Charles Phythian-Adams
From 1429 at the latest, bystanders at the monastery town of Bury St Edmunds were accustomed to witness a curious annual sight on a feast day of its patronal saint. Led by monks and hung with garlands of flowers, a white bull (reared for the purpose on an adjacent manor of which the abbey was tenant-in-chief) would have been seen wending its way through the Southgate, via the edge of the Great Market, to the Great Gate of the abbey itself. The bull was accompanied each year by barren wives, who stroked its flanks as they processed, until they reached the abbey precinct. There they proceeded separately to offer at the shrine of St Edmund, ‘glorious king, virgin and martyr’, and to pray that after the performance of this ritual they might at last conceive.431
Such an observance may serve as a paradigm for the mechanisms of public ritual process to be discussed in what follows. As in this case, ritual contexts invariably reflect, first, both a specific time or occasion and a particularised spatial setting, each of these features thus helping to define the relevance of the occasion. Second, the participants too are deliberately distinguished through their positioning in the ritual, often by social status or age, though in this instance the contrasts are emphasised through gender and reproductive status. These focus on the married females who are nevertheless infertile. Then there are the unmarried adult males who are vowed abnormally to celibacy and chastity while dedicated to the service of a virgin male saint (who himself acts as intercessor with God the Father). Last is a male beast belonging to the saint, which is white and therefore appropriately ‘pure’, whilst paradoxically but unambiguously expressive of natural sexual potency. A third feature of contemporary ritual process is therefore the parade of potentially multiple meanings implicit, whether separately or together, in the nature of the contexts, the participants, the specific objects, costumes, actions, even decorations involved. Such meanings, fourth, frequently include direct or elliptical points of reference to, and interactions with, the perceived spheres of nature, magic or the supernatural. Finally, and above all, the same symbolic element may be differently deployed in other ritual contexts, whether public or private.
Belonging as ritual does to one extreme of a continuous spectrum of social behaviour, the isolation of it is to some extent an artificial exercise. What is clear, nevertheless, is that in a society so densely ritualistic in its social behaviour, ritual involves the varied mobilisation of a limited, but always developing, vocabulary of signs. The constant intermixing of different elements from the same vocabulary, but in contrasted circumstances, ensures that in any one case there will be a degree of cross-referencing within this wider spectrum of meanings. The task of the historian of social ritual, therefore, is to seek as far as is practicable to understand such interlocking ritual patterns as underlying cultural constructions of the society in question.
To expose something of the latent logic of such patterns, albeit in so short a compass here, it will be best to begin by briefly examining the fundamental vocabularies of the body, of gesturing and of physical positioning, before looking at ritual characterisations of social space and the interconnectedness of social time. In so doing, the discussion will move from a concentration on some basic elements of ritual to the consideration of whole rituals or groups of rituals.
The Bury observance was concerned overtly with the female body. Physical references designed to ensure the desired solution thus lay at the very core of the ritual performance. Having touched the live body of the bull, with the same hands the wives then offered to St Edmund and, we may confidently surmise, also touched the shrine containing his reputedly incorrupt cadaver. Before body language is discussed more generally, therefore, some stress should be placed on hands as the most conspicuous physical referents and, as a starting point, on the hand as supernatural conduit. Here, of course, the overarching symbol was ‘the Hand of God’, but it was the sacerdotal laying on of hands, and especially the anointing of bishops, priests and kings with different grades of oils, which empowered those so consecrated or ordained in the first case or those crowned in the second. Bishops and priests could themselves then anoint (to different degrees) and, since a priest was anointed specifically on his hands, he could now effect the mystery of the mass using those same hands in consecrating the elements. Kings might consequently heal scrofula through the royal touch, or other ailments with cramp rings worn by those afflicted. Originally forged from gold or silver coins
Offered manually by the sovereign for consecration on Good Friday and then redeemed for coins of lesser quality to the same value, these were later offered as already manufactured rings that were deliberately touched by him. At a more mundane level, according to a fifteenth-century custom of Romney, the withdrawal of the hand from the gospels by a suitor at law whilst swearing his oath could void the case. By so evading the divine contact necessary to ensure the truth, his testimony would be invalidated.
From a different supernatural angle, what was celestially imprinted upon everyone’s inner hand might be divined through palmistry. More grisly was the magical power associated with ‘the Hand of Glory’, as it was later known: the severed hand and arm of a dead man (some potency clearly being thought to inhere in it) which needed to be buried for nine days and nights before use. Thereafter, it was claimed in 1439, with a burning candle placed in its clenched fingers by a night-time housebreaker, everyone in a dwelling, whether sleeping or waking, would be conveniently immobilised.2
If the hand could be employed as a direct link to the supernatural when certain rituals were observed, the perception of the whole body, together with its hierarchically understood members, as a model for society was central to medieval culture. It is hardly surprising therefore, that punitive ritual focused on the body of the individual deviant. When the stability of the body of Christian society itself was seen to have been threatened, indeed, the penalties could range from bodily mutilation - like branding, or nailing the ear of a thief to a post and letting him cut himself free - to the ritual destruction or total dismemberment of whole bodies in the most brutal ways. These extended from burning alive to pressing to death in the case of those who refused to plead; to hanging, disembowelment whilst still alive and then ‘quartering’ for the separate display of the parts.
The hand (and sometimes the glove as its surrogate) was the symbolic link between the whole society and its members and so between the highest and the lowest in it. It was no accident that some of the most basic social and legal terminology exploited the image of the hand as holding someone or something: maintenance, mainprise, mainour, mortmain or, in the case of marriage, hand-fasting. At the beginning of our period a serf knelt in public before his lord so that the latter could take the inferior’s head between his hands, thereby taking the man symbolically into his physical possession. When he was released from the
R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (1966), p. 202.
Hand of his lord, by contrast, the lord placed the weapon of a free man in the hands of the now ‘manumitted’ serf. For a vassal, the act of homage involved him kneeling before his seated lord and placing his hands, rather than his head, between those of his superior. For a lord the members of his own household, being fed effectively by him, were in his mainpast and, as his dependants, were to be produced in court by him if accused of felony. In the last resort a hand could be regarded as an offending member, and might be ceremonially amputated as the penalty for physical violence in the royal court or a court of justice.
More commonly, hands were the most expressive vehicles for gesturing and, in cases of physical proximity, therefore, were used to delimit body space in ways that helped to define relations of closeness or distance. It is by no means clear that the modern custom of handshaking as a greeting in Europe generally is any earlier than the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Before that in England, male handshaking, as elsewhere, may have been restricted to the sealing of bargains or conflict reconciliation. What forcibly struck late medieval foreign visitors was the English emphasis on greeting or departing with kisses, presumably on the cheek with hands on the upper arms. One Venetian observer in 1513, however, reported that when a woman met a friend (gender unspecified) in the street they shook hands (perhaps warmly grasped both each other’s hands) and kissed on the mouth. Apart from the actions of gentlefolk when ‘leading’ ladies by the hand, kissing seems to have been the nearest that those who were broadly social equals could come on an agreed formal basis to invading someone else’s body-space. In total contrast, the language of threat included seizing someone by the front of his garment and pulling him so close, in order to intimidate, that the two faces were almost touching.
In a society of distinct social gradations, body spacing was the means by which social relations of different sorts were instantly expressed in public. Apart from the obvious advantage of height given to a social superior on horseback, of whom a corresponding degree of ‘port’ or personal bearing was expected when unmounted, it is evident that ever more extreme degrees of relational positioning before a lord were necessary in order to ensure that inferiors signalled their acknowledgement of that reality. This might be through bowing: ‘low obeisaunce’ whilst looking him in the eye; making ‘a running knee’ — genuflecting on the move; or, whether male or female, kneeling before a lord or husband, perhaps for some time, in order to crave a favour. The most abject posture, that of total prostration face down on the floor with arms outstretched, could be adopted by priest, monarch or flagellant as a gesture of utter humility or contrition towards God. At close quarters, then, not only did inferiors thus seek, at least temporarily, to position themselves at a conspicuously lower physical level than a superior; they were otherwise also expected to keep a respectful distance. Even a town clerk of mid-fifteenth-century Exeter had to stand sufficiently far away so as not to overhear a crucial conversation concerning the city, and so had to accept that others would need to report on it ‘for y was not all thyng so nye ham to hire and knowe alle thyng that was said and comyned, for my degree was not... ’.432 433 When the central space of a great hall was not cluttered by tables, and a lord wished to receive some private communication standing before the fire, his followers were clearly expected to stand well away around the walls.
Physical spaces generally were designed or exploited to reinforce customary social positioning. Close parallels between the arrangement of publicly shared interiors, whether secular or ecclesiastical, were very apparent. The royal court and lordly hall together with cathedral churches, for example, shared clearly defined upper ends marked by an elevated table or high altar (distinguished further by music), behind which in secular cases was traditionally located the seat or bench of the incumbent lord under a canopy. At the beginning of our period the removal of bishops’ thrones from behind high altars to the south sides of choirs was a comparatively recent matter. In both these secular and ecclesiastical contexts the ritual focus was segregated: for the consumption of actual food or for the realisation of ritual food at the privileged ends of the buildings concerned, inferiors or laity were largely confined to the lower ends. Just as congregations had to stand aside to allow the passage of liturgical processions along the central space of a nave, so room had to be left in a hall for the ceremonial entry of the dishes for the lord’s table from the screen end. As Mark Girouard has pointed out, moreover, in the case of a gentleman carver at a great man’s banquet (whose ritualised dissection of entire cooked beasts or fowls comprised but a mannered extension of what had been ritually done in the field to prepare the carcass for the kitchen), even ‘his towel, second napkin and girdle were worn in exactly the same way as a priest wears a stole, maniple and girdle for mass’
Usually adjacent to the dwelling of a lord was a ring-fenced area in which he and his favoured followers shared the ‘quest’ for game and incidentally provided some of the venison for his mainpast. Ordinary tenants being excluded, hunting grounds were the venues for socially restricted and highly specialised rituals which, in regularly pitting culture against nature in the pursuit of an exclusive meat (which it was customary to gift rather than sell), were more frequently practised by those of rank, including women, than the tournaments of which so much has been written. Each hunt followed a set sequence and climaxed with the ritual ‘unmaking’ of the dead beast - even by the lord personally - for subsequent cooking, the first external parts to be cut off a male carcass, and specially reserved on a forked stick, being the testicles, whether those of hart or buck (or even of boar or hare), all of which animals were reputed for their sexual potency. Significantly, these delicacies were regarded as ‘the finest eating’ for a hereditary ruling caste and were so reserved for ‘the mouth of the lord’.434
Other social spaces, by contrast, more closely reflected the fraternal ideal of communitas, being occupied by whole bodies of people in self-identifying social groupings: parochial congregations; ‘communities’ of vill or town; urban councils; occupational fellowships and guilds, whether rural or urban. Church naves or yards, guildhalls, marketplaces or streets were variously used for oath-taking ceremonies as people joined or progressed in seniority through each particular group; for seasonal eating and drinking together, whether as adjuncts to meetings or to raise funds; and for processions. Processing two by two in ascending order of seniority, indeed, may normally have been a rather less solemn affair than might now be suspected, to judge from the need to issue injunctions entirely to set aside ‘all idle chatter’ on ad hoc propitiatory processions in the face of nothing less than the Black Death.435
The converse of such activities were the rituals involving social discipline in much the same public places. Most common were shaming rituals for moral offenders who might be ordered by the Church to do penance standing barefoot in the nave, churchyard or marketplace for set periods of time in their shirt or, in the case of women, in their shift with their hair let down, and sometimes to be whipped. Likewise the extreme humiliation of one throwing himself on the ground publicly to beg for mercy in the face of likely execution was further emphasised not only by the similar stripping away of normal attire (the mark of an accepted member of society) but also by the addition of a yoke or halter to denote that the individual was no better than a beast. Even more pointed was a customary punishment of those, like cheating urban tradesmen, who had betrayed a public trust. The culprit was forced to ride through the streets to open derision, facing backwards on horseback, holding onto the tail, and hung front and back with symbols of the offence: two urine flasks in the case of one quack physician; rotten joints of meat for a butcher; or simply a placard where a London citizen had sought to sell a girl into prostitution.
If in all such cases normal external indicators of reputation in local society were displaced, in more extreme circumstances formal exclusion from it and its social space was possible. Leaving aside outlawry by the shire court and excommunication by the Church, dwindling numbers of lepers, for example, were still incarcerated in lazar houses after undergoing a form of ritual burial, during which they had to kneel under a black pall for mass to be recited over them, before having earth piled over their feet. The fugitive from justice who had taken unprivileged sanctuary for forty days would be ordered by a coroner to abjure the realm: to walk garbed as a penitent to an often distant port, to wade into the sea and to beg to be shipped to another country. So real and so symbolic a repudiation of a subject beyond the precise limits of the realm was echoed in customary modes of execution by towns along the coastline, whether the condemned were thrown into the sea with their hands tied over their shins, or buried alive on the foreshore, or simply lashed to a stake at low water so that the tides might flow and ebb over them twice.
More localised jurisdictional edges were delimited in different ways. On an expedition around Wales in ii88 to whip up recruitment for a crusade, the archbishop of Canterbury was courteously met at the limits of each native princely territory by its lord, entertained, and then escorted to the boundary of his next host. Probably from the fourteenth century, each new bishop of Durham was greeted on his first visit to the diocese midway across the Tees, the southern boundary of his palatinate, by his tenant, the lord of Sockburn, who there handed over the family falchion (a short curved sword) to be looked at by the bishop as a symbol of his new temporal authority before he handed it back again. The outer perimeter of the permanent sanctuary at Beverley was defined by sanctuary crosses, though the broad area concerned, like its equivalents at York or Ripon, was sub-divided into a series of precisely delimited concentric zones of increasing safety, narrowing in on the frithstool near the high altar where the seizure of a fugitive was regarded as an unamendable crime.
In many cities as the middle ages progressed, moreover, there are signs that, perhaps beginning with London’s Cheapside in the later thirteenth century, central spaces were developing as permanent arenas for processions which publicly moved dignitaries or symbols through civic spaces for different purposes. Such occasions simultaneously flaunted the power of the current civic and guild officers whilst parading whole bodies of sworn, and therefore privileged, citizens in their formal groups before crowds of spectators. At Coventry, and close to the marketplace, the cathedral and two parish churches shared a single central graveyard which was surrounded by foci for different ritual occasions: a bishop’s palace, halls for priests and the gaol, as well as the civic guildhall. The whole of this area was linked by ‘procession ways’. In other towns like King’s Lynn or Leicester, guildhall and civic church stood in deliberately close relationship to each other. Ritual was thus built into the medieval environment.
Contemporary perceptions of clearly defined spaces as variously privileged bring us to a fundamental feature of ritual mechanisms which is best introduced through a particular example. From 1275 onwards, it would seem that annually on the feast of the Commemoration of St Paul (30 June) it was customary for Sir William le Baud or his heirs, the tenants of an Essex hunting chase held of the chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral, to bring in the ‘unmade’ carcass of a fallow buck. This would be borne through the cathedral itself, in the wake of the liturgical procession, even up to the steps of the high altar - as though to the saint’s high table. There it was received by the canons, fully vested and with garlands of roses on their heads, who immediately dispatched the meat for cooking. As if to confirm that the offering was made to the patron saint of the cathedral through his mainpast, the canons, the head and antlers were then carried on a pole before the cross in the procession back to the west door of the cathedral. Here the lord’s keeper blew ‘the death of the Bucke’ on his horn, to which similar horn calls replied from around the city.7 In doing this, the participants simply replicated the practices of a customary home-coming by a hunt when the spoils were ceremonially accompanied to the castle gate or hall door. In other words, what was normally done in another, secular place was in this instance transposed to a new context where such activity was strictly abnormal.
John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (2 vols., Oxford, 1971), i, p. 334.
For the duration of the ritual on St Paul’s Day, therefore, what might otherwise have been regarded as a violation of sacred space was permitted.
This temporary ritual transgression into a zone of quite other normal usage is one of the hallmarks distinguishing the exceptional quality of ritual occasions. Indeed the same public space might be differently transformed according to separate moments in the local ritual cycle. The start of the route taken by the white bull into Bury, for example, was also that customarily used for royal entries when, doubtless, the house-fronts were hung with table-carpets or bed-coverings from the best rooms, as seems to have been the case for coronation processions in the capital. In probably all settlements, the seasonal decoration of house-fronts with masses of foliage brought in from the country at May Day helped temporarily to convert ‘culture’ into ‘nature’. Most remarkable of all, from the fourteenth century to the Reformation, was the brief annual transformation of civic space into ‘sacred’ space at the feast of Corpus Christi. Parishioners, or guilds, or urban freemen in their fellowships, then solemnly escorted the host under a canopy of honour, in a tabernacle or crystal monstrance, from the church in which it had been consecrated out into the open air and then through the main thoroughfares of the built-up area.
If at York this ommegang or ‘going about’ with sacred tableaux (perhaps derived from the Low Countries) seems to have avoided the separate liberties that there fractured any sense of unified municipal space, at Coventry the procession and the pageants appear to have traversed the different jurisdictional elements that had until then been in conflict with one another, so underlining the ‘one-body’ symbolism of the event. Not that we should understand such occasions in isolation. At Durham there was a distinct pattern of interlinked processioning between the feast of St Mark (25 April) and Corpus Christi. Four processions in succession involved the prior and the monks going out from the cathedral to visit different parish churches in the city in turn. Three processions at Rogationtide then comprised virtual circuits of the priory precinct with portable shrines and relics including the banner of St Cuthbert. The climactic observance of Corpus Christi itself involved a reciprocal movement from the laity. In this case the host was brought by the bailiffs and occupations of the city with their craft banners and flaming torches from the civic church in the marketplace, up through the town to the north door of the cathedral. There it was greeted outside and reverenced by the prior and monks, probably kneeling so that their hands and heads might touch the ground, accompanied again by St Cuthbert’s banner.
The body of Christ was then escorted inside by the augmented procession, and eventually to the shrine beyond the high altar, where lay the incorrupt body of St Cuthbert, and around the feretory, before the civic element moved out of doors again and so back to the other end of the town. Interconnections in social space, whether indoors or out of doors, between distinct gradations of sanctity and between sacred and secular, let alone between different all-male corporate groups, are here self-evident.
As Durham’s ritual calendar indicates, the timings of ritual too need to be understood as parts of a whole: as linked punctuation marks within recognisable short-term cycles of social time - whether agrarian, customary or liturgical - or as points of annual emphasis that varied from community to community. It is impossible to do full justice to this complex and much misunderstood matter here. What must be stressed, however, is that, unlike historians of religion, students of the contrasted rituals of local societies and of localised social groupings - whether rural, urban or domestic - cannot focus only on the liturgical calendar. What is at issue are communal calendars which drew also on other sources of influence. Great households, for example, boasted their own individual calendars based on quarter days, the rhythms of the hunting seasons, adopted holy days and the timings of trips to distant parts of their lord’s estates or the capital. For fixed urban and rural societies, by contrast, although the year was characterised by the blending of economic, administrative, popular and liturgical timings, which led to much variation from place to place, an underlying common pattern may nevertheless be discerned.
The three most popular seasonal celebrations - Christmas, May Day and midsummer - were, indeed, only partially assimilated into the liturgical calendar, the first and the last being residually linked to both the solstitial cycle and, it may be legitimately argued, even to shadowy remnants of the pre-Christian calendar. The absence of Carnival, so commonly celebrated on the continent as the prelude to the movable season of Lent, is one of the most marked features of the English scene. In Yorkshire, by contrast, it was the pagan midwinter season - in Bede, a double month (‘before Giuli’ and ‘after Giulf)8 - that seems to have been reflected in churches when, even in the seventeenth century, the parishioners danced and cried ‘Yole’ on Christmas Day; or when mistletoe, a plant held to be under the astrological governance of the sun, was placed on the high altar of York Minster. It was also when, as in the
K. Harrison, The Framework of Anglo-Saxon History to A. D. 900 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 3-4.
Early thirteenth century at the river port of Torksey (Lines.), which had close trading links with York, a special amnesty for the suspension of disputes known as the ‘Yule-gyrth’ was declared.436 At York by the end of the middle ages this was first proclaimed in the city centre on St Thomas’s Day (21 December) but to the effect that ‘all manner of whores and thieves, dice players, carders and other unthrifty folk be welcome... att the reverence of the high feast of Youle, till the twelve days be passed’, and then publicised with special horn fanfares at four entrances to the city.437 438 This seems to have been succeeded by a carnivalesque ‘riding’ led by the sheriffs’ serjeants, which featured a gluttonous ‘Yule’ facing backwards while carrying a shoulder of lamb with cakes hanging from his neck, and ‘Yule’s wife’ bearing a distaff, denoting either women’s employment - suspended for the season - or the mark of a scold. The casting about of ‘draff’ or processed brewers’ grain (fit only to feed pigs), indeed, even suggests Tudor shaming rituals associated with husband-beaters, though to judge from local tradition both may have been guised as reputedly deceitful Jews. The presence of children ‘crying after them’ could indicate the promise of a new generation in the succeeding year. On Distaff Day, the day after Twelfth Night, the normal order was resumed.11
The inter-related fire ceremonies of the midsummer season, with their cognate residual references to the solstice, may also relate back ultimately to the other pagan double month which, despite a thin later Christian overlay of feast days, had formerly linked the latter part of what later became June with the early part of July. These interconnections are brought out by customs at Whitby, ‘a havyn towne inhabyted with maryners’ and at ‘all other havyn townes, thereaboute’. Along this stretch of the Yorkshire coast, annually on the eves of the feasts of the Nativity of St John the Baptist (23 June), Sts Peter and Paul (28 June), and the Translation of St Thomas Becket (6 July) respectively
At the tyme of the bonefiers accustomed... all maryners and masters of schippes, accompanyed with other yong peple, have used to have caried before them on a staf halfe a terbarell brennyng [tar-barrel burning], and the maryners
To folowe too and too (having suche wepons in there handes as they please to here...); and to syng throught the strettes, and to resort to every bonefier, and there to drynke and make mery with songes and honest pastymes.12
Elsewhere on such occasions we hear not only of neighbourhood bonfires, but also of burning wheels being launched down hills or of multitudes of torches being carried through city streets by armed watches marching under royal licence.
The period between the Christmas and midsummer seasons not only shared special days marked by the ubiquitous ritual importation into settlements of different classes of vegetation at different times: holly, ivy and mistletoe, Palm Sunday willow, May Day hawthorn, red roses at Corpus Christi, or midsummer birch. It also contained the major liturgical moments in the church calendar connected with Christ’s life and resurrection and the impact of his ministry — most of them oscillating from year to year between 4 February and 24 June because of the movability of Easter. When Easter was at its latest the climax of the sequence, Corpus Christi, coincided with Midsummer Day. Echoing this bunching since before the Norman Conquest were the only extended annual holidays for ordinary people, at Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide. Clearly as a result of these conjunctions, the same six-month block attracted to itself the greatest set-piece, communally collective, rituals of the year. In it also were compressed those rituals that were most expressive of the world turned temporarily upside down: boy bishops in great churches around Christmas; lords of misrule in great households, whether lordly or civic, during the twelve days; the customs associated with the young at Shrove Tuesday; the ritual assertion of wifely authority over husbands on Hock Tuesday; the May Day festival of youth; and the summertime lords of misrule with the attendant churchyard junketings of youth especially in market towns at, for example, Whitsuntide.
There was nothing to match this concentration of collective ritual occasions during the remaining half of the year. Certainly there were isolated days of liturgical significance, especially saints’ days (notably those of the Virgin, who tended to be the object of individual veneration), as there were occasions for marking distinct stages in the agricultural, fair-time, municipal or exchequer years. It cannot be argued, however, that the character of the second half of the year replicated the
W. Brown, ed., Yorkshire Star Chamber Proceedings, III (Yorkshire Archaeological Society record series, LI, 1914), p. 198.
Extended holiday patterns, the ritual intensity, the regular communal involvement (as opposed to small-group participation) or the symbolic coherence of the first. For this reason it has been suggested that, despite local variations, communal customary calendars during the later middle ages generally shared this underlying temporal division into two halves which may be characterised respectively as predominantly ‘ritualistic’ and ‘secular’. We need to appreciate that this contrast ‘was more a matter of emphasis than of rigid demarcation’.439
Ritual did not simply entrench overall structures of medieval authority or the nationally derived hierarchies of superiority and inferiority so beloved of the textbook writers. It is also misleading to regard regular observances - often designed to raise money for local works - as indicating a ‘Merry England’ that never in fact existed. Rather, the study of ritual should refocus us on contemporary realities on the ground, many of them harsh in the extreme, by enabling us to follow the different ways in which ritual permeated all aspects of medieval life in a face-to-face society (private rituals and rituals of riot being but two of many issues that could not be covered here). Above all perhaps, medieval ritual involved techniques of sending, recognising and decoding a multiplicity of interpersonal visual signals from a limited vocabulary of meanings in a largely illiterate and predominantly outdoor world of small communities.
If there was effectively a common ‘language’ of ritual performance, its expression was infinitely varied geographically. Repetitive annual rituals involved everyone through a continuing process of public reiteration: the constant rearrangement, whether calendrically or through rites of passage, not only of signs but also of differently overlapping groups of people in particular places. Rituals regularly reminded the members of such groupings, even if they were in conflict with one another, that they interrelated nevertheless within locally specific customary structures, variously privileged social spaces and often within regionally identifiable cultural spheres (not least with regard to the cults of major saints like Edmund or Cuthbert). Even personal confrontation seems to have invoked a set sequence involving ritualised threat, symbolic signals of imminent violent action, and an expectation of customary intervention, as a built-in way of defusing conflict - though not necessarily always successfully. The serious breach of constantly reaffirmed customary norms, moreover, might invite implacable public reprisals and ultimately ritual expulsion or execution. Overall the structural interconnections peculiar to every community were ritualised annually through its own local calendar, which thus became the unique expression of its collective identity.
Customary ways, however, were never static. As time went on, from the fourteenth century in particular, not only were ritual details adjusted from place to place but society kept adding extra observances to existing repertoires. As communities shrank dramatically in size, especially in village and city England, it looks almost as though efforts were made to intensify the bonds of belonging amongst the survivors, and not least in the market towns that benefited most. It is a coincidence at least worth pondering that in English history ritual proliferation or re-emphasis by local societies (rather than by government choice) seem most often to be associated with periods of population contraction, whether nationally during the later middle ages or in post-Restoration England, or more specifically in the countryside of later Victorian Britain.
World History
