Philobiblon

I’ve been reading in the odd spare moment The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion After the Black Death, Katherine L French, Uni of Penn Press, 2008. It is delightfully lively for a serious academic text; there is a thesis and theory, but the book wears this lightly and recovers from church records and accounts snippets that give an insight into the lives of women in this difficult age.

In post-plague England as many as a third of women never married, and there was a preoccupation with controlling independent and mobile women, French finds. Studies on women and religion in this period have tended to focus on nuns and the elite, but at the local level churchgoing, and church activities, played a central role in women’s lives. Parochial activities were designed to promote lay support for the parish, but in their frequent gender segregation, women adapting their housekeeping roles and behaviours in the service of the parish, which fostered collective action and expanded their opportunities.

There’s not of course in this era the sort of spiritual diaries that start to occur, from relatively modest places on the social scale, after the Reformation, so French has to find hints, suggestions and draw conclusions from rather drier records. But her conclusions were, to this reader, solid.

So, she says, when in Tintinhull Somerset in 1449 and again in 1452, when the group of women who would have been paid six pennies for laundering the church linens declined payment, chosing instead to donate their labour, they were expressing not just devotion, but probably also drawing considerable satisfaction for doing so. (That would probably have been something like a week’s wages.) When in Bassingbourne, Cambridgeshire, the parish produced a St Margaret’s play to raise money for a new statue of St George, many women donated their brewing and baking labour for the refreshments.

The value of this was considerable, and when the women couldn’t afford to, or chose not to do it, the cost was considerable. So when Dame Margaret Capell, widow of a London knight draper, died in 1552, she not only instructed her executors to turn their velvet and silk clothes into vestments for London churches, she left extra money to the churchwardens to fund the hire of laundresses to care for her bequests. (p.30)

There was also special focus on the link between piety and housework in the cult of St Zita (Sitha), which came with the Lucchese merchants working in London. (Zita was remembered as an exceptionally pious servant who died in 1272, having been not only obedient but charitable, giving food and money to those even poorer than herself. By the early 16th-century her images were in parish churches throughout England. Proportionately more women than men recognised her in their wills.

The church was God’s house, but it was also a public place that allowed women to escape the household, and allowed them public and even respected roles.

By the mid-15th century, French concludes, collective action by single sex groups had become common in activities such as making collections and providing wax for candles, as well as building and maintenance projects. The laity had responsibility for maintaining the nave. Wills covered some of the costs, but far from all of them, and were obviously unpredictable.

In the urban parish of St Ewen’s Bristol, the wives of former churchwardens collected in 1466 a total of 83 shillings for a new silver censor – possibly by calling door to door in pairs, each responsible for a street or small area. There were often groups for maidens and groups for wives (in which widows seem generally to have remained.)

Hocktide was traditionally carried out on the first Monday and Tuesday after Easter. A critic, John Carpenter bishop of Worcester, in his complaints left a description of it:

“Women feign to bind mind, and on another (or the next) day men feign to bind women, and to do other things – would that they were no dishonourable or worse! – in full view of passers-by, even pretending to increase church profit but earning loss (literally damnation) for the soul under false pretences.”

Another victim complained in the early 16th century: “As I went yesterday to St Mary’s church there came a great many women about me and began to stop me at the gate…And when I asked them what they meant, they answered that it was the rule to let no man pass that day, unless they had something of him. … there was no man who passed by then but that they got something from himby hook or by crook”. (p163)

Get hints of the women gathering together. When St Mary Hill in London first celebrated Hocktide in 1498, the parish contributed “for 3 ribs of beef to the wives on Hock Monday and bread and ale for them that gathered”. You can imagine the raucous evening that might have followed a day of ribald stunts. But this didn’t become a permanent event – French suggests that the parish didn’t want to kind of solidarity among the women that it might have engendered. But Hocktide did have value in raising money for church maintenance “it brought in less money than May Day, but was more financially successful than the winter holidays”; it could be 15-20% of a parish’s annual income.

But interest was already fading before the Reformation largely put a stop to it – one exception was the Hock-play in Coventry, although there the form was civic rather than religious. The city revived it in 1566 and then again in 1573, for Queen Elizabeth, fittingly, since the play re-enacted a supposed Anglo-Saxon women’s defeat of a Viking army.

In 1536 a group of women in Exeter went to the priory of St Nicholas and assaulted the Breton men hired to dismantle the rood screen. A reflection that much of women’s activities and opportunities in the church were lost in the Reformation. Lost was all-woman seating in the church, all-women guilds and stores, female saints, and the transformation of household goods into items of religious and liturgical significance. It did mean they had a lot loss laundry to do for the parish, but they lost the chance to influence the look of the church. Although during the early stages of the Reformation there was a surge in the number of female churchwardens, this did not last. The religious behaviour of women was “no longer as collective, visible and active”. (p. 230)