of a priest, and declared that such a marriage was not legitimate and would be regarded as fornication.130 Later Church legislation was not so stringent, but councils and bishops continued to condemn what they called ‘clandestine marriages’ and urged that weddings should take place only at a church: in public and under clerical direction.131 They censured marriages made ‘with laughter and jest’ in taverns or at public eatings and drinkings: happenings that are not improbable. A marriage was made at a fair in 1375 although its status was later disputed.132 No one should give a ring made of a rush or of any other ‘vile or precious material’ in order to fornicate.133 The rush ring was a real folk custom, mentioned in a rhyme found in a fifteenth-century grammatical miscellany:

O Robin, I will marry you

Underneath a woodland bough, With a ring made of a rush, Because that will be good enough.134

The Church also condemned what it called practices of sorcery and evil-doing at marriages, presumably ones made away from church.135 These censures partly reflected its wish to gather all the great events of life beneath its roof, but they embodied a practical motive as well: to ensure that marriages were

lawfully made in public and safeguarded from subsequent challenge. Nevertheless the Church condemned, rather than prohibited, marriages made away from churches and, as we shall see, even those at church took place outside the door, not inside. A marriage made privately by two people without witnesses was regarded as definitive even if it was not consummated physically and most certainly if it was.136 This fact was understood among the laity and enabled lovers to marry despite the opposition of their families.137

Such flexibility meant that marriages could be and were contested. One party might allege that no valid contract had been made or that a previous contract existed. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the Church established a system of courts to deal with such issues. To enable their work, it distinguished two kinds of contract that a couple might make. One was a promise to marry in the future, a betrothal, technically known as using words of the future (verba de futuro). The other was a promise to marry now with words of the present (verba de presenti) such as ‘I take you as my husband or wife here and now’. The first of these was not a valid marriage unless it was subsequently consummated. The second was valid if the fact could be proved, and might be set aside only if one of the partners was not at liberty to have made it, refused to consummate it sexually, or proved unable to do so.

The problems resulting from marriage disputes help explain why the Church discouraged informal contracts and tried to bring them under its own supervision. Such supervision ensured that the parties were free to marry and did so in public before witnesses, so that the validity of the marriage could not be contested. In 1200 the Council of Westminster convened by Archbishop Hubert Walter laid down that no marriage might take place without three public announcements of the fact in church.138 This principle was endorsed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.139 The latter did not specify the number of times, but thirteenth-century bishops in England continued to insist on three. A refinement came to be added that the announcements, eventually called ‘banns’ (meaning ‘proclamations’), should be made in church at intervals, usually of a week, on Sundays or major festivals.140 At first, if one of the partners was not known locally, there was an obligation for that person to produce a letter from his or her own bishop or archdeacon as to the legitimacy of the marriage.141 Later the

practice developed for the banns to be read in the parishes of both partners, after which a letter was sent to the parish priest who was to conduct the marriage by his counterpart in the other place. A form for a letter of this kind was included in some editions of the Sarum manual.142

For the marriage banns to be effective, they needed to be ‘spurred’ or announced in the vernacular, most appropriately during the principal mass on Sunday. The following form in English is found in a fifteenth-century manual belonging to the church of St Aldate Gloucester:

I ask the banns of marriage between [Name] and [Name]. If any man or woman can say or put any letting [impediment] of sibrede [kinship] wherefore they may not, nor ought not, to come together by law of Holy Church, do us to wit [know].143

A religious miscellany of the same period has this:

[Name] of [Place] has spoken with [Name] of [Place] to have her to his wife to right live in form of Holy Church. If any man know any letting why they may not come together, say now or never, on pain of cursing.144

Banns could be contested, and sometimes were. If the objection was serious, the matter would be remitted to the Church courts for a decision, and the court would instruct the priest of the church to proceed or not, as appropriate.145

WEDDINGS

Once the banns had been called, the wedding could take place. This was typically held, it seems, in the bride’s church as has been the later tradition.146 There were three further requirements. First the chosen place must be a parish church or parochial chapel-of-ease. A wedding in a private chapel required a special licence from the bishop.147 Next the appointed day must be within the seasons permitted for marriage. Church weddings were not allowed during the three penitential periods of the year, and the clergy had a Latin couplet to remind themselves of this, in translation,

From Advent, Septuagesima, and the Rogations – no weddings

Till the octaves of Epiphany, Easter, and Pentecost.148

The first prohibited season covered Advent, beginning on Advent Sunday but extending over Christmas as far as the octave of Epiphany on 13 January. The second spanned the prelude to Lent, Lent itself, and Easter week: from Septuagesima Sunday until the Sunday after Easter Day (Low Sunday) inclusive. The third included the seasons of Rogationtide and Pentecost, beginning with Rogation Week and lasting until Trinity Sunday a week after Pentecost. Some clergy permitted marriages on Low Sunday itself, but Lyndwood thought this illegal.149 These prohibitions arose from the assumption that marriage would be followed by sexual activity, and the belief that this was improper in such holy seasons. Indeed even married Christians were advised to abstain from sex at these times as well as on the Ember Days.150

The third requirement, when the day had been chosen, was for the marriage to take place in the morning. This was necessary because it was followed by a mass, which could only be celebrated from dawn until about 10.00 a.m. We hear anecdotally of marriages from very early in the morning until about 10.00 a.m. or 11.00, but the commonest time must have been before a church’s principal mass at about 8.00 a.m. or 9.00.151 Ceremonies later in the day were highly irregular and subject to disciplinary action.152 It is likely that the church was prepared and decorated for the occasion as is the case today. We are told of fresh rushes being strewn on the floor, while on the analogy of christenings and funerals, special hangings may have been brought in and extra lights lit to give a festive atmosphere.153 The Italian scholar Polydore Vergil, who lived in England in the early sixteenth century, described the coming of the bride to the church with ‘two young boys dressed like angels’.154 Did he mean that two boy acolytes wearing white albs would be sent to greet her, perhaps at the churchyard gate?

One of the earliest accounts of a marriage service in England relates to that of a man and woman of gentry rank at Thremhall Priory, Essex, in about 1200. It shows that many of the elements of later weddings were already in being. This one took place at the west door of the priory, early in the morning, and was conducted by the prior. He asked those present if there was any

impediment to the marriage, and was told that there was not. The groom placed a ring on the bride’s hands and said words of espousal. He also laid a penny on the prior’s book as a sign of the financial support he would give her. The marriage was followed by a ‘nuptial’ or wedding mass at which the couple went to the high altar of the priory where they prayed while two canons held a pall or veil over them.155 More comprehensive directions for the marriage service survive in manuscripts of the Sarum missal from the mid thirteenth century and in late-medieval versions of the manual, of which the York version gives more attention to the vernacular, in other words English, whereas Sarum conveys most of the material in Latin.156 The account that follows is based on the fuller, late-medieval sources.

A marriage service falls into two parts: a public exchange of vows followed by the Church’s blessing on the union. The medieval rite began outside the church door, with the bride and groom standing ‘before God, the priest, and the people’, the man usually placed on the right hand side of the woman.157 Guillaume Durand, writing in France in the 1290s, talks of women being veiled when married and this is likely in England since it became a longstanding custom, but references to the fact are elusive.158 All present were fasting as were all the guests, since the wedding was to conclude with a mass. Both partners were also expected to have been to confession: one bridegroom got into trouble in 1491 for failing to do so.159 The service began with an explanation by the priest in English, given in York as follows:

Lo, brethren, we are come here before God and his angels and all his saints, in the face and presence of our mother Holy Church for to couple and to knit these two bodies together, that is to say of this man and of this woman, that they be from this time forth but one body and two souls in the faith and law of God and Holy Church, for to deserve everlasting life, whatsoever that they have done here before.160

The priest explained that the banns had been called, but asked in the vernacular if anyone could say anything against the wedding. He then enquired of the couple if they knew of any impediment.

Next the priest questioned them, ‘with all listening’, as to whether they were willing to marry, with the responsibilities that this incurred. Again he spoke in English. To the man,

Wilt thou have this woman to thy wife and love her [one manuscript adds ‘and worship her’] and keep her, in sickness and in health, and in all other degrees be to her as a husband should be to his wife, and all other forsake for her, and hold thee only to her to thy life’s end?

The man answered, ‘I will’. The priest then asked the woman, with slightly different words,

Wilt thou have this man to thy husband, and to be buxom [obedient] to him, serve him and keep him, in sickness and in health, and in all other degrees be unto him as a wife should be to her husband, and all other to forsake for him, and hold thee only to him to thy life’s end?

She too replied, ‘I will’. Then the priest said ‘Who shall give this woman?’ or similar words.161 The York and Sarum rubrics required the woman to be given by her father or a ‘friend’, meaning a family relative. If the bride was unmarried, her hand was uncovered; if she was a widow at a second marriage, her hand was covered. The bridegroom took her right hand with his right hand, and gave his ‘troth’ or vow of marriage using verba de presenti, ‘I marry you now’, following the instructions of the priest (Fig. 48, p. 334).

The familiar marriage vows were already in being, at least in part, by the time of the marriage at Thremhall Priory in about 1200. The record in this case, like the examples that follow, is in Latin, so that the words presented here are modern translations taking into account what is known of the latemedieval forms in English. The man at Thremhall said,

With this ring I thee wed, and with my body I thee worship.

In another marriage of a similar date the man’s words included the phrase ‘for as long as I live’.162 Records of vows in the diocese of York in the early fourteenth century include a man saying in 1326,

Here I take thee, Elizabeth, as my faithful conjoined wife, to hold and to have until my life’s end, and thereto I give thee my faith [fidem].

The woman replied,

And I take thee, Thomas, as my faithful married husband, to hold and to have until my life’s end, and thereto I give thee my faith.163

A man in 1334 said,

Here I give thee my faith to have you as my wife, if Holy Church it will allow.164

In this case the influence of the Church can be seen, reflecting its wish to regulate weddings according to its laws. In a further example, in 1339, a woman said,

Here I take thee John, son of John of Bristol, as my husband, to have and to hold, for better and worse, for fairer and fouler, until my life’s end, and hereto I give thee my faith.165

The full text of the vows in English is preserved in late-medieval manuscripts and printed copies of the York and Sarum manuals. In York, the man said,

Here I take thee [Name], to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, at bed and at board, for fairer for fouler, for better for worse, in sickness and in health, till death us depart, and thereto I plight thee my troth.

The bride’s promises are identical in the York manual. Slightly different are the man’s vows in a manual of the church of St Aldate Gloucester:

I [Name] take thee [Name] to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, for fairer for fouler, in sickness and in health, till death us depart, if Holy Church it will ordain, and thereto I plight thee my troth.166

Further variations are found in the common printed Sarum manuals of the end of the Middle Ages. In these the man’s vow omits ‘Here’ at the start – the definitive statement so typical of the York vows, as well as the phrase ‘for fairer for fouler’:

I [Name] take thee [Name] to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death us depart, if Holy Church it will ordain, and thereto I plight thee my troth.

The woman’s vow in the Sarum manual differs more from the man’s, and she alone is required to promise her compliance ‘in bed and at board’:

I [Name] take thee [Name] to my wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be bonair [courteous] and buxom [obedient] in bed and at board, till death us depart, if Holy Church it will ordain, and thereto I plight thee my troth.167

In yet another version, that of Hereford Cathedral, the man’s vow is similar to that of Sarum but the woman’s is exactly the same as the man’s, as it is in the York manual, so that there was no uniform custom of giving the woman different words to say.168

When the vows had been made, the groom laid money – ideally gold or silver – with the ring on a plate or book as a token of the wealth he would give to his wife. In one manual the priest explained the significance of this to the groom in English:

Lo! this gold and this silver is laid down in signifying that the woman shall have her dower of thy goods if she abide after thy decease.169

The priest blessed the ring, if it had not already been blessed. He sprinkled holy water on the ring, and put it into the groom’s left hand. The groom was instructed to hold it with the first three fingers of his right hand, and he then took the right hand of the bride, where the ring would be placed. The bride’s hand was changed to the left in 1549.170 The groom used the ring to touch the bride’s thumb while he said (according to the Sarum manual), or said repeating the words of the priest (in York), the invocation of the Trinity in Latin. Beginning In nomine Patris, he touched her thumb, with et Filii, her forefinger, with et Spiritus Sancti her middle finger, and with Amen her ring finger, at which point he put the ring on that finger. The ring finger – the

48. Marriage in church. A couple make their vows before a priest and his clerk, watched by members of their families.

fourth finger – was known as the medicus in Latin or ‘leech-finger’ in English, because there was believed to be a vein running from it to the heart.171 The bridegroom then followed the priest by saying, in York,

With this ring I thee wed, and with this gold and silver I thee honour, and with this gift I thee endow.

The Sarum rite adds to the words ‘gold and silver’ ‘and with my body I thee worship and with all my worldly goods I thee endow’. It also differs in directing the man to put on the ring after the words above.172

The giving of the ring was followed by Latin prayers and blessings, except in the case of second or third marriages after the deaths of spouses. The Church looked coldly on these and termed them ‘bigamy’. It did not forbid them, but it withheld the special sacramental blessing given at the wedding mass if the man and woman were both re-marrying, although a virgin espousing a widower was allowed to receive it.173 Next the priest led the bridal couple into the church, through the chancel screen, and up to the east end of the chancel where the couple prostrated themselves before the high altar. Where the rest of the congregation went is not mentioned, but doubtless to their usual places with, perhaps, the most exalted being in the chancel as well. Further prayers and blessings were said, after which the couple were raised up and placed on the south side of the presbytery between the altar and the choir stalls, presumably facing the altar. This time the woman stood on the right hand side of the man. Mass was then celebrated.

After the Sanctus in the mass, the couple again prostrated themselves before the high altar, and a cloth was held over, or placed on, their heads by two clerks (York) or four (Sarum). This cloth was called in Latin the ‘pall’ (palla) or the ‘veil’ (velamen) and in English the ‘care-cloth’, a term of uncertain origin.174 Then, when the bread and wine had been consecrated, the pall was taken away, the couple rose, and the priest gave the pax to the groom to kiss – in effect recognising the couple as the most important people in church. The groom gave it to the bride, whom he was directed to kiss by mouth – but her alone, after which she presumably kissed the pax which was then taken round by the clerk to the congregation in the usual way. The

bridal couple did not receive communion, but when mass was over and there was the usual blessing of bread, ordinary bread and wine ‘or something else that is drinkable’ (probably ale) were blessed and consumed by the couple as ‘sops’, the bread being soaked in the wine.175 Vergil says that the bride drank first, then the groom, and lastly the guests.176

Weddings, then as now, could be expensive occasions. If money was forthcoming, special clothes would be made, especially for the bride. One source imagines a rich widow spending £5 on her attire; another talks of the purchase of gowns, girdles, and headdresses.177 The poor were challenged by the costs. In Exeter diocese each parish church was told to acquire a bridal veil for lending out when necessary, and some churches elsewhere kept bridal jewels.178 Piers Plowman urged wealthy people to ‘marry maidens’, which may have meant providing them with dowries or with the costs of a wedding.179 A gentleman of Newcastle-on-Tyne left money in 1540 to ten poor maidens ‘towards their dinners in the days of their marriages’.180 One motive for ‘clandestine’ marriages may have been the inability of the poor to pay for the costs involved in a public event. Despite the prohibition that has been mentioned, on charging for any sacrament including marriage, a small fee was often taken for reading the banns or holding the wedding, and it became customary to make offerings at the mass that followed.181 In a typical parish the totals might vary from a few pence to a few shillings, most of which went to the rector or vicar with a gratuity for the parish clerk.182 Another expense, this time for the guests, was for the bride to receive wedding presents at the church door after the service.183

The cost of weddings reflected their importance as social occasions. Evidence about two in Yorkshire in the fourteenth century spoke of over a hundred people at each.184 In another case we hear of the presence of the bride’s father, three uncles, two clergy, and many other people.185 Very likely both bride and groom brought their own friends: the ‘bridemaids’ and ‘bridemen’ who occur in records after the Reformation.186 After the wedding there would be a procession to the house where the celebration took place: the ‘bridal’ or ‘bride-ale’ as it was termed, or the ‘feast’ as it is called in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ and ‘Merchant’s Tale’. Vergil described how ‘two married men accompany [the bride] home while a third one precedes her

carrying in his hands a vase of gold or silver’. This looks like a wealthy wedding, perhaps displaying a wedding present. He went on to relate that ‘the bride is carried about, especially in the countryside, with a crown of wheat on her head. At times she carries such a crown in her hands, and when she enters the house grain is thrown on her head for good luck.’187

The ‘Merchant’s Tale’ depicts the bride and groom at the feast, sitting on a dais ‘with other worthy folk’, enjoying food and music.188 The food would have been all the more welcome after the fasting required before mass. A school exercise of the 1490s imagined the feast at a wedding of status as starting with frumenty (i.e. fruit, milk, and cereal), followed by goose, pork, capon, and swan.189 This is confirmed by a late-medieval book of recipes, which suggests a five-course bridal meal with these and other such ingredients.190 A ‘bridecake’ might also make its appearance on such an occasion.191 The venue of the feast doubtless varied according to wealth: from a manor or merchant’s house to the church house hired for the occasion, or even to an alehouse. Then, in the marriage liturgies, there was a final rubric to the effect that at night, when the bride and groom came to bed, the priest should visit them to bless their chamber, the marriage bed, and the two of them. ‘This having been done’, says the rubric, ‘he asperses them with holy water [York adds that he censes them with incense], and so he withdraws and leaves them in peace’.192

SICKNESS AND DEATH

The Church provided a series of rites for sickness, death, and burial. Those up to the point of death took place in the home, not in church. Clergy must frequently have visited the sick in all degrees of their maladies, and the rite known as ‘the Visitation of the Sick’ contained material that could be used to bless and comfort those with lesser disorders. If the sick were seriously ill, on the other hand, they would be offered the sacrament of anointing or ‘extreme unction’, along with communion. This required the priest not only to vest himself but to go with some ceremony: riding or walking in the company of his clerk at least, with the ringing of a hand-bell to announce the passing of Christ’s body and blood, to which onlookers were expected to give due reverence.

In these grave circumstances the priest came to the house and set up a crucifix for the invalid to contemplate. This was done for the mystic Julian of Norwich when she was gravely ill and led to the first of her revelations in which she saw the figure of Christ appear to bleed.193 Invalids were aspersed with holy water, prayers were said, and the priest turned to their belief. He expounded the creed and asked the sick person to make a profession of faith. The directions for this were in Latin, but it must usually have been conducted in the vernacular. English forms occur in fifteenth-century manuals:

Believest thou in God [the] Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth?

to which the invalid replied, ‘I believe’, and so on.194 Next the priest heard the sick person’s confession, asking appropriate questions. This too would be in English, with one of the suggested forms for the penitent person beginning:

I acknowledge to God and to Our Lady Saint Mary and to all the hallows [saints] of heaven that I have sinned.195

At the end of the confession the priest set out an appropriate penance but did not impose it immediately. Instead he asked invalids to ensure that their friends or executors did almsgiving on their behalf, and told them that if they recovered, they should do the penance that he had assigned. The priest then gave a blessing, offered the crucifix to be kissed, and prayed to God to remit the sins confessed.

The next procedure, in the case of serious illness, was the sacrament of anointing (Fig. 49, p. 339). While the priest’s clerk or other companions said psalms, the priest took holy oil from a container and used his right thumb to anoint the invalid’s right eye, left eye, ears, lips, nostrils, hands, feet, and back (or navel in the case of a woman). Afterwards he washed his hands with salt and water. Blessings and prayers of healing followed. He then asked the sick person if they believed that the bread and wine in the sacrament of communion were the true body and blood of Christ. On their affirming that belief, a communion wafer was placed in the mouth with the words of

administration used on Easter Sunday. The sacraments of anointing and communion were not given to children under the age of puberty, on the grounds of immature understanding and lack of need through absence of mortal sins. Nor was communion offered to anyone likely to vomit, the insane, or those who had not declared orthodox beliefs.196 There was apparently a popular reluctance to be anointed until the point of death, because people assumed that the one was followed by the other. Clergy were ordered to teach parishioners that anointing could be repeated – in other words one could expect to recover afterwards – and if so, those who were cured could lawfully resume conjugal relations and all their normal occupations.197

49. Anointing and sick communion. A priest administers a wafer to a man in bed, watched by his wife and clerks with a candle and a box of holy oil.

When someone was dying, it was expected that clergy would be called and prayers be said to commend the dying soul and to pray over his or her body (Fig. 50, p. 342). In towns it would not have been far to bring the rector, vicar, or chaplain, and the wealthy might have had a chaplain or a friar at hand. In large country parishes this was less simple. Chaucer imagined his ideal parson as ministering to a large area with scattered houses, travelling through storms to reach his furthest parishioners in times of sickness or trouble.198 In reality clergy could fail to arrive in time because of age, negligence, or a vacancy in the benefice.199 The rector of Bergholt in Essex, was guilty of leaving his parish after mass on a feast day in 1541, despite his duty of staying to say evensong. In consequence he was not available to attend a sick woman who died without benefit of confession or communion.200 More widespread lack of care was claimed by the parishioners of Wembury, Devon, in 1534. Their population numbered 500 but the church was staffed by chaplains or canons dispatched from Plympton Priory, four miles off. When someone was dying, a message had to be sent to the priory for help that was slow in coming. Nine adults were said to have died without a priest at hand, and one child’s body waited all day for its funeral.201

The liturgy for the dying included psalms, intercessions, a litany of prayers for the soul addressed to the Trinity and the saints, and the great commendatory prayer Proficiscere: ‘Go forward, Christian soul, from this world, in the name of God the Father Almighty who created you’. The ‘passing bell’ might be rung at the church, with two soundings for a woman and three for a man.202 Further prayers and psalms, known as the Commendation of Souls, were said around the body after death in the room where it lay. It was washed with tepid or warm water and wrapped in a linen shroud while further prayers were said. Some households carried the dead to church to rest overnight; others kept the body at home.203 It was a common practice to watch over the dead that night and, if clergy were available, for them to sing psalms by the corpse or the service of Placebo: the vespers of the dead. There were ancient social customs at watches, including drinking, singing, dancing, and even wrestling. These were frowned on by the Church which tried to discourage them, even in private houses, and clergy were barred from attendance unless to sing psalms.204

When the body was taken to church, on the day of death or the following day, it would be accompanied by family, servants, neighbours, or fellow guild members, and lights might be carried to give dignity to the occasion.205 Wooden coffins were often used to carry the body until it was buried, although only the wealthy were generally buried in a coffin of wood or stone.206 In the countryside the journey to church might be a long one, and it was a common complaint of people demanding a graveyard for a chapelof-ease that it was too difficult to transport the dead elsewhere, especially in winter. Paths to the church from outlying farms might have recognised places where those bearing corpses stopped to rest. One Cornish rector left money in 1448 to erect nine stone crosses in Camborne parish where such halts were made.207 When the body arrived at church its placing is likely to have varied according to status. Clergy, nobility, and gentry were probably admitted to the chancel; ordinary parishioners may have been confined to the nave. The service of matins for the dead, known as Dirige, would often be said in the early morning before the funeral itself.

FUNERAL AND BURIAL

Burials seem to have taken place typically at about 9.00 a.m. or 10.00 in the morning with the church bell or bells being rung as the body was brought to the church or to the grave. This time was dictated by the custom of preceding burial by a funeral mass of requiem, so called from the repeated Latin sentence Requiem eternam: ‘Eternal rest give them, O Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them’. The requiem mass had to be celebrated after the principal mass of the day if there was one, and clergy were permitted to perform a second mass for this purpose.208 It took place in the presence of the deceased and, in the case of important people, might include the preaching of a sermon praising their piety and urging the congregation to live devoutly and die well.209 The priest and other clergy of status would wear black or blue vestments if the parish possessed them. After mass the body was carried to the grave attended by its mourners, to the accompaniment of psalms and prayers (Fig. 51, p. 346). For clergy and the wealthy, the grave might be within the church in a stone coffin or a stone-lined tomb, topped

50. The rite of anointing before death. A priest administers the holy unction, assisted by his clerk, while family members look on.

by a ledger stone at floor level. For most other people it lay in the churchyard under the sky.210

The priest marked the grave by taking a spade and inscribing a cross on the ground in the dimensions of the body. The Sarum manual seems to imply that the grave was then dug by a sexton.211 This may have been done beforehand, but medieval graves were often shallow: only 0.4–0.7 metres in depth.212 The grave was blessed, aspersed with holy water, and censed with incense. After prayers, the body was placed in the grave in its coffin or shroud. The wealthy could procure a papal indulgence granting them a ‘plenary’ or complete remission of the penances that they would have

incurred at the time of their death. If such a document existed, it too was laid on the body, and lead seals or bullae found in the graves of high-status people no doubt come from this source.213 The grave was again aspersed and censed, and the priest scattered earth on the body in the manner of a cross, with further aspersion and censing. More prayers followed, commending the soul to God, while it seems that the grave was filled and closed.

Mirk’s collection of sermons from the 1380s, Festial, includes one for funerals which describes some burial customs and tries to rationalise them.214 The dead are buried wearing a white sheet to show that they have confessed their sins and been absolved by Holy Church. They are laid in the grave facing eastwards, so as to be ready to greet Christ when he comes from that direction to hold judgment. A wooden cross is laid beside their head to show their belief in Christ’s passion, and a cross made of wax is placed on their breast to symbolise that they died burning with charity and will therefore receive the prayers of the Church. A measuring rod is put into the grave as well, presumably having been used as a guide to dig the grave, but the rod is broken as a reminder that we have no defence after death from what we deserve. Small wooden crosses have been found in graves as well as rods but not fractured ones, although some royal and noble officers are recorded breaking their staffs of office at their masters’ funerals and throwing them into the grave.215 Finally earth is cast on the body and the grave is shut, while the priest sprinkles it with holy water so that the fiends may have no dominion over the grave.

The service and interment were only two elements of the funeral. People – the family and the mourners – and, in the case of the wealthy, the pageantry with which their funerals were presented must also be considered to express their status and the obligations that they felt that their status imposed. There was no standard funeral, of course, and the circumstances must have ranged from the simplest to the most elaborate. Some people, especially around 1400 and including those with Lollard sympathies, asked for a simple disposal of their ‘foul carrion’.216 Very many deaths were those of children, and it is not clear if they all received the full treatment of prayers at the deathbed, although some certainly did. We find records of offerings made at the funerals of children, presumably at the same requiem mass that was

provided for their elders.217 Many adults, from poverty, may have had the minimal rites allowable. The ban on making charges for funerals was ignored to the extent that it was a virtual requirement for those present at the requiem mass to make monetary offerings which the rector or vicar received, and these were sometimes petrified by custom: 6d. at Hornsea in Yorkshire, for example.218

A further expense was the burial itself. The London church of St Mary at Hill charged 8d. for adults in the churchyard and 4d. for children. At Exeter the bellman who dug the graves in the common cemetery outside the cathedral expected 6d. 219 Graves inside churches, as we have seen, were more expensive, and might well be limited to those considered to have an appropriate status.220 In addition a death might involve the payment of a ‘mortuary’, meaning a funeral gift, to the church incumbent in recognition of his spiritual lordship. This was not necessarily due on the day of a funeral but was a consequence of the death, at least that of a male householder. It varied in nature from place to place but usually included one’s best robe or a farm animal in the case of those who had such livestock, and might extend to household utensils.221 Women and children were sometimes exempt, although not always, but we do not know if clergy waived the requirement when there was little to be had.

In consequence the cost of a death and funeral posed problems for the poor like those of a wedding. It was a religious and social convention to have lights burning round the corpse in church, from Placebo and Dirige until mass. Some people noticed the challenge that this posed for the needy and sought to alleviate it. In Worcester diocese in 1219 churches were told to turn the remains of the Easter candle into smaller ones for the funerals of the poor.222 Andrew Kilkenny, dean of Exeter Cathedral (d.1302), left an endowment for two candles to burn beside each of the bodies of three poor people every day while they lay in the cathedral for their funerals.223 At Stratfordon-Avon the principal guild – the Holy Cross – undertook to help the poor or strangers in a similar way by providing four candles with a sheet and a pall to cover the deceased.224 One can guess the meagre resources of some families from the small sums donated as offerings. At Scarborough in 1435 one funeral produced only 1d., eight 2d. or 2½d., and ten 3d. or 3½d 225

A child’s funeral, too, might yield very little: examples from Oxford in 1492 include amounts of 1½d., 2d. and 2½d. 226 Still, it might be observed, the deaths of these children at least merited some kind of service at which an offering was made.

Better-off people were buried with more formality. The lowest social ranks whose wills survive – substantial peasants and craftsmen – did not always include instructions in them for their funerals.227 Nonetheless it is likely that families and neighbours attended, candles were lit, and some ceremonies paid for. Many adults, men and women, belonged to guilds which were common in towns and to be found in some country parishes, and these traditionally made arrangements for the passing of their members. The Tailors’ guild of Norwich, for example, founded in 1350, provided two tapers of wax weighing twelve pounds to burn by the body. All its brothers and sisters were required to come to the Dirige and the funeral mass, and to offer a halfpenny there. They were to stay to see the body buried and to pay a further penny for intercessory masses after the death. If the dead member died within seven miles of the city, the guild was to bring his body back again.228 Other guild ordinances expected their members to go to the house of death, attend the body to church, watch with it overnight, provide numerous torches or candles, and sometimes even pay and clothe some poor men to hold them during the services. They arranged for bread to be given to those in need – the common practice at wealthy funerals – and paid for additional masses.229 It is reasonable to assume that the companies of young men, maidens, and wives in country parishes gave corresponding support to those who died in their fellowship.

The rich were able to pay for elaborate funerals to display their status and that of their families. This is a huge subject, of which a single example must suffice.230 Joan Barre, who died in 1485, came from a family of Gloucestershire gentry and married first an esquire and later a knight, after which she lived in widowhood at or near Newland in the Forest of Dean. She gave orders for her burial with her first husband in Newland church, in a chapel where she had already endowed a perpetual chantry. Sixteen torches, each worth 5s., and twelve tapers, each weighing two pounds, were to burn at her Dirige and funeral mass. The torches were to be carried, perhaps around her bier or in

procession, by sixteen poor men wearing gowns and hoods of black cloth, and the tapers by twelve others. All were to have food, drink, and a small sum of money for their labour. Every priest who attended Dirige and mass was to receive a shilling and every clerk 2d., so that there was likely to be a substantial presence of local clergy and parish clerks.

Members of the gentry, both male and female, were expected to attend, as well as local yeomen. These were all to be offered clothes in black to the total value of £40. All comers were to be fed, and the poor in particular to have food, drink, and a penny each.231 After the funeral, Dirige and mass were to be held every month for a year. In addition to her permanent chantry priest, a second priest was to execute masses in her chapel for three years, and a third to perform St Gregory’s trental of masses for one year. An additional four

51. A burial in an urban churchyard with a palm-cross and a grave marker.

hundred masses were to be celebrated in groups of fifty, with intercessions to the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, Our Lady, and other kinds of veneration, with a further thousand masses at 1d. each, presumably meaning that local clergy put her name into their celebrations. Fifty poor men and women were to be employed to say fifty ‘psalters’ of the rosary, in return for clothes and 2d. each.232 The resulting funeral, if all the directions were carried out, must have assembled the largest throng, perhaps, in the church’s history. Its duration, far from being limited to a single day, lasted for a year or more and involved huge numbers of people: no doubt many onlookers too. Such events were, of course, exceptional and would be remembered for long afterwards.

The funeral, then, was not the end of the matter. Vergil noted that the English observed thirty days of mourning.233 If financial resources permitted, an additional requiem mass for the dead person might be held, sometimes one week after the funeral but more commonly one month later and known as the ‘month’s mind’.234 Thomas More, censuring funeral pomp in 1529, described the second as an occasion for a sermon praising the dead, in the case of the wealthy, and for ‘much feasting’ when mass was over.235 No doubt, like a modern memorial service, it enabled the immediate family to come with some of their grief having moderated and those unable to get to the funeral to honour the departed with plenty of warning. Further on in time there could be a ‘year’s mind’, or anniversary, with a similar commemoration, and in the case of wealthier people regular mentions of the departed in chantry masses, guild masses, and the reading of the bidding prayers in church.

A CHURCH FOR LIFE AND DEATH

A church, then, was the scene of all the major events of human life. The first ‘epiphany’ after birth at baptism, first confession and first communion in adolescence, marriage, churching, and funeral punctuated innumerable visits to services. This was true in a general sense, but not always for each individual. Some people moved to live elsewhere in the course of their lives. A marriage might take place in the bride’s church rather than the bridegroom’s. Those who lived in outlying parts of a large parish with a chapel-ofease might need to go to their parish church only for baptisms, marriages,

and funerals, or on designated days of the year as a sign of dependence. Equally leaving a church did not mean forgetting about it. The affections of some people for the churches where they had once worshipped can occasionally be glimpsed in wills where alumni who had long left a parish gave it bequests. In Cornwall, for example, one finds a pewterer of London leaving money to Truro church, a worthy of Southfleet in Kent to Sithney church, and a rector in Devon to Gwinear church, where their parents were buried.236

The discussion of churches in this book has necessarily centred on their relationship with living people. But it is hardly too rash to say that a medieval church was almost as much a place of the dead as it was of the living. The painting of the Last Judgment above the rood screen warned all who entered of the future examination of their souls before Christ, and their assignation to His left or to right. Every mass included a prayer for the dead.237 Every year had a special day to remember them: All Souls Day. Bidding prayers included their names. Within many churches, tombs proliferated during the later Middle Ages. A few drew attention to themselves by their size or splendour but even grave slabs on the floor kept alive the memory of their namesakes. Tombs and slabs recorded dates not of birth but of death, so that the dead might be remembered on that day. Most carried the plea Orate . . ., ‘Pray for . . .’ or the affirmation cuius anime propicietur Deus, ‘on whose soul may God have mercy’, inviting the passer-by to pray likewise. Even the mounds in the open air meant something to close relatives, as the poem Pearl so eloquently reminds us.238 Every Christian was urged to remember the dead in the churchyard, and to pray for their souls in general while passing by.239 The church, in short, was in one sense a destination for its worshippers, a place to come close to God. In another it was a lookout point on a journey that was to take them into another world altogether.