3 - The minster and its parishioners: the living

Summary

Medieval religion was structured around the seven sacraments: baptism, confirmation, ordination, marriage, extreme unction, penance and the eucharist. Penance and the eucharist were the most regularly repeated of the two. On Sundays and feast days laypeople encountered the eucharist as a component of the mass, though for the most part they only consumed the consecrated host once a year, at Easter. They prepared themselves for this act by making their annual confessions and undertaking the penance assigned to them by their confessors. The other five sacraments marked changes of status and are therefore often interpreted as rites of passage. Through baptism in the parish font an infant became a member of the parish as well as of the wider Church. Membership brought certain obligations, including the payment of tithes, church attendance on Sundays and feast days, and annual confession and communion. Marriages were solemnised in parish churches after the priest had ascertained that the couple were in fact free to wed. Similarly, when a person died after properly receiving extreme unction, the parish churchyard was the most likely place of burial. Most laypeople would look to receive the sacraments from the hands of their parish clergy at their parish churches, so that in theory the ‘model of the Christian extended life course – from conception to afterlife – was fully realised in the materiality of the parish church and cemetery’. The parish church was also a conduit of saintly help. It would normally have an image of its patron saint and any number of other saints’ images. The images of the saints helped laypeople to seek their patronage and honour them. Groups such as guilds formed for fellowship, mutual support, moral development and the veneration of their own particular patron saints.

In practice the workings of the parish of Ripon were more complex, but the principle still applies: to understand how the parishioners of Ripon practised their religion, it is necessary to determine where they ordinarily heard mass and where they received the other sacraments. When focusing on sacraments and saints, it is immediately apparent that religious practices varied significantly depending on an individual's status, proximity to the minster and membership of a guild. Above all, these factors affected when and where a parishioner heard mass. It was very rare for the majority of parishioners to be in the minster together at the same time.