The church in medieval England: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra
"‘This is, I think, the one thing that we always underestimate about the medieval church, the extent to which is under lay control. So bishops in England are appointed by the Crown, or rather they’re chosen by the Crown, the Crown makes a nomination, the Pope appoints. But the real power lies with the crown, the bishops are all the king's men. And then at a local level, you've only got think of the situation of the lord of the manor, and the parish church. He is the top dog locally. And everything that goes on in the parish church is going to be subject to his approval, basically. And finally, of course, there is the laying put [sp?] of ordinary people. If ordinary people don't want to go to church, they don't go. That's something we underestimate.
We think somehow the church had a power of control, like that, say, which Hitler or Stalin had in the 1930s. The church didn't. It did have sanctions against people going to church, but like modern law, like making people drive 30 miles an hour or whatever, it's one thing to have the laws, it's frightful difficult actually getting people to obey them. So it's an incredibly complicated structure. And it's different, really, from any modern firm like Tesco, or Sainsbury's, where you can simply send out an order, the price of baked beans will go up by two p, there's nothing like that in the Middle Ages, partly because of course of communication difficulties, it takes an awfully long time to get a message from one person to the other. And that's no guarantee that that person will actually do it…
The church is not a single body. So you can't say that the church is rich, anymore than you can say that British society today is rich. And you can say it is rich in comparison with parts of the world, but then there’s enormous variations within it...
As to the experience in a service, well, the services are in Latin. And they are said or are said and sung in the chancel, which has got a big screen between it and the, and the nave. So the service is quite a long way away from you. You are not expected as you are in a modern church to follow the service, to say responses. That's done by the parish clerk, you're expected to watch the service, almost like we do when we go to a concert. We're part of the experience. We listen to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and were part of the experience, but we're not paying it. And that's what it's like in a medieval church. So the performers are up in the chancel, you're listening and watching. You're, you're being devout, you're spiritually with it. You may have a rosary and you, you, you, you say your basic prayers, you're clicking off your beads. You've got a prayer book with you, if you're literate and you're reading that, not the same book as the clergy are using. A different book. So you've got this murmur of voices, subdued murmur voices that you would have got in the nave alongside the service that is in the chancel.
Now the one thing that people have not previously understood is that there is quite a lot of English in the Latin services. And this has come in, this has probably always been the case, but it’s been coming particularly clear by the 15th century. So there are three or four points in the service when English is used. Beginning of the service, everybody is sprinkled with holy water and is treated to an English first which encourages them to, to to give their attention to the service. In the middle of the service, you get announcements, you get prayers for the king, for the, for the crops, for the, for individual people, you get a bit of a sermon if you're lucky. And then at the end of the service, you get some more English, and you get given a piece of bread, because you don't receive the communion, bread and wine, at all. Except that you get the bread at Easter, not the wine. But on a normal, normal Sunday, when the mass is over, the priest blesses a loaf of bread, which is provided by each family in the parish in turn, and it's broken up into little bits, and there's some English words to accompany this, then you get your bit. And that's effectively your communion. So it's not at all like a modern church experience, you are not expected to take part in the words. You're expected to do your own thing. And it was quite a change and an unwelcome change for some people at the Reformation, when the Church of England's suddenly required people to take part in the service. And there's a very amusing thing I came across when Queen Mary became queen in 1553. And we briefly went back to Catholicism. Somebody said, hey, this is great. Now when I go to church, I do my own thing. I don't have to take part in the service’...
‘Were men and women separated in church services?’...
‘Very complicated… It appears that wealthy people were not separated… the rest of the congregation may well have been separated, but it probably varied locally… Women usually on the north side of the church, men on the south side… The north side of the is the safe side of the church, and the south side of the church is the unsafe side of the church. Now you have to imagine what a medieval church looked like inside. Between the chancel at the east stand and the nave at the West End, you've got this screen, which is about 12 feet high, and this window, was not glazed, so that you can get the sound through from the chancel. So you can't actually get into the chancel. Above the screen, you have the rood loft, which is a kind of gallery. In the middle of the rood loft, you have the rood, which is Christ on the cross. So he is facing west. And on his right hand side is the Virgin Mary, along his left hand side is the, is St John the Evangelist. So the right hand side is the safe side, that's the side of the Virgin Mary. So the side of the saved.
If you've ever seen these pictures of the Last Judgement, the photos on the north side of Christ are all going up to heaven and the figures on the south side are going down to hell. Now, the women have to be on the safe side, because they're more open to temptation. The men are, so is the view, the men are rather sturdier standing up for, to evil. So say, so they are on the dangerous side...
Of course, pious people went to Confession more often. But the only time you had to go to confession was in Lent, on this occasion. And then the other thing that you had to do at the end of Lent was to take your annual communion on Easter Sunday. So these are the two things that the church insists on for all adults, confession once a year, followed by communion once a year. But communion you only got on Easter Sunday, you don't get it any other time of the year normally. And when you get it, you only receive the consecrated bread. So a little wafer, baked wafer of bread, and that's put straight into your mouth. So you can't do anything that you shouldn't do with it. You were then given a drink of unconsecrated wine. They can't give you consecrated wine, because the belief is that in the mass, the bread and the wine become, each of them, becomes the body and blood of Christ. And in a congregation where you've got people of all kinds, and you may even have the village idiot there. You can't afford to have somebody slumbering Christ's blood all over themselves or all over the floor. It's just not possible. The bread is relatively easy. Even then they have to guard against crumbs. So when you receive the bread, somebody, two people hold a towel in front of your chin. And then the wafer is popped in and that stops any bits of Christ getting on the floor. But the wine is too big a problem. So you're given unconsecrated wine just to wash the, the, the wafer down’...
‘Were there confession booths?’...
‘No. Confession booths were an invention of the Catholic Church in the 16th century, medieval people were worried a lot about Confession. Remember that the clergy were all celibate. And they were worried about untoward things going on between a priest and a woman, particularly. So confession has to happen in church, in a part of the church that is public. So it's either done in the nave of the church or just inside the screen so they can be visible. The, the person who is confessing kneels, but doesn't look directly at the priest, the priest is sitting in a chair, he pulls his hood over his head, so he can't be seen, particularly. And he's told not to look directly at the person confessing. And then the confession takes place...
And there are examples of priests trying to seduce women during confession, actually. So it's not a, it's not a ridiculous idea. It sometimes happens: come into the vestry and I'll do it there. And then, you know, things began to happen... Some clergy are brought up in in church courts for that purpose. And churches are places for sex, as are churchyards. I mean, they are, you see going to church is a, is an acceptable way of leaving home. So if you want to leave it to meet up with a lover, going to church, particularly on a weekday is a, is a good way of meeting up and if you want a very quiet place, a churchyard, particularly at night, also has its attractions… there's a delightful book for the education of women that was written by a French knight in about 1380. And it's actually got a warning about having sex in church. And it tells the story of a man and woman who did so under the altar. And they got stuck together. And they couldn't be disentangled until the whole congregation had turned up and prayed for them. So they got, you know, public humiliation.’...
‘Anna would like to know how widespread atheism was or non church attendance?’...
‘I don't think there were many people who would have openly said they did not believe in the existence of a god. There weren't books in circulation that would have said that that you could have appealed to. So if you had said it, everybody would have said, well, you're just mistaken or mad. And it would have come up when you next went to Confession. But I think there was plenty of popular skepticism around. and I think that's something that historians have tended to underestimate. We haven't actually talked about heresy, but in, England did not have much in the way of heresy until the 1380s is when an Oxford scholar called John Wycliffe began actually to challenge in intellectual terms, a lot of the beliefs and and rules of the church. And he attracted followers who became known as the Lollards, who believe that you should read the Bible in English, that you should live a rather puritanical form of life, that you should not engage in what they call superstitions, like pilgrimages, or veneration of images and so on. And it's widely recognized that Lollards were a small minority of the population, I think. And so historians have tended to say, okay, everybody else was orthodox. I don't believe that.
I believe that there was an awful lot of skepticism about, it must have been very hard to believe a lot of the church’s dogmas. For example, the fact that the priest at Mass has consecrated this wafer, this tiny chalice of wine, they are now the body and blood of Christ. But look, they go on looking like bread and wine. So how can this be? The church is insisting on it, you get into trouble if you. if you disbelieve it, but it's very hard to believe. And we've got evidence that people found that hard to believe. That they speculated about things like Virgin Mary, did she have other children? This is something the Bible is rather actually mysterious about, isn't it? We hear of James the brother of the Lord. The church said no, Mary was a virgin. She married an elderly man, Joseph, but look here, where, were there other children? These are things the church didn't really like to get involved with. But people wondered about them. Was it really right for God to chuck Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden? We hear, one writer says, I've heard people discussing this. So, there was skepticism around, and people did not believe everything they were told, just as people didn't go to church all the time, as they were meant to do. And there's this huge lay influence.
I think that we constantly undervalue about medieval religion or religion in any period. We think that it's all being stage managed by clergy, and that everybody is, is having to to go along with that unless they totally turn their backs on it, which they can do nowadays. But in fact, there's a tremendous amount of lay influence on what the clergy do. I'll give you another example of this. What happens if a baby dies before it's been baptized? Now, according to the official church, dogma, it can't go to heaven. But then it hasn't sinned, so it can't go to hell. So it has to go to a place called limbo, which is on the edge of hell. And its punishment is not being burnt in fire or anything, but by the knowledge that it can never get to heaven. Well, that's all a terribly bleak way of looking at the death of a newborn baby, which is terribly traumatic for parents. People didn't go along with that. You get scholars saying, well, there may be a way around this. Jesus talked about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Suppose the Holy Spirit baptizes every new child, then it will go to heaven. Officially, this is not church dogma, but it's what some theologians are saying. And what happens when dad is told by the parish priest, you can't bury your new born dead baby in the church, because it's not baptized, Dad goes along at night with a spade and he puts it in. And we know that that happened’"
