Of British history, Britten and puffins
Going to Church in Medieval England
Nicholas Orme (Yale University Press, £20)
AS a child, I was given a charming book called They Lived Like This in Chaucer’s England. Its drawings of minstrels, pilgrims, dogs and merry-making ignited a spark of fascination for the daily lives of people in the Middle Ages. Therefore, I devoured history professor Nicholas Orme’s new book, Going to Church in Medieval England, a scholarly study of their churchgoing habits.
Searching for revealing human details, Prof Orme has trawled through every primary source available to glean what people actually did on a Sunday. His book takes us to the heart of a Roman Catholic country with 200 feast days a year and religious authorities who cracked down on non-attenders. You weren’t required to go to church every week, but you had to be ‘houseled’ (attend Communion) four times a year, only let off if you were a leper or so poor you couldn’t afford clothing.
‘In 1497: “Leave thy preaching, for it is not worth a fart”’
Then, as now, archbishops despaired at the fact that, all too often, on Sundays the taverns were full and
