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Prayer and Participation in Late Medieval England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
At some point in the 1520s the printer Richard Pynson ran off a poster to spread information about an indulgence. The sheet has a poor survival rate: what appears to be the unique extant copy exists as printer’s waste used for book-binding, and is now badly damaged. Nevertheless, the bit which matters for present purposes is almost intact. It notes that Cardinal Wolsey had offered a pardon of ten years and ten Lents to all who recited a specific psalm and set of prayers ‘for the most noble and prosperous estate of our soverayne lorde king Henry the .viii. the quene and the pryncesse’, which could be gained once each day. In addition, all the other bishops of the realm had offered forty days of pardon to everyone who recited five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, and a Creed for the same intent. (How often that indulgence could be gained is unclear: it may have been secured at each recitation.) The Latin prayers specified to gain Wolsey’s pardon were printed on the bottom half of the sheet, but more than half of that text is now lost.
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References
1 Bryn Mawr, PA, Bryn Mawr College Library, Special Collections (gift of Howard Lehman Goodhart), bound into 878 P7 AC. I am grateful to Marianne Hansen for providing images, and other assistance. The sheet is listed in Pollard, A. W. and Redgrave, G. R. (rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and K. F. Pantzer), A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad (1475–1640), 3 vols (2nd edn, London, 1976–91)Google Scholar, no. 14077c.146. The section of text considered in this paragraph is reproduced in the appendix below.
2 It can thus be integrated into the issues considered in Swanson, R. N., ‘Unity and Diversity, Rhetoric and Reality: Modelling “the Church”’, Journal of Religious History 20 (1996), 156–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 See, e.g., the indulgence issued collectively by a group of cardinals for devotions before the image of the Veronica in Linköping cathedral in 1412: the literate were to say the prayer ’salva sancta facies’; for the ‘layci illiterati’ an Our Father and Ave would suffice: Seibold, Alexander, Sammelindulgenzen: Ablaβurkunden des Spätmittelalters und der Frühneuzeit, Archiv für Diplomatik Schriftgeschichte, Siegel- und Wappenkunde: Beiheft 8 (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 2001), 282 Google Scholar. Compare the devotion to the Veronica in an English primer (seen. 19 below).
4 John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, Edited from MS Cotton Claudius A II and Six Other Manuscripts, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. Kristensson, Gillis, Lund Studies in English 49 (Lund, 1974), 115.Google Scholar
5 The Register of John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury, 1388–1395, ed. T. C. B. Timmins, CYS 80 (1994), nos 1119, 1146; Helmholz, R.H., The Oxford History of the Laws of England, volume I: the Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction from 597 to the 1640s (Oxford, 2004), 622, n. 108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (this a demand for five Paters, five Aves, and a Creed – a package itself almost a standard unit, regularly mentioned in devotions before indulgenced images).
6 The Lay Folks’ Mass Book, ed. T. F. Simmons, EETS, o.s. 71 (1879), 2–60, passim.
7 See, for instance, the stipulation of daily recitations of Our Father and Ave (together with more complex orations) in the prayers required of pupils at the school associated with the Greyndoore chantry at Newland, Glos.: Registrum Thome Spofford, episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. MCCCCXXII-MCCCCXLVIII, ed. A. T. Bannister, CYS 23 (1919), 282. They are also included in prayers stipulated for the fellows and scholars in the early statutes of Corpus Christi College, Oxford: Statutes of the Colleges of Oxford, 3 vols (London, 1853), 2: Statutes of Corpus Christi College, 45 [separately paginated].
8 Peters, Christine, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge, 2003), 57–9 Google Scholar (Peters emphasizes a gendering in types of beads, but that is another issue beyond present concerns); Beer, B. L., Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in England during the Reign of Edward W(n.p. [Kent, OH], 1982), 55–6.Google Scholar
9 Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. Tanner, Norman P., Camden Society, 4th ser., 20 (London, 1977), 44.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 89–90.
11 CUL, EDR G/1/6, 54–5.
12 Ibid., 55, 72–4.
13 Duffy, , Stripping of the Altars, 219.Google Scholar
14 BL, MS Harley 4012, fol. 109r-v: these 600 days were in addition to the 100 years earned by reciting the English text without the additional prayers.
15 Russell, G. H., ‘Vernacular Instruction of the Laity in the Later Middle Ages in England: Some Texts and Notes’, Journal of Religious History 2 (1962), 98–119 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lollards of Coventry, 1486–1522, ed. Shannon McSheffrey and Norman Tanner, Camden Society Publications, 5th ser., 23 (Cambridge, 2003), 72–3.
16 English Gilds, ed. T. Smith, L. T. Smith and L. Brentano, EETS, o.s. 40 (1870), 20.
17 Davis, V., ‘The Rule of Saint Paul, the First Hermit, in Late Medieval England’, in Sheils, W.J., ed., Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, SCH 22 (Oxford, 1985), 203–14, 210–11.Google Scholar
18 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashm. 750, fol. 140r-v.
19 Hore beatissime virginis Marie… (Paris, 1534), fol. 73v. Cf. n. 3 above.
20 Chartulary of Winchester Cathedral, ed. Goodman, A. W. (Winchester, 1927), no. 170.Google Scholar
21 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 165, fol. 91r-v.
22 Ibid., fol. 94v.
23 Calvert, E., ‘Extracts from a Fifteenth Century MS’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2nd ser., 6 (1894), 99–106, 104–6 Google Scholar; Simmons, , Lay Folks’ Mass Book, 64–80 Google Scholar; Death and Memory in Medieval Exeter, ed. Lepine, David and Orme, Nicholas, Devon and Cornwall Record Society, n.s. 47 (Exeter, 2003), 337–9.Google Scholar
24 English Gilds, ed. Smith, Smith, and Brentano, 22–3; see also 110–12, 114–15.
25 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen, EETS, o.s. 212 (1940), 250–1.
26 For the verse, neck see The Reports of Sir John Spelman, ed. Baker, J. H., Selden Society Publications 93–4 (London, 1976–7), 2: 329.Google Scholar
27 See above, n. 1. The damage to this part of the sheet prevents full reconstruction. There was at least one full Latin prayer; a ‘Gloria patri et filio’ points to at least a doxology to be recited from memory.
28 The prayer ‘Avete omnes anime fideles’ (with variant wordings) occurs in both manu script and printed primers, rewarded with indulgences: CUL, MS Ee.1.14, fol. 136r-v; Hore beatissime virginis Marie, fol. 144r. For another churchyard prayer, ibid., fol. 152r-v.
29 See above, n. 1. The original spelling is retained, but an ampersand replaces Pynson’s sign for ‘and’. Abbreviations are silently extended. Material in square brackets reconstructs lost text. Paragraphing replaces paraph marks. Punctuation has been modernized.