Several recipes from Leonard Mascall's A profitable booke declaring […] remedies to take out spottes and staines in silks, velvets, linnen and woollen clothes (London, 1583) advise the use of prayers to approximate the passage of time. Readers are instructed to leave or do something for so many ‘paternoster long’ or for a ‘paternoster-while’. This suggests that the Lord's Prayer was still being rhythmically repeated to time profane processes in Protestant England. What then of the large beads also known as paternosters and arrangements of them which often bore the same name?

The word paternoster, although strictly only accurately applied to the bead prompting the ‘Our Father’, was widely used to describe all rosaries in the late Middle Ages. Rosaries ranged from strings of 50 ‘Ave Maria’ beads comprising 5 sets separated by 10 by paternosters to strings of 150 ‘Aves’ comprising 15 decades divided by paternosters, and could even be short strings of only 10 ‘Ave’ beads terminating with a paternoster. Though many essays and exhibitions have focused on rosaries, the examples they give can only be drops in an ocean of thousands if not millions of beads. Scholars of Counter-Reformation Europe and its material culture have documented large numbers of rosaries in contemporary inventories, exposed the breadth of materials used for them, and shown that their role as aids to prayer and sacred offerings did not prevent their pawning or pledging.