Bury St Edmunds as test case

Fundamental to this work is the capacity to ascribe an extant liturgical manuscript to a particular establishment, secular or monastic. A brief explanation as to how this is done – by what methods, with what degree of confidence, and at what risk – may be found useful, and may best be approached not so much through setting down abstract principles as through tracing one case study. For this purpose it seems desirable to choose an establishment for which, though there is a great deal of documentation in a number of respects, not many ascribable liturgical books have survived: the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, a twelfth-century missal from which was discussed a few pages ago.

Bury has the further advantage that its monastic past extends only to 1020, when King Cnut established monks there to replace the shadowy community of canons who had kept the shrine of St Edmund, the East Anglian royal martyr killed by the Danes on November 21st (the traditional date, anyhow), 869. The immediate source of its original monks seems to have been the Norfolk monastery at Holme St Benets, but as this had been (re)founded only in 1019, what would seem material is the founding impetus for that house: apparently Ely. If this, which is certainly plausible, is true, we can hope for traces of the much better documented abbey of Ely in particular and of the thelwoldian sphere of influence in general.

Fortunately, surviving information about the Bury's library is as full as that about its liturgical books is scanty.

Dominicans

Each of the major orders of friars went through an initial phase of trial and error in seeking definition, clear identification, and regulation. After a generation or so these hallmarks had for the most part been achieved, though questions, often leading to vigorous controversies, remained. It is only after some of these had been settled on the Continent that the various groups appeared in England: Dominicans first, in 1221, Franciscans in 1224, Carmelites in 1241, Austin Friars in 1248. By those dates the notes of papal approval, composition and acceptance of a rule (sometimes more than one), and establishment of a system of continuing centralized governance are discernible for each of these orders; but the regulation of worship tends to come relatively late and, as would be expected, to be an ongoing process. So our task will be to try to sense what would have been the situation during the early years of the presence of each of these groups in England, then to notice the effects of the more or less normative regulations for each group, and finally to get some feel for their adaptations to local circumstances and their inclusions of English saints in their service books.

When the first Dominican friars arrived in England in 1221, the order – Ordo praedicatorum, colloquially called Black Friars – had been in existence for less than a decade. Among the principal houses came to be those at Cambridge, Canterbury, Gloucester, King's Langley, London, Northampton, Norwich, Oxford, Winchester, and York. The story of their quick rise to prominence and popularity in England, in circles academic, royal, and merely urban, cannot be gone into here.

The ideal equipment for consideration of the fully developed Sarum mass-rite would be three pairs of manuscript books, a missal and an ordinal: a pair each to represent the circumstances there at roughly the ends of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries; and then a printed missal of the end of the fifteenth. As should be clear from the previous chapter, the first putative pair simply does not exist. There is neither anything that can be fairly called a Sarum missal surviving from the twelfth century – that is, a massbook of the kind that would have been in use at Old Sarum – nor a separate ordinal from that period. Lacking these, we have had to perform a good deal of rather wearisome extrapolation to get at elements of some sanctorale texts which look to be discernible as “Sarum” peculiarities, though not identified as such. Two hundred or so years later, by the end of the fourteenth century, a high degree of both elaboration and standardization seems to have been reached, and the very full rubrics which reflect what we shall study as the New Ordinal are widely copied into missals. When books with unambiguous titles like Missale ad usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum begin to be printed at the end of the fifteenth (the two earliest are 1487 and 1492), the relevant material from ordinals has been thoroughly incorporated into the text of the missal.

The present chapter aims to sketch the outlines of a picture that might be representative of the situation in, say, about 1290.

Had the extant sources permitted this, it would have been desirable to call this Excursus simply, “On liturgy in female religious houses.” As things stand, we can only indicate a couple of considerations that apply generally, then provide a brief list of what does survive, and finally look at the one house, Barking, for which several sources are available. Because the sections on the Gilbertines (pp. 303–10) and Bridgettines (pp. 529–39) deal primarily with the female members of those “mixed” religious orders, information given there will not be repeated here.

The most obvious generalization is that those books which survive and can be attributable to a specific female house are overwhelmingly psalters (and Horae, excluded from the present work). This is a point that may have a wider application than is immediately obvious. It may say something about the priorities for expenditure in nunneries (the term, if not exactly accurate in all cases, will be used here as an alternative to the bulky “female religious houses” or “houses for women”) that it does not seem possible to ascribe a single extant massbook to them. Does this fact suggest that the male celebrants generally brought their own missals – which is scarcely to be supposed – or even that it was not thought appropriate for nunneries to own missals – which is absurd? But it remains the case that, of some thirty manuscript books (or substantial fragments) that can with some confidence be ascribed to English nunneries, not one is a missal.

Although among secular establishments in medieval England it is always Salisbury, the home of the Sarum Use, that occupies center stage, Exeter cathedral is actually the building for which some sense of liturgical life over a period of centuries can be most fully constructed. This is owing primarily, but by no means exclusively, to the ambitious work of two great bishops of the see, Leofric, 1050–72, and John de Grandisson, 1327–69. Leofric's achievement was surveyed at the end of chapter 4, which dealt with the period of the Norman Conquest. There is little, if any, discernible continuity between his liturgical program and that of Grandisson; no part of Leofric's building was extant in the fourteenth century, and whatever influences had been most substantial in the various books that are connected with him were long since submerged in the flood emanating from New Sarum. Nonetheless, a distinct “Exeter” liturgical identity is evident in the program envisaged by Grandisson, an identity of which we can glimpse hints in the episcopates of some of his predecessors.

For there seems to have been, to a perhaps unusual degree, a self-consciousness connected with holding the see of Exeter. This may be seen already in the set of prayers in Leofric missal “C” for a Missa propria pro episcopo, most likely composed (as noted earlier) by Leofric himself. The bishop of Exeter is mentioned in all three prayers, with language – like “me famulum tuum. ill. [the name to be supplied] non meis meritis, sed dono tuae gratiae, pontificali cathedra exoniensium sublimasti” – which makes explicit his hope that it will be used by his successors.

The title of this chapter should not mislead the reader into thinking that after 1215 (or possibly before) there was an entity clearly identifiable as the liturgy of the Benedictines. The specifically liturgical provisions of the Rule of St Benedict are almost entirely concerned with the daily office, and worship which was in accord with those provisions can fairly be called Benedictine worship. Agreement with the Rule was the single criterion that mattered, although, as has been frequently noticed in previous chapters, considerable accretions grew around the office in connection with various influential monastic regimes: for example, Cluny (incomparably the most important; see p. 243 for a discrete section on worship in Cluniac houses), Fleury, the Winchester of the Regularis concordia. But there was never a mechanism for absolute liturgical uniformity, as was to come to be the case with some later bodies, above all the friars, spearheaded by the Dominicans. Even after 1215, Benedictine abbeys remained for the most part autonomous, liturgically as well as in other ways.

In November 1215 Pope Innocent III's Fourth Lateran Council promulgated two canons that in effect brought about the establishment or, better, the regularization, of something like an Order of St Benedict. Canon 12 mandated General Chapters, to be held at least every three years, for all those living according to any religious rule; and canon 13 forbade the establishment of new religious orders, specifically using the term ordo.

The Gregorian books are so named, since at least the time of Charlemagne, after the pope whose pontificate (590–604) provides our precise starting point, Gregory I – which does not necessarily mean, of course, that he had anything do to with the actual construction of such books – and represent a basically papal tradition: in theory, for the liturgy of the mass as celebrated by the pope in Rome. Whatever earlier nuclei there may have been, perhaps going back to the pontificate of Honorius I (625–38), no form of a Gregorian massbook seems to be recoverable, even by extrapolation, until early in the last quarter of the seventh century, c. 675: the one known as Paduensis. The best known Gregorian book, moreover, dates from roughly a century later: the Hadrianum, named from Pope Hadrian I, who in about 790 sent such a book to Frankland at the request of Charlemagne. Not adequate to that ruler's grand hopes and purposes, it was soon furnished with an extensive Supplement, confected by either Alcuin or (more likely) Benedict of Aniane; this is signalled by a celebrated preface always referred to by its opening word, Hucusque. The Hadrianum itself has not survived, but several copies do: the earliest, made around 812, at Cambrai. Further copies proliferated and ramified throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, and these, intermixed with Gelasian elements, eventually become the main stock of Roman-derived massbooks throughout northern Europe, including England.

If a pictorial metaphor for the present book may be offered, it is that of a tapestry rather than a mosaic. A mosaic is characterized by clarity and coherence; if undamaged, it is a tidy whole. What we hope to trace here is never tidy, certainly never a static entity fixed in a framework: the medieval liturgy. There will always be loose threads and, all too often, faded patches, some of them scarcely recognizable. Indeed, we might best think of the picture we shall attempt to confect, of regular, formal public worship in England between about 600 and 1535, as a tapestry-in-progress. Because surprisingly little has been written towards the end here envisaged, of trying to get some idea of the history of the liturgy in medieval England as a whole, a bit of preliminary musing as to what can reasonably be expected from an attempt such as the present one – its shape and main emphases, along with its self-imposed limitations – may be helpful.

We know in a general way that Christian worship was carried on in England by those who professed that religion from the early seventh century on. Although we shall pay the most careful attention possible to that earliest period, our understanding of the details of worship during it will remain unavoidably exiguous for the early centuries, roughly up until the late tenth. From that time on, however, there survive consider able bodies of evidence, all of which need to be weighed and then balanced. Three such bodies are of the greatest importance, one of them indeed paramount.

York Use

What was known in the later middle ages as the Use of York differs in kind from that of Sarum in that it refers to the metropolitical church – York Minster, in common parlance – of the province, whereas Salisbury was just one of fourteeen cathedral churches in the province of Canterbury. The province of York was not at all like its southern neighbor. For one thing, it was vastly smaller, in terms both of population and of having only three dioceses: York itself; Carlisle, where a modest Augustinian priory founded around 1123 received cathedral status some ten years later; and Durham, monastic (from 1083), wealthy, powerful, jealous of its dignity and prerogatives. Durham stood also as a bastion, ecclesiastical and otherwise, of English presence in the unclear and often controverted border region with Scotland: expressed in terms of early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Durham came to stand for the old north-facing Bernicia, York for the south-facing Deira of which it had always been the center. Not surprisingly, then, some liturgical tension can be discerned between York and Durham; for example, a few secular service books used in the latter diocese follow Sarum rather than York use.

York stands in some tension also with Canterbury. This is reflected obviously in the primacy struggle between the two archbishoprics, a struggle that did not finally end (with Canterbury the victor) until the fourteenth century. More obvious liturgically is York's comparative deficiency in saints.

Cluniacs

There is a marked disconnect between the period during which the ten or so important Cluniac foundations in England were established and dates of the seven manuscript sources from which we might hope to get some idea as to their corporate worship. In one sense this should not trouble us much; patterns laid down in the customaries of the great age of Cluny itself, the abbacies of Odilo 994–1049 and Hugh 1049–1109, were meant to be normative in all the houses connected to it. In another, however, it is troubling that for the expression of Benedictine monasticism most celebrated for elaborate liturgical practice – the reputation, largely deserved, of the Cluniacs – we draw a blank among English sources until at least the third quarter of the thirteenth century.

The earliest of the ten English houses referred to above was Lewes, 1077, the latest Bro(o)mholm, 1113; the others are Much Wenlock, Castle Acre, Bermondsey, Montacute, Pontefract, Northampton, Lenton, and Thetford. The most extensive ruins are those at Acre, Wenlock, and Lewes. One liturgical book survives each from Lewes and Wenlock, none from Acre. For Pontefract both a breviary and a missal are extant, though of widely different dates. The remaining witnesses are scattered in type, date, and place of origin. The two we consider first are of a type not previously discussed.

Breviary-missals: priors' books?

These, the oldest books to be noticed, are a pair of combined breviary-missals, both rather splendid and probably designed for the use of a prior. The first was written, mostly in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, for Lewes.

As has been noted in the Introduction, towards the end of the nineteenth century several factors coalesced to make the comparative study of liturgical texts possible, at least in England. The most directly obvious is the availability by that time of a number of catalogues of manuscripts, however imperfect and incomplete, which made possible some sense of the range of (for example) missals available for textual comparison. These include catalogues for the Harleian, Cotton, Sloane, Egerton, and early Additional (through 34526) manuscripts at the (then) British Museum; for the University Library manuscripts at Cambridge (albeit quirkily); the Quarto Catalogues for manuscripts at the Bodleian and H. O. Coxe's two volumes for the Oxford colleges; for French manuscripts, the first twenty-five volumes of the Quarto Series of the Catalogue Général des Manuscrits des Bibliothèques Publiques des Départements, providing at least rudimentary coverage for Rouen and Orléans, and, much more importantly, Léopold Delisle's Mémoire sur d'anciens sacramentaires. Other factors that can here be only enumerated include the foundation of the Henry Bradshaw Society in 1890 (see p. 10); widespread peace in Europe and rather advanced mail and rail communications for roughly forty years after about 1875; and what seem to have been relatively low printing costs.

J. W. Legg's 1897 “Notes”

Many of these elements are reflected in the publication in 1897 of the “Liturgical Introduction” that comes at the end of the third and final volume of John Wickham Legg's great edition of the Westminster missal (on the book itself, see p. 227), of which the first volume was the initial HBS publication.

At some time during the second half of the fourteenth century there appeared a fuller codification of the rubrics according to which services were to be conducted at Salisbury cathedral. A bland word like “appeared” is necessary because we know neither who is responsible for drawing this up nor by what authority (or means) it was promulgated. All that is even remotely clear is that these rubrics are mostly drawn from something called the New Ordinal – the conventional capitals, though possibly misleading, will be retained here – which seems to have been recognized as existing, with wider reference than merely to the cathedral, by the end of the century. The new rubrics are characterized by a great attention to, indeed an apparent fascination with, details of the tiniest sort. It is inevitable that we should attempt to use this New Ordinal as a prime means of understanding both the development of the Sarum rite in its final form and the extension of that rite into most of southern England; but we shall have to do so with caution, above all against being bogged down in too much of that detail.

Frere's Use of Sarum again

To begin, we have once again to take a preliminary look at the way the matter has been studied previously: a look that will of necessity recapitulate some of what has been explained in earlier chapters, particularly chapter 11. In the two-volume work entitled The Use of Sarum (1898–1901), Walter Howard Frere (on whom, see p. 10) presented documents he termed “consuetudinary,” “customary,” “ordinal,” and “tonal.”