IN 1992 Dr Eamon Duffy, in a remarkable book, described and analysed the vibrant traditional religious culture of England at the close of the middle ages, and very much of his evidence was drawn from East Anglia. This paper is an attempt, on an infinitely smaller scale, at a reconstruction of the religious climate of the region in the century and a half after the Norman Conquest. The task is hampered by the complete lack of various categories of evidence which provide valuable information on the period prior to the Reformation. There are no churchwardens’ accounts, no devotional texts aimed at the laity, and above all no wills, which in their thousands have been so valuable in reconstructing the religious sentiments of late medieval English men and women. The pious investment which resulted in the great rebuilding of East Anglian churches in the perpendicular style between the 1370s and the 1520s brought about the destruction of by far the greater part of the region's twelfth-century romanesque heritage – it is symbolic that at Blythburgh there stands one of the finest of fifteenth-century parish churches, while almost nothing remains of the small Augustinian Priory which in an earlier age had attracted so many donations from the neighbourhood. What survive in profusion, however, are charters: grants and confirmations, usually of land or rent, sometimes of rights and privileges, in effect title deeds. In the earliest years of the twelfth century these are rare and precious, written in the name only of those at the apex of society. By the mid-thirteenth century they are relatively common, recording the gifts even of peasants and shopkeepers. Charters can to some extent act as a source analagous to late medieval wills as a window on lay piety, especially before the 1180s when the devotional phrases of earlier deeds of gift were giving way to legalistic common form. By using these, supplemented by chronicles and miracle collections, it may be possible to appreciate something of this earlier world just as, to employ an architectural analogy, one passes from the perpendicular exterior of Wymondham abbey to the glories of the priory's romanesque nave.