Records of the Churchwardens of Mildenhall: Collections (1446–1454) and Accounts (1503–1553), ed. Judith Middleton-Stewart

Abstract

A posthumously-published labour of love by a meticulous scholar (whose first book was Inward Piety and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Suffolk Deanery of Dunwich), this edition of ‘collections’—records of extra funding for specific projects—and of fifty years’ worth of churchwardens’ accounts for the parish of Mildenhall, Suffolk, is a fine production that should be taken as a model by anyone attempting similar tasks elsewhere. The annotation is copious; the appendices include selected wills, notes on people mentioned, an admirable glossary and a thorough index. And there is a substantial fifty-page introduction revealing close acquaintance with recent secondary literature. For anyone who wants to know more about late medieval Mildenhall, whether for its own sake or as an example of a late medieval market town, this study will be very useful. Dr Middleton-Stewart gives a clear architectural history of the church, usefully supported by black-and-white photographs, together with information about priests and chaplains. She draws on the churchwardens’ accounts to show the purchase of liturgical equipment. Accounts are supplemented by wills to show the profusion of gilds and chantries. For students coming to the religious history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for the first time, the introduction offers a sure-footed guide, and the edited texts provide an instructive indication of the sources from which historians try to understand the late medieval church. Such historians will find illustrative examples in plenty here. What they will not find, not least because the sources edited here were not created to answer such questions, is much on the state of the church. Unavoidably, financial accounts give an impression of activity—spending on the fabric and on liturgical equipment—and to that extent suggest a church in good heart, effectively maintained by parishioners. But how deeply pious such parishioners were is not a question the financial accounts attempt to answer—and nor does the editor. Reviewing her earlier monograph (ante, cxvii [2003], 462–3), Colin Richmond noted that ‘little, probably nothing, that we did not already know about late medieval religion is revealed by this painstaking investigation’, and that is just as true in general terms here. What instead we receive is more information more accessibly presented than we have had before, and for that we are richly in her debt.