For the hundred years or so with which this book must conclude there is a vast amount of material, more than can be taken in and used effectively. The difficulty is one of selection: the opposite of that with the earliest periods, where we had to squeeze the few available sources for every possible drop of inference. Despite, or perhaps because of, this plethora of material, the ground is potentially tricky here. In general, any mention of the close, or end, of the middle ages conjures what in conventional periodization comes “next,” the (note the definite article) Reformation. The difficulty here is not partisanship – happily, no longer the bugbear of dispassionate investigation – but the implicit teleology of which we have been steadily aware (often mentioned, from p. 9 on). Even recognizing the temptation, we may find it hard when talking about liturgy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to avoid attitudes expressed in metaphorical language like “autumn” and “tiredness” – and, these days, even harder to avoid those that suggest “freshness” and “vitality.” The cogency of the argument for each pair of nouns will be examined briefly at the end of this chapter; we need to begin it by going back earlier in the fifteenth century, to the founding of a new religious order in England, the Bridgettines.

The Bridgettines

The religious establishment with the simplest, and at the same time most paradoxical, character in our story is that of the Ordo sanctissimi Salvatoris, usually known as Bridgettines, whose English presence began in 1415 at the instigation of king Henry V.