We may begin by saying that England then was at the center of Catholic Europe. It was a shared civilisation of ceremony and spectacle, of drama, of ritual and display; life was only the beginning, not the end, of existence and thus could be celebrated or scorned as one station along the holy way. It was a world in which irony and parody of all kinds flourished, where excremental truth and holy vision were considered fundamentally compatible, where Aquinas could mount towards heaven with his divine dialectic and Rabelais stoop towards the earth with his gargantuan corporeality. It was a world of symbolic ceremony, with the processions of Palm Sunday, the rending of the veil in Holy Week and the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday. Doves were released at Pentecost in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Resurrection dramatised on Easter Day in Lichfield Cathedral. It was a world also deeply imbued with symbolic numerology; this lies behind the preoccupation with form and ritual, as well as the fascination with pattern. There were the five wounds of Christ and the five joys of the Virgin, the five wits of the human self and the five principal social virtues of fraunchise, felawship, cleanness, cortaysye and pite. There are seven sins, seven sacraments, and seven works of mercy, all of them part of the passage of humankind through earthly existence; the importance of allegory may here be glimpsed, with the allegorical “reading” of texts and illuminations as a fundamental prerequisite for the understanding of Piers the Plowman, Pearl or the “General Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales.