ABSTRACT
A bishop or the abbot of a large, well-endowed monastery would have a range of lower clerics to assist him; there may have been a practiced choir and a large audience. In a local church, the same ritual would probably be performed by the priest alone, with a much simpler chalice and paten, while the audience in some places consisted of just a handful of believers. Interestingly, the – usually normative – texts that give any detailed information at all on the subject of mass and its lay audience generally assume two things: in the first place that lay people as a rule lived close enough to a church to go there and attend mass, and second that people actually went to these gatherings. The theme of salvation is frequent in both texts, and taken together the knowledge shared through these explanations can be considered as a compact guide to Christian life as a whole.
