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Liturgical Celebrations and the Cult of the Saints in Place " T H E W O R T H I E S T T H I N G " The Liturgy The clergy and laity shared the same goal in building, maintaining, and furnishing the church. They sought a proper space for the celebration of the liturgy. Although many aspects of parish life fell under the rubric of religious practice, formal worship consisted of the liturgy. Parishioners typically attended three services on Sundays:matins at around sixor seven o'clock in the morning, high mass at around nine or ten o'clock, and finally evensong between two and three o'clock in the afternoon.1 Although the laitymight go to church only on Sunday, their parish priest, along with the stipendiary priests, said a daily mass and the other canonical offices. When and how depended largely on local custom; he might saythe hours privately or fold them into the beginning and end of the dailymass.2 The mass, as the reenactment of the Last Supper and Christ's passion and resurrection, provided the most important access to sacramentalgrace. TheLay Folk's Mass Book declared the mass to be "the worthiest thing, [and] most of the goodness in all this world."3 The doctrine of transubstantiation held that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were turned into the body and blood of Christ. As such, the Church expected the laityto worship the host asthe very body of the Lord. Punctuating the year of Sunday services came special holy days that commemorated the life ofJesus and the martyrdom of the saints. On these days, c^&dfestaferianda, the laity were to leave off work and attend church. Parish life promoted and facilitated the celebration of the mass and this cycle of holy days. Their celebration by the parish holds in tension the demands of orthodoxy and local practices.Through visitations and educational 6 programs, the church hierarchyworked to keep each parish within the bounds of acceptable Christian practice; yet, as we saw in the last chapter, liturgical performances cannot be removed from the specific place or lay organization that facilitated them. In addition to the formal celebration of the liturgy within the church, the laity moved celebration into the churchyards and church houses in the form of processions, ales, and revels, and these celebrations continued throughout the year in the form of the cult of the saints. In this way,local concerns shaped orthodox religious practices, and through liturgically sanctioned celebrations, a parish further articulated its community identity. The differences and similarities in the scale and form of the parish liturgy highlight the parameters of orthodox liturgical practice, while at the same time showing worship to be a creative enterprise for the laity. Unlike the local variations in parish administrations , greater uniformity resided in liturgical calendars and the actual liturgical observances. The primary reason is that orthodoxy by its very nature limited deviation. Although the episcopacy tolerated a variety of practices, there were set boundaries that delineated the acceptable from the unacceptable. In 1464, Bishop Beckynton asked his commissary-general to investigate reports of a spring within the hamlet of Wemdon, in the parish of Bridgwater, that had alleged healing powers.4 It was not the fact of a holy spring per se that worried the bishop—there was biblical precedent for that—but rather the idea of uncontrolled religious enthusiasm and erroneous worship.5 In the end, parish religious practices were essentially conservative in nature, but conservatism does not mean stasis. In this chapter, we will explore how the church hierarchy's educational programs tried to instill orthodox religious practices and beliefs into the parish. Then, as a way of seeing how parishes practiced orthodoxy, we will look at the parishes' celebration of holy days that celebrated the life ofJesus and the cult of the saints. Throughout the late middle ages, parishes expanded their liturgical celebrations to include extra-liturgical activities that increasedthe laity's participation in the holy day. This expansion expressed the anxieties and affirmations of the parish's growth as a forum for layinitiative and religious expression. lLea.rningA.bout Christianity One wayin which the Church worked to maintain orthodoxy was through education. In the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, the papacy and the episcopacy worked to increase lay knowledge of Christianity. Without proper and regular instruction, the laity could fall into error and heresy. At the same time, bishops also worried about the quality of the...

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