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In recent years, students of recusancy have begun to turn their attention to the inner life of the Catholic community, a development much to be welcomed; and it is understandable that for the most part the centre of interest has been what is called the spiritual life. Influences coming from St. Francis of Sales and St. Teresa of Avila have been traced, and Augustine Baker has rightly been the subject of much study. What needs further investigation, I believe, is the devotional life of the ordinary person, namely the gentry and their wives and daughters in their country houses, especially in the seventeenth century. There were also those who towards the end of the century increasingly lived in London and other towns without the support of the ‘patriarchal’ life of the greater families. No doubt, many were unlettered, and even if they could read they were probably unused to handling anything but the simplest of books. It would be interesting to know what vernacular prayers they knew and said, how they managed to ‘hear Mass’, as the phrase went, what they made of the sacrament of penance, and what notions about God and Jesus Christ they entertained. Perhaps the religious practice of the unlettered is now beyond recall, but something remains of the practice of those who used the many Primers and Manuals that are still extant.
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References
Notes
1 C.R.S. Monograph 3 (1982).
2 I wish to make grateful acknowledgement to Mr. Every for putting it in my hands and giving me the leisure to study it. It is not recorded in the Oscott College Catalogue, though I suspect that it may have been in some former catalogue. The copy of the same edition recorded in Allison and Rogers, ‘A Catalogue of Catholic books in English printed abroad or secretly in England 1558-1640’, no. 509, is in the British Library.
3 Op. cit. pp. 168–175.
4 Blom, op. cit. p. 177; A & R, no. 509.
5 Blom, pp. 176–177.
6 Op. cit. pp. 126–127.
7 Both texts were often sung in the later Middle Ages at the time of the consecration, usually after the second elevation.
8 B.C.P.: ‘time’, ‘none’; ‘Lord’ omitted. This is not the only place where the Manual echoes the English of the B.C.P., though in content it is profoundly Roman Catholic.
9 See Bossy, , The English Catholic Community, pp. 1–34.Google Scholar
10 It was not derived from the rite of communion from the chalice, as practised before the eighth century for all, but from the ablutio Oris, a practice which was contemporaneous with communion in both kinds.
11 Whether the penitent was expected to say all of it, I do not know. If so, confession would have taken a very long time.
12 Reluctance to speak of ‘the Lord’ had thus already established itself. Presumably it was regarded as a ‘Protestant’ usage. At the end of the century John Gother, whose origins were French/Huguenot, English/Presbyterian, showed less reluctance but his usage is quite inconsistent. Sometimes he wrote ‘The Lord is with you’, at others ‘Our Lord is with you’. In the Garden of the Soul Challoner has only the former.
13 At St. George’s, Taunton, the Venite was still being sung before the principal Mass about 1930 and the prayers mentioned above were said at the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, Wolverhampton, in the 1920s.
14 A translation of the Ave Regina caelorum seems to be attached to it. Its last line shows the translator in difficulties:
‘All hail O Heavens Queen to thee,
Thou Ladie of Angels greeted be,
God save thee holy roote,
From whence the worlds light did sproote’.
15 It received its fixed form only in the sixteenth century and perhaps no English translation was available.
16 See Gillow 2, p. 44.
17 There are one or two Eastern saints bearing the name Macarius.
18 See Bossy, pp. 110–121.
19 See Blom, pp. 76–111.
20 The Latin titles of these hymns may put the learned in hymnology on the track: 1) Magnae Deus potentiae; 2) Plasmator hominis Deus (see Blom, p. 243 and p. 245).