Plympton Priory and the Laity: Challenges to the Authority of the Priory

CHAPTER SIX PLYMPTON PRIORY AND THE LAITY: CHALLENGES TO THE AUTHORITY OF THE PRIORY As has been demonstrated, the canons of Plympton Priory displayed an abiding interest in the protection of their rights to the sources of their spiritual income. This chapter throws into high relief the com- peting conceptions of the purpose of spiritualia: for the laity, churches and chapels were primarily meant to be sites of divine worship, and the main duty of their incumbents was to attend to the spiritual needs of the parishioners. Whatever the state of pastoral care in these parishes in earlier times, by the later Middle Ages signi cant segments of the lay population came to perceive it as inadequate. From the point of view of the canons of Plympton, churches and chapels provided income that would support the canons in their duties of reciting the Of ce and celebrating Masses in the conventual church. The attempts to derive greater incomes from their spiritualities did not necessarily indicate an indifference on the part of the canons towards the state of pastoral care in the parishes under their jurisdiction. Indeed, it is due to the limitations of the sources that we tend to hear only of the complaints and the tensions between parishioners and priory; lesser disputes may have been settled peacefully by the priory and laity without resort to the bishop or the Crown. However, it is hard to escape the impression that a gap was widening in the late Middle Ages between laity and canons in regard to lay expectations of what the priory was obligated to do for the parishioners. While the canons were pre-occupied with issues of management, of defending their rights to their spiritualia and making the most of them nancially, the laity were beginning to consider their churches and chapels the loci of community identity. Recent scholarship into parish life in late medieval England has shed light on the development of this sense of corporate identity. Katherine French has defended the notion of a parish as a community “de ned by a broader range of characteristics than administrative necessities, geographic borders, or social similarity,” a community in which religious rituals and celebrations were key components in the 154 chapter six formation of a “sense of belonging.”1 One of the duties which was central in this process was the upkeep of the parish church: as Eamon Duffy has pointed out, “what was imposed on the laity as their collective responsibility became the focus of their corporate awareness.”2 In the thirteenth century, fabric funds appeared in various English parishes for the purpose of collecting and managing donations for the maintenance of the church building and of items such as books and vestments necessary for the services held within it.3 These fabric funds were controlled by lay parishioners, and, along with the development of the of\ ce of churchwarden, indicate the increasing involvement of the laity in the day-to-day administration of parish life. That these responsibilities were expressions of lay desire to gain some amount of control over the symbol of their community identity, rather than unwel- come burdens imposed by Church authorities, can be seen in the zeal with which parishioners engaged in programs of rebuilding the naves of their churches. In one case from the diocese of Exeter, 460 parishioners of the church of Bodmin, which belonged to the Augustinian canons of Bodmin Priory, between 1469 and 1472 paid the substantial sum of £270 to rebuild the nave.4 Thousands of parish churches in England experienced renovations, alterations, or enlargements from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries; the collective effort and collective investment required to mount these programs demonstrates the powerful identi cation between community and parish church in this period.5 Another development of this period was that parishioners who attended chapels of ease—chapels dependent on a mother church— began to agitate for full parochial rights for their chapels, including the performance of the Mass and the creation of burial grounds. The status of these chapels re] ected the fact that parish boundaries had been xed by the early thirteenth century; these boundaries did not necessarily take into account community borders or the possibility of 1 Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval Diocese (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 21–2. 2 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400– c. 1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, 2005), p. 133. 3 Andrew Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000–1500 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 90–1. It was during the thirteenth century that parishioners became respon- sible for the care of the naves of their parish churches. 4 Ibid., p. 94. 5 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 132..

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