Preserving the Mass

The York Use dominated in the north of England just as Sarum did in the south. The Broughton Missal is one of only twelve York Use missals to survive. The text shows that it was made for liturgical use at York Minster. Later annotations shed light on the life of a parish church, All Hallows, Broughton, Lancashire, in the years before, during, and after the Reformation. The opening here shows an inventory of liturgical objects held in the church, including vestments, altar cloths and a chalice. Below, in a different hand, the donation of another missal is indicated: ‘Item gyfte to the chyrche of broughton In honour of god and all holowes of the devotion of nicolas malmysbye ii. westement with a masse boke of sarome use’. Although the book has some minimal defacement in accordance with government decrees, memories of the old ways were resilient in Broughton: as late as 1590 one William Cowell of Preston found Edward Haworth, priest, ‘saying mass after the popish manner in a loft to the east end of the house of one Dilworth, a widow, in the village of Broughton… with a mass book, a super-altar, chalice containing wine, and a paten, with other massing furniture’. BC

Broughton Missal (York Use, early fifteenth century)

LPL: MS 5066, fo. 182r

Further Reading

Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 445-62.

Extended captions