Candlemas, Lent, and the Rules of Fasting
Candlemas and Lent together kicked off the most visually dramatic and dietetically demanding stretch of the whole medieval Church year — genuine hardship layered on top of genuine spectacle, and the details of both survive in surprisingly specific detail.
Candlemas, on 2 February, marked the Virgin Mary’s ritual purification forty days after Christ’s birth, and required every parishioner, adults and children alike, to bring a candle to church for blessing — a Beverley guild dedicated to Mary went further still, with members dressing up as Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and angels to walk in torchlit procession through the streets to church. Roughly three weeks later, Ash Wednesday opened the forty days of Lent proper, marked by ashes painted onto every forehead in the shape of a cross while the priest intoned, “Remember, man, that you are ash, and to ash you shall return” — followed, at least in liturgical theory, by a formal ceremony expelling any serious public penitents from the church entirely until their readmission on Maundy Thursday, three days before Easter.
Lent’s dietary rules were genuinely comprehensive: no meat, no “white meats” (eggs, milk, butter, cheese), fish and shellfish the only permitted animal protein for the full forty days, with pregnant women, nursing mothers, children, manual labourers, the sick, the elderly, and travelling pilgrims all specifically excused from the fast entirely. A large hanging curtain, the “Lenten veil,” was strung across the chancel to physically block the high altar from view for most of the season — drawn back only on Saturday evenings so Sunday’s congregation could still see the consecration, then rehung again before Monday’s services resumed. And on the Wednesday before Easter, as the Passion story reached the words “the veil of the Temple was rent in the middle,” the Lenten veil was deliberately allowed to fall from its own hanging rail at exactly that moment — a genuinely well-timed piece of medieval liturgical stagecraft, landing the physical prop and the spoken text together in a single dramatic beat.
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