December 2025
Going to Church in Medieval England
Review article
GOING TO CHURCH IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND by Nicholas Orme. Yale University Press (July 2021). Pp. 496. Available from Amazon (Paperback/Hardback, and Kindle).
There is something so tragic in the Reformation. Something so terrible that my soul trembles at what was lost and what is still cleaved. Western man was cut in two: the people of my blood, the northwestern Europeans, were lost to the lies and heresies of the Reformers (with the notable exception of the Irish, at least historically). The Reformation changed more than people who left (or who were forced to leave), it changed the Catholic Church.
While I disdain nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, pre-Reformation Western Europe was a place of wonder and miracles — of saints and sinners — of local and quixotic custom and tradition. It was a place where the word “Catholic” was not necessary because we were all sons and daughters of Holy Mother Church. Of course, it was a brutal world too: of violence, war, pestilence, plague, poverty, hunger, and toil. We romanticise it our peril. Yet we lost something great and innocent when we left the medieval world for the ascendant modern one. The loss is so great that we cannot even articulate that which was lost.
Part of my fascination with the medieval world — the world before the Reformation or Trent — may lie in my acute response to the alienating and deracinating influence of modernism on the souls of Western men. Again, nostalgia is a dangerous thing. But we lost something profound when men lost touch with the soil and with the seasonality of life: when they let go of the traditions of their fathers.
It is not accidental that Western man lost his natural and communal religiosity. When ideology came to predominate over nature and man’s natural humility within it, a new religion — the cult of egotism, greed, and individualism — was embraced.
If we fast forward five hundred years thereafter, we find ourselves in a world utterly detached from seasonality, nature, and tribe. We find ourselves celebrating egotism to such an extent that we have deified our sensibilities and seek to redefine nature itself. While I do not long for the misfortunes of the medieval world, it was a world that existed in harmony with God’s order and man’s place within it. It was a place of much simpler faith: a living faith in which the wonders of God and the vicissitudes of life were accepted with a profound humility moderns can scarcely fathom.
Recently, I had an enjoyable moment visiting that magical place of pre-Reformation Europe. Going to Church in Medieval England by Nicholas Orme is a wonderful book. It transported me to a place that was distant but also recognisable due to my immersion in traditional Catholicism.
Orme is an Emeritus Professor of History at Exeter University who has authored numerous books on the religious and social history of England, emphasising medieval society. Going to Church is a book that has some overlap with The Stripping of the Altars by Professor Eamon Duffy. But Orme’s book is more informational on the who, what, where, and how of the medieval English Church whereas Duffy’s book probes deeper into the weighty spirituality of the medieval English people.
Orme’s book is descriptive of place and time; Duffy’s book is soulful and wistful in its appraisal of medieval Christianity as it was practiced. Read together, both books give the reader a comprehensive glimpse of a world lost to us.
What is revealed is a blossoming form of religious life embedded in the parish church which challenges the misinformation of the Reformation.
While the Reformers were hopelessly contradictory in theology and destructively revolutionary in practice, they excelled the believers of the old faith in one vital thing: propaganda.
Amazingly, these same Reformers branded their fathers and the world of their fathers as credulous, superstitious, and idolatrous. Even if Orme’s work is not as strong on the soul of pre-Reformation English Christianity as Duffy’s work, his account, which is grounded in the seasonality and organisation of the Faith in visual, physical, and human terms, exposes a flourishing world. The commitment of the people to this Faith gave them a sense of time and place, of sacred and profane, and an active and living faith.
The world that Orme reveals is one of a powerful sense of community, charisma, and identification amongst the laity who develop as stakeholders in their local churches.
His depiction is not a world rife in medieval superstition or vice, as the Reformers mercilessly and falsely depicted of the old religion. Instead, we see a Christian people who, like us, were sinners and saints, but also knowledgeable about their faith and steeped in the religious and cultic life to an extent that is hard for us, who live in a compartmentalised and secular world, to imagine. That we still mistake mystery for superstition is more an indictment of our world than it is of a world steeped in mystery.
Parishional protagonist and plot
Orme’s book is both scholarly and popular. Well-cited, it has academic trappings. At the same time, its breadth is wide and ambitious. It seeks to describe the medieval English Church broadly over the span of several centuries. He admits as much by saying in the introduction that the book “does not attempt to argue a particular thesis about medieval parish churches. This is not possible given a coverage of hundreds of years, thousands of churches, and millions of people.” But implicitly throughout, Orme reconstructs the life of the typical parish as a tableau of medieval religious and communal life. It is a world that varied from parish to parish and time to time but nonetheless shared a unity and cohesion of time and purpose.
In many ways, Orme’s account is a narrative in which the parish church is the protagonist, and the plot of the story is the description of that place and the manifold ways that the community was centred around it. It is also a story of marking and keeping time in a cyclical fashion—natural time in the form of seasons and harvest; human time in the milestones of life and death; and supernatural time in the form of the Church’s calendar of feasts and fasts.
What is absent from this world is the notion of “progress.”
Instead, we find cyclicality, virtue and vice, and people who do not believe that they can create a utopia. Rather, they strive, as best they can, to live in a community that supplicates the living God in every aspect of life.
As much as “progress” is absent, so is the idea of a separation between the religious and the political. All of it belongs to God, and medieval people understood this acutely.
Structure
The book is organised in eight chapters that describe, visually and physically, what we would encounter if we could time-travel to medieval England:
(1) the origins of the parish and the structure and geography of parish church. Here, Orme reviews the introduction of Christianity to Britain (from the Roman, Viking and Saxon periods to the various missions that were sent later) and the monastic revival following the Norman Conquest in 1066;
(2) the staffing of the parish church, focussing on the various clerics who worked in the parish church, including clerical assistants, vicars, chaplains, rectors, and deacons;
(3) the church building itself with its architectural elements as they changed over time such as the chancel, rood beam, and the nave. Orme explains their function, how they differed, and how they changed and expanded in the later medieval period;
(4) the congregation and anecdotes of the people who came (or did not) to church; rich and poor, nobility and serf, men and women, the fervent and the dissenters or the irreligious;
(5) the days and the weeks of churchgoing people including the liturgy of the Holy Mass and the Divine Office;
(6) the seasons and the year in the Church’s calendar (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Septuagesima, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost) as well as the special seasonal times of Rogation Week and Ember Days;
(7) the life cycle of birth, marriage, and death in the lived experienced of medieval people; and
(8) the Reformation’s impact on the world described in the first seven chapters albeit in brief. In his effort to generalise the medieval Christian world of England (something multifarious and localised in time and place), Orme vivifies the dry descriptions by interspersing a variety of anecdotes of real people and places. These bring the book to life.
Sources
Throughout the book, Orme uses a variety of sources that round out this attempted reconstruction of the religious past.
He adduces clerical manuals; official edits; poetic anecdotes from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to The Canterbury Tales; surviving medieval sermons; wills and testamentary devices; disciplinary records (both of parishioners and priests); court cases; and parish records. This “both…and” approach of incorporating the Church’s official records, the governments official records, and various anecdotal and literary records give a glimpse into this world that is satisfying and believable.
Distant but familiar
Any Catholic familiar with the Latin Mass would recognise the Mass of pre-Reformation England. It was, indeed, the same Mass albeit with certain Sarum or York rite distinctions. Unlike our liturgy today, there was no altar or communion rail but a highly decorated rood screen that physically separated the chancel from the nave. In a sense, an English medieval church might resemble, in terms of its space, an Eastern Church given the similarity of the iconostasis and rood screen. A constant struggle, according to Orme, was the desire to keep the laity out of the chancel and in the nave with only some success, as the rich and powerful wanted to be closer to the liturgical action.
A host of similar distinctions are chronicled throughout the book in custom and practice (including folk customs). Yet in the round it would be recognisable to a Catholic familiar with the Latin Mass.
That said, there was something vibrant and colourful in pre-Reformation England that is missing today. The people had an appreciation for the florid.
This is the world of pre-Vatican II Catholicism with some significant pre-Reformation particularities: eerily familiar even if distant. At the broadest level, everything centred around the parish church; hubs of communal and religious life that have no adequate modern analogue. Every adult member of the community was expected to contribute and participate. They attended services regularly, paid tithes, maintained the church building, and took part in processions. Every significant life event — from birth to death and everything in between — was touched in some way by parish life. Even the crops they grew and animals they husbanded were incorporated into that parochial life through the blessings of seasons and harvests.
To modern ears, the idea of a communal requirement to attend services sounds horrendous and invasive; an affront to individual conscience. Yet this world of obligation existed for centuries. Orme explains, however, that the obligation was nuanced. Even if one could “lose face greatly by being absent,” and although “church authorities [could] take action against” those who avoided this social duty, it did not apply, for example, to children, to post-partum mothers for a time after delivery, to certain occupations like shepherds or fishermen or harvesting farmers, and to the infirm.
It is clear that our concept of “Sunday obligation” was not as developed during this period; it was expected but not seen, per se, as a legal obligation. Persistent absenteeism could prompt action but how often this eventuated is unclear (although it certainly did periodically).
It seems that there was always a segment of the population who were not pious or who held heterodox views. This manifested itself in an undercurrent of anti-clericalism and occasional blasphemous speech that the Reformation’s later iconoclasm and heterodoxy tapped into with success.
As already indicated, the medieval religious life was much more than Sunday Mass. Religious festivals and processions marked the seasons and appear to be frequently crowded and jammed. The fasting schedule was far more daunting and frequent during Advent, Lent, Rogation, Ember, and Vigil days.
The pre-Reformation English Church allowed, for most members, Communion only once a year at Easter. While some may have received more frequently (but always less than we do today), most received only at Easter. In addition, every adult must likewise confess their sins during Lent. This created a crush for confession during Lent and a logistical challenge for everyone to receive at Easter. But again, the beneficial communal nature of this crush, even with the potential for jostling and sleights of a mass of people doing anything simultaneously, brought everyone together at one point in time. It reinforced the Christian ideal that the community is one family.
Holy Communion
Orme does well to explain how these customs developed from Anglo-Saxon times in proportion to the growing sentiment of Eucharistic adoration throughout the West from the beginning of the second millennium. This was a society that took the administration of Holy Communion (or “houseling” as it was called then) very seriously because they recognised that it was indeed the Body and Blood of our Lord. To satiate, as it were, the need for communion in the everyday sense of the term, two practices replaced Communion of the Sacred Host.
First, the faithful received from the hands of the priest a “pax,” which was something like an icon, which was passed around the congregation to be kissed by each parishioner during the Mass.
Second, the priest blessed an ordinary loaf of bread (which was not consecrated) and the parishioners would share pieces of this bread as their first food after fasting for Mass. Thus, even in a society that seldom received Holy Communion, the pre-Reformation English Church made provision for customs to compensate for this absence. Moreover, for the faithful then, as Orme points out, the elevation of the Host at Holy Mass—seeing God and being seen by God in the Host—satisfied the faithful to an unimaginable extent. To some degree, our regular reception of the Blessed Sacrament has replaced this awe at the elevation.
We are mistaken if we judge this infrequent Holy Communion as something the modern Church has “improved” upon through frequent Communion. Observant and knowledgeable Catholics assume that Saint Pius X’s recommendation to receive Holy Communion more often than in previous generations was an clear improvement. But is this so?
Most traditional Catholics blame the post-conciliar liturgical changes as the root of the crisis of belief in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist. Perhaps “extraordinary” ministers of the Eucharist, Communion under both kinds, Communion in the hand, and “altar girls” bear some blame, alongside a “reformed” liturgy that is transparently banal and quite often ridiculous. But what if the answer hits closer to home for traditional Catholics?
What if Saint Pius X’s efforts to encourage more regular reception of the Eucharist made that which should be approached solemnly and only after sufficient preparation something that was instead approached more cavalierly?
What if the collective benefits of the faithful receiving Holy Communion more often are outweighed by the collective detriments of the faithful receiving Holy Communion thoughtlessly, neglectfully, and mundanely?
Everyone knows, or should know, that we veil and protect that which is sacred and holy; that we cloak such things in a veneer of privilege and awe. In making Holy Communion less veiled, less protected, more approachable, have we not made it less awe-inspiring?
To our ancestors at this time, Holy Communion was something that required preparation and focus — given what they believed it was and what the Fathers of the Church wanted the faithful to believe and understand. To concentrate, as it were, the faithful on the formidable privilege of receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord in such a way made their churches and Masses that much more sacred. It made the reception of Holy Communion something memorable and meaningful in a way that approaches what reception of our Lord really is.
Of course, no amount of human preparation or delay can adequately convey the gift and mystery of the Holy Eucharist. But there is a familiarity and ordinariness that can deaden the soul to its awesome reality, since it is hard to square something holy with something automatic and commonplace.
Reformation revisited
To someone unchurched, Protestant, or even a post-Vatican II Catholic, the world that Orme describes and unfurls would seem incomprehensible.
Almost twenty years ago, I began to assist exclusively at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in its Latin form that was in use in the West for almost the entirety of Christian history— until 1969. As stated earlier, familiarity with—and worship within—the pre-Vatican II liturgy makes the world Orme depicts recognisable. While a glossary of technical terms was included at the end of the book to acquaint clueless modern readers with the terminology of this strange world, I knew the terms perfectly well because I live them daily—being immersed as I am in the “old” Catholicism untouched by Vatican II.
We sense here the Great Divide so often treated in Christian Order down the decades: viz., the cleaving of the Faith that accompanied the “reforms” of Vatican II; the ways in which the traditional bloodletting of the 1960s and 70s created a confounding void and dislocation. In many ways, the penultimate chapter of Orme’s book, on the impact and changes (from 1530s until the 1570s) wrought by the Reformation on the medieval religious world that came before it (described by Orme throughout), contains a great many similarities to the impact and changes wrought by Vatican II and its subsequent era. To note just several:
• both introduced the vernacular in liturgy;
• Communion under both species;
• Communion in the hand;
• the modification of sacrificial altars into communion tables;
• the accompanying de-emphasis on saints, Eucharistic devotions, processions, and auricular confession.
In fact, the contemporary Catholicism ushered in after the Second Vatican Council looks much more like Thomas Cranmer’s Anglicanism than it does pre-Vatican II Catholicism. and certainly medieval Catholicism.
Nevertheless, my personal familiarity with pre-Vatican II Catholicism puts me and similarly situated people in a position to commune with the men and women featured in Orme’s Going to Church. They are not strangers who practiced a foreign cult; they are fellow Catholics who would have been comfortable in my church and liturgy today, just as I would have been reasonably comfortable in theirs. In other words, I belong to the same cult described in this book, which is, after all, the living and timeless Western Christian faith.
Reservations
I enjoyed this book immensely. A didactic work that is primarily descriptive of religious place, ceremony, custom, and traditions, I found it riveting. Lurking below the surface of these religious places and their associated practices was a vivacious world of faith and mystery. In between the lines, as it were, we find “Merrie Olde England” — before the corruption of the modern world, of which the Reformation was arguably the first salvo.
Nonetheless, while I liked the book (and would recommend it accordingly), I found aspects of it problematic.
First, the cult of saints is noticeably muted; it does not even have its own chapter. Yet the cult of saints was something that the Reformers took aim at (as do their descendants in religion) because of the way in which the saints captured the imagination of the faithful in pre-Reformation Europe. Indeed, the many English shrines that Orme describes (subsequently destroyed by the Reformers) were evidence themselves of the outsized role of the saints among the pre-Reformation faithful. To his credit, Orme does note that “the patron saint was venerated at the high altar, by which his or her statue stood, and some people had a special devotion to the saint as a personal patron as well.” Surely more could have been added in this regard.
Second, Orme’s last chapter on the Reformation’s impact on the world he described throughout the book is wanting to say the very least. He argues in the main that despite the Reformation and the myriad liturgical changes set forth in the various Reformation Prayer Books that followed, aspects of pre-Reformation religion lived on. But it is an unavailing treatment on several counts
Orme certainly helps us visualise an arresting world of unity, integrity, identity, and seasonality that was ruthlessly broken and destroyed by the Protestant 'reformers'. But this makes all the more curious his emphasis on the continuity between the pre- and post-Reformation English Church, which seems like a justification of the Reformation itself. In this regard, Orme writes as if he is a confessing high church Anglican who is at pains to demonstrate that the breach created by the Reformation was not, after all, that great in practice.
In one sense, the chapter concerned seems superfluous: viz., we know the pre-Reformation world of English Catholicism disappeared, so why include a chapter describing its end when it is discordant with everything that comes before it? Moreover, not only is there no seeming regret over the Reformers’ destruction of this rich religious life that he describes, there is also no regret for the iconoclastic obliteration of the indescribably beautiful artistic and religious heritage England had amassed for a thousand years.
Simply put, no Catholic could have written his closing chapter on the Reformation in the same way. The so-called “established” Church of England is not just a different religion to that practiced by pre-Reformation English Catholics. The English Reformation was a trail of tears that dragged a Catholic people into institutionalised heresy and subjected them to vicious and unrelenting waves of iconoclasm. Ultimately, a Catholic would know this in myriad ways but also in a most emphatic way because the Anglican Church has not preserved the priesthood. In the concise words of Pope Leo XIII (Apostolicae Curae, 1896):
Wherefore, strictly adhering, in this matter, to the decrees of the pontiffs, our predecessors, and confirming them most fully, and, as it were, renewing them by our authority, of our own initiative and certain knowledge, we pronounce and declare that ordinations carried out according to the Anglican rite have been, and are, absolutely null and utterly void.