Vitality and vulnerability in the late medieval church
Long seen as riddled with abuses and thus an easy and inevitable target of critics, the late medieval English church has recently - and often movingly - been presented by Jack Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy as still cherished by an overwhelming majority of laypeople, offering spiritual services that most men and women fully welcomed. The difficulty with that approach, however, is that it makes the subsequent Reformation inexplicable. How could so popular a church be overturned, even allowing for the threats and pressures that rulers could impose? Why did many
(even if not as many as protestant historians once used to claim) welcome the protestant message, and rejoice in the dissolution of the monasteries and the abandonment of practices such as pilgrimages that they saw as superstition? The fashionable emphasis on the vitality of the late medieval church, while in many ways convincing, can nonetheless distort. It is the aim of this study to see the late medieval church from a fresh perspective, one that balances an emphasis on its vitality with - crucially - an exploration of its vulnerability to criticism. In this I aspire to transcend the ever-prevalent confessionalism of so much writing on religious history and to offer a more compelling synthesis. An enriched understanding of the late medieval church is valuable in itself. It also has profound implications for the way we understand the religious and political history of Tudor England, and the subsequent very distinctive and persisting character of the church of England, relations between church and state, and thus
English society as such, in succeeding centuries. Although my study is focussed on the halfcentury before the 1530s, the decade of the break with Rome, its significance is much larger than the period with which it deals.
My book begins with a cause celebre : the death in December 1514 of the London merchant
Richard Hunne while in an episcopal prison under suspicion of heresy. But my purpose is not to use that affair to offer a modern reworking of the martyrologist John Foxe's grand narrative of the forward march of the godly in which Hunne stands as a forerunner. Rather, details from the
Hunne affair dramatically raise questions and highlight themes that my book will explore.
The Hunne affair came to an end (as my reinterpretation of recent discoveries in the records of
King's Bench shows) when Henry VIII intervened in the legal process and accepted church officials' pleas that they were not guilty. Such royal intervention vividly demonstrates how much the church in England was a monarchical church, very much under the influence and control of successive kings, the theme of the first chapter of my book. After Hunne's death, the bishop of
London defended his officials against lay hostility: the second chapter of this book will evaluate the effectiveness of bishops as leaders of the church and as 'lanterns of light' for their flocks. The
Hunne affair began in a quarrel between a London merchant and his parish priest: chapter three will assess how well parish clergy were serving their parishioners, especially in the light of recent studies of parishes as communities. Hunne was clearly interested in religious matters.
Chapter four will explore lay understanding of the christian faith: in considering how laypeople acquired their knowledge, as much attention will be paid to mystery plays and wall paintings in churches as t more formal modes of instruction.
Hunne had refused to make a payment to the church. Popular piety - as reflected in chantries and gilds, pilgrimages, church (re)building - depended on lay contributions and involvement.
Chapter five assesses how far such lay religious activity reflected social conformity or conviviality more than it did deep conviction and genuine understanding. Chapter six will deal

with the condition of the monasteries. Here there is no obviously direct prompt offered by the
Hunne affair: but that in itself stimulates reflections on whether monasticism was playing a less significant part in late medieval society and religion. Hunne had allegedly questioned the place of saints and the significance of purgatory. Chapter seven will assess the extent to which the possibly superstitious features of late medieval religion left it vulnerable to criticism, whether from the first-principled moralising of a merchant who had not formally been educated, or from an erasmian or protestant perspective. Pilgrimages depended upon faith in the power of saints to work miracles. There were risks that purgatory would be treated in arithmetical-mechanistic ways.
Hunne was charged with heresy. That raises the question of how widespread and how organised dissent was. Chapter eight will consider how far there was a 'sect' of true believers in opposition to the church - and raise the uncomfortable possibility that truculent individuals were fashioned into heretics by a church that mistook idealistic criticism for heresy.
My conclusion will assess how far those features help explain developments in the reign of
Henry VIII - the break with Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, the pursuit of a doctrinal and liturgical middle way between Rome and Wittenberg - that are the subject of my forthcoming monograph on The King's Reformation . But it will also draw together the evidence for the vitality of the late medieval church - seen especially here in churchbuilding - and, in emphasising the contingency of events, will deny that there was anything inevitable about the forms that the English Reformation would take.
CHAPTERS
Introduction: The Hunne Affair
1. The monarchical church of England
2. Bishops
3. Clergy
4. Lay beliefs
5. Chantries, pilgrimages, churchbuilding
6. Criticism
7. The condition of the monasteries
8. Dissent and its repression
Conclusion: Vitality and Vulnerability