More from the newsletter archive of the Gwent County History Association.

An insight into medieval piety

Since this was written, the Abergavenny Pax and the Kemeys Inferior crucifix have been moved to our National History Museum at St Fagans. The Kemeys crucifix was the inspiration for the newly carved crucifix in St Teilo’s Church at the National History Museum.

As part of the Experience of Worship project (http://www.experienceofworship.org.uk/) a lot of liturgical artefacts were commissioned, including a rather simpler version of the pax. We used this in the two iterations of the Mass that we did as part of the project. Those of us who were part of the congregation were encouraged to work on roles that we could play. I spent some time as a rather obstreporous pilgrim, then moved on to be a servant in the big house. One of the singers from the afternoon services was in the congregation for Mass and decided to cast himself as a bedesman who had been influenced by Reformed thinking. As a result he didn’t actually kiss the pax when it was offered to him. I decided to take him up on this and (in role as a trusted old servant of the lady of the manor) said I’d seen him just pretending to kiss it. He admitted that he’d had three seconds of absolute panic thinking he was going to be hauled before the courts and accused of heresy, before he realised it was only play-acting.

We all learned a lot from the project – about the dynamics of the medieval congregation, about the mixture of deep devotion and very secular concerns, and about the logistics of medieval worship.