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Are you a medieval worshipper looking to demonstrate the strength of your devotion? A pilgrimage could be the answer – and we have the ultimate guide to planning your trip
Where to go There are many reasons for going on pilgrimage. You may wish to undertake the journey to show your religious devotion. You may be doing penance for sins you’ve committed. You may wish to be cured of a serious medical condition or illness, or to gain a cure for someone else. You may wish to make a political protest: to visit the tombs of Simon de Montfort or King Henry VI, because you supported their causes. Or you may just be in need of a holiday and a little adventure. But pilgrimages cost time and money. Most people cannot spend long away from their work, their children or their farm animals. Going a great distance means either walking, which is wearying; travelling in a carrier’s cart for which you have to pay; or riding a horse, which you must own or hire. Then how are you to find food or a bed? You can beg, which is hazardous, or you may be able to stay in a monastery, but often the only alternatives will be inns or private houses charging money. This means that, for most people, pilgrimage is a local matter. You go out for the day, often with friends and neighbours, to visit a nearby abbey, church or chapel. You take a picnic and get home by nightfall. Long pilgrimages to the most famous shrines are chiefly made by the wealthy, who can afford to take time off and have money to spend, or by very devout poor people who support themselves as best they can along the way. Local pilgrimage places are innumerable. Many churches have images of Christ or the Virgin Mary, which are reckoned to be especially holy and where your prayer may be answered. Small chapels are also popular, usually on their festival day once a year, especially ones in romantic places such as hilltops, woods or caves. If you have the means to travel further, there is also a wide choice of places to go. Canterbury Cathedral, with the shrine of Thomas Becket, canonised in 1173, is the most famous and busiest shrine of all, attracting pilgrims from all over Britain and from the Continent. Other notable churches to visit are Walsingham in Norfolk, which has a copy of the Virgin Mary’s house at Nazareth and is a shrine in her honour, and Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire, which possesses some of the blood of Christ in a crystal phial. Of course, anyone lucky enough to live close to these places can easily visit them in a single day. When to go Scheduling your pilgrimage properly will be crucial to your enjoyment of the whole experience. The best time to go is from after Easter until the autumn. This is when the weather is better, the roads are drier and (except at harvest times) there is less work to do on the land. But you do not have to make a pilgrimage the whole point of your travel. If you are going on business, even to a market in a nearby town, or if you are a wealthy member of the aristocracy, moving from manor to manor or to London, this will allow you to call in at churches with an image or a shrine, on the way or at your destination. A pilgrimage can be part of a journey for other reasons. What to bring For your time on the road, you may dress in normal clothes suitable for travelling (Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims were dressed in this way). Some pilgrims, chiefly men, wear a special outfit, but this is not compulsory. It consists of a wooden staff for support (and for warding off hostile dogs), a wide-brimmed hat to protect you from sun and rain, and a bag in which to carry your provisions. Make sure that you also bring or buy an offering to the image or shrine. Candles, coins and jewellery are all acceptable. At the major pilgrimage places, you may purchase a wax image to hang up at the shrine as a sign that you are asking for help, or to give thanks for help you have already received. These can include little human figures, parts of the body such as hearts, limbs and fingers, or images of animals or hawks. How to travel and where to stay It is more pleasant to travel in company than alone. On a short pilgrimage you may go as a church group, and on a longer one, you are likely to find other people on the roads whom you can join. Indeed, Chaucer describes pilgrims from different parts of England – including Devon, Norfolk and Oxford – meeting in Southwark, across the Thames from London, and forming a party to go to Canterbury. You will mostly travel by the ordinary roads rather than by special pilgrim ways. The main roads have inns and shops to buy food, and they are safer as long as you go in a group. You can stay briefly in a monastic almonry, where you may be able to secure basic food and lodging. Monasteries, by the later Middle Ages, however, are tending to build inns for this purpose, and these inns will probably charge for staying, as other inns do. Private houses are likely to take in travellers, but there too some payment will be expected. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/07/GettyImages-464473545-813a3f2.jpg" width="4946" height="3803" alt="Three medieval pilgrim badges. Metal badges, such as these would have been worn as a cherished souvenir of a pilgrim’s travels (Getty Images)" title="Three medieval pilgrim badges. Metal badges, such as these would have been worn as a cherished souvenir of a pilgrim’s travels (Getty Images)" /> When you get there The best time to arrive is the early morning, so that you can attend mass in the church. After that, you will visit the main image or shrine that you have come to see, and there you will make your offering, and pray for your needs. The church may have other relics to show you: when the scholar Erasmus visits Walsingham in 1512, he is shown a bone of Saint Peter and some of the breast milk of the Virgin Mary. But relics are more likely to be brought out for wealthy pilgrims who can be expected to make generous offerings. After visiting the shrine, you may wish to buy a souvenir in the form of a lead or pewter badge to wear on your hat. At Canterbury you can also purchase a small lead phial of water that has been in contact with a drop of the blood of Saint Thomas. This may be taken home and kept for veneration, or for drinking during a serious illness. Four other places to go on pilgrimage Don’t fancy Canterbury? Here are some more holy sites for your consideration... Durham Cathedral The relics of Saint Cuthbert ended up here in AD 995, having not had a permanent home after the Vikings’ sacking of Lindisfarne more than two centuries earlier. The relics were the primary reason for pilgrims to visit Durham, especially after they were placed in the new cathedral in the early 12th century. The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham Located in the Norfolk village of Walsingham, this popular shrine was established in 1061 by a noblewoman who had a vision of the Virgin Mary asking her to build a replica of the house at Nazareth in which she brought up Jesus. St Albans Cathedral The shrine to Saint Alban, a Christian martyr who died at the hands of the Romans (possibly around AD 304), was visited by pilgrims from the fifth century onwards. The Venerable Bede would later describe it as a place where “there ceases not to this day the miraculous cures of many sick persons, and the frequent working of wonders”. St Michael's Mount The saint’s chief shrine in Britain attracted some pilgrims from far away (it seems to have been regarded as Land’s End is today), but it was especially popular as a local place of pilgrimage for Cornish people, most of whom could visit on a short journey. Expect some disapproval Not everyone will approve of you going on pilgrimage. Some images are claimed to have powers that the Church does not endorse, and a few bishops have expressly forbade people from venerating them. A series of writers have also criticised pilgrimage. They include Chaucer’s contemporary, William Langland (the author of the poem Piers Plowman); the followers of John Wycliffe (died 1384), known as the Lollards; and Erasmus in the early 16th century. These men question the superstitions associated with some pilgrim places, and think that human life is the only pilgrimage that God asks us to follow. Instead, people should stay at home, work, go to their local church, and give money to the poor rather than shrines and images. If you ignore these views and still wish to go, just make sure that you do so before 1538, because in that year Henry VIII will ban the practice altogether!
What were the games and pastimes enjoyed by Tudor children?
Dolls and dice, ball sports and blind man's bluff, hide-and-seek and “hot cockles”: childhood in Tudor England – one of the “seven ages of man” – was time for play as well as learning, duty and growing up. Nicholas Orme highlights some of the most popular children’s pastimes and explores their place in wider society
It was fashionable, about 60 years ago, to say that childhood was a recent invention. In the past, it was argued, children’s lives were nasty, brutish and, often, short, deprived of the loving care and self-expression of modern times. That theory ignored what people in previous centuries actually thought – and wrote – about children. Human life in Tudor England was seen as a series of stages – the “seven ages of man”, famously summed up by William Shakespeare in As You Like It. Each age had its own character, and that of childhood – the ages of seven to 14 – was playfulness. “I am called Childhood,” says a boy, in the words of Thomas More in the 1490s. “In play is all my mind, to cast a quoit, a throwing stick, and a ball… If only I could burn all my schoolbooks,” he continues, “then might I lead my life always in play.” Read more | Chess, gambling and cards: Tudor games and indoor pastimes Tudor parents and educators did not, of course, approve of unrestricted play. Children had to learn good behaviour, religious duties and the skills needed for adult life. Some critics wanted to direct children’s play, or even to prevent it, but play persisted nonetheless. Children invented their own playthings. Some toys were mass produced, to be sold in shops and at fairs. Spare time, on Sundays and the many holidays, was spent in social games. Every open space was used for activities such as running, chasing and ball games including tennis and football. Dolls and action figures: for both girls and boys Many parents bought toys for their children. Tudor family portraits depict babies with rattles, and dolls, known as “puppets” or “babies”, were common. These were easily made from scraps of fabric, or bought in the form of wooden truncheons with heads, which were then dressed. There are many references to girls playing with dolls, and mentions of boys doing so, too – some dolls were male figures. In 1599–1601, William Cavendish of Hardwick in Derbyshire bought dolls for his children, including his young son, James. Boys also played with dolls together. A children’s Latin dictionary of 1584 contains the sentence: “Thy puppets bring with thee, if thou wilt play with me.” This book was produced for use in a school classroom, which would have contained only boys. On the podcast | Nicholas Orme uncovers what infancy and childhood were like in the 16th century Metal toys were also popular. Many have been discovered by detectorists on the Thames foreshore in London, but they were not limited to the capital. Some were flat human figures with widely splayed arms, dressed as gentlemen or gentlewomen. Fingers were inserted within the splays to manipulate the figures. Coaches and horses were produced too: in 1601, a “little coach” was bought for James Cavendish, at a cost of 14 pence. There were miniature cauldrons, skillets, cups, ewers and dishes, as well. Cupboards and dressers have been found, stamped from sheets of pewter. These were bent or slotted into three-dimensional forms, much like modern model kits. Children used these toys in make-believe scenarios, based on what they knew of adult life. Games of strategy and skill: for more sedentary playtime Apollo Shroving, a play acted by the scholars of Hadleigh School, Suffolk in the 1620s, mentions a number of pastimes that would have been known to the boys. These included blow-point, dice, check-stones, football, hide and seek, leap-frog, morell (nine men’s morris), nine holes, quoits, mumble-the-peg, mumchance, scourge top, span-counter, spurn-point, tick-tack, trap-out and truss. Read more | 8 of the best historical board games for history lovers And these were just a few of the games that children in Tudor and early Stuart England played. Some games were sedentary, others more active. Boys and girls who wanted to play sitting down could easily find cherry stones for the flicking game of “cherry pit”. Or they might scratch a grid on to a pavement and use pieces of gravel to play nine men’s morris. Old coins were used in shove-ha’penny, or “shove groat” as it was known. The wealthier had access to dice, draughts, chess and playing cards. In the 1960s and 70s, excavations at the site of a Tudor grammar school in Coventry unearthed many metal tags and discs that had slipped through the floorboards, as well as some marbles. These tags were the currency used in children’s games. Read more | Ancient board games: which ones did people play for fun in the past? In 1581, the guardian of Richard Fermor, a six-year-old orphan in Oxfordshire, paid three pence “for a dozen of points [tags] for him to play with”, and four pence for “two little boxes to keep his points and counters in”. A further two pence was spent “for pins for him to play with at Christmas”. Chasing games: from “base” to “hot cockles” Running-and-chasing games were commonly known as “base” or “prisoners’ base”. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare mentions “lads more like to run the country base” than to fight in a battle. The Oxford scholar Gerald Langbaine recalled the rhyming dialogue that preceded a chase when he was a schoolboy in the 1620s: Chased: Pe, pe, postola, How many miles to Beverley? Chaser: Eight, eight, and other eight. Chased: Think you I shall get thither tonight? Chaser: Yes, if your horse be good and light After these lines were recited, the chase began. The rhyme is interesting because it resembles one recorded in a sermon of the 13th century. This indicates that children’s customs were passed down through the generations, though wordings and rules might change from time to time. Other active games recorded before 1600 included “king-by-your-leave” and blind man’s buff, both of which involved a player being blindfolded. Read more | Medieval childhood: a historical A-Z The first of these is described in Richard Huloet’s 16th-century Latin dictionary: “King-by-your-leave: a play that children have, where one sitting blindfold in the middle hideth so till the rest have hidden themselves, and he then going to seek them, if any get his place in the mean space, that same is king in his room.” In another variant, “hot cockles”, a player lay or knelt with their eyes covered, and tried to guess which player struck them on the back. This may have led to a chase, as it did when I played it in the 1940s. Ball games and brawling: rough-and-tumble for older children As children grew older, they played more strenuous games. John Stow, the Elizabethan historian of London, described youths there “leaping, dancing, shooting, wrestling, casting of the stone or ball” during holidays. Wrestling was a widely popular activity among boys. The Cornish historian Richard Carew, writing in 1602, noted that it was common in the west of England: “You shall hardly find an assembly of boys in Devon and Cornwall where the most untowardly [awkward] will not as readily give you a muster [display] of this exercise as you are prone to require it”. Read more | The history of rugby: when was the sport invented? Each combatant stripped to his doublet and hose, then took hold of his opponent; only holds above the waist were lawful. The aim was to cast down the opponent so that at least one shoulder and one foot made contact with the ground. Ball games, which attracted large numbers of boys and youths, probably took different forms from place to place. One variety that Carew termed “hurling” was, in fact, chiefly a form of hand-ball; in his description, he does not mention kicking. This game was played in a limited area with two goals. There were recognised rules, including an offside convention. Read more | What was clog fighting? This sport also took place across country, with no restriction on the number of players, nor much in the way of rules. The struggles, said Carew, went “over hills, dales, hedges, ditches, yea, and through bushes, briars, mires, plashes, and rivers, so as you shall sometimes see 20 or 30 lie tugging together in the water”. The result was often “bloody pates, bones broken and out of joint, and such bruises as serve to shorten their days”. Sport in schools: with a focus on learning, not leisure Since the 19th century, games have been seen as an important part of education. Thomas Hughes’ 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays, for instance, extols the virtues of rugby and cricket for building manliness and team spirit. Tudor writers on education who discussed games mainly did so in treatises aimed at the aristocracy. Because the nobility and gentry still led the nation’s armed forces, their sons were supposed to be trained to ride and be physically fit. Swordfighting, wrestling and swimming were recommended. Hunting was encouraged, too, to develop not only physical endurance but strategic skills: a hunter had to anticipate the wiles of the deer or the fox. However, interest in pupils playing sports was lacking in most Tudor schools compared with their modern equivalents. Their business was to teach reading and Latin, not games. Timetable hours mirrored those of adult workers, starting soon after dawn and ending in late afternoon, with intervals for breakfast and midday dinner. On the podcast | Susannah Wright answers questions surrounding the history of British schools Most school pupils were day boys, so their play took place outside school hours, and was nothing to do with the school. One writer mentions whipping tops, playing cards and dice, throwing stones and, in winter, snowballing or sliding on ice. Only at boarding schools did provision need to be made for boys staying on site. Eton College and Winchester both allocated time for play, usually in the afternoon. At the former, prefects were appointed to supervise the boys “in the field, when they play”, to guard against fighting, torn clothes, or black eyes. They played games including handball, football, quoits and an early kind of or rounders. Banning games: when teenagers fell foul of authorities The authorities in Tudor England took no interest in the play of small children. They did, however, try to control that of teenagers, for several reasons. The church disliked gambling and, though children were never required to attend services, teenagers were expected to do so. If playing games resulted in absence from church, it was frowned upon. And, as Puritanism grew in influence after the Reformation, some people disapproved of any kind of merrymaking on Sundays. The lay authorities also had views on play, particularly ball games. “Tennis” – a term covering a variety of games based on hitting balls against walls – damaged property, especially windows. Read more | Bad sports? Puritan attempts to ban games in 17th-century England Football was seen as socially subversive because, as with hurling, it gave no concession to rank, and disturbed public life. One Puritan writer, Philip Stubbes, complained in 1583 that football caused injuries and led to “envy, malice, rancour, choler, hatred, displeasure, enmity, and what not else”. Allowing youths to play games was seen as encouraging them in idleness and criminal behaviour. A parliamentary statute of 1495 forbade apprentices, servants and labourers from playing backgammon for any stake except in the form of food or drink. Read more | What was Real Tennis? Other games were banned completely for such people, except at Christmas – and even then could be played only in their masters’ houses. These included tennis, closh (similar to modern-day croquet), bowls, dice and cards. Fines were levied on transgressors, including employers who winked at the practice. Archery: a must-play practice for the defence of the realm One of the crown’s grievances about games was that they could distract the male population from the practice of archery with longbows. Tudor England had no professional army, so the defence of the realm, the keeping of peace and the mounting of expeditions abroad depended on amateur soldiers led by the nobility and gentry. Until the later part of the Tudor era, when handguns became widely available, ensuring a supply of good archers seemed essential. The longbow was part of the national heritage – its virtues exemplified in the tales of Robin Hood, whose exploits were recounted in hugely popular ballads and plays during the 16th and 17th centuries. Accordingly, Tudor governments sought to maintain the skill of archery in the male population, and considered other games to be unwelcome distractions. In 1512, parliament ordered that every man up to the age of 60 should possess a bow and arrows, and must practise using them. Each male child aged between seven and 17 was to be provided with a bow and two arrows, and to be taught the skill of archery. Read more | Toys and games that killed in Tudor England Targets, known as butts, were to be set up in towns to enable practice, and competing games were to be suppressed. However, as was the case with so many Tudor attempts to meddle in everyday life, the impact of these policies was limited. Complaints that the statute was being ignored continued throughout the century. Roger Ascham wrote a whole book, Toxophilus (1545), to explain and encourage the use of the weapon – to little effect. By 1603, historian Richard Carew was lamenting that longbows were getting smoky, being left hung up over fireplaces. In the end, what children wanted prevailed over the wishes of adults. That, in itself, ought to make us take Tudor children and their experiences more seriously. This article was first published in the April 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Tudor childhood: from dodging death to nursery rhymes
HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course
Nicholas Orme uncovers what infancy and childhood were like in the 16th century
Look at a Tudor family portrait, and you’ll often find children depicted like miniature adults, standing confidently alongside their parents in their doublets and dresses. But how far is this an accurate portrayal of what childhood was like in the 16th century? Nicholas Orme, author of new book Tudor Children, joined Emily Briffett to talk about the lives of young people in the era, from nursery rhymes and moralistic bedtime stories, to playtime, punishment and more. Nicholas Orme is the author of Tudor Children (Yale University Press, 2023) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Discover more learning from week two of the HistoryExtra Academy Elizabethans course Elizabethan daily life, with Professor Tracy Borman – watching time 15 mins What did the Tudors wear? – listening time 36 mins The dark side of Elizabethan England – reading time 9 mins Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England – reading time 14 mins 10 ways to die in Elizabethan England – reading time 6 mins The missing Tudors: black people in 16th-century England – reading time 5 mins Tudor dining: a guide to food and status in the 16th century – reading time 9 mins
Cathedrals: from bishops' seats to tourist hotspots
Nicholas Orme traces the story of English cathedrals, from their early medieval roots to their role in modern day communities
Nicholas Orme speaks to Emily Briffett about the long story of English cathedrals, tracing their role in society from their beginnings in the early Middle Ages to the modern day. Nicholas reveals how cathedrals have survived the turbulence of religious and social change, and explores what they can reveal to us about our history.
The medieval church: your guide to religion and worship in the Middle Ages
HistoryExtra Academy late-medieval England course
Professor Nicholas Orme answers key questions about religion and worship in the Middle Ages
Why was the Church so important in medieval England? The Church in the Middle Ages was more than just a way of connecting with God; it was a whole belief system. Christianity in medieval times didn’t just focus on people’s relationship with God. It also set out to explain history, science, ethics, how one should behave, and so on. Whole areas of study that we would now separate into science or sociology or politics, fell under religion in the medieval centuries. What’s more, the Church was responsible for many things which, nowadays, we would look to the government to care for, such as education, morality, and charity. The Church also had an important role in medieval life, which it has somewhat lost today. Nowadays, there are lots of different things you can be doing on a Sunday morning rather than attending church services. In a rural community of the Middle Ages, the local church would have been a major place to meet and socialise. Many churches developed social organisations of maidens (girls aged from 12 up to marriage), young men of similar ages, and married women or ‘wives’. So church was not just a place where people worshipped on a Sunday; it was a place where friendship groups could gather, too. Read more | What was life like for a medieval housewife? Where and how did the Church get its wealth? The Church was not a single body, so you cannot say that it was rich any more than you can say that British society today is rich. There were enormous variations of wealth within the Church and its various institutions. At one extreme, there were archbishops and bishops who received huge salaries, although they had to pay the costs of their administrations out of their own pockets. At the other end of the scale, poor chaplains and curates earned about £3–£5 a year, which wasn’t much different to the annual income of artisans and labourers. Monasteries, too, might be rich or barely able to survive. There were huge variations in wealth. Did you know? The Church was one of the main distributors of charity during the medieval period and gave out alms – such as money or food – to the poor and needy. Hospitals, run by religious orders, cared for the sick and poor, and gave shelter to travellers. As to where the money came from, the Church possessed endowments. Individuals over the centuries gave lands and money, particularly to support monasteries since monks could not go out into the world and earn money for themselves. The clergy of the parish churches were supported by tithes and offerings. Tithes were the most important part of their income, allowing them to receive a tenth of agricultural production – corn, barley and rye, and one tenth of newborn animals – calves, piglets, lambs, as well as honey, milk, cheese and so on. Offerings of money formed a smaller part of clergy income. They were made four times of the year and at baptisms, marriages and funerals. Parish sizes and wealth varied hugely from one to another, so being a parish priest didn’t indicate what income you might receive. Incomes could vary from as much as £80 or £100 a year to as little as £3 or £4. What would the sensory experience of a medieval church have been like? Ideally, churches were to be neat and colourful, with hangings of coloured fabric on the altar. Clergy wore coloured vestments for mass and some other services. But it all depended on how much a church could afford. It is often thought that the inside walls of all medieval churches were decorated, and they were up to a point, but sometimes the decoration would have been quite simple – imitation brickwork, plaster or stencil patterns, for example. There are many records of churches lacking watertight roofs, window glass and satisfactory furnishings, and some would have looked rather shabby. Read more | Dan Jones on the surprisingly modern Middle Ages Inside, churches would have smelt of damp, candle smoke, incense and possibly the bodies of dead worthies buried beneath the floor. At a well- attended service you would also have sung in royal and noble chapels, from which it spread to cathedrals, monasteries, and the wealthier parish churches. Many lesser churches can have heard it only from visiting singers on special occasions. Was attending church compulsory? From puberty you were expected to go to church on Sundays and for religious festivals. There were about 40 or 50 important festivals in the church calendar, so for about 90 days of the year, you would be expected to be in church, at least for mass in the morning. However, the Church had to accept that it could not impose complete attendance and exceptions had to be made for shepherds, fishermen and servants. In practice, making people attend church was difficult. A priest could refuse to hear their confessions or report them to the church courts where they might be fined or made to do public penance, but it was a long-winded process. There were always some people in a parish who did not go to church very often. Attending church on Easter Sunday was absolutely compulsory for all adults, however, so almost everyone would have been there on that festival. Were children required to attend church? Small children were often taken to church because they could not be safely left at home. Equally, there are records of accidents that happened when parents left them at home, possibly in the care of an elder sibling. As mentioned, children did not have to attend church until puberty: indeed 15th and 16th-century congregations could be unforgiving about the restlessness and noise of younger children in church. Read more | The clever medieval trick that destroyed the last stand of stubborn paganism in Europe There were no services specially for children except on Saint Nicholas Day (6 December) and the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December), when a boy would be dressed as a bishop, with a mitre and staff, and preside over the service with a retinue of other boys. When the Reformation came, however, the first Book of Common Prayer – in English – in 1549, decreed that parish priests should hold regular classes in church to provide religious instruction. What happened during a medieval church service? We know little about how churches were used before 1300. Until then, the likelihood is that there were not many seats, except for the nobility and gentry who sat in the chancel with the clergy. Instead, the congregation may have mostly stood, unless they brought their own stools, and knelt at significant points in the mass. The most important of these was the point at which the bread and wine of the Eucharist was consecrated and held up by the priest to be venerated. Read more | Social mobility in the Middle Ages: could medieval people improve their station? Seating seems to have become more common during the 14th century, and normal during the 15th. Congregations wished to imitate the seated nobility, and people wanted seats that recognised their social rank. Parish church authorities were eventually obliged to put in general seating and grade it accordingly. The wealthy would sit (or stand or kneel) in seats at the front, with their inferiors further back. Seating was allocated by the churchwardens, the lay officers who looked after the church fabric and furnishings, and fees were usually charged for seats. As for the religious experience, services were conducted in Latin mand took place in the chancel at the east end of the church, which had a big screen separating it from the western nave where most of the congregation were placed. People were not expected to follow the text of the service or say responses as they would do today. That role was performed by the parish clerk, with the congregation watching from a distance. If you were pious, you might bring a rosary or a prayer book with you and say quiet prayers, so there would have been a subdued murmur of voices in the nave alongside the service itself. What most people do not realise is that, by the 15th century, the Latin mass included some material in English. At the beginning, all were sprinkled with holy water, and heard an English verse reminding them of their baptism. Then, in the middle of the service, there were announcements, and prayers for the pope, the king, the crops and individuals in need. There was sometimes (but not necessarily often) a sermon. At the end of the service, an ordinary loaf was blessed and divided up, another English verse was said, and everyone was given a fragment of the bread. Medieval congregations were not given the communion bread and wine at mass, hence the ‘substitute’ of the holy loaf. Only at Easter did the congregation receive the communion bread, and even then not the wine. Were men and women separated during church services? This is hard to answer. Sometimes they were, and sometimes they weren’t. Wealthy people do not seem to have been separated according to sex because we hear of nobility, gentry and merchants sitting with their wives in the chancel or side chapels. The rest of the congregation may well have been separated, but the practice probably varied from church to church. At times when they were separated, women would usually have been placed on the north side of the church, and men on the south side. The reason for this is that the north side was considered to be the ‘safe’ side, while the south was considered ‘unsafe’. The rood – the figure of Christ on the cross set above the entrance to the chancel – always faced west. A figure of the Virgin Mary was placed at his right (north), with Saint John the Evangelist to his left (south). The north side, the side presided over by the Virgin Mary, was considered to be the side of the saved, and women were seated here because they were deemed to be more open to temptation. Men were placed on the ‘unsafe’ side because they were reckoned to be better able to stand up to evil. But equally there were other customs that dictated where you sat, such as certain seats being tied to particular properties. Going to church was a very different experience from what it is today. It centred on ceremony not on instruction. Yet through regular attendance, the form and much of the meaning of services could become understood, and for literate people, at least, services could be supplemented by reading instructive books at home. Nicholas Orme is emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter. His most recent book is Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, 2021) Interview by HistoryExtra content director Dr Dave Musgrove. Words by BBC History Revealed editor Charlotte Hodgman This article was first published in the Christmas 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed Explore more learning from week one of our course on late-medieval England Video lecture: Faith and worship in late-medieval England – watching time 19 mins Black Death facts: your guide to "the worst catastrophe in recorded history" – reading time 9 mins The winter storms that rocked medieval Europe – reading time 6 mins The medieval church calendar: a guide to the holy days – reading time 5 mins Podcast episode: Margery Kempe: medieval mystic – listening time 53 mins
The church in medieval England: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Professor Nicholas Orme answers listener questions about the church in medieval England
Did medieval people have sex in churches? What was a boy bishop? And why did women have to sit in the ‘safe side’ of a church in the Middle Ages? In the latest episode of our everything you want to know series, Professor Nicholas Orme responds to author questions and popular internet search queries about the church in medieval England. Nicholas Orme is the author of the upcoming book Going to Church in Medieval England (Yale University Press, due 27 July) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Everard Digby: the man who taught Tudors to swim
The first handbook on how to swim was the brainchild of an eccentric 'crypto-Catholic' with a liking for controversy. Nicholas Orme surveys an ambitious visual guide designed to tempt Tudor gents into the water...
It took an eccentric person to write the earliest book on how to swim. That was because he wrote it in 1587, when there were no swimming pools and nobody went to the seaside for holidays; when you could only swim in a river and then only in the summer, provided you did not mind slimy water weed, dead branches, swans and fish-traps. The writer was ambitious as well as eccentric. He aimed to turn swimming from a disregarded skill of bargees and boatmen into an accomplishment for gentlemen, to make them more like the Romans. In modern terms, that was the equivalent of turning swimming into an Olympic sport and getting it sponsorship from the richest people of the day. To do this he wrote in Latin, the civilised language of Europe, the language you used if you wished to be taken seriously. But he also realised that pictures were needed to show how the strokes should be done. And so not only did he produce the earliest book about swimming, but one of the first visual guides to any sport. On the podcast | Nicholas Orme uncovers what infancy and childhood were like in the 16th century Who was Everard Digby? Everard Digby came to notoriety only once in his lifetime, and then not for his interest in swimming. Born in 1548 into a poor gentry family from Leicestershire, he got a place at St John’s College, Cambridge, when he was 19. He worked his way up to a college fellowship and finally in 1584, to be the lecturer in charge of teaching the students. There were three strands in Digby’s character. Two of them helped him write his swimming book. He was an instinctive teacher (his first book was a basic guide to knowledge for students), and he was a rumbustious outdoor sports enthusiast who must have enjoyed the water. He was later accused of fishing when he should, in fact, have been in chapel, and of disturbing the college by shouting and blowing a horn. The third strand was more problematical. The Digbys had leanings towards Catholicism. One of them was in the Guy Fawkes plot, and Everard soon gained a reputation (deserved or not) as a crypto-Catholic. That was a risky reputation to have when England was facing danger from Catholic conspiracies and a Spanish invasion. Up to the late 1580s, Digby’s career was successful. He was ordained as a priest and acquired a parish in Rutland in tandem with his college fellowship. In 1585 he was elected a senior fellow with greater privileges and powers, and in 1587 he published his book on swimming. Then things went seriously wrong. Within a year he lost his fellowship, left Cambridge and was living in the countryside, an embittered man. Read more | Chess, gambling and cards: Tudor games and indoor pastimes The cause of this was trivial but it snowballed because of Digby’s religious reputation and his liking for controversy. He refused to pay a college bill because it was incorrectly presented. The master of the college, William Whitaker, a determined Protestant, seized the opportunity to deprive Digby of his fellowship. Digby appealed successfully, but Whitaker lobbied powerful courtiers to intervene, assuring them that Digby was a dangerous influence. In the end he had to leave. Financially he did not do badly. He went first to his parish in Rutland, acquired two other churches and enjoyed a very respectable income. Eventually he moved to his church of Orton Longueville outside Peterborough, close to the amenities of a town. But he was not happy. His last book was a lament for the state of the Church of England and for his own exile. He died in the autumn of 1605, in his late fifties. Let us now go back to happier times and the year 1587 when Digby published his De Arte Natandi, ‘The Art of Swimming’. It was not quite the first book on the subject. Nicholas Wynman, a Swiss, had written one in 1538, but that was a short work in praise of swimming not a handbook of how to do it. Digby’s is larger and more methodical. It starts with a survey of swimming, going back to classical times to explain why the skill is valuable and civilised. Then it tells you how to swim in chapters illustrated with woodcuts of Tudor gentlemen undressing on river banks and demonstrating strokes and feats in the water. Digby was a clear and sensible teacher. Lesson 1 is getting used to the water. Don’t go in if you’re feeling hot. Cool down and then wade slowly in. You can jump in more dramatically, but that is for experienced people. Lesson 2 is learning to swim. This should preferably be done with someone supporting you under the chin, or by using water wings made of two inflated pigs’ bladders. The basic stroke to learn is like our breast-stroke, although it has no name. After this you are taught how to turn in the water, and then to do other strokes. There is a back-stroke with legs alone, a back-stroke with arms and legs, a side-stroke, a breast-stroke with legs alone and doggy-paddle: “to swim like a dog”. Digby did not know the front or back-crawl or the butterfly, of course, because these are modern inventions. Diving comes at the back of the book, and this is not diving from the bank – unwise in a muddy river where you could not see hazards – but diving from the surface of the water, learning how to swim underwater and how to come up again. In 1595 the work was translated into English by Christopher Middleton as A Short Introduction for to Learn to Swim, “for the better understanding of those who know not the Latin tongue”. Middleton cut out Digby’s historical digressions and theorising, and concentrated on the practical chapters, with the same woodcuts. Neither the Latin nor the English version had a great impact to start with. Only three copies in English survive today, and a few more in Latin. But they are important for two reasons. First, they are the earliest detailed accounts of how swimming in England was done. Before 1587 we have only a few manuscript pictures of people in the water, and these show little more than a kind of breast-stroke. Digby’s swimming was more happy-go-lucky than ours. He lacked our obsession with speed, and thought that the side-stroke was the fastest. If we had watched him in the River Cam, he would probably have shown off by doing 20 or 30 different kinds of strokes in succession. Where he comes out strongly is in what one might call exhibitionist swimming: sitting on the water while keeping afloat; carrying things in both hands across the water; swimming holding one foot with one hand – useful, he says, if you happen to get cramp; swimming while dancing with both legs in the air; and, rather dangerously, cutting your toenails in the water by lying on your back, bringing up one knee to your chest and using a knife. He lived in an age when dancing was very popular, especially spectacular dancing by jugglers and minstrels, which would have coloured his approach to swimming. His idea was not to get somewhere quickly but to impress the onlooker, and so he is perhaps the grandfather of synchronised swimming. The second importance of Digby’s book lies in its influence. Although neither Latin nor English version was ever reprinted, they were copied by later writers without acknowledgement: William Percey in 1658, Melchisedech Thevenot in France in 1696, and an anonymous English translator of Thevenot in 1699. Digby’s work was reprinted in one version or another until 1789, and parts of it made a final appearance as late as 1838 in an early Victorian book called The Art of Swimming and Skating. So Digby started something after all. It was pretty good to write a book in 1587 that was still coming out in England and France on the eve of the French Revolution, even if he had been forgotten as the author. The run-up to the London Olympics is a good time to remember the man who brought swimming out of the shadows, recorded it in words and pictures, enabled many people to learn it and helped to bring about the ways that we do it today. Swimming in Britain: a brief history Swimming in Britain is mentioned from Roman times. Plutarch describes a centurion doing it during Julius Caesar’s expeditions in 55–54 BC, and Caesar himself swam the Nile during a battle when he was in his fifties. All swimming until about the 19th century was done by men, usually naked. Women only bathed while wearing clothes. The skill continued to have status among the Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. The hero of Beowulf, the earliest English epic poem, is portrayed doing superhuman feats in the North Sea, and the Viking sagas feature men swimming, more realistically, in the fjords of Scandinavia and Iceland. Swimming fell out of fashion with the coming of feudalism because it was not compatible with fighting on horseback wearing armour. It rarely features among the skills of medieval knights, although Sir Thomas Malory, the author of the Morte d’Arthur, is recorded swimming a moat to escape from Coleshill Castle (Warwickshire) in 1451. Interest in the skill revived with the Renaissance of the early 16th century and its renewed respect for the culture of Greece and Rome, including the art of swimming. Digby’s treatise reflects this approval, and other educational writers in Tudor and Stuart England recommended it for gentlemen. The overseas discoveries of the 16th and 17th centuries made people aware of the skill among indigenous peoples. Man Friday swims in Robinson Crusoe (1719). By 1725, when Benjamin Franklin came to England from America, there was enough interest in swimming in London for Franklin to demonstrate it in public and teach it to other people. Swimming’s modern popularity dates from the 19th century. Leisure brought about seaside holidays and the building of swimming pools for both sexes. Schools incorporated sport into the curriculum and developed competitive swimming. The Industrial Revolution inspired a search to bring the techniques of swimming to mechanical perfection. This article was first published in the August 2009 issue of BBC History Magazine