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The prosperity of the years around 1500 was vividly displayed in church-building. Spires, towers, clerestories (an upper row of windows in a cathedral or large church, above the level of the aisle roofs), aisles and side chapels were being added to churches all over England and lowland Scotland, often, like the great spire of St James's, Louth, built in 1500-15, funded by myriad local donations. Inside there were ever more statues of saints, lights kept burning before them by the confraternities, each with its own patron saint or feast. These religious guilds were proliferating in town and countryside alike, sometimes as craft associations, sometimes as vehicles for new forms of pious practice, sometimes as social clubs or unincorporated town councils. The greatest, like the Holy Cross guild of Stratford-upon-Avon, drew together the social elites of entire regions; the least are known to us from a handful of bequests in wills from one country parish. Yet all subscribed to the great social ideal of Christian charity between guild brothers, guild sisters, and neighbours in general. And all prayed for the souls of the departed, whose release from purgatory was one of the key concerns of religion.

When not building churches or holding guild feasts and services, churchwardens and guild wardens co-ordinated the expenditure of much of their and their neighbours� surplus income on the elaboration of local festive culture. In the 14th and 15th centuries, new or spreading Christian feasts and practices - Corpus Christi, St George's Day, boy bishops, Easter sepulchres - were added to the older rhythm of Christmas, Epiphany, Candlemas, Shrovetide, Palm Sunday, Easter, Ascension Day, Whitsun and All Saints. Processions, plays, services and feasts of increasing scale marked each of them out. In the decades before 1500, new secular jollifications joined them in the town and village calendar. At Hocktide, eight days after Easter, teams of men and women kidnapped members of the opposite sex and ransomed them for the benefit of parish funds. Maypoles, morris dancing and Robin Hood plays all spread widely too.

In the countryside religious rites spoke directly to the needs of the agrarian economy in the blessing of ploughs on Plough Sunday in January, the blessing of land and crops on Rogation Days. In the cities religious rites spoke just as directly to the needs of social, political and economic order, as Corpus Christi processions took the citizenry through their streets. They marched as one united body, but the mayor and aldermen escorted the consecrated eucharistic host more closely than common councillors, councillors more closely than guildsmen, higher status crafts before lower. The unenfranchised - almost all women and many poorer men - had to make do with watching the processions and the cycles of plays that often accompanied them. Local identities were reinforced as different communities stressed different feasts, just as different parishes, regions and nations honoured distinctive saints: William Elphinstone, bishop of Aberdeen from 1483 to 1514, encouraged devotion to more than seventy neglected saints of Scotland.

For some this interweaving of religious and social life no doubt made religion an unreflective business. Protestant reformers would soon call it superstitious. There was a niche saint to be invoked for each of life's problems. St Erasmus, martyred by evisceration, served for stomach troubles; St Sebastian, martyred by crossbow, for the plague with its shooting pains; St Margaret, swallowed by a dragon which exploded to permit her escape, for childbirth. In the Mass itself the stress on the miracle of transubstantiation could lead to a mechanistic view of the merits of 'seeing' one's 'maker', as the priest elevated the consecrated wafer to be adored as the true body of Christ. And the idea that the celebration of Mass could focus the benefits of Christ's sacrifice on a named individual led to a multiplication of chantry masses paid for by those keen to ease their loved ones heavenwards.

Yet there was also much in contemporary piety that was more individual and thoughtful. Schooling and lay literacy had grown as disposable income rose and child labour became dispensable in the economy of larger numbers of households. From 1476, when William Caxton began printing at Westminster, and 1507-8, when Walter Chepman and Andrew Millar did the same at Edinburgh, book production could advance well beyond even the well-organised copying of manuscript texts organised by fifteenth-century stationers.

From the outset, religious books were central to the market for print. Some were compilations of saints' lives or single-sheet indulgences to purchase the remission of sins on the authority of the Church. But many - 114 known editions for the English market at perhaps 500 copies each between the 1470s and the 1530s were primers, books of Latin prayers for reading in church or at home, often in tune with the Christocentric trend of the new devotions to the Five Wounds of Christ or the Holy Name of Jesus. Others catered to a still more individual lay spirituality, ranging from the works of the English mystic Walter Hilton through translations of Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ to the sermons on the penitential psalms of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester.

Some books stimulated an individual or family religion condemned by the Church as heretical. Manuscript works generated by the Wycliffite scholars of the late-fourteenth century still circulated in the Lollard communities of the Chilterns and elsewhere. Indeed, bishops were finding more Lollards to condemn than they had for a century, though it is unclear whether there were more to find or whether they were looking harder. Lollardy would soon blend with Protestantism seeping in from abroad. Both movements were critical of the monasteries, most of which were past their best well before Henry VIII and the Scottish reformers struck them down. On the other hand, Protestantism drew some of its earliest leaders - the martyr Robert Barnes and Bishops Bale, Coverdale and Hilsey in England, John Willock and John McAlpine in Scotland - from the friars. Bequests from lay people suggest their preaching and pastoral work were still widely popular. They featured in the Franciscan Observants, the favourite reforming movement of Henry VII as of many of his contemporaries on the thrones of Europe. And they would provide, together with More, Fisher and the Carthusians, the leading opposition to Henry VIII's attack on the church.

To cater for the needs of a more educated laity, expansion in the universities aimed to generate a more educated secular clergy, though the lawyers tended to outnumber the preachers. New colleges were being founded at a lively rate. Between 1440 and 1530 Cambridge gained King's, Queens', Jesus, Christ's, and St John's; Oxford added Magdalen, Brasenose, Corpus Christi, and Cardinal's College (now Christ Church); and Scotland saw three new colleges at St Andrews and new universities at Glasgow and Aberdeen. In the universities, as at court, humanist intellectual influences from Italy, France and the Netherlands were gathering strength. Desiderius Erasmus, whose publication of the Adages, pearls of wisdom culled from the classics, in 1500, marked him out as the rising star of northern humanism, visited England in 1499 and struck up a lasting friendship with the young Thomas More. The association would lead in 1516 to More's Utopia, the greatest English contribution to international humanist literature. For the moment direct humanist influences on vernacular literature were not so strong. English and Scots verse alike was dominated by authors, such as Skelton and Dunbar, who looked back to Chaucer rather than across to Italy. Welsh and Irish poets continued to develop their inherited traditions under the patronage of local lords whose lineage, hospitality and valour they praised with great virtuosity. More in Part C.....