The Right Ordering of Souls

One Sunday afternoon in September 1457, as Vespers was being sung in All Saints’, Bristol, a man entered the church, quickly pursued by a bailiff. The man (a fugitive priest from another town) took refuge in the choir, but the bailiff was not deterred, and a scuffle ensued. Eventually a layman intervened. Breaking up the fight, he accidentally scratched the hand of one of the trouble-makers with the clasp of a book he was holding. The incident was subsequently investigated by the bishop’s commissary, who fortunately judged that the negligible amount of blood spilled meant that the church had been ‘only very slightly polluted’, and services might continue. This minor incident in an obscure church would, in the normal way of things, have been long forgotten. All Saints’ was a tiny and apparently unremarkable parish in the centre of Bristol, covering an area of less than 100 square metres; in 1548, it had only 180 communicants. But from a historian’s perspective, All Saints’ was a remarkable place: it is one of the best-documented parishes in medieval England. From the decades leading up to the Reformation, the surviving material includes numerous wills and property deeds, a long series of churchwardens’ accounts and the All Saints’ Church Book (a possibly unique volume which includes parish ordinances, inventories and information about benefactors), as well as records relating to the foundation and administration of a perpetual chantry

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