Reply to Karen - 2
Dear Karen
Encouraged by George's own imprimatur and your own kind words, and
dispensing with the much-lamented Renihan, I continue with a few more
remarks. Let us suppose, in fact, that Renihan, like Orlando, has changed
sex in mid career and is now called Karen (Karenihan?), but still lives
somewhere vaguely in the York area at a date not too precisely defined in
the thirteenth century.
You enjoy the religious drama that is frequently to be seen these days, both
in and out of church. You have gone to Beverley to see a Resurrection play.
This is not, strictly speaking, a liturgical drama, because it is not being
performed during the liturgy, nor yet in the church building, but outside in
the churchyard. Let Dominica Legge take up the story:
"Some time early in the thirteenth century the history of the drama in
England was marked by another accident. At Beverley Minster, the
performance of a Resurrection play was in progress in the churchyard on the
north side. A door into the church had been left open, and some boys took
advantage of this to climb the tower in order to get a better view. The
sacristans caught sight of them. The windows were glazed, and glass was
precious; the boys might break it. Accordingly, the sacristans gave chase,
caught, and beat them. One, trying to escape, went up higher, put his foot
upon a rocking stone and crashed down on to the pavement of the church,
where he lay as one dead. While his parents were weeping over his
apparently lifeless body, he recovered his senses, so that those who had
been prevented by the size of the crowd from being present at a performance
of the Resurrection outside the church, saw a more myraculous symbol of the
resurrection within it." (Anglo Norman Literature and its Background, pp.
321-2. The boy's recovery is credited as a miracle to St John of Beverley
in Acta Sanctorum.)
Legge thinks the play may have been in French and suggests that it may have
been the play we know as "La Seinte Resurreccion". This is possible, though
really no more than guesswork. The point I would want to make is that
whatever language it was in, people evidently flocked to see it. A couple
of children risked their lives, and one nearly lost it, to gain a better
view. It was an attraction.
Another point I would make is that the "Church" was not as remote and alien
as you might think. Almost everyone was a member of it (I mean no
disrespect to the Jewish minority, or to any other minority). Even if we
confuse "the Church" with "the Clergy" as many do, the fact was that a very
large number of families would have a member who was a priest, or a monk, or
a nun, or a lay-brother - there were three huge Cistercian monasteries
nearby, at Rievaulx, Byland and Fountains, who employed large numbers of lay
brothers. The priest, in a small village (and most people still lived in
small villages) might be your brother, or your cousin, or your uncle.
Indeed, throughout the twelfth century he might have been your husband or
your father. A good source for this subject is John of Ford's "Life of St
Wulfric" (unfortunately the relevant passages are omitted from the
translation in the Penguin Classics volume "The Cistercian World"). But if
you read the original (ed. Dom Maurice Bell, Somerset Record Society, vol.
xlvii, 1933) you will learn of a priest called Segar, who had four sons,
three of them monks, the fourth a lay-brother, at Ford. Brictric, the
parish priest of Haslebury, where Wulfric lived, had a wife Godida (a good
and pious lady who made vestments for the church) and a son Osbern, who
became parish priest after his father. John of Ford nowhere indicates
disapprobation of such arrangements, nor does he suggest that they were
unusual or noteworthy.
The Bishops were also generally married at this time, but it would weary you
to demonstrate this at length. Suffice it to quote from A.L. Poole, "From
Domesday Book to Magna Carta 1087-1216" (Oxford History of England, vol.
iii), p. 183:
"The great Roger [Bishop] of Salisbury . . . lived openly with his mistress,
Matilda of Ramsbury, while his nephew, Bishop Nigel of Ely, was a married
man, the father of Richard Fitz Neal, and scandalized the strict churchmen
by putting in a married clerk as sacrist in his own cathedral; even the
conduct of the papal legate who presided over the council of 1125 was not
above suspicion."
These clerical wives are the forgotten women of the middle ages. Why, for
example, are the passages referring to them not included in the Penguin Life
of St Wulfric? Has anyone done a study of their place in society?
Oriens.
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