Bad Behaviour in the Pews
Medieval churchgoers, by the Church’s own repeated complaints, were considerably less consistently well-behaved than the solemn stereotype of medieval piety usually suggests, and the surviving disciplinary records preserve a genuinely entertaining rogues’ gallery of exactly how congregations misbehaved.
Weapons and animals both turn up with startling regularity; the parishioners of Coverham in the Yorkshire dales were bringing swords, bows, arrows, and staves into the church porch, stacking them so densely that people struggled to actually get inside, and dogs wandered in on their own account often enough that several churches, including York Minster, kept a paid “dog-whipper” specifically to eject them, after complaints of animals urinating on the walls and even getting loose in the chancel itself. Gossips, quarrellers, and outright disruptors get named individually and repeatedly across the records; Kirby Bellars in Leicestershire reported five separate chronic gossipers in a single 1518 visitation, and Thomas Nash of St John Walbrook, London, was hauled before a Church court in 1491 for interrupting the service to shout at the assembled congregation, “what be you but whores, harlots, and bawds?”
Genuine violence broke out too, and not infrequently over the era’s touchiest social flashpoint, precedence; four women physically dragged from their seats at Hawkhurst, Kent, in 1502 were apparently dragged by men convinced their own wives deserved the spot instead, and a 1522 Essex dispute over who received the ceremonial “pax” first escalated into a full assault, the aggrieved parishioner allegedly breaking the sacred object over the parish clerk’s head hard enough to draw blood in front of the entire congregation. Even sartorial pride drew real, pointed scorn from contemporary moralists; Robert Mannyng dismissed starched women’s headdresses in church as “the Devil’s sails,” Chaucer’s Wife of Bath was famously mocked for wearing church headscarves heavy enough, at ten pounds, to weigh down a genuinely modest wardrobe budget.
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