6 - Politics and Piety: Norwich City Churches, Commemoration and Networking for the Afterlife

Summary

Researching the Middle Ages, whether examining documents, literature, landscape, buildings, archaeology or artefacts, is, in some measure, to resurrect our forebears, to get a glimpse of their lives, their thoughts and motivations, and to try to plot their personal interactions within their various communities. To do this for the late medieval period, the culture, language and even private preoccupations must be placed firmly in a religious context, whether or not an individual was pious in whatever historians mean by ‘a conventional sense’. Such was the quotidian culture and the language: the calendar marked and known by the feasts of the saints and the earthly life of Christ and his family. The administration of law and government, both local and national, was imbued with the language of religion: justice, a God-like attribute, being implemented through law, judgement and restitution.

At the heart of everything were the Mass and the Passion of Christ, and what was understood as its power to save – that is, the offer of the possibility of a blissful eternal life in the presence of God after death. Perhaps for we who have lost this language and its symbols, it is well to keep all of this in mind when attempting to ‘read’ a church building, its memorials and ornaments, the use of space and light, and, importantly, the remnants to survive of its medieval parishioners and benefactors. Funerary commemoration in churches, whether in glass, wood, stone, brass (or latten), was a prime investment, because it was understood to be a gift focused on charitable reciprocity of the spiritual kind. It was, in effect, a prompt to friends and neighbours to remember to pray for the donor, so his or her soul might be eased through Purgatory the faster. It was also held to be a ‘gift that goes on giving’ in a pragmatic sense, as it was believed that spiritual credit accrued to those who practised such intercession as well as the person for whom the prayer was offered. The lasting and primary Christian duty of intercessory prayer was executed in the expectation of a reciprocal response from one's fellows, and also prayers from the Church Triumphant above, including sponsorship of particular patron saints.