CHAPTER I
THE CHURCH
IT is customary to set out on any survey of medieval peasant
life by attempting a description of the manor and its occu-
pants, and this we shall have to do, however briefly, although
throughout our emphasis will be more on actualities than on
legal distinctions. But, before we come to that, it is essential to
realise that the peasant (in this respect like his betters) was part
of a great organisation whose power, now light, now heavy, con-
tinuously pressed upon him. The Church meant more to
medieval man than we are ever likely to understand, but a little
imagination allows us to glimpse its force and its prestige. The
building itself, standing commonly in the centre of the village,
symbolised the place of the Church in medieval life. The great
moments of man's story on earth—baptism, marriage, burial—
centred in the sacred building. There, on Sundays at least, the
villagers heard Mass, and perhaps mattins and evensong as well:
there they learnt what little they were capable of retaining from
staring at the pictures on the walls or in the windows, or from
the infrequent and halting sermon of their village priest, or from
the picturesque and dramatic outpourings of a preaching friar.
And the village Church was the more important because
medieval worship was still mainly a matter of congregational
worship—the altar, the chantry, the shrine were the places the
villager came to naturally when he wished to express his religious
aspirations. Whatever part family devotions may have played
(and we have little evidence of any such happenings) it was to
their parish church and to the parish clergy that men turned for
instruction, consolation and refreshment.
Nor must we think that religion was a thing for Sundays,
hastily assumed as men approached the church. It is probable
that the peasant was unable to attend except on Sundays or
great Saints' days, but his life was not thereby divided into two
compartments—religious and secular. Rather the shadow of the
Church was about him in his fields or in his close; as he laboured
on the edge of the forest or carried his load to the neighbouring