An inquiry[203] by Cardinal Pole, in 1557, whether taverns and ale houses opened their doors on Sundays and holy days in time of mass, matins, and evensong, indicates that the law required them to be closed at those times, but permitted them to be open at other times on Sundays and holy days.
The churchgoing habits of clergy and people on other days than Sundays and holy days are not so easily arrived at. There is no proof that a daily celebration was ordered in the Saxon Church; after the Norman Conquest, a weekly celebration was ordered.[204] There is no canon of the English Church which imposes a daily celebration on the clergy; by a Constitution of Peckham,[205] they are required to say mass once a week, and that, if possible, on a Sunday; at a later period it became the general practice for a priest to say his daily mass. Where the services of the church were regularly performed, it is probable that the parish priest said the Divine service every day, either in the parish church or in one of its chapels, if it had any; and that he also said matins and evensong; but it is not unlikely that in many country parishes there was an amount of laxity. We have seen that the inhabitants of hamlets who were solicitous about the services in their chapel were content with it on three days a week, viz. Sunday, Wednesday, and Friday; and we should not be surprised to be told that in many of the rural parish churches it was not said more frequently, or indeed more frequently than on Sundays and holy days.
As for the attendance of the laity on daily service, we have given reasons in the chapter on domestic chapels for believing that it was the custom of the nobility and those of the higher classes who had domestic chapels and chaplains to have a daily celebration of mass, matins, and evensong.
There is a passage in the “Vision of Piers Plowman” (Passus V.) which seems to indicate that this was the case in churches also—
The king and his knights to the church wenten,
To hear matins and mass, and to the meal after.
But the services were likely to be duly performed in any church which “the king and his knights” were likely to attend, and in the principal churches in towns, and in well-served churches everywhere; we only doubt it in many of the churches and chapels in rustic parishes where devotion was cold and discipline slack, or the number of the clergy insufficient.
At the ordinary daily services in parish churches it is very likely that there was some congregation; for attendance on the Divine service was highly regarded as a pious exercise, and pious people who had the leisure—women especially—would be likely to attend it; the custom of gathering poor people into almshouses in which they formed a kind of religious community with their chaplain, chapel, and daily prayers, would be likely to have its counterpart in the attendance of the pensioners of the parish church at the daily service in it; but it is unlikely that it was ever customary for the middle class, still less the lower class of laymen, engaged in the active business of life, to attend daily mass, or matins, or evensong, as a habit of their religious life.
The Bidding Prayer, being in English, was a popular part of the service. It was usually, from the eleventh century onward, said from the pulpit before the sermon. It differed somewhat in various places and at different periods; but the following example, taken from “The York Manual,” is a fair example of the class:
Prayers to be used on Sundays.[206]