‘In common for everyone’: shared space and private possessions in the English parish church nave

Breaking the peace: Representation, affect and materiality in pre-modern England

“…Observing how women in church ‘jostle to get in front of each other’ for the offertory and the Kiss of Peace, Christine de Pizan argued that ‘they should hang [the pax] on a nail and let whoever wants to kiss it do so’ (Pizan, 1989, translation taken from 2003; cf. Byng, 2019). The Synod of Seville actually introduced such a change in 1512, ending the carrying of the pax (Braun, 1932: 560).…”

“…That a symbol of communal peacefulness, and of sacramental contact, should also describe communal ordering – from clergy to laity, from the lord to his tenants – was wholly consistent with both medieval social ideology and ritual practice. Seating in church, the giving of the offertory, the reception of the Eucharist and the ordering of religious processions all ordinarily manifested social gradations, albeit in complex and occasionally fraught ways (Byng, 2019). For this reason, the context for Browne's claim to kiss the pax ahead of Hampden is hard to recover.…”

“…It is thus probably significant that a woman was the first to kiss the pax. The gender politics of parochial rituals intersected in complicated and inconsistent ways with differences in age, wealth and status, not least since in many places men and women were supposed to sit or stand separately (no doubt explaining why accounts tend to describe the pax being passed between same-gender congregants), although married couples could sit together and the lord of the manor sometimes sat in the chancel (Byng, 2019). There is, however, no evidence for a commonly shared expectation that the lady of the manor should receive the pax after a senior male tenant (if that is what Browne was) and Browne does not say explicitly that he refused to receive the pax after a woman, rather he simply wanted it ‘first’.…”

“…In fact, the distinction between the two claims is not as considerable as it might first appear. I have written elsewhere about how church seating faced a similar problem in rendering the complex, multi-faceted and fluid ordering of medieval society into a static unidimensional one, thus all but guaranteeing that it would become a source of friction as the social order changed or as different beliefs about social position were forced into the open (Byng, 2019). This happened because unavoidable material qualities (seats must be ordered from front to back; paxes must pass from one person to another) meant that differences that were not usually articulated, or which could otherwise be safely articulated in more nuanced or even inconsistent ways, had to be not only explicitly expressed but also publicly dramatised in a spiritually charge context.…”