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Reply to Karen - 3 Meanwhile, back at the church, the Three Amigos have sung the Gradual and Alleluia, and now Oswald the Deacon sings the Gospel. I'm assuming this is a Solemn Mass when Priest, Deacon and Subdeacon are all present and do their own proper liturgies. At a Low Mass Brictric would do it all himself. I don't know if Brictric is intending to preach a sermon. He doesn't always do so, but when he does it is always in English - indeed Brictric would be hard pressed to compose a sermon in Latin. Friar Hubert is better at preaching. That, in fact, is the whole purpose of his order, the "Order of Preachers" (Ordo Praedicatorum), founded by St Dominic. There are many people on this list far more able than myself to tell you what sort of a sermon Brictric would have preached, if any. I do though have a fair idea of what sort of sermon Hubert would preach. I was indiscreet enough recently to mention that a friend of mine had been received into the Catholic Church. To mark the occasion, I bought her a book of sermons by that eminent O.P., Thomas Aquinas. They were delivered in Naples to a popular audience - not to other friars - and in Italian. They are on the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Apostles' Creed. They are simple and direct expositions of those texts, intended for the edification of the laity. That's the sort of thing the Dominicans did, and still do. The book is entitled "The Three Greatest Prayers" and is published in Manchester, New Hampshire. I'm sorry I didn't make a note of the full bibliographical details. [There's a companion volume, which I bought for my friend's husband, on the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sacraments - these are treatises abstracted from the Summa. The title is something like "God's Greatest Gifts". Again I'm sorry to be a little vague.] Let's assume that there was no sermon. What happened next? I don't know when it became the custom to keep a bede-roll. A what? A bede-roll. I came across this in Eamon Duffy's "The Stripping of the Altars." Duffy is talking about the 15th-16th centuries, so I may be guilty of anachronism in supposing that Brictric might have done something like this:- "The second additional ceremony on Sundays was the bidding of the bedes. This was a solemn form of prayer in English, which took place before the offertory. The priest from the pulpit called on the people to pray for the Pope, the bishops, the clergy, and especially their own priest, for the king, lords and commons, for the mayor or other authorities of the town or village, for 'all our good parisshens', and for those in special need such as pilgrims and travellers, prisoners, 'and all women that be with chylde in this parysshe or any other', and finally for the household which that week was to supply the holy loaf, the basis of another parochial ceremony peculiar to Sundays. "In the second half of the bidding the congregation prayed for the dead, especially the parish dead. Recently deceased parishioners or special benefactors of the churchor parish were mentioned by name, and once a year every name on the parish bede-roll would be read aloud, at the parish requiem." (pp. 124-5) Anybody know when the custom started? Anybody know what sort of fist Brictric would make of preaching? Don't be shy, you learned lurkers. Oriens. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%