4 - The ritual year of the minster and parish

Summary

Two complementary types of evidence – a liturgical calendar from the fifteenth century and the financial accounts of the minster's officers – together conjure up the image of the ritual year in medieval Ripon. The calendar alone is its mere skeleton, unable to indicate much beyond the prescribed dates and rankings of the feasts. The financial accounts are like flesh stretched over the dry bones, giving more tangible form to the various customs of different holidays. The ritual year is the third mode of time, a natural complement to, first, the ordinary, constant repetition of the mass and, second, the life cycles of individual people whose changing place in the world was signalled by sacraments and rituals. It had two significant types of feast day. On the one hand, the guilds and chapels had their own special feast days that distinguished them from each other and from the parish as a whole. On the other hand, feast days interrupted the more mundane pattern of religious observances with special obligations to attend the minster rather than the nearest chapel. The latter were an integral part of parish society because nothing else drew the whole parish together at once. The major feast days at Ripon formed a cyclical and recursive annual routine in which people venerated the saints, elevated the great and good, and commemorated the dead with processions, banners, bells, chanting, flames, incense and smoke.

The Ripon Psalter is the only surviving manuscript witness to Ripon's medieval liturgy and thus contains its only liturgical calendar, a ranked chronological list of saints’ feast days. With leaves measuring 310 x 223 mm it is a very large manuscript, which would have been suitable for use by a priest in the choir or at one of the subsidiary altars in the minster. In addition to the Psalms, which would have been necessary for performing the daily office, it contains sets of readings and other material proper to the performance of the office on Wilfrid's feast days. It is clear from the rubrics that accompany these texts that the manuscript was always intended for use in Ripon. The feast of St Wilfrid's nativity, celebrated nowhere else in Christendom, was a principal double feast ‘within the church and parish of Ripon’. Such feasts, with nine lessons, were the highest grade in a secular collegiate church.