The shaping of a community : the rise and reformation of the English parish c.1400-1560

Churchwardens' accounts are fast threatening to oust wills from their position as the first port of call for historians seeking to recreate the religious and social experience of'ordinary' English people in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a book brimming with graphs, tables and pie-charts, Beat Kiimin demonstrates how a systematic analysis of the income and expenditure described in surviving churchwardens' accounts (in particular those for ten sample parishes) can be used to substantiate the now increasingly familiar emphasis on the vitality of late medieval religious life. The seductive lore of these fascinating documents should not blind us to their limitations: little over 200 often incomplete sets survive from this period from nearly 9,000 parishes, and this book is understandably not able to tell us whether any principle more dependable than happenstance accounts for the pattern of survival. Why, for example, do Devon and Somerset between them provide 16 per cent of all surviving sets? None the less, in analysing these sources more rigorously than any previous commentator, Kumin paints a compelling picture of how churchwardens (here convincingly demonstrated to have been drawn overwhelmingly from the broad middle swathe of parish society) were able to extract from their communities, and apply to communal purposes, very substantial sums of money, usually considerably more than the crown was able to raise from the same communities in direct lay taxation