Conclusion

Summary

This book has considered the social production of time, focusing on religious practices and memorial culture within the vast parish of Ripon during the fifteenth century. The minster was the most powerful influence, dividing the day with its bells, the week with its Sunday high masses and the year with its calendar. The spiritual authority invested in the chapter bolstered this power by enabling it to enforce proper observance. Yet the minster was not the only force that shaped time in Ripon and the surrounding area. Lay elites used important feast days as opportunities to display their status, various types of founders endowed their own masses inside and outside the minster, and for much of the year many people followed their own routines in the numerous chapels of the parish. The families and other groups powerful enough to take hold of these opportunities could use them to reinforce their power. Furthermore, ritual and attendance at the minster fluctuated according to the day and season, so it is only within this context that its potential to commemorate the dead can properly be understood. The same applies to the dual nature of the parish and the privileged religious practices of the gentry. While many of the demands imposed by the liturgical calendar were universal, the special character of the ritual year in Ripon was determined by their combination with the feasts of the minster's own saint.

St Wilfrid, apostle of the north of England, was the spiritual patron and lord of late medieval Ripon. His lordship was symbolised by his heraldry, displayed alongside that of the knights and archbishops who sponsored the rebuilding of the nave in the early sixteenth century, and it was manifested in the oaths of fealty that the knights and gentlemen who were Marmion tenants swore to him when they inherited their lands. This special form of tenure integrated new lords into parish society when old families became extinct in the male line of succession. Even if they no longer carried the relics of the saint at Rogation, their oaths were still timed to correspond with Ripon's major annual procession. In their place other men of good standing in the parish bore the relics of their patron, who protected their lands and livelihoods from disease, bad weather and demonic influence.