Clive Burgess – författare

St Andrew was a small and comparatively obscure parish situated in the south-east of the medieval city of London, but its churchwardens' accounts survive in a virtually unbroken series starting in 1454 and continuing into the 1620s. Such complete sets of churchwardens' accounts are rare and particularly so for the period before the Reformation. These accounts reveal much about the practices and priorities of ordinary Londoners and demonstrate how they responded to the often conflicting demands of royal government in the sixteenth century. In addition to the accounts, the editor has also provided the texts of nearly a hundred wills of men and women who lived and died in this smallparish during these years. There is a full index provided to both the accounts and the wills.

The relationship between people and parish in the late medieval ages illuminated by this study of a remarkable survival from the period.In the two centuries preceding the Reformation in England, economic, political and spiritual conditions combined with constructive effect. Endemic plague prompted a demonstrative piety and, in a world enjoying rising disposable incomes, this linked with current teachings - especially the doctrine of Purgatory - to sustain a remarkable devotional generosity. Moreover, political conditions, and particularly war with France, persuaded the government to summonits subjects' assistance, including responses encouraged in England's many parishes. As a result, the wealthier classes invested in and worked for their neighbourhood churches with a degree of largesse - witnessed in parish buildings in many localities - hardly equalled since.Buildings apart, the scarcity of pre-Reformation parish records means, however, that the resonances of this response, and the manner in which parishioners organised their worship, are ordinarily lost to us. This book, using the remarkable survival of records for one parish - All Saints', Bristol, in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries - scrutinises the investment that the faithful made. Ifnot necessarily typical, it is undeniably revealing, going further than any previous study to expose and explain parishioners' priorities, practices and achievements in the late Middle Ages. In so doing, it also charts a world that would soon vanish.Dr CLIVE BURGESS holds a Senior Lectureship in late medieval history at Royal Holloway, University of London.