Books for the liturgy and private prayer

Abstract

Service books Production of liturgical books required for the services of the Church must have been the largest category of work for scribes and illuminators in the Middle Ages, for which there was continuous demand from a wide range of patrons. At the peak of the population expansion in the mid-fourteenth century, shortly before the decline resulting from the Black Death, there were probably at least 20,000 churches and chapels in England and Wales. The overwhelming majority were parish churches, in contrast to the much smaller numbers of cathedrals, colleges and churches of the religious orders. The foundation statutes of some collegiate churches give details of book provision. All these places needed liturgical books, and from the inventories that survive almost all of them had more than one of each of the books needed. Even small parish churches and chapels often possessed two or three Missals, Breviaries, Graduals and Antiphoners. Taking as an example one type of service book; at a conservative estimate some 40,000 Missals for use in the churches and chapels of England and Wales must have existed at the end of the period covered by this volume. Any attempt to discuss the production centres, formats, textual variations and decoration of this book essential for the daily celebration of the Mass, is put into depressing perspective by the fact that only about ninety fairly complete Missals of the period c.1100–1400 survive. Of these, only nineteen are documented as belonging to specific parish churches, although in addition to these there are of unknown provenance thirty-three of the use of Sarum, six of the use of York, three of the use of Hereford, and three of the use of Lincoln, some of which were very likely from parish churches.