Duffy on "creeping to the cross"

Historian Eamon Duffy describes the late Medieval Good Friday tradition of “creeping to the cross” in English churches and how the Protestant Reformers sought to discourage it:

“Good Friday in the late Middle Ages was a day of deepest mourning. No mass was celebrated, and the main liturgical celebration of the day was a solemn and penitential commemoration of the Passion. The whole of the narrative of St. John’s Gospel was read, with a small dramatic embellishment: at the words ‘They parted my garments among them’ the clerks parted and removed two linen cloths which had been specially placed for the purpose on the otherwise bare altar….”

Later, “The cross was unveiled in three stages….”

“Clergy and people then crept barefoot and on their knees to kiss the foot of the cross, held by two ministers.”

“Creeping to the cross was one of the most frequent targets of Protestant reformers from the 1530s onwards, and there can be no doubt of the place it held in lay piety: well into the Elizabethan period Bishop Grindal would complain on Good Friday ‘some certeyn persons go barefooted and barelegged to the churche, to creepe to the crosse.’”

-The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, p. 29.