Description

A new unused book.

About the book >.>.> At the heart of medieval Bristol All Saints’ was a small parish numbering fewer than two hundred communicant members and possessed of only modest somewhat cramped church buildings. Yet somehow this otherwise unremarkable parish has preserved an extraordinary selection of records from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Its late medieval archive has few if any equals in Britain. Such documentary abundance affords information and impressions of unrivalled detail and clarity for any who seek to understand or reconstruct the beliefs and behaviour of town- dwellers at the end of the Middle Ages. The generosity and care which parishioners lavished on the regime that cared for their souls emerges in the accounts which their churchwardens compiled and which for the first time are printed here in full for the period from the 1460s until 1530. The copious transactions of income and expenditure reveal much about the pressing priorities and conditions of everyday life but may also be made to disclose the sophisticated and developing procedures which the laity fashioned to manage and guide essential aspects of their lives – aspects which unknown to anyone were shortly to be profoundly changed. On offer is a tantalising glimpse of a world on the brink of Reformation. (SP)