Going to Church in Medieval England by Nicholas Orme

Author:Nicholas Orme
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300262612
Publisher: Yale University Press

40. People going to church at Candlemas in this painting by Simon Bening of about 1550, but as in earlier times. Men, women, and children carry the obligatory candles, and their dogs follow them.

From 13 January or later the Church numbered the Sundays as ‘first’, ‘second’, and so on, ‘after the octave of the Epiphany’, so that the next few weeks may be called the season of Epiphany, although its character as a time of celebration continued that of Christmas. Indeed Christmas could be considered as lasting until Candlemas on 2 February, and Epiphany could do so until 20 February if Easter fell on its latest possible date of 25 April. Candlemas honoured the purification of the Virgin Mary forty days after the birth of Christ and served additionally as a festival of light. From at least the end of the tenth century it was a major feast requiring attendance in church and the bringing of candles not only by adults but children (Fig. 40, above).19 A boy at Ewelme school in 1465 had a halfpenny candle bought for him on the occasion.20 It may also have been a day for a guild or company devoted to Mary to come as a group. At Beverley, members of the guild of St Mary dressed up as Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and angels, and walked with their brothers and sisters through the streets to the parish church holding torches.21 When mass was over, the candles intended for use in the church during the following year were blessed, aspersed with holy water, and censed with incense so that they, like the other furnishings in the church, were holy objects.22 In some places there was a practice – perhaps associated with Candlemas – known as ‘measuring the church’. This involved stretching lengths of candle-wick and wax through or around the building. These were then used to make the church’s candles so that they symbolised the church itself – a practice similar to that of ‘measuring’ sick people with wax and then offering the wax to a shrine or image.23

The bringing of a candle was a duty of each parishioner. ‘It is a common use of all Holy Church’, wrote John Mirk, ‘to come to church this day and bear a candle in procession, as though they went bodily to church with Our Lady, and after offered with her in worship and high reverence of her’.24 Some people repeated the duty on the following day, that of St Blaise, perhaps in tandem with a custom of having their throats blessed on his festival.25 Ranulph Higden also talked in 1340 of bringing wax images to Candlemas in the forms of animals, which were burnt after blessing in the belief that protection was extended to the beasts concerned.26 The candles seem to have been the perquisite of the rector or vicar, no doubt for use in his house, in an elegant inversion: the enlightenment of the incumbent by the congregation. In 1287 the bishop of Exeter condemned those

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