Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T17:25:24.310Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - ‘Was but single and no thing of beauty’: Enhancing the parish church

from Part V - Ordering the parish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2018

Clive Burgess
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in History, Royal Holloway, University of London. He obtained his undergraduate and doctorate from Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Get access

Summary

Its location at the centre of the town meant that All Saints’ church was – and remains – cramped: hemmed in by other buildings, only the tower and north aisle are visible from a major thoroughfare. The body of the church measures no great length, possessing a nave of only five bays; given that the church has two aisles, its interior (disregarding the chancel momentarily) is not so far from being as broad as it is long. As a result, the church housed four side-altars arranged ‘across’ the church at the east end of its aisles and nave, all in addition to its high altar in the chancel. By the mid fifteenth century, the side-altars were dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the north (or Lady) aisle and to the Holy Rood in the south aisle (the latter being commonly referred to as the Rood altar in the Cross aisle); those on either side of the chancel arch and in front of the rood screen were dedicated to St Thomas on the north side, and to Sts John the Baptist, John the Evangelist and Dunstan on the south.

The church housed the Kalendars’ guild, a long-established fraternity which, by the later fifteenth century, served both the secular clergy and the laity of the town, and supported a prior and two priests. Their house jutted into the north aisle of All Saints’ church at first-floor level at the west end of the church, and here they kept the library stocked by Bishop Carpenter. Given that, from the 1430s, the parish incumbent resided in a house that similarly jutted into the south aisle of the church and, also, that the Halleways’ chantry priest had a chamber adjacent to the parish cemetery on the south side of the church, the presence of five full-time clergy effectively living and working in the parish church might, at first glance, seem to have been out of all proportion, both with the communicant population of the parish (numbering approximately 180) and also the small dimensions of the church itself.

Type
Chapter
Information
'The Right Ordering of Souls'
The Parish of All Saints’ Bristol on the Eve of the Reformation
, pp. 331 - 382
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×