So speaking, they pursue the pebbly walk
That leads to the white porch the Sunday throng,
Hand-coupled urchins in restrained talk,
And anxious pedagogue that chasten wrong,
And posied churchwarden with solemn stalk,
And gold-bedizened beadle flames along,
And gentle peasant clad in buff and green,
Like a meek cowslip in the spring serene;
And blushing maiden – modestly array’d
In spotless white – still conscious of the glass;
And she, the lonely widow that hath made
A sable covenant with grief, – alas!
She veils her tears under the deep, deep shade,
While the poor kindly-hearted, as they pass,
Bend to unclouded childhood, and caress
Her boy, – so rosy! – and so fatherless!
Thus as good Christians ought, they all draw near
The fair white temple, to the timely call
Of pleasant bells that tremble in the ear, –
Now the last frock, and scarlet hood and shawl
Fade into dusk, in the dim atmosphere
Of the low porch, and heav’n has won them all . . .
The Lord of the manor and his family have entered their private pew, hidden in a transept and with a separate entrance. Their liveried servants sit on a bench behind them. All round the church is an array of hats hanging on pegs on the walls above the pews. The parson, who has entered the church in his long white surplice and red silk hood of an Oxford Master of Arts, takes his place in the second desk of the three-decker. The parish clerk is below him to say ‘Amen’. He begins Morning Prayer, facing the congregation. He then mounts to the pulpit and preaches a sermon, which is usually read. Extempore preaching was a sign of ‘enthusiasm’. The Devon poet N. T. Carrington well describes a morning service in My Native Village (1830):
Ah, let me enter, once again, the pew
Where the child nodded as the sermon grew;
Scene of soft slumbers! I remember now
The chiding finger, and the frowning brow
Of stern reprovers, when the ardent June
Flung through the glowing aisles the drowsy noon;
Ah admonitions vain! a power was there
Which conquer’d e’en the sage, the brave, the fair, –
A sweet oppressive power – a languor deep,
Resistless shedding round delicious sleep!
Till closed the learned harangue, with solemn look
Arose the chauntcr of the sacred book, –
The parish clerk (death-silenced) far-famed then
And justly, for his long and loud – Amen!
Rich was his tone, and his exulting eye
Glanced to the reedy choir, enthroned on high,
Nor glanced in vain; the simple-hearted throng
Lifted their voices, and dissolved in song;
Till in one tide, deep welling, full and free
Rung through the echoing pile, old England’s psalmody.
The singing is from metrical psalms which are bound with every prayer book. The versions used were generally those awkward quatrains by Tate and Brady. They are easily committed to memory. The minister or clerk reads out the stanzas and then the congregation sings, stanza by stanza, those few who cannot read committing the lines to memory. The custom, still prevailing in some Evangelical churches and many chapels, of the minister’s proclaiming the first verse of the hymn, is doubtless a survival of these days. Two of Tate and Brady’s metrical psalms, ‘Thro’ all the changing scenes of life’ and ‘As pants the hart for cooling streams’, survive, cut down, in modern hymn books. An appendix to the Psalms was also printed, consisting of rhyming doxologies and a few hymns for special occasions such as ‘While Shepherds watched’. From this appendix grew the separate hymn book, of which the most famous and successful was Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), which consisted first of 273 hymns.
The parson’s sermon is the end of the service unless it is ‘Sacrament Sunday’. For the sermon has come after the Nicene Creed and not at the end of the office of Morning Prayer. It was the custom to have Morning Prayer, Litany and Ante-Communion. The whole service lasted about two hours. As the time of eating was at three o’clock, this was no great inconvenience. But one can understand where the deep-rooted English idea that church worship is boring had its origin. The layman was asked to take part in the monkish offices of Morning and Evening Prayer (an anglicized and potted version of the daily offices of monks and nuns) as well as in the celebration of Communion, always the central act of worship of the Church. The English habit of attending but not receiving Communion was the origin of the Ante-Communion service alone being read, and ‘Sacrament Sundays’ being special and rare occasions; for it was ordered in the Prayer Book that two or three people must be willing to partake of the Sacrament before it could be celebrated. This order was made with the intention of encouraging people to communicate. But the habit of abstaining was too strong, hence the diminution of the service to Ante-Communion.
The Church in the Fifteenth Century
There will be no end to books on the Reformation. It is not my intention to add to them. Rather I would go back to the middle of the 15th century, when the church we have been describing was bright with its new additions of tower, porch, aisles and clerestory windows, and to a medieval England not quite so roseate as that of Cardinal Gasquet, nor yet so crime-ridden as that of Dr Coulton.
The village looks different. The church is by far the most prominent building unless there is a manor-house, and even this is probably a smaller building than the church and more like what we now think of as an old farm. The church is so prominent because the equivalents of cottages in the village are at the grandest ‘cruck houses’ (that is to say tent-like buildings with roofs coming down to the ground), and most are mere hovels. They are grouped round the church and manor-house and look rather like a camp. There is far more forest everywhere, and in all but the Celtic fringes of the island agriculture is strip cultivation, that is to say the tilled land is laid out in long strips with no hedges between and is common to the whole community, as are the grazing rights in various hedged and well-watered fields. There are more sheep than any other animals in these enclosures. The approaches to the village are grassy tracks very muddy in winter. Each village is almost a country to itself. Near the entrance to the churchyard is the church house where the churchwardens store beer or ‘church ales’ for feasts. This is the origin of so many old inns being beside the churchyard in England. The graveyard has no tombstones in it. The dead are buried there but they are remembered not in stone but in the prayers of the priest at the altar at mass. Everyone goes to mass, people from outlying farms stabling their horses outside the churchyard. The church itself looks much the same. The stone tower gleams with new cut ashlar; the walls of the church when they are not ashlar are plastered.
Not only does everyone go to church on Sunday and in his best clothes; the church is used on weekdays too, for it is impossible to say daily prayers in the little hovels in which most of the villagers live. School is taught in the porch, business is carried out by the cross in the market where the booths are (for there are no shops in the village, only open stalls as in market squares today). In the nave of the church on a weekday there are probably people gossiping in some