Why I Want to Go to Church in Medieval England
And live a life so ordinary
The feast days and festivals have been coming thick and fast all year. It might seem that barely a week has passed when there hasn’t been an excuse to parade around the parish waving something in the air, ducking a child in a pond or baking some kind of regional bun.
Now calm down.
According to the liturgical calendar, we are now in a period called “Ordinary Time”. The party’s over. It’s no longer Pentecost or Eastertide or Epiphany. Every Sunday hereafter is counted as the Xth Sunday after Trinity until we hit All Saints Day on 1st November. At that point, we’re counting down Sundays before Advent.
It’s Ordinary Time. Take down that bunting – okay you can leave up that nice floral one by the fireplace – and get back to work. The growing season is upon us. There is much work to be done before Winter returns, harvests gathered, berries preserved and animals fattened, slaughtered and salted. Winter is coming. But let’s not worry about that right now.
A Life Less Ordinary
This is a point at which I want to take stock and reflect on why I’ve found looking up these old feasts and festivals so fascinating. I thought it was my curiosity about the pre-Reformation church. In order to understand Cranmer and Cromwell, I wanted to understand what they were up against.
Note that I used the phrase ‘up against’. This comes from my deep-seated Conservative Evangelical convictions. I still hold them. Remain calm. But my theological preferences severely skewed my studies of Church History. I’d studied the Reformation since my A-Levels in early 1990. By this time, I was already a keen, card-carrying Evangelical Christian. I was happy to cry out three cheers – or maybe two and half cheers - for Luther and Zwingli.
I continued my study of religious history at university in the same vein. I hope the quality of scholarship improved a little, but I was drawn to choose papers which painted the pre-Reformation church in a poor light. This is why I took a course on the Papacy from Martin V to Martin Luther. It was taught by a sceptic of all religions, as far as I could tell. But that was okay. The course confirmed my worst prejudices about the worldly, nepotistic Renaissance popes like Alexander VI, Leo X and Julius II, the latter of whom famously went into battle in a golden suit of armour. No surprise that I was awarded my top mark on that paper.
The Lure of the Lollards
My interest in the Reformation continued after university. I read plenty of popular works on the reformers, and listened to various audio resources and podcasts on the subject. (Yes, I was listening to podcasts when there were about fifty podcasts in the whole world). But I was always curious to know more about the medieval church, especially Wycliffe and the Lollards. As far as I was concerned, these were, I’d been taught, proto-Protestants who were advocating a more recognisably Evangelical gospel. They were nailing theses to cathedral doors over a century before Luther banged home his 95 Theses in 1517. The Lollards, inspired by Wycliffe, nailed their 12 Conclusions to the doors of Westminster Abbey and old St Paul’s Cathedral in 1395, over ten years after Wycliffe’s death.
However, when you study any historical movement in detail, you find a rag bag of concepts and ideas. The concerns of the 15th century shoemaker were, surprise surprise, different from a 21st century comedy writer. Looking to the Lollards I found much I agreed with, such as their concerns over transubstantiation, confession and crusades. They were concerned about money left for priests to say prayers for the dead, but not because Purgatory was rejected. They were more concerned that others without financial means were neglected and not prayed for. They also rejected Holy Orders as the ‘livery of Antichrist’. And to what extent did Lollards prepare the ground for later Reformers when their opportunity arose under Henry VIII in the 1530s? The evidence is pretty scant.
It's History but with Better Food
As I studied the medieval period, I began to take a greater interest in the pre-Reformation feast days and festivals, reading almanacs and yearbooks about how various days of the year were celebrated in different parts of the country. I wanted to know more about the rich tapestry of medieval life and the lives of people who actually made rich tapestries.
The book I’ve finished most recently is Nicholas Orme’s chunky tome, Going to Church in Medieval England. It was reading this book that helped me figure out the appeal of the medieval society to me, especially when I read about it being dismantled by the Reformers: I loved how Christian medieval England it was. The Church was thoroughly integrated in the life of the villages and town, and their people.
There were public pageants, parades and festivals to celebrate the story of Jesus Christ, the King of Kings: his conception on Lady Day and birth on Christmas Day to his crucifixion, resurrection and ascension during Eastertide as well as the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We also collectively remembered Christ’s circumcision, baptism, transfiguration. We were penitent in Lent and again in Advent as we remembered the promise of Christ’s return.
It strikes me that these are significantly more nourishing celebrations than World Book Day; National Sausage Week; Bat Awareness Fortnight. Rather than celebrate Whitsun, we have the bizarre pageantry of the Eurovision Song Contest. I rarely feel like the Apostle Paul, but when I hear about another press release about a product turned into a National Day I feel that I really do “consider everything rubbish compared to the surpassing knowledge of knowing Christ Jesus.”
For centuries, the people of England celebrated the stories of the Bible, particularly during the Feast of Corpus Christi, as I wrote last week. For the people watching those mystery plays in York, Wakefield or Chester, the Bible stories were our stories.
Of course, there were also folk tales too, but many of these, like stories of Arthurian chivalry, we mingled with Christian themes. Today we live in a multinationally-owned multiverse melange of Marvel, DC, Star Wars and Harry Potter. I don’t want bread and circuses. I want the Bread of Life from the one who provides it in abundance and the dramas of the Word, acted out and proclaimed.
I realise medieval life was hard, brutal and short, ravaged by plague, pestilence, poverty and poor dentistry. But it was Christian. And honestly? That’s all that matters.
And why not listen to The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer? As an audio book. For free:
Thank you for giving Cromwell a nod there (hoping you meant Thomas).