Chapter 16 - The Flock (2)

Summary

Church behaviour was childlike in both directions: it had the child's happy familiarity and, sometimes, the child's embarrassing lack of restraint. Even unwilling Protestants have often admired, in Continental churches, not only the figures constantly flitting to and fro for private prayer, but the engaging bonhomie with which the women, in especial, make themselves at home in the Father's House; one sitting at the sermon with her basket full of cabbages from the market on the floor at her feet: another with the company of her pet dog. The earliest mention of a private pew is Italian, of about 1200. In England, not later than 1320, the Lady de Dalton had her private pew, and “of her humility” did not allow her servants to eject the stranger who was found kneeling in prayer there. In some of our thirteenth-century churches a stone bench runs all round the walls; but the Friar Salimbene, in 1248, found Louis IX of France, with his retinue, sitting on the ground in a wayside village church to which they had repaired for prayer. Hence the nave lent itself to that abusive use which we have seen at St Marychurch in Devon, and which meets us in many other records; the storing of corn, barrels, and similar unecclesiastical furniture. Many indications show that talk at divine service was rather normal than exceptional. The sermons of Berthold v. Regensburg and St Bernardino of Siena testify to this; cathedral canons, as we have seen, had statutory permission to converse during service, as far as to the third or fourth stall away.