Why the drinkers got up early to go to church
It had hardly occurred to me that people would be criticised for wanting to get up on a Sunday morning and go to an earlier Mass. But that was sometimes the case in the high Medieval period in England.
In 1364, the nuns of Shaftesbury complained of the noise of crowds of layfolk coming to Mass in the nave of their church at dawn so as to have longer leisure afterwards drinking – and getting drunk.
That detail comes in a welcome new book by Nicholas Orme, Going to Church in Medieval England. The author is immensely learned, bringing together hundreds of citations in a vivid mosaic of daily life 600 years ago or so.
Parishioners were expected to be at the principal Sunday Mass, provided at 8am or 9am, and half a dozen holy days during the year. It was, the author, suggests, seldom a matter of external compulsion. Parishes stuck together socially, and children might take it as natural to go to church, where there were things to see and people to be with.
The latest Mass was generally said at 10am, over in time for dinner. During the week, women in towns, if they had leisure, might like to go at that time, being free to be at church even when their ambit was otherwise more restricted to the home.
Children at church receive their due from Professor Orme, whose Medieval Children proved in 2001 that parents of the time did not cherish their offspring less than we do, or grieve less if they were lost to them. He reckons about a third of the congregation were children, although their presence was not obligatory before puberty, deemed to be 12 for girls, 14 for boys.
Then as now, children could disturb other worshippers. The complaints at Kirby Bellars, in Leicestershire, were that “children make a noise indecently, so it is hard to hear divine service”.
But there were opportunities for women and girls to run their own affairs at church, although men might take charge in public life. Besides men’s guilds, associations perhaps known as companies, were formed by women. Maidens’ companies were open to unmarried girls of about 12 to 20 (with companies for young men of a similar age). Wives’ companies probably included widows.
As Eamon Duffy showed so brilliantly in The Voices of Morebath, such companies were both social and religious, holding funds and livestock or beehives in order to maintain devotional images of saints and the candles burning before them.
Professor Orme points to details of stained glass at St Neot in Cornwall which show wives and “sisters” (perhaps meaning maidens) as donors of the larger windows above. They hold the “pairs of beads” on which they told their prayers and are dressed in fashionable headdresses. Those, said pious writers of the time, could be objects of pride – or in the eyes of envious neighbours, proof of it. But so might men be vain of fine Sunday clothes, as they wandered annoyingly about the church, even with a hawk on the wrist, if they had the status to own one.
People not at church might be sick, infirm or too far distant. At harvest time, a bishop might condone buying and selling on a Sunday – but after Mass. At Holbeach, Lincolnshire, shepherds, not always able to be at church because of their animal charges, formed a guild to provide candles to be burnt there as a sort of remembrance. But a shoemaker who slept through Mass time was accused by fellow parishioners at St Giles, Colchester, of behaving “like a dog that would keep his kennel”. I shall set my alarm tomorrow.