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2 " T H E B O O K A N D W R I T I N G S O F T H E P A R I S H C H U R C H " Churchwardens' Accounts and Record Keeping The Parish as a Textual Community By the thirteenth century, English law, government, and religion all depended on writing and record keeping.1 Consequently, the number of people able to acquire and to use the skillsof reading, writing, and numeracyon adaily basis (mostly urban men) seems to have increased throughout the late middle ages.2 Literacy rates in late medieval England varied according to class,level of urbanization, occupation, and sex; even the most optimistic estimates, however , show that the majority of the population stillhad to hire scribes and have documents read to them.3 Studies such as those by Michael Clanchy and Brian Stock on the increasing use of writing and the growth of literacy also show how literacy and orality cannot be simply opposed.4 Thus, medieval people often functioned within a context framed bywriting, without actuallypossessing the skills of reading and writing. Simultaneously,political, ecclesiastical, or legal expectations of literacy existed in a context created by persistent local oral practices.5 There are gradations of literacy. One may read, but not write, and one may do either in manyor fewlanguages with varying degrees of competency. In the middle ages, literacy originally referred to Latinity—the ability to read and write Latin—but as the vernacular languages gained in prominence, the term literacy took on other connotations.6 The commercialization of the late medieval economy and the reality of a cash economy made it necessary for merchants to keep accounts. Writing, reading, and numeracybecame tools for success at business, a practice that we may fairly label practical literacy.7 Schools and private tutors taught the skills of reading and writing separately, so that a person might know how to read English or Latin but be unable to write. Similarly, listening to a text being read out loud provided access to written information, yet those participating might not possess the skills of reading and writing.8 The differing levels of familiarity with writing and reading led to various strategies for using written records. These strategies are visible in the recordkeeping practices of the late medieval parish and have implications for the creation and perpetuation of a community's identity. The amount of surviving parish material makes it possible to look at the relationships among recordkeeping practices, the character of local religion, and ideas of community formation. Using these records is difficult, however, because they are often vague, incomplete, and unclear. Yet their variety and vagueness can actually tell us something about how communities of people with greatly divergent literacies created and used these records. Examining how parishes kept and used their records reveals some of the internal processes of community formation and identification. Our best insights into parish life are churchwardens' accounts. These documents record the laity's parochial income and expenditures on behalf of their portion of the parish church—the nave and its contents. Creating these records was one aspect of how the laity, or at least a portion of them, forged a community identity around their parish involvement. This process worked in tandem with episcopal oversight. Although churchwardens' accounts were the result of diocesan regulation and thus were imposed from the outside, the processes of creating and using churchwardens' accounts were internalized and reflective of local concerns. As we have just seen in the last chapter, diocesan regulations compelled the laity to organize themselves. Although we can read the diocesan statutes as anticipating the development of layparochial organizations, led by lay officials called churchwardens, the statutes for Bath and Wells are not themselves clear on exactly how the laity were to organize. At most they suggest that a member of the laitymight serve as a custodian of the liturgical items, in the absence of a clergyman.9 There is no discussion of keeping accounts and no discussion of accountability. The earliest statement of these responsibilities comes from the diocesan statutes of Exeter, Bath and Wells' neighbor to the south. Bishop Peter Quinel issued these statuesin 1287, some thirty yearsafter Bishop Bitton wrote his for Bath and Wells. In his diocesan statutes, Peter Quinel urged parishioners to elect responsible custodians, or churchwardens, to manage parish resources, explaining that these wardens were to render to the parish and its clergy an annual written account of their activities...

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