Gone Medieval - Going to Church in Medieval England

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

Parish churches were at the heart of English social life in the Middle Ages. But how did they come into existence? Who staffed them? And how were the buildings used? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Professor Nicholas Orme, whose new book Going to Church in Medieval England was shortlisted for the 2022 Wolfson History Prize, the UK’s most prestigious history writing award. Together, they explore how worship touched everyone’s lives, what happened in the daily and weekly services, and how churches marked festivals and the great events of life.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The church was a huge influence on almost all aspects of medieval life in Christian Europe. In Nicholas Orme's wonderful new book, Going to Church in Medieval England, the buildings, their functions, those who attended services and what those services looked and sounded like are all explored to bring the experiences of medieval churchgoers vividly to life. I'm delighted to be joined by Nicholas to discuss something right at the heart of medieval life in the Christian world. Thank you very much for joining us,

Nicholas. Thank you very much, Matt, for inviting me. It's a pleasure. So I guess to begin with, how does the Christian church arrive in England? How is it founded and how does it begin to become organised in England? It profilates into England under the Roman Empire. It spreads through the Roman Empire from the east to the west. It is lawful in the Roman Empire from the early 300s. So it's got about a hundred years to establish itself in what was then Britain before the Roman Empire collapsed. So you have got churches then, although we know very little about them. We know there were three bishops in York, London and Lincoln, so it must have been an organised church. But then that all falls apart after about 400 or 450.

And the church is an organised presence, only survives in Wales, the north-west and the south-west. And in England, it's still there, but in some sort of folk fashion rather than organised churches. Then in 597, there's a papal mission from Rome to restore organised Christianity in what was by that stage, England. comes to Kent, led by St Augustine of Canterbury, and that begins to re-establish a formal, organised church with bishops and church. For the first few centuries, Christianity was in a missionary situation in England because the population hadn't yet become fully Christianised. The main method of spreading Christianity was through large churches, which had several clergy operating them, and would have been very much like a Thane's household, sometimes in a defensive site. Places like Glastonbury and Malmesbury, the bury means not a secular castle,

it actually means the fortification round the minster. And that was necessary because they were pioneers and they had to be totally self-sufficient. The clergy were either monks or they were like what later on became known as canons or secular clergy. In other words, they were allowed to marry, live in separate houses. Then by the time you get to about 900, which is after Alfred and the first attack of the Vikings has been driven off and so on, you're in a different situation because the population has become Christianised. There appear to be important changes taking place in society as well. Big estates were being divided up into smaller ones.

A gentry class was emerging. villages were being established rather than people living in individual farms and hamlets. And all that made desirable a lot more local churches, which would be staffed only by a single clergy person, and would deal with a relatively small area of land and population. And that's the characteristic parish situation being developed through the 900s and 1000. which we still have today. So over most of the countryside, you would get a church every two or three miles,

dealing with a fairly small area. And in towns, of course, you would get far more churches. We've lost most of the town churches. Places like York and Lincoln and Winchester had dozens of them. Even today, if you go to a town like Norwich, you would be aware that there are still a lot of parish churches within a fairly small area. you can have lots of different kinds of churches, and there were far more places of worship

than there were parish churches. And so what makes a church a parish church? It's interesting they've been around for sort of a thousand years, and they're still dotted around England today. How do we define a church as being a parish church? What makes it that? Basically, a parish church is a church which has the statutory duty of serving a population in a distinct area of land with boundaries.

So there's a parish boundary, and everybody within that area has certain rights in the parish church, even today, and the right to be baptized and married and buried, for example. And until the late 17th century, I suppose, everybody was meant to maintain the parish church building and right down to the 20th century, in some case, contribute to the income of the priest. This was through tithes in the middle ages.

Nearly everybody played tithes because most people are engaged in agriculture. You pay a tenth of your crops or a tenth of the produce of your animals. You pay on milk. It's not money originally. It's actually giving some of your milk and your cheese and your eggs to the incumbent of the church. And that goes down among some farmers until as late as 1936. when it was finally abolished. A parish church has this kind of public duty of serving a particular area,

and the people of that area have certain duties in relation to going to the church and maintaining it. But there were many other churches. Of course, there were monasteries on the whole were not parish churches, though some were. Some had a parish church inside them, like Tewks, for example. Some cathedrals had a parish church inside them as well, right down to the Second World War. And then scattered across the landscape, there were huge numbers of chapels by the end of the Middle Ages. There were chapels in manor houses.

There were chapels in town halls and guild halls. There were chapels on tops and in woods and on fords and bridges, tens of thousands of them, actually. But they did not have parish rights. They did not serve a particular group of people. and nobody had an obligation to maintain them. Interesting. So all of these churches and different types of places of worship,

what might we expect to see in them in terms of standard features? Were they all built along similar lines? Did they have the same features at Naive and things like that that we might recognise today? Yes. Christian churches, certainly in Western Europe, from very early times, were built in two parts, or probably in the case of the smaller chapels, only one part, but you've got to have a bit where you do your worship, where the worship is carried out by the clergy, and that's the chancel. The word chancel means a screened-off place. And then with a very small chapel, you may have nothing else than that, and worshippers will gather outside. But for most purposes, you then have a much larger coven area called the nave, which is where lay people watch the service being conducted.

You can embellish that, you can put on transepts, you can put on side chapels, you can on aisles, which are longitudinal bits. But the essential features of a church are an eastern chancel and a western nave. The word nave is linked to navus in Latin naval ship. It's like a great ship building, as if you turned a Viking ship upside down, and that's where the congregation are sitting, standing or kneeling. Yeah, fascinating. If you look at a lot of church ceilings today, you can get that sense of an upside-down ship still, can't you, in some of them? And does the structure and the way that buildings are built and arranged, does that change and develop throughout the medieval period? Or does it stay largely the same and it's just sort of the fashion of building that changes with Gothic and things like that? Very early churches that we now have, which are late Saxon and Norman, the Chancellor on the nave, are divided by a fairly small, round, head.

archway so that there's a sense of separation between the two, but you can get a view of what's going on beyond. And now what seems to happen in the 1100s is that there develops a much different idea of what happens at the Communion Service or the Mass, as it was known. The Communion Service centres on taking bread and wine. repeating the words of Jesus at the last supper, this is my body and my blood, and venerating it. Nowadays, most churches will give the communion to the congregation, but in the Middle Ages, people only took communion on East Sunday, and it was the priest who actually consumed the bread and the wine. And in the 1100s, the idea that this bread and wine really becomes, in a physical sense,

the body and blood of Christ, is important. not just in a kind of memorial sense or a symbolic sense, but it is like having Christ in your room. And that being the case, it becomes essential for everybody to be able to see the elements, which the priest holds up. After consecration, he first of all holds up the wafer of bread, and then he holds up the chalice and then both together. And that becomes the supreme moment of the service which you should be able to see. So churches then change their design. The small arch is done away with, and the whole church is opened up between the chancel and the knave,

so that everybody gets a much better view. However, if you've got Christ really appearing in the chancel, you do want to distance people from him. You don't necessarily want hoi-ploi all crowding around and breathing and making a noise. so you want to keep them off. And so in these big issues which have straight through view, you now put in a wooden screen, which is about 10 feet high, and it's a series of open windows and then panelling underneath and a door in the middle.

And so the congregation has to look through, and they're kept at a certain distance, but they're able to see the wonderful moment when the elements are held up to be venerated. Another is, I think, that churches tend to get larger and more elaborate so that they're extended. There are reasons for this. Importantly, people like to be buried in church. And I think that transepts, these arms that you get coming out from about the middle of the church, were often places for the burial of the local gentry and the clergy.

So we need space for burial. We then need space for processions because they're very important in services, particularly on Sundays. So we want to have aisles, which are long corridors down the side of the nave, so that the party can come out of the chance or circle the church and then go back in again. And then we add chapel because there is veneration to saints. So we would like to have a special chapel in which to venerate the Virgin Mary. for example, or Peter or James or Thomas Beckett or whoever it may be. There may be religious organisations in the parish.

There may be a guild, and that will want a chapel in which it can have occasional services held. So for all those reasons, the churches become more and more elaborate, and of course they go upwards as well. They get towers, they sometimes get galleries, they sometimes get bridges as well. there are cases where the Lord of a manor house next to the church, and incidentally churches were often placed next to manor houses, will have a bridge constructed so that he and his family can get into church dry on a wet day. Always important for the important and rich people to be able to keep their hair dry. I think it's fascinating that you can see in all of that

that church design and building is affected by the huge questions of transubstantiation that big theological questions, but also those small individual acts at worship with saints. And the practicalities of using a church mean that we need the aisles and things like that. And also the secular elements of people wishing to be buried inside the church. All those four parts are coming together to influence the way a church is laid out and developed. So they're quite utilitarian buildings really, aren't they, I think? That's right. And that produces complications in using a church.

because the reformers abolish the regular performance of the Mass, and it tends to happen after about 1560s. It's a thing that happens four times a year, so it's very rare. The reformers want to concentrate on Bible reading and preaching, and yet they don't have the resources to pull all the churches down and rebuild new ones in a simple way. They have to use the old Catholic. buildings as best they can so that the chancel remains tends to get taken over partly by the vicar's

family because courte are now allowed to marry and also by the lord of the manor. The side chapels are no longer used because there's no more veneration of saints. They get appropriated by other wealthy local families and the wing areas are used for burials and whereas in the middle ages you'll have to be pretty wealthy to get a burial in a church. After the Reformation, when there's plenty of room, it means that all the farmers in the countryside can have a big slab and be buried under it on the floor or a citizen in town churches. So the church is then being used, again, in a different way,

although it's the same building. Fascinating. And so who would have staffed a medieval church if we'd walked in? What kind of people would we have found in there and what roles would they have been performing? You normally have one priest. This is not necessarily the incumbent of the church, because the medieval church is much affected by wealth and rank and power.

And the sons of the aristocracy and gentry who go into the church expect to have a similar lifestyle. Some are bishops, some are deans or canons of cathedrals. Those who can't get that would like to have two or three churches to give them a decent income. That is tolerated to an extent, although there were rules about it. But if you're not serving your church yourself, you'll have to appoint a chaplain to do it in your place. So there will always be a clergyman there. It may not be the actual rector or victor of the church.

It may be a representative chaplain. He will be assisted by a parish clerk, which is a pretty, a pretty good. full-time job because there are so many tasks to be done and the clerk assists the priest in the services. All services are a dialogue. The Lord be with you and with thy spirit, as it were. Somebody's got to say the answer and that's what the parish clerk does. You may have others. There are many churches with several clergy, places like Ripon and Sutherall in Yorkshire and Crediton and Mary in Devon where they had large staffs of clergy. But the single priest and clerk are more typical of country parishes.

They do the service, and then you have the congregation as well. In the late 15th century, it comes to be a fashion for what is called polyphony. In other words, church music sung in harmony. Church music up until then, and indeed after then, is plain song sung in unism. But during the 15th century polyphony, which is harmonised music of the sort that we're used to, comes to be very popular. And beginning in the great households of the king and the aristocracy, and then spreading to the cathedrals and the monasteries,

and then finally down to the parish churches, is the idea of having a choir. In the case of the big establishments, it will be a professional choir. They will be salaried men or boys to do the music. In a country parish, you may never get the resources to maintain that. Or if you do, it will be half a dozen boys who do duty on Sundays and get a bit of practice during the week. But that's another group, a small choir that you may meet when you go to church

or alternatively in a very small parish, the choir may just come in from elsewhere on one or two special days of the year. So if we think about now the people who would be going to church to attend the services. I guess my first question is, was attendance at church services compulsory to any degree? Did I have to go every Sunday? That is technically the case from about the 1200s onwards down to 1689 when the Toleration Act did allow you to go to other places of worship than your parish church. It was desirable up until 1,200, but they weren't really the means to enforce it. There were very poor means of enforcement even after 1200. It's all very

well to have a law, isn't it? As we know with speed restrictions, for example, it's quite a different thing to actually make people obey them. So I don't think you would have got into trouble by not going on the old Sunday because you could always say it was too wet. You had to come too far, you weren't well, or you had to look after your sick wife, things like that. But the church did take action against people who were deliberately and frequently absent or were clearly absent for the wrong reason in order to carry on a business or something like that. In that case, there was the possibility of proceeding against them. But again, like we know with modern crimes, with burglary,

rape. It's a long, difficult process to get the person into a court to deal with them. And the problem that a parish priest would have would be that he didn't want to upset all his parishioners all the time by hauling them into the church courts for non-attendance. And I suspect that the people who were eventually brought into court were people who were unpopular in the community generally, the priests would then have society on his side, as it were, or if it was really blatant. You do have cases of a phrase in church, people attacking one another, which was very serious, because if you spill blood in a church up to the Reformation, the church has to be closed and re-consecrated. You get those cases where, again, the community would say yes, get them into court

because we don't want our church closed for two months and then have to pay the bishop the much for coming to do it again. So I guess the priest is having to pick his battles and decide the fights that he can win. And what's the sanction for non-attendance? Would that be a financial penalty? Or were there are the kinds of punishments? The financial penalties, the usual penalty in the first instance, is public humiliation. It's doing penance.

You have to come to church. You go round the church in the Sunday procession, possibly on several Sunday processions, or sometimes in a marketplace. You go round barefoot, belted, carrying a candle or something like that. So you were publicly humiliated and you were then probably given other things to do like prayers to say or fasting to do or whatever. And did those rules apply to everybody across the social spectrum or were there different rules for different people? I think the number of lords of the manor and their wives who were subject to that would actually be very small. There were occasions when proceedings were taken against members of the aristocracy for some kind of a fray in a church.

There really were occasions when two noble or gentle men went at each other with knives, and that was very shocking. But again, you've got to consider the relationship of the priest with the Lord of the Manor. Sometimes the Lord of Manor is the patron of the church. Technically, he is the owner of the church, although his only right is to appoint. clergy when necessary. But even if he's not patron of the church, the priest has a lot more to gain by keeping in with the Lord of the Manor. The Lord of the Manor will offer hospitality, for example. Come and have lunch in the quiet world of the countryside. Well, clergy are very isolated, really. The support and hospitality of the local gentry is very important

to them. And again, it's something to rely on if they're having disputes with parishioners lower down in society. The fact that the local is on your side counts a lot. I'm sure there's something to be said in there about the law not being applied to everybody evenly, but maybe we'll stay off contemporary politics. And so if I was to attend a medieval church, what kind of services would I expect to see? Would it be seasonal? Would it depend on whether there was a feast day or a festival or were there regular services that would have been pretty much the same and dare I say a little bit boring and monotonous?

There's a default that happens every day and then there are Sunday and festival and seasonal changes. What you have every day is a morning service called Matins, which takes place at or soon after dawn. and an afternoon service known as Evensong, because they yet have the word afternoon, they consider evening begins afternoon. The afternoon service at about 3 o'clock in our computation. And those have to take place in the church every day, and the parish priest is expected to go into church and say them through. There are services of hymns, prayers, readings,

and the like, not hymns as we understand it, but it will be a plain song hymn just sung by the priest and the carac themselves. With no congregational involvement, they are services of prayer and praise to God. Mass, which is the most popular service from the 1100s up to the Reformation in 1500s, doesn't have to take place every day, but often does. There's a lot of popular wish for a mass to be celebrated every day and there are reasons for the priest to do. You have to have a mass before a funeral. If there's a funeral in church there will always be a mass as well. And mass was a way of attracting people to church

because it was a more interactive service than Matins-Neevinson. It was most interactive in the sense of this creation of the body and blood of Christ which you venerated and was felt to give you, spiritual medicine as a result of going to church to see it. But on Sunday, mass is very important. It's done with more ceremony and it takes longer and it's the main Sunday service and that's the one at which all adults are expected to attend. Millions dead, a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the Second World War. America, Britain, Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day.

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where something very specific would happen as part of the service that was out of the ordinary? Yes, there are a lot of those. What you have in the church year, which technically begins a month before Christmas on Advent Sunday, very end of November, you have a penitential period from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day, where you're preparing yourself for Christmas. You then have a festival period from Christmas until 12th day, which is Epiphany. You have another penitential period in February and March called Lent, where you have to make your annual confession to your priest, and you also have to abstain from eating meat and dairy product. Then you have Easter, which is another festival period, and so on. Then alongside that, you've got the festival. Christmas not perhaps quite so important as it is nowadays, because they had no equivalent to a festival.

because they had no equivalent to our carol services. Carols originated as secular songs or songs for secular occasions. They may be religious songs, but they're not sung in church. They're sung in people's houses and in the halls of the gentry and the aristocracy. So Christmas is lacking something of its special nature today. The 2nd of February is the important day, can be. Mass, that's a public holiday because of course holy days and holidays really mean the same thing. You go to church and you have the rest of the day off.

On candle mass, everybody, children included, take candles to church and that's a big occasion. The days immediately before Easter in what is called Holy Week, Wednesday, Thursday, Good Friday, Saturday. These have a lot of ceremonial observances in church which people would go to because they were regarded as very holy and they were also rather interesting as well. Easter Day is very important. It's the one day when every adult must take communion. So that's going to be the day of the biggest congregation. In fact, the congregations were too big. because there were some churches that had enormous populations.

Some towns, like Great Yarmouth and Grantham and so on, were quite large, but only had a single parish church. And if you've got to get 2,000 people into church receiving communion, it's actually very difficult. So I think that Easter in these sort of places probably took several days that some people, probably the higher in society, had a ticket, as it were, for Sunday, and the others were done on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and so on. But we certainly here in one place, it's Doncaster, I think, that it took a whole week to give everybody communion because there was only that one church there. And then you get into what was very popular in England up to the Reformation and even afterwards, which is rogation tide.

Rogation tide starts five weeks after Easter and it's a short penitential period in which processions are held round the parish or into other parishes. What happens is that these are holidays, so people are not working. You go into church, you hear mass, which will be over by, let's say, half-past nine or ten. You then go on a long procession. Whether they went round the parish boundary, it's not entirely clear because that would have taken a very long time and wouldn't necessarily have a path all the way around it anyway. It would have involved avoiding a lot of obstacles. but we know that they went to other churches or to one of the many chapels which were scattered across

the landscape in that time. On the way they pray for God's blessing on the crops. They read Latin Gospels at particular points. They ask for God's wrath to be taken away from sinners. Eventually they arrive at their destination. They have another mass and that will have finished by, let's say, 12 or 1, and then they are really hungry because you can't eat before mass, so they won't have had anything since a minimal breakfast at about 7 or 8. You then have picnic on a grand scale, and there was the making of what we would call kishis or flams for consumption on these occasions. There was a great deal of drinking, and often Lords of the Manor invited, certainly the higher,

folk in the congregation in for drinks. And it said that clergy often find it difficult to get home afterwards, and that gospel books and frottes tended to get left behind and forgotten about. So those were wonderful occasions, so popular in fact that they managed to survive the Reformation in abbreviated form. And then we go on to Pentecost, which is 40 days after. Easter. We have more processions then. They take place after Pentecost Sunday. There's another holiday period and you have to take your parish offerings to the cathedral. Now if you live in Lansend,

your cathedral is in Exeter, that's not possible, but you take it to some local point. And it's a long journey and it's the young men, I think, who take the money with the church banners. And you know what happens when rival football teams start arriving at the same venue, while the medieval equivalent was fights over the Pentecost offerings and the drawing of knives and the shedding of blood, I'm afraid to say. And then finally, a week and a half after that, you have Corpus Christi, which is another big religious festival. It's on a Thursday. It's a festival to celebrate the sacrament of communion. And clergy go with the Holy Sacrament in a receptacle and the laity all in procession behind goes round the town or round the parish. And you often have other

festivities on those days, particularly dramas. There are a lot of Corpus Christi plays, either about the sacrament or biblical plays. So that's another big day of public observance. The period around the ancient tide in Corpus Christi was the main holiday period. It's the time when the crops have been sown of course, they're all growing but they're not yet ready to harvest. So it's possible particularly in the countryside to take time off agricultural work. But it's also a time of relative scarcity of food because you have used up last year grain for bread and ale and you're dependent on much less nourishing and less satisfactory foods,

vegetables and so on. So it's also a time of discontent and it's interesting that some of the popular rebellions of the early modern period, the Peasant's Revolt of 1381, for example, the Prayer Book Revolt of 1549, they take place. precisely at that time of the year. Firstly, because it's a holiday time, people haven't got anything else to do. And secondly, because it's a time when people are feeling annoyed

with the authorities, because they're hungry. That's an absolutely fascinating connection that I hadn't come across before, but the more you think about it, there are so many of those revolts that happen at almost this time of year, you know, around June and July,

when people are obviously, as you say, feeling the pinch. And so in researching your book, did you come across any sense of what medieval people thought about going to church and having to go to church? Did they find joy in it or do you think they considered it a chore? Was it an investment in their eternal soul or an annoying chunk that they had to take out of their day? Or could it have been all of those things? It could be all of those things. We're talking about millions of people. There's no such thing as a medieval view of anything anymore than there's a 21st century. view of anything. In a population, in a parish community, you will get a range of opinions. You will get some devout people. There were people for whom religion, I think, was a kind of obligation, particularly the aristocracy. It's part of their lifestyle. It's part of their setting an example to the rest of society. So it's something they ought to embrace. And of course, they are

more in contact with the clergy. They often have their own confessor, for example, so better instructed about religious things. But among perfectly ordinary people, you can get people of great piety and devotion who will want to go to church and will also accept the orthodoxes of the day that clergy should be celibate, for example, that the bread and wine really turn into the body and blood of Christ. that the Pope is the godly ordained head of the church. You will then get people who, while not having any particular theological doubts, would really rather do something else than going to church, have a day in bed. After all, they'd worked Monday to Saturday in most cases.

Sunday was there one day of rest. Going to church in the morning would not leave you free until about half past 9 or 10 o'clock. That took out quite a lot of the day, considering that they got up at dawn much earlier than we do. People would prefer to be doing their own jobs at home if you've got a peasant holding, particularly in the days when you had spent some of your time working for the Lord of the Manor on his land as a kind of rent, then your Sunday became a very precious day for working on your own bit of land, even it was only, as it were, an allotment with your vegetables. Or you might prefer to carry on with your craftwork,

if you were a shoemaker or a basket maker. Why not use that day for more work or for taking round what you'd made during the week and selling it? Because a congregation in church was an obvious target. You wait outside somebody else's church when the congregation is coming out and you sell your shoes or you take orders. So there were people doing that. there were people who wanted to enjoy themselves, go to an alehouse, open an alehouse for such people, go shooting or fishing or something like that. Then there will be people who've fallen out with the priest or fallen out with their parishioners and don't like going for that reason. And then there are people

who are sceptical who don't necessarily believe that the Pope should be head of the church, or that the body and blood and Christ are changed in some way in the Eucharist, or that people people should have to pay tithes to the parish priest, or that people should not be allowed to read the Bible in their own language. And I think there were always people like that. They come into view in the 1380s in the reign of Richard II as a result of the teachings of John Wycliffe, who is an Oxford theologian who develops Orthodox, in the eyes of his contemporaries,

ideas on theological matters who questions the authority of the Pope, who questions the nature of the mass, who questions the paying of tithes. He has an influence through disciples of his on the whole population. From 1380s onwards until the Reformation, there is a disaffected group called Lollards who adhere to these doctrines. At first they're treated with some tolerance, but as time goes on, the church authorities became very worried about them. In 1400, when the death penalty for heresy was introduced, although you had to be recalcitrant, refusing to recant your opinions, or you'd been caught before and had recanted and then returned to your heresy. but there were executions through the 15th and early 16th centuries. Historians tend to take the view that Lollards were not very numerous,

but of course it's only a few people who are either sufficiently careless or sufficiently determined to actually get into conflict with the authorities. And my own view is that most people who had these views kept pretty quiet about them. We know that some people had English Bibles. There was an English Bible from the 1380s or 90s. And that some people had English religious books and English Bibles, which you could do that in private and still go to Mass on Sunday for appearances. And as long as your family were confidential.

you would get away with it. And again, I think people would not want to necessarily upset you by investigating you unless you were locally unpopular. But I think that beyond Lollody, which I think was more common than is generally believed, I think there was all this other skepticism, which curiously enough the church didn't categorise as heresy. I came across a man who, either because he was an oath or because he was drunk, held up a candle to the image of the Virgin Mary and burnt her chin and said, ha, now you've got a beer. What's that? It's certainly not the work of somebody who believes all the orthodoxes. Was he a Lollard? I doubt it. I doubt whether he necessarily had enough

sense at the time to have believed in what the Lodd's believed in. But there's a lot of skepticism about. You pick this up from time to time. I don't believe that. I don't believe Mary was a virgin. I don't believe Jesus was any other than a man. And the church doesn't treat that as heresy. They just treat us as ignorance. They may punish you. They will. If you're found to have done it, you'll have to do your public penance again for doing it. But I take the view that those things should be considered alongside Lollardy as a sign that a lot of people did not believe or were disaffected. Because I believe that fundamentally medieval people are ourselves living six or seven hundred years ago. And therefore, I believe that the range of views that you would

expect to get nowadays, you should to some extent expect to get in the 14th and 15th centuries. That's a fascinating note to leave it on that perhaps these people aren't all that distant from us as we sometimes think them to be. Thank you very much for joining us, Nicholas. That's been fantastic. Nicholas's book, Going to Church in Medieval England, is out now. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about these buildings and what went on in them and the people that used them, it's a really fascinating read to dive into the subject. You can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone

medieval. If you get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify Now. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this podcast and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below and I'll drop into your inbox every Monday. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis. and we've just gone medieval with history hits.