Parish, Belief, Ritual
July 1326, Brigstock Court: Cecilia’s brother William arranged in this court for a young man identified as John, the son of Alice Perse of Kingsthorpe, to inherit his lands—some twenty separate properties, including his house in Stanion, located next door to Cecilia’s own home. “Master William,” as he was known, never married, and he was likely a local cleric, trained by the church and bound by vows of celibacy. Why did William leave his property to John Perse? We learn the answer some eighteen years later, when John, in a dispute about another inheritance (that of Cecilia herself), is identified as Cecilia’s nephew. In other words, John, the son of Alice Perse of Kingsthorpe, was the bastard son of Master William Penifader.
In the center of Brigstock today stands the church of St. Andrew. Some parts of the church are very old. The western tower and parts of the nave were built by Saxons, about a century before the Norman invasion of 1066. The church of St. Peter in Stanion is much the same—not quite as ancient, but also old and centrally located in the original settlement. These church buildings were already old in Cecilia’s time, but much of what we can see today would have been unknown to Cecilia. Like so many English parish churches, St. Andrew and St. Peter were greatly improved by prosperous parishioners in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Today, both churches are built of fine stone; Cecilia knew smaller churches with some parts built of wood and rubble as well as stone. The interiors are different too; instead of the pews, electrical lights, and whitened walls of today, Cecilia stood (or squatted) in a nave with no pews, relied on natural light or candlelight, and looked up at colorful walls painted with scenes from Christian history and salvation. The modern churchyards are more orderly too, sedate, quiet, and well tended; the graves in Cecilia’s churchyard shared space with people gathered for markets, ball games, gambling, gossip, sexual assignations, and sometimes even meetings of the manorial court. Hens, ducks, cats, and dogs also made themselves comfortable around the graves of the human dead.
Yet the biggest differences between then and now have less to do with the two church buildings in Brigstock parish and more to do with belief and ritual. Cecilia’s Christian faith differed from that of the Anglicans who worship in St. Andrew and St. Peter today. Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century (including the founders of Anglicanism, a faith known in the United States today as Episcopalianism) swept aside many of the beliefs of Cecilia’s time, along with some of the oldest rituals of the medieval Church. They also introduced a diversity of Christian practice unknown to Cecilia. Although there were two main branches of Christianity in the Middle Ages—Western Christianity centered in Rome and Orthodoxy centered in Constantinople (modernday Istanbul)—Cecilia, living on the western periphery of Europe, knew only the teachings of what she simply called “the Church.” Today, Roman Catholicism is the modern faith most closely tied to the teachings and practices of medieval Christianity in Western Europe, but doctrine and practice have changed considerably. Especially important in this regard have been the two reforming councils of Trent in 1545–1562 and Vatican II in 1962–1965.
The differences between Cecilia’s faith and modern Christian faiths also reflect changes rooted more in history than theology. First, Cecilia’s religious world was strikingly homogeneous; she might have heard stories about Jews, Muslims, or Christian heretics, but the world in which she lived offered no alternative religious practices. Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, a few years before Cecilia was born, and although the English heresy known as Lollardy developed a generation or so after she died, no heretics tempted country folk with radical interpretations of Christianity in early fourteenth-century England. Sometimes Cecilia and her neighbors frequented holy wells, cast spells, sought help from hermits, or established informal shrines. These practices were sometimes discouraged by the Church, but they were easily absorbed into Christian holiness and Cecilia would have considered them as a seamless part of her faith. Second, Cecilia’s religious life was imbued by the rhythms of the natural world around her; she would not have thought it odd that she feared fairies as well as her Christian God, or that she mingled charms with prayers, or that major Christian holy days coincided with the summer and winter solstices. Third, her religious education was accomplished more by observation and listening than by study; Cecilia understood what it meant to be a Christian from what she saw in church (the ritual of the Mass, the wall paintings, the statues) and from what she heard in occasional sermons, pious songs, and the talk of her friends and family. Indeed, Cecilia’s mother was probably her most important religious instructor. Joan of Arc, another peasant woman, born in Lorraine in the early fifteenth century, testified that she learned her prayers from her mother: “Nobody taught me my belief,” she said, “if not my mother.”
Peasant Piety
Some historians have suggested that peasants like Cecilia were so poorly trained in Christianity and so devoted to traditional beliefs that they were not truly Christians. After all, when peasants wore animal masks at midwinter or danced around bonfires at midsummer, they echoed the customs of ancient pagans. Yet for Cecilia and others like her, there was no worship of older deities in these practices; instead, these were age-old customs that merged easily with Christianity. For the most part, folk traditions and Christianity were complementary, not contradictory. Masking became part of Christmas revelries, and midsummer bonfires burned on the celebratory night before the feast of St. John the Baptist. The Church sometimes even encouraged these blendings of Christian practice and older custom. In the early seventh century, Gregory I had advised the missionaries he sent to the English to convert pagan temples into Christian churches since people will be “more ready to come to the places with which they are familiar.” Gregory was willing to make these concessions to ordinary folk because, as he put it, “it is impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds.” Seven centuries later, peasants were still stubbornly fond of folk customs, and the clergy were still accommodating Christian beliefs to rural traditions.
For Cecilia and other medieval peasants, then, Church teachings, natural phenomena, and folk traditions merged easily into their understanding of religious belief and practice. In this blended form, Christianity permeated rural life. Cecilia may have prayed to the Virgin Mary as she mingled malt, yeast, and water to brew ale, or bowed her head when she passed a crucifix roughly built alongside a footpath, or whispered the Lord’s Prayer before she entered the forest to gather herbs and nuts. These practices ensured that every day and in many ways, Cecilia sought the protection, help, and comfort of her God and his saints.
As a young girl and a grown woman, Cecilia particularly focused her piety on the churches of St. Andrew and St. Peter. Two contemporary alternatives to parish-focused piety were not readily available to her because she was an illiterate peasant woman. First, private piety was common only among the wealthy. For example, before she died in 1360, the widowed Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of Clare, enjoyed the daily support of her own private confessor and was also allowed to take a vow of chastity without entering a monastery. Many aristocrats even had their own private chapels in which they could worship, without having to resort to parish churches. No peasants had the leisure, education, or money for such pieties. At least one person in Brigstock owned a psalter, but it was rare for a peasant to be able to read such a book or to be able to afford one (before the development of printing in the fifteenth century, books were handwritten and expensive). For Cecilia and her neighbors, formal religious efforts were mostly confined to church services on Sundays and holy days. Second, a career in the Church was seldom available to peasants. Sometimes a peasant boy was accepted as a priest, friar, or monk, or deacon, as her brother William seems to have been. But church careers were rare for boys and nearly impossible for girls. Careers among the secular clergy, that is, among the clergy who ministered in the lay world (saeculum) to the souls of the faithful, were not available to women: there were no female deacons, priests, or bishops. Medieval people told a story about a Pope Joan, a woman who had begun to dress as a man to accompany her lover to university and who had then moved rapidly up the clerical hierarchy to become pope. Most such stories ended with Pope Joan dying in a papal procession, struck down by a difficult childbirth (or, in some versions, attacked by an angry mob after her birthing pains revealed her female identity). With its story of cross-dressing, illicit sex, and confused gender roles, the legend of Pope Joan titillated medieval listeners, but it had no basis in reality. From the pope in Rome to his bishops who oversaw dioceses throughout Europe to the priests who worked in parishes, the worldly work of the church was done by men.
A pious girl’s main option for a professional religious life was among the regular clergy who lived by a monastic rule (or regula). To medieval Christians, monastic withdrawal was the ideal religious life. Unfortunately, most female monasteries required expensive dowries (or entry payments) from would-be nuns. This practice began in the early Middle Ages, and although popes and bishops tried hard to eradicate it, they were never successful; as a result, most female monasteries accepted only the daughters of wealthy parents who offered lucrative dowries. Moreover, even among wealthy women, monastic life was not readily available; the monasteries of England accommodated about three or four times as many monks as nuns. In England by 1300, there were about five million people but only 3,500 nuns.
HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT PEASANT SEXUAL MORALITY?
Moral texts are easy to find for the Middle Ages. We have the pronouncements of popes and church councils; we have many, many sermons; we have manuals that taught priests how to provide good pastoral care; we have hundreds of exempla, short moral tales for priests to use when their audiences “begin to get sleepy.” (This chapter includes three exempla—the story of the priest’s concubine and the bishop; the story of how the demon Tutivillus was overwhelmed by gossiping women; and the story of the terrible fate of dancers who skipped Christmas services.)
All of these various sources prescribe morality (they tell us about ideals, not what people actually did), and the ideals come from above (from the Church, not peasants themselves). Peasants sometimes marched to a different moral drummer. Premarital sex is a good example. The Church actively punished people they called “fornicators,” men as well as women. Offenders were stripped of their outer clothes, shoes, and headgear, paraded through churchyards, and publicly whipped. (Some avoided this public shame by paying a fine.)
Peasants punished fornication too, but much more selectively and sporadically. In manor courts in England (not elsewhere in Europe, as best we can tell), young serf women were regularly fined for fornication, paying leyrwite, literally a “lying-down-fine.” Sometimes the fine was called childwite, and it was levied not for fornication but for its result—the birth of an illegitimate child. Here are some examples from Walsham-le-Willows in the county of Suffolk, about sixty miles east of Brigstock:
January 1329:
Christina Patel gave birth out of wedlock and pays 32 pence as childwite.
March 1329:
Alice Hereward gave birth out of wedlock and pays 32 pence as childwite. Cecilia Pudding, 32 pence for the same.
October 1333:
Catherine Machon gave birth out of wedlock; and therefore pays the fixed fine of 32 pence.
Unlike Church prosecutions, men are almost never mentioned in manorial fines for leyrwite or childwite. It is as though peasants thought fornication was committed by women, all by themselves.
Manorial lords and ladies profited, of course, from leyrwite and childwite, but since manors relied on local jurors to name offenders, peasants must have agreed that these women should be punished. Several clues suggest that their objections were more practical than moral. First, well-off jurors, like the Penifader men of Brigstock, did not name their own daughters for leyrwite or childwite; they instead targeted women from the poorest village families. Second, they punished these women with exceptionally large fines. In the Walsham court, fines for most offenses were set at 2 pence, 6 pence, or 12 pence, but childwite, as explicitly stated in the case of Catherine Machon, cost 32 pence (to earn this sum, Catherine had to save all her wages from about forty-five days’ work). Third, well-off villagers discouraged poor, unwed mothers in other ways, too, especially by expulsion; in the 1280s, the good folk of Horsham in the county of Norfolk, not far from Walsham, forced out of their village four poor mothers and their six small children (see Figure 9). For village elites in the hard times c. 1300, control of the proliferating poor was a survival strategy, and leyrwite, childwite, and expulsion were its tools.
Figure 9. A Wayfaring Mother and Child. This woman’s walking stick suggests that she is a vagrant, moving from place to place in search of work and shelter. She carries a child on her back, and since no male partner walks beside her, she was likely meant to represent the wayfaring life forced upon some mothers of illegitimate children. The rosary around her arm indicates her piety, and it might have been included to evoke sympathy for her plight. (British Library, Luttrell Psalter, folio 53.)
Nothing proves this more clearly that the historian’s best friend: chronology. English villagers punished unwed mothers in hard times and tolerated them in good times. In 1300, villages were crowded, harvests were unpredictable, life was difficult, and leyrwite and childwite flourished. In 1400, when standards of living had risen dramatically in the wake of the Black Death, peasant juries utterly ceased to report leyrwite and childwite. By 1500, however, population pressure had begun again to undermine peasant prosperity, and villagers resumed punishment of unwed mothers (because manorialism had by then declined, they used village by-laws instead of manorial fines). Throughout these centuries the Church continued to prosecute fornicators, but peasants harassed unwed mothers only when they threatened to become a burden on parochial charity.
We can also see peasants’ acceptance of premarital sex in one last fact: many of the women fined for premarital sex c. 1300 eventually married. They were not, in other words, somehow tainted by their sexual experience or in some cases, by their bastard children. This was the happy case for Catherine Machon who, three years after she bore her out-of-wedlock child, married a local man, John Taylor.
Morality is a slippery subject for historians, with moral precepts often imposed from above and ignored in practice. In the case of premarital sex, it seems that the Church consistently worried about the morality of sex outside marriage, and peasants worried, if they worried at all, about the charitable burden imposed by unwed mothers.
FOR LEYRWITE AND CHILDWITE, see my article on “Writing Fornication: Medieval Leyrwite and Its Historians,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 131–162. More generally, see Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (2010).
Some female monasteries allowed poor women to work as lay sisters. Doing the chores that allowed nuns to focus on their prayers, lay sisters pursued holy lives, hoping to benefit spiritually from their hard work and their proximity to nuns. Lay sisters were helpers of nuns, not nuns themselves. For a few poor women and even fewer men, life in an anchorhold offered an alternative to monastic life. An anchorhold was a sort of hermitage, a small, enclosed space that was usually built alongside a church. The anchoress (or if male, anchorite) was permanently walled into this enclosure, observing holy services through a window that looked into the church, and receiving goods and visitors at a second outside window (or sometimes, door). Anchoresses and anchorites were more common in England than elsewhere, and they were tolerated by the Church but never fully integrated into the clergy. The most famous of medieval anchoresses, Juliana of Norwich, lived about a hundred years after Cecilia in the East Anglian city from which she took her name. Her book Revelations of Divine Love still offers inspirational reading. Life in an anchorhold was hard and chosen by only a few. All told, only a handful of peasant women ever managed to pursue pious lives as either lay sisters or anchoresses. For a woman like Cecilia, a life devoted to religion was not an option.
The Parish and Its Clergy
The physical space of the churches of St. Andrew and St. Peter followed a pattern set long before the time of the Penifaders, a pattern used in almost all parish churches (see Figure 10). They were long buildings, composed of two main rectangles: a small chancel (where the priest celebrated Mass) in the east and a larger nave (where the parishioners gathered) in the west. The chancels of medieval churches and cathedrals were oriented to the east, that is, toward Jerusalem, the center of the medieval world. Over time, the two rectangles of nave and chancel were slowly expanded; aisles were added to the nave to accommodate more parishioners, and eventually chapels were built at the east end of aisles to accommodate the veneration of particular saints. The bell tower stood at the west end of the nave, and its bells regularly called people together, for holy services, to be sure, but also for deaths, fires, court meetings, and any other events that required everyone’s attention. Along the south wall was usually the door through which people entered and left. Outside, a porch protected this door from rain. At St. Peter’s, more than fifty stone-carved heads of women, men, and animals ran, and still run today, above the porch and along the south wall. Cecilia would have looked at these carvings, completed just before her birth, whenever she went into St. Peter’s or lingered in its churchyard. Masons often carved stone from standard patterns, but they sometimes chose models from local people. So it is possible that among the faces along the south wall, Cecilia might have recognized her parents, her grandparents, and some of her neighbors.
Figure 10. Cecilia’s Parish Church. This photograph, taken from the south, shows St. Peter’s Church in Stanion as it appears today. To the left stands the bell tower, and adjacent to it is the entry porch for the south door into the nave. The nave is the large rectangle in the middle, and the chancel is on the right, located at the eastern (and holiest) end of the church.
When Cecilia entered the church and stood in the nave, she watched the priest celebrating Mass in the chancel directly in front of her, she heard the clatter of people entering and leaving to her right, and if she turned fully around, she faced the bell tower. During services, she stood or squatted with other women and girls, as the two sexes did not mingle together in church for fear, it seems, of sexual scandal in such a holy place. All around her the walls were painted with bright and vivid scenes that inspired wonder and fear. Today, no medieval paintings can be seen in the church of St. Andrew, and the two that survive in St. Peter’s were completed about 150 years after Cecilia’s time. One shows a stag and a unicorn kneeling before a now-obscured figure, and the other depicts the Archangel Michael weighing souls to determine whether they are saved or damned. The walls of other churches near Brigstock still contain holy scenes that are like those Cecilia would have seen on the fourteenth-century walls of St. Peter’s: the Last Judgment, the Virgin Mary, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, St. Christopher, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret of Antioch.
By custom, the chancel was the responsibility of the parish priest. If the roof leaked or the altar wobbled, he had to fix it. The nave and the rest of the church—that is, by far its largest part—was in the care of parishioners. If the door fell off its hinges or a bell cracked, then the parishioners of St. Andrew’s had to raise money to cover the work. Parishioners maintained their part of the church with money-raising festivals (the most popular were church-ales, at which ale was sold for the benefit of the church), collections, and even gifts from pious and community-minded parishioners. In April 1344, for example, Denise in the Lane gave a small piece of her land to St. Andrew’s church, asking that income from it be used to pay for general maintenance. Yet as neither the parish priest nor his parishioners ever had much money to spare, sometimes the chancel roof did leak, the door did sway loosely, and the bell did ring untrue.
The appointment of a parish priest was a complicated business in the Middle Ages. To begin with, control of the appointment (that is, the advowson) did not always rest with the local bishop or other ecclesiastical authority. Instead, the person whose family had originally built the church often appointed its priest, generation after generation. This had a certain logic to it. Some might protest that the Church should appoint its own parish priests, but lords and ladies could justifiably respond that they should choose the men who worked in churches that had been originally built by their ancestors and were still generously supported by their money. In the case of Brigstock, the king once held the advowson of Brigstock parish just as he held the manor, and he had once appointed a new parish priest whenever the old one died, retired, or resigned. In 1133, however, Henry I gave the parish to Cirencester Abbey (located about one hundred miles southwest of Brigstock).
Henry’s gift is an example of another complication in the staffing of parishes. Ideally, a priest was appointed to care for a parish, but by his gift, Henry made Cirencester Abbey perpetually responsible for the souls of Brigstock. In effect, he made the abbey the rector (or appointed parish priest) of Brigstock. By the late thirteenth century, some rectors were institutions (as Cirencester Abbey was for Brigstock), and many others were individuals; both sorts of rectors were often absentees who appointed other priests to do their work. For example, the monks of Cirencester could not travel regularly to Brigstock to care for its parishioners, so the abbey appointed a priest to do the job. This priest was known as a vicar (from the same Latin root as such modern words as vicarious or vice president), because he acted in the place of the rector. In most parishes with a vicar, the absentee rector took most of the income from the parish and paid the vicar a measly sum. In the case of Brigstock, William de Clive was vicar of Brigstock from 1275 to 1325, Roger de Corndale from 1325 to 1340, and John de Seymour from 1340 to 1344 (the year Cecilia died). Cirencester Abbey, as rector of Brigstock, took a hefty sum from the parish each year (more than £10), and then paid their vicar less than half of the takings (a bit over £4). As the history of the advowson, rectors, and vicars of Brigstock parish shows so clearly, appointment to a parish had become by the fourteenth century a sort of commodity that could be owned by institutions as well as individual priests, and that could be bought, sold, or even traded. It was a source of income acquired by a lucky man or institution who often then hired someone else to do the work.
Supported by only a fraction of the parish income, the vicar of Brigstock nevertheless had to find money to pay others to help him in his work. Because Brigstock had two churches, the vicar had to hire a second priest to manage the church of St. Peter in Stanion. These two priests were likely assisted by still other clergy—a deacon or two and a parish clerk. Deacons were the chief assistants of parish priests; they helped at Mass, read scriptures during services, and instructed parishioners. Parish clerks also assisted during holy services, but, as skilled secretaries, they especially busied themselves by reading and writing up the documents of the parish.
The priests, deacons, and clerks who assisted the vicar of Brigstock are rarely mentioned in either manorial or ecclesiastical records, but it is likely that Cecilia’s brother William was among them. William left Brigstock in 1308, and after he returned in 1317, he was always identified with the unusual and respectful title of Magister (or “Master”). Perhaps he held a degree from Oxford or Cambridge (as did many “Masters”), but more likely he was just much better educated than anyone else in Brigstock. He might have been the parish clerk or a deacon, but he was certainly well educated enough to be the second priest in Brigstock, appointed by the vicar to care for St. Peter’s church in Stanion.
As one of a handful of churchmen in Brigstock parish, Master William personifies the ambivalent status of rural clergy. On the one hand, William was an ordinary person, a local boy. Older people remembered him as a child; his friends sweated beside him in field and pasture; children played with his nephews and nieces. Most days, he got up and did exactly what his neighbors did. He went into the fields to plow, sow, or weed; he tended to the health of his sheep; he cultivated fruits and vegetables in his garden. When he attended the manorial court every three weeks, he never served as a juror, aletaster, or other manorial officer, but he otherwise acted like his brothers. He purchased land from his neighbors, he pledged for the good conduct of his friends, and he proffered excuses for those unable to get to court. Like everyone else in Brigstock, William was a peasant, well known to his neighbors and busied by the same tasks.
On the other hand, William, as a cleric, had special stature within Brigstock parish. First, he was better educated than most people. There were no seminaries to train priests in medieval Europe, so most would-be priests had to rely on local clergymen to teach them to read Latin and to train them in the rituals of the Mass. As a result, priests in rural parishes were often minimally trained for their duties. Some were so ignorant that they could barely mumble the first lines of the Mass, and others even unwittingly led peasants into theological error. William’s title of “Master” suggests that he received a better education than most priests, and when he left Brigstock for nine years, he may have studied with some learned men. His education was exceptional for a rural cleric. Yet whether highly educated or roughly trained, rural priests had more learning than their parishioners. Many read with difficulty and understood only rudimentary Latin, but they were, at least, literate.
Second, William was special because he did not marry, at least not in a technical sense. The Church had long encouraged priests to practice celibacy, and from the eleventh century, clerical marriage was explicitly forbidden. Many priests interpreted this prohibition loosely. Some sought casual liaisons, and others, although they refrained from contracting legitimate marriages, settled down with women, fathered and raised children, and sometimes even trained sons to become clerics and take over the family business. Everyone looked the other way; it was irregular, but it was common. William, for whom no “wife” is mentioned in the courts of Brigstock, had at least one child, John Perse to whom he gave his properties in 1326. Alice Perse, the mother of this son, might have lived in Kingsthorpe, a village about eighteen miles southwest of Brigstock, or she might have moved from Kingsthorpe to live with William in Brigstock. If so, she lived like numerous other “priest’s concubines” in medieval villages; much like other wives in most respects, they were always vulnerable to gossip, criticism, and even Church sanction. One medieval tale related how a priest’s concubine reacted to word that the bishop was coming to inspect the parish and, among other things, order her to leave. Fixing up a basket of cakes, eggs, and other good foods, she set out to meet the bishop on the road. When he asked her where she was going and why, she replied, “I’m taking these gifts to your mistress who has lately been brought to childbed.” The bishop, thus reminded of his own sexual relationship, left her and her family alone. William’s family was also left alone. His son John not only inherited William’s lands but also became a cleric like his father. Treated kindly by his aunt Cecilia when she was on her deathbed, John seems to have been an accepted and well-loved member of the Penifader family.
Third, William and other clerics enjoyed a special legal status: if he committed a crime, he was punished in ecclesiastical courts, not secular ones. “Criminous clerks” had been the cause of a great argument at the end of the twelfth century, an argument that had pitted Thomas Becket, then Archbishop of Canterbury, against his former friend and king, Henry II. Becket supported the Church’s claim to judge clerics under the procedures of canon law; Henry II thought it outrageous that he could not punish all those who committed offenses within his realm. Becket lost his life in this argument, killed before the altar of Canterbury by four knights who thought they were carrying out the wishes of Henry II. But Becket’s viewpoint finally prevailed. Arrangements differed throughout medieval Europe, but in most places, the Church successfully maintained its right to judge (or sometimes just to punish) clerics for most crimes.
Fourth, if, as is likely, William was ordained as a priest, he was also a special person in Brigstock because of his sacerdotal powers. Of all the people in Brigstock, only he and the vicar could celebrate Mass, impose penance on sinners, anoint the dying, and otherwise ensure, through their special powers, God’s grace and God’s salvation. As someone empowered to administer the sacraments of the Church, he stood as a critical intermediary between ordinary people and their God. A priest’s words were understood to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ; his absolution wiped away sins; his blessings baptized infants, confirmed marriages, and eased the dead toward salvation. If the Penifaders saw William celebrating Mass when they went to St. Peter’s on Sunday, they understood little of the Latin he muttered and not much about the symbolic significance of all he did, but they knew that he, alone of all of them, had a special relationship to the bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ.
The duties of the vicar of Brigstock and his assistants were carefully specified. They were to celebrate Mass every day; they were to preach sermons at least four times each year; they were to teach their parishioners about the fourteen points of the Christian creed, the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments, and the seven deadly sins; they were to be sure that everyone confessed their sins and took communion at least once a year; they were to baptize the young, marry the nubile, and bury the dead. Whether priests did all this or not was mostly left up to their own consciences. Although bishops visited rural districts to search for incompetent or lazy priests, their visits were neither frequent nor effective. The bishop of Lincoln and his subordinates sometimes asked the vicar of Brigstock to report his doings to them, but they seldom verified his responses by directly visiting the parish. The care of the souls of Brigstock was left almost wholly to the discretion of its vicar and his helpers. Perhaps many children learned their catechism, as did Joan of Arc, more from their mothers than from their parsons.
The clergy of Brigstock took their “living” from the parish in several ways. The vicar himself managed the glebe, lands in the parish assigned to his use. Like the demesne and the holdings of peasants, the glebe was usually scattered through the fields of a manor. Some priests leased out the glebe to others, but most worked it, like any other peasant, with their own muscle and sweat. In addition to the glebe, Cirencester Abbey assigned 22 shillings of rent to the vicar of Brigstock. In other words, there were a few tenants in the parish whose houses were owned by the abbey and whose rent supported the vicar. Aside from the glebe and any rents that might accrue to the parish, most of a priest’s living came directly from parishioners. Everyone paid oblations; that is, they paid (in cash or kind) for the services rendered by the priest. When the Penifader children were baptized, Robert and Alice paid for the priest’s labor; when their children Emma and Alice died, they paid for their burials; and when Christina and Agnes were married, they paid the priest to officiate. In theory, these payments were voluntary, but in practice they were expected and required. Everyone in the parish was also required to tithe by contributing one-tenth of their yearly gains to the parish—every tenth sheaf at harvest, every tenth lamb born each spring, every tenth bucket of nuts from the forest, every tenth egg, every tenth of every sort of produce. Some Christians today tithe voluntarily, but in the Middle Ages it was compulsory, and it was also resented.
In addition, in Brigstock and many other parishes, a mortuary was customarily due on the death of every head of a household. Based on the assumption that a dead person left behind unpaid tithes, the mortuary gave to the Church the second-best animal of the deceased. More than likely, profits from tithes and mortuaries went directly to Cirencester Abbey, for their agreement with the vicar stipulated that he would keep only his glebe, his 22 shillings of rent, and his profits from oblations.
The vicar’s assistants patched together their livings as best they could. Usually the vicar paid each assistant a small sum from his own income, and assistants also took oblations from parishioners. Master William, of course, had his own lands and house, so in addition to the money he got from the vicar and parishioners, he lived off properties he inherited or purchased. Other clerics made do as best they could. Absolon, the fictional cleric in the Canterbury Tales, made extra money by writing charters and other documents for his neighbors, but he also practiced medicine, barbered, and perhaps earned some money by singing and playing his guitar.
The churches of St. Andrew and St. Peter were familiar and comfortable places for Cecilia. She visited them often, she contributed to their upkeep, and she knew one of their clerics very well indeed. For her, as for most medieval peasants, parish churches were much more than sacred places visited on Sundays and other holy days. As the most substantial building in a village, the parish church was readily used for many purposes that some might label profane. People sometimes stored grain, cloth, or animals in the parish church, and they gathered in it to debate local issues as well as to worship their God. After all, the building was strong, and it was maintained by local funds. As long as its use as a storehouse, meeting place, or even indoor market was confined to the nave (away from the sacred space of the chancel), no harm was done.
As a familiar gathering spot, the parish church sometimes inspired more chatter than prayer. A perennial complaint of parsons was that their parishioners did everything during Mass except pay attention to the sacred business at hand. Priests even gave sermons about a special demon, Tutivillus, who took notes on women’s chatter in church; since he had so much gossip to write down, Tutivillus had to stretch his parchment by grasping it with teeth and feet, and in so doing, he lost his balance and cracked his head. The lesson was a funny one, intended to teach that talk in church, particularly the talk of women, was the devil’s delight. This was a much-ignored lesson. Most parishioners attended church regularly, but they did not necessarily feel compelled to pay close attention to what the priest and his assistants did at the altar. They were satisfied to have made it to church at all, instead of lingering in bed or stopping at an alehouse. So, while the Mass was celebrated in the chancel of St. Peter’s, some parishioners in the nave recited prayers and pondered the miracle of the Eucharist, but others discussed spring plowing, gossiped about a stranger met on the road, or planned a trip for the next Friday to the weekly market in Kettering. In short, like the men who served as its priests, deacons, and clerks, the parish church negotiated between sacred and everyday functions. It was holy space, but it was also community space.
Beyond the Parish
By Cecilia’s lifetime, parishes in England were firmly established, well regulated, and responsible for most pastoral care. They also had competition. In the early thirteenth century, new orders of religious men called friars were established, some by St. Dominic (thus, the Dominicans) and others by St. Francis of Assisi (the Franciscans). Friars were like monks in that they took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but unlike monks in that they moved around in the world rather than withdrawing into monasteries. Franciscans became especially important in England, traveling from village to village and offering an alternative to the pastoral care of the local clergy. Friars were excellent preachers, so their arrival in Brigstock or a nearby village was exciting news—a reason to gather together, to be entertained, and to learn some theology, too.
St. Francis had relied for his daily bread on the gifts of strangers, and Franciscans were supposed to follow his example. This meant that they looked to local people for food and shelter and even money. It is not hard to imagine how much local clergy chafed against visiting friars. Friars were just passing strangers, but they offered delightful sermons, riled up parishioners with newfangled ideas, and then took gifts from them. The local parson could easily feel dull and poorer by comparison.
He might also feel stodgy, because Franciscan theology was cutting-edge and radical. St. Francis and his early followers had tried to imitate Jesus and his apostles. They threw away all their possessions and worked or begged for their daily food; they embraced humility (Francis dubbed them friars minor or “little brothers”); they joyously accepted the world and all people within it—peasants as much as nobles. They even embraced the poor, arguing that the rich were a scandal to God and that the poor were God’s true children. These ideals were too good to last, and they were even changing by the time St. Francis died in 1226. Some aspects of early Franciscan theology were even declared heretical. By 1300, the Franciscan friars were not as radical as St. Francis had been, but they still spoke positively about poverty and the poor. From their sermons, Cecilia and her siblings might have taken good heart, understanding that although the tripartite scheme that condemned peasants to labor for the rich was God-given, peasants were, nevertheless, especially loved by God.
The Ritual Year
For the Penifaders, the year had no clear beginning or end, and its rhythms comfortably mingled sacred and profane. The modern designation of 1 January as New Year’s Day was as old as Rome itself, but in the early fourteenth century, it was eclipsed as a holiday by Christmas a week earlier and the feast of Epiphany a few days later. (Epiphany commemorated the arrival of the Magi, or Wise Men, to visit the infant Jesus and his mother in the manger.) On most religious calendars, the year officially changed on 25 March, the feast celebrating the Christian feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (that is, the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel before Mary to announce that she was pregnant). The Annunciation was neatly timed exactly nine months before the birth of Jesus in the Christian calendar. For Cecilia, however, “Ladyday” passed without much notice in the gloom of Lent and the bustle of spring planting. A third annual shift coincided with the end of harvest, and was linked to Michaelmas, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel on 29 September. Clerks and accountants usually figured years from one 29 September to the next, counting acres, seed, and bushels; paying workers and creditors; and adding up their figures in preparation for audit. Live-in servants were hired either at Michaelmas or a few weeks later, usually agreeing to serve year-long contracts.
Yet if Cecilia’s year had no clear beginning or end, it was punctuated by many holidays. She worked hard, but she also often rested and often played (see Figure 11). The calendar of the Church dictated a great deal of this schedule of work and leisure (which explains why our word “holiday” derives from “holy day”). By Cecilia’s time, holy days and Sundays accounted for about one hundred days a year—or about one of every four days. On Sundays, work in the fields was discouraged, and while women might mend clothes and men sharpen tools, it was mostly a day of rest. An additional forty-odd days, concentrated around Christmas and Easter but otherwise scattered throughout the year, were special holy days on which no one did much work. The Church’s designation of holy days ran along two primary axes. The first set commemorated the story of Jesus’ life and work as understood through the New Testament, and the second celebrated notable events in the lives of various saints. In Brigstock parish, the feasts of the patron saints of the two churches—St. Peter (29 June) and St. Andrew (30 November)—would have been especially observed, and for Cecilia, the feast of St. Cecilia (22 November) would have been a special day, as important as her birthday. With all of Christendom, Cecilia and the parishioners of Brigstock also rested for two long periods each year—for the Twelve Days between Christmas and Epiphany, and for all of Easter Week.
Christmas was a time of special festivity. Like everyone else, Cecilia fasted through December, restricting her diet, perhaps no meats or tasty sauces, for the four weeks of Advent that preceded Christmas. On Christmas morning, her piety was rewarded. As people gathered in church in the cold darkness before dawn, they were met with an abundance of candles and a celebratory service. Afterward, the feasting would begin, and some people were so eager to start the fun that they skipped the holy services. One grim but popular medieval story tells of twelve people who sang and danced in front of their church at Christmas; when the priest called them to Mass and they refused to come, he cursed them; for an entire year thereafter, they were condemned to dance in an endlessly wearying frenzy; when the curse was finally lifted at the next Christmas, some died, and the rest were condemned to wander the countryside, afflicted with agitated minds and twitchy limbs. A tale like this did a great deal to encourage Cecilia and her family to attend Christmas services and to wait patiently for the feasting and dancing that was to come.
Figure 11. Holidays. Wrestling was good entertainment, and all it required was eager boys and fine weather. (British Library, Luttrell Psalter, folio 62.)
By tradition, the wealthy opened their houses at Christmas, feeding the humble and poor. On manors with resident lords or ladies, tenants could expect a feast of fine meats and strong ale in the hall of the manor house. In Brigstock, with no lord or lady to act as host, the Penifaders and other well-off peasants might have fed their poorer neighbors, or perhaps all the parishioners pooled their resources for a common feast. However it was staged, the Christmas feast signaled the beginning of twelve festive days when people put aside work to eat, dance, tell stories, wear masks and costumes, and play. In castles, monasteries, and towns, professional entertainers—harpers, minstrels, and actors—provided amusement. Their grand festivals sometimes included intentional episodes of disorder and misrule; for a few hours everyone enjoyed a “feast of fools,” when a servant might be crowned king, a novice monk made abbot, or an apprentice elevated to mayor. English peasants never adopted this practice (which, in any case, served more to reinforce hierarchy than to ridicule it), and in Brigstock and other villages, the songs, dances, and stories came from local talent. For Cecilia and her family, the Twelve Days of Christmas were days of full stomachs and tipsy heads. It was a good way to get through some of the darkest and coldest days of the year when neither fields nor flocks demanded much work. The worst of winter would soon be past.
On 6 January, the Twelve Days ended with an Epiphany service commemorating the arrival of the Magi and one final feast. Then, it was back to work, and especially to plowing the fields in anticipation of spring planting. In Brigstock, as in many villages, the transition to work was a gentle one; on the Monday after Epiphany, men secured blessings for their plows in the parish church and then dragged them through streets and lanes, cajoling money out of everyone they encountered. The money raised on “Plow Monday” was then put to charitable uses—perhaps to fix a loose door or recast a bell, or perhaps to aid parish orphans and other unfortunates.
A few weeks later, work paused briefly for one of the most beautiful services in the Christian calendar: the commemoration of the Purification of the Virgin on 2 February. The Old Testament had required that new mothers be purified in a ritual bath several weeks after giving birth; medieval Christians adapted this Jewish tradition not only in their commemoration of the Virgin Mary but also in churching ceremonies for new mothers. Each new mother in Brigstock went to church about six weeks after childbirth to celebrate her successful delivery. The medieval service stressed thanksgiving rather than purification, but its purifying implications persisted. In some parishes, women who died in childbirth (that is, without the benefit of churching) were refused burial in holy ground. Cecilia’s mother Alice celebrated eight churchings over some twenty years, each time thanking God for her safe delivery and enjoying the congratulations of the women, kin and friends, who had assisted in her perilous labor. These churchings could be so happy and festive that in some towns, authorities had to step in to control crowds and to limit the “dishes, meats, and wines” consumed afterwards. Churchings were surely joyous occasions, with the new mother thanking God for her delivery, her friends and family offering their congratulations, and everyone celebrating the mother’s successful passage through the perils of childbirth.
The feast of the Purification of the Virgin, then, was especially important to the mothers of Brigstock. As they gathered with everyone else on the second day of February, Alice and the other mothers of Brigstock may have felt a particular kinship with the Virgin who, like them, had offered thanks for a successful labor. This feast also marked, as Groundhog Day now does in the United States, the early turning of winter into spring, and it was celebrated, appropriately enough, with dramatic darkness and dramatic light. Lit with an extraordinary display of candles, the church of St. Andrew welcomed the Penifaders out of the cold dawn of a February morning. After the Mass, everyone paraded around the church with candles, and when this procession ended, other candles and tapers were blessed and then saved for later use (they were considered to be especially useful for warding off demons or other evils). The candles were so bright in the darkness of early morning that the service was familiarly known as Candlemas. Afterward feasting began, and having fasted the day before, everyone ate with enthusiasm.
Within a few weeks, parishioners began to prepare for the Easter season. As the major movable feast in the Christian calendar, Easter fell on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox—a date that could fall anywhere between 22 March and 25 April. Each year, the forty days before Easter were times of particular fasting and self-denial (even more so than the four weeks of Advent). Before Lent began, everyone enjoyed one last party: Shrovetide. The winter stocks of foods that would be forbidden during Lent—meat, eggs, cheese, and so on—were eaten, and then, on Ash Wednesday, the fast began. The next forty days were a somber time. Everyone ate a restricted diet; no festivities eased work; and religious sculptures, paintings, or other images in the churches of St. Andrew and St. Peter were veiled from human view. These were also critical weeks in the agricultural year. Fields were plowed, sown, and harrowed; ewes were brought through lambing; and houses were swept out and spruced up in spring cleaning. With half-empty stomachs and a shrouded church, Cecilia and her family thought much about sin and redemption during Lent, but they also worked hard. Fortunately, they also relished the warming weather, increasing daylight, new flowers, migrating birds, and newborn lambs of spring.
The final week of Lent was Holy Week. On the last Sunday before Easter, the Penifaders brought branches to be blessed, a celebration of spring growth that also remembered the palms strewn before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem. Solemn services followed all week, and then, on Friday, the crucifixion was commemorated. Later generations of English peasants built Easter sepulchers—miniature tombs surrounded by candles and watched by the faithful between Friday and Sunday—for this part of Holy Week, and although we cannot be sure, the custom might date as far back as Cecilia’s time. Easter sepulcher or no, Cecilia and her family gathered in church on Saturday night, extinguished all candles and flames, and then lit them anew, brightening the church with the largest candle of the ritual year, the Paschal Candle. Early Sunday morning, after forty days of moderate fast and a week of intensifying observances, the Penifaders celebrated the Resurrection in a church joyously returned to its old state—candles lit, statues unveiled, and paintings revealed. They brought with them eggs to be blessed, for even in the early fourteenth century, eggs were already a dual symbol of Easter and spring. After the Easter Mass, everyone in Brigstock enjoyed several days of feasts and games. The celebrations were not as long or as intense as those of the Twelve Days of Christmas, but they were more likely to be outside. The Penifaders watched and participated in archery contests, ball games, wrestling, tumbling, dancing, and singing in the aftermath of Holy Week.
After Easter, a variety of lesser holidays relieved the work of late spring and early summer. On May Day, Cecilia and her sisters rose before dawn and gathered flowers to decorate themselves and their house. Later, they danced with local boys around the maypole, a custom that possibly dated from before 1066. May Day was a holiday of particular importance to the young, but everyone joined in the predawn walks, the selection of the maypole, the dancing, and the feasting. Ascension (celebrating the Christian feast of the ascent of the resurrected Christ into heaven) was the next important holiday, following Easter by six weeks. On the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before Ascension (known as Rogation Days), Cecilia and her sisters might have watched as their father and brothers walked the boundaries of the parish, a practice designed to ensure that each generation of men remembered the trees, ditches, and hedges that marked off the jurisdiction of Brigstock. In many parishes, boys were beaten at critical junctures, to ensure that boundary markers were forever impressed on their minds. Less than two weeks later, everyone commemorated the feast of Whitsun or Pentecost when, according to Christian tradition, the Holy Spirit had descended on the apostles. Whitsun usually fell during the fine weather of June, and it was often observed with parades, dances, games, and feasting. Many parishes took advantage of the weather to hold churchales, using the festivities to raise money for parochial projects. Throughout May and June, the Penifaders and their neighbors continued to work hard—plowing fallow fields, weeding sown acres, fixing drainage ditches, checking flocks, and making hay.
Then, as haymaking ended at midsummer, work stopped for the bonfires of St. John’s Eve, the night before the feast that commemorated the birth of St. John the Baptist on 24 June. Today, we celebrate the solstice on 21 June; medieval people considered that midsummer coincided with St. John’s Eve, a small shift that neatly accommodated nature to the religious calendar. On St. John’s Eve, the people of Brigstock gathered on a nearby hill, built huge piles of twigs, wood, and straw; and then, when the sun finally set on the longest day of the year, chased away the dark with fire. As she stood sweating from the blaze and panting from the dancing, Cecilia may have felt protected by the fire. Medieval children were taught that the fires of St. John’s Eve guarded them from summer infections and saved the ripening crops from blight.
The time between midsummer and Advent was the busiest time in Brigstock. In late June and July, fields needed to be weeded and plowed; in August and September, harvest ruled the day; and in October and November, the Penifaders were busy slaughtering pigs, collecting fruits and nuts, and otherwise preparing for winter. In these months, only a few dates loomed large. On 29 June, the church of St. Peter in Stanion celebrated the feast day of its saint, and the church of St. Andrew in Brigstock did the same on 30 November. Some churches mounted large church-ales on such days and used the occasion to collect money for church repairs or charitable uses, but in Brigstock parish, neither saint’s day fell at a convenient time. The celebration of the feast of St. Peter was likely eclipsed by the still smoldering fires of St. John’s Eve, and the combination of cold weather and Advent ensured a modest feast in commemoration of St. Andrew. Aside from these two saints’ days special in the parish of Brigstock, only two other holy days were particularly important to Christians in these months: the feast of All Saints on 1 November followed the next day by the feast of All Souls together marked the beginning of winter. At the moment that nature itself seemed to be dying or preparing for death, Cecilia and others remembered the human dead. In the dark afternoon, with dead leaves underfoot, and an uncertain supply of food put aside for winter, they began to ring the bells of St. Andrew and St. Peter—to comfort the dead, as they had been taught—and they continued their somber task well into the night. Less than a month later, Advent began.
Today, many things can seem familiar about the ritual year that set the pace of Cecilia’s life. We can link Plow Monday with the ritual of blessing tractors in some parts of modern Germany; the Purification of the Virgin with the custom of Groundhog Day in the United States; the feasting of Shrovetide with Pancake Day in Britain as well as Mardi Gras in New Orleans; the branches blessed before Easter with modern Palm Sunday; the feast of St. John the Baptist with Québec’s National Day; the remembrances of All Saints with Halloween; even the complementary rhythms of farming and schooling (for many academic calendars still offer their longest breaks during the work-heavy months of the agricultural year).
Yet Cecilia’s year was different from our own. For us, May Day, midsummer, and Halloween are pleasant interruptions in modern schedules far removed from the dictates of nature. For Cecilia, the natural cycles of the year—light and dark, warm and cold, work and leisure—were strongly echoed in the ritual calendar. For many of us, religious rituals are comforting but somewhat distant from our everyday lives. For Cecilia, they often spoke not only about holy events and holy persons but also about her own life and her own experiences: about the churching of her mother on the feast of the Purification of the Virgin; about the coming work of harvest on St. John’s Eve; about the deaths of her sisters Emma and Alice on the feast of All Souls. For most of us, food and fire are controllable things, available when we need them and easily put aside when we do not. Yet Cecilia would have thought it foolish to count so confidently on food and light. She saw people sicken and die from inadequate diets, and she accommodated her work to the light of the sun and the dark of a night lit only by the moon. For her, these rituals—which so often asked her to fast and then feast, to feel darkness and then see light—spoke powerfully about things that she could not fully control. So in real and direct ways, the ritual year of Brigstock spoke about the life of Cecilia, about her religious faith, to be sure, but also about her natural world, her experiences, and her fears.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Although it focuses on a later period, Ronald Hutton’s The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (1994) provides an excellent introduction to many rural practices, beliefs, and rituals. See also Ronald C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (1995). For parish life, see especially Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (2001). For pilgrimage, see Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (2000) and Medieval European Pilgrimage (2002). For Europe in general, see John H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (2005), and the many, varied essays in his edited Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (2017). For sources, see John Shinners, ed., Medieval Popular Religion (2nd ed., 2006).
For ecclesiastical history and religious practice, see two books by R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989) and Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515 (1995). For medieval ideas about poverty and the poor, see Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (2010), and Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (2001).
