Is it fair to say that most medieval laymen did not understand the mass?

This assertion does not seem to make much sense when you take into account the intelligibility of Romance languages with Latin. Especially because the majority of Europeans speak a Romance language. Would it be more correct to say that most could at least piece together what is being said?

 

That seems like a big stretch, like saying that the French and the Spanish are mutually intelligible, which they most certainly are not

 

The short answer has to be no.

You most certainly can understand the mass without knowing the liturgy it was written in. The language of the Mass is bread and wine, taken, offered, blessed and broken.

 

I know Eamon Duffy's scholarship will show that in some parts of England, the Latin mass was fairly well understood by the people. However across Western Christendom there was a widespread dissatisfaction in regards to how reverent the mass was and how ill-educated the clergy were. My guess is the norm was a certain degree of ambivalence if not total incoherence for many.

 

I would say French has drifted a lot more from Latin than the other Romance languages, especially in pronunciation.

 

You have to remember that those languages that you posted are todays equivalent. They have developed to this point. At the year 1000 that are not what they are now and in the year 1500 they were different than they are now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish_language#Spelling
Just for reference. I have no clue how pronunciation has changed.

 

And don't forget Romanian, the language of the country Romania. If I remember correctly, and correct me if I am wrong, it's closest to French

 

That is true. Romanian is a weird language b/c it has a lot of influence from Slavic as well.

 

Ah, but in medieval times the Roman Church only served communion about one time per year. The rest of the year, the host was on display in the monstrance for people to worship; this must have messed up their understanding to no end!

 

I am not sure of the background to the claim you make here. Henry VIII was a daily mass kind of catholic, and even more often when he had the time.

 

Pre-Reformation English churches would've had daily Masses, even multiple Masses each day in churches with chantries. Even small churches would've had side Altars. The nobility and wealthy would hear multiple masses each day as Botolph has remarked re Henry VIII.

Whilst there was an obligation to hear Mass on Sunday and numerous Holy Days throughout the year, reception of HC for most people would've been annually at Easter and known as 'taking one's rights'. A minority might have received monthly and in exceptional cases weekly.

In churches with chantries and side Altars there was a trend to go from Altar to Altar to see the Elevation of the Host. (Cranmer complained about this practice.) Where multiple Masses were being said simultaneously, the Consecration had to occur first at the High Altar. In English churches you can still see some surviving squint holes in walls. These are small tunnels cut through a wall to allow a Priest celebrating in a side chapel to see what's going on at the High Altar.

 

I'm talking about pre-Reformation medieval times. For support references, here are a couple:
Wonderful Blood by Caroline Walker Bynum, a medieval church scholar
The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy

Here is a quote from Duffy's book (bold emphasis added by me):

Frequent communion was the prerogative of the few. Lady Margaret Beaufort received only monthly, and even so was considered something of a prodigy. For most people receiving communion was an annual event, and it was emphatically a communal rather than an individualistic action. In most parishes everyone went to confession in Holy Week and received communion before or after high Mass on Easter Day, an act usually accompanied by a statutory offering to the priest. Only after the completion of all this was one entitled to break one's Lenten fast and resume the eating of meat.​

 

Yes, reception of HC was for most people at that time an annual occurance. However, people would've ve attended Mass on Sunday and other days of obligation. They just didn't receive. The exception, as you note was at Easter. To see the Host at the Elevation was the priority for most people, not reception of the Eucharist. This was a major issue for Cranmer who stopped the Elevation of the Host in the BCP liturgy and wanted the faithful to receive HC more frequently.

I think it's Duffy who mentions 'fiesta ferianda' some 50 or so saint's days throughout the year when the faithful were obligated to attend Mass, as well as Morning and Evening prayer. Most just didn't receive at Mass.

 

Any evidence for this claim?
Daily and even weekly communion was extremely uncommon practice until Archbishop Cranmer introduced it after the Reformation, and it later got stabilized as monthly, contrasted to annually in the Church of Rome.

The jesuits were the first ones to introduce the aberration of daily communion, because they believed the Sacraments worked automatically. That’s why they tried to baptize the Natives in India etc in the 100,000 of men women and children, hoping this would stick (which it never did).

 

OK. I now get what you were saying. To return to the topic of the thread. I believe that the medieval layfolk may well have had a different understanding of the mass, which is to say that the did not understand the mass the way we understand the mass. Given that it is a profound mystery - though perhaps I prefer the word ineffable, that does not mean that they did not understand it. It sustained them, and through their being sustained the Church has lived on, and we today in our turn are now sustained by the life of Christ in the blessed sacrament.

 

I would have to disagree with that. I do so because I speak French and I am learning Romanian. My smatterings of Italian are fr more useful to me than French. The pronunciation is very different from French. I have also read that in terms of grammar it has remained closer to Latin than the other Romance languages. With its isolation that would not surprise me.

 

On reading your question I found it to be a little vague. It could mean what most people have taken it to mean and that is because it was celebrated in a language they did not speak. I think the question could also be asking did they understand what was going on at Mass.

If it were the latter I would go out on a limb and say I think that many people in those times would know what was happening at Mass.

As for the language issue I think it is a little more nuanced. We need to remember that the overwhelming majority of the people we illiterate. So, when the Book of Common Prayer came along the masses did not suddenly have a liturgical book that they could read. I think if the Mass had been celebrated in English, and that were the only change, with many of the prayers, etc. being said by the priest in a low voice they may still have had some difficulties in knowing what was going on in the sense of being able to follow the Mass in their native tongue.

 

I think this is an interesting question - I think people today, and most English speakers, have a hard time understanding the different forms and levels of multilingualism that many people had in the middle ages. Likewise, I am growing more suspicious that the Reformation cry of "language of the people" was more a lot of centralized-government proto-nationalism piggy backing on tensions between the northern and southern European countries. Which language of which people? Each village could have its own language, not just accent differences, but real differences in vocabulary and syntax. In some places in Europe this is still the case, even though in the Early Modern period there was a push to national languages (the situation in Norway is one example, where the only official written nation-wide language is a language which is no-ones spoken language). Did each village get its own prayer book? No, it was the language of the capital city, the king, or whoever else was "learned" in language - which may not have been the language of the people outside that group. Such was the situation in Ireland, which was happy to follow the lead of the English bishops until Queen Elizabeth sent over her prayer book in English and expected everyone to use it. When given the choice between praying in two foreign languages, the Irish chose the one they were more familiar with. And the Bible was never translated into a local Saxon dialect (which is still the primary tongue of some groups of people living in The Netherlands) until about 20 years ago. Similarly to other local languages throughout Europe....

Don't get me wrong, I believe in people praying in their native, spoken language. But in a heavily multi-linguistic society, there's practical advantages to keeping a standardized written language which is broadly understandable to many people, especially when the cost of book production was astronomical. It was a problem when the practicalities gave way to bad theology, that there's "sacred" languages (though I will point out that I see much the same happening all over again with regard to the KJV). But when I see modern people speaking a highly-standardized and highly-permanent language (English) crowing about "language of the people!" efforts in the middle ages, I wince a little. The situation was actually really complicated. And the failure to actually put the idea into full practice makes we wonder just how seriously the people who talked about it during the Reformation actually believed it. Or if, for many, it was something more like a convenient "talking point."

When considering why the Reformation took hold in the north, and not the south, language is one big divider (except Ireland, as I already mentioned). Especially the "Romance" languages, which formed specifically as a local form of "vulgar" Latin, I think for many centuries people continued to have what linguists call a passive use of the language - they could understand much of what they heard, even if they couldn't use the language actively. Over time this passive understanding itself faded, but I think it remained enough that people were loathe to give it up for something else, which probably also was not their own everyday spoken language. As the continued religious use of Elizabethan English attests, some people don't like change, especially when what they've "always done" is familiar and good enough.

 

I strongly agree that the idea we should have worship in the language of the people was to a certain extent a con. It was OK creating the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) or having the Bible translated into English. However, the great masses were illiterate so the BCP and Bible were no more use to them than if they had been written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

It would take some actual evidence to convince me that there were different languages in each village and thus the English used in the liturgy would be incomprehensible to most because it was not a form of English with which they were familiar. I do know that there were more dialects than there are now but I do not think that someone going from one village to the next would not be able to communicate with the people he encountered in the next village.

 

One of the grievances of the Cornish contingent of the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 was that many Cornish people didn't understand English. There were still monoglot Cornish speakers at that time particularly in west Cornwall. The uprising was brutally surpressed and around 5000 Cornish people lost their lives. This represented about 10% of the population of Cornwall at the time.

During the Medieval period there were a number of mystery plays and miracle plays written in the Cornish language. Many of these were associated with Glasney College, a major religious institution and centre of learning which was surpressed under Henry VIII. It's possible that other Cornish language documents were lost or destroyed in the process.

During the reign of Mary Tudor, a number of Bishop Bonner's counter Reformation homilies were translated into Cornish. It's likely that a number of Cornish people held to the old religion and I have read accounts of some Cornish churches using the Missal well into the reign of Elizabeth I.