Going to Church in Medieval England

"It is often moving. It shows us how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences, from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation . It is richly illustrated, too. These churches were crucial to English, religious and social life, for church services on Sundays weekdays and for feast days, such as the celebrations at Christmas and Easter. The recurrent cycle of baptism, marriage, funerals, the everyday existence of ordinary people in parish churches are at the very centre of the story. The book looks at who went to church and who did not. The last chapter discusses the English Reformation: which aspects of church worship changed, and which remained. It shows how, unlike today, religious practice was the very warp and weft of life—although parish churches still hold an important place in the English imagination, even as church-going has declined. In the modern era churches are part of national heritage. But medieval churches were more than pretty buildings. They were the heart of a community, the focal point of an unceasing cycle of feasts and fasts that make sense of a fragile and transitory life. Orme mainly focuses on the period 1200 to 1530."