RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN
THE PARISHES
RELIGION & RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND,
C.1470-1558
THE REFORMATION – BEFORE & AFTER:
Pre-Reformation:
• A parish religion:
• Communal (where faith
met community)
• Based on ritual, on DOING
Shaped by actions – actions
dependent upon liturgy –
liturgy dependent upon
material culture
Removing that culture was
traumatic
• Prevent expression of belief
• Prevent the community
worshipping the divine as it
had for generations
Post-Reformation:
• Story of loss:
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Monasteries
Chantries
Altars
Christ’s Body & Blood
Relics
Images of saints
Pilgrimages
Guilds
Whitewashed walls
CONTRASTING EXPERIENCES:
• LOOKED, SMELT, & SOUNDED DIFFERENT
• ACCESS TO THE SACRED CURTAILED – POINTS AT
WHICH THE SACRED & THE PROFANE MET
ERADICATED
• IF LATE-MEDIEVAL CATHOLICISM DEFINED BY
TANGIBLE EXPERIENCES OF THE DIVINE IN THIS
WORLD, THE REFORMATION CLEARLY DRAMATIC &
TRAUMATIC
But……
THE CONUNDRUM:
• A decidedly ORDERLY Reformation…..
• We expect to see a revolution – but what marks
England’s Reformation out above all else is how
quietly this was all achieved.
• Problem: English laity not want a Reformation; but
neither did they act to prevent it from happening.
HISTORIOGRAPHY:
• Traditional school – kicking out the rot:
• ‘Had to’ happen: Reformation a bad form of religion replaced
by a good one
• Revisionists – the ‘long Reformation’:
• LMC buoyant – even in Elizabeth I reign, surprising legacy of
traditional religion; ‘Protestant nation’ problematic
• Mary I – could have restored Catholicism if lived longer
• HVIII/EVI – broad acceptance:
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Lukewarm in religion?
Moral dilemma – Crown or Conscience?
Negative – fear the consequences of resistance
Positive – duty-bound to obey
‘Grumbling’, ‘hesitant’ – not convey moral agony that
accompanied change
• Mary I:
• A change in belief; or ‘nothing happened’?
EVIDENCE:
• Illiteracy:
• Problem – reading ideas from actions
• When ‘ordinary’ people appear, usually in courts – typical?
• Wills:
• Quantification possible
• Preambles – who entrust soul to? What want done about it?
• Problem – homogenous; scribe or individual?
• Material Culture:
• Fabric of the Church/ trace its objects
• Church accounts:
• Expenditure of the community
• Trace when they implement changes; and which ones they ignored.
• Later reigns – Church attendance seen as an effective form of
calculating resistance.
• Authorities only really keen to assess after 1559
THE PROCESS OF CHANGE:
• Who implemented change?
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Local people
Churchwardens (appointed by the parish)
Clergy
Often continuity across reigns (often communal hostility)
INDIVIDUAL CONSERVATIVES/EVANGELICALS COULD HAVE A
DISPROPORTIONATE IMPACT
• The Tudor State?
• Not autonomous
• Relied upon will/compliance of the people
• No roads/news networks/police
• Importance of the gentry
• HVIII an unlikely ‘Stalin’
• Makes obedience remarkable
OBEDIENCE?
• Rex – dominant ethos of HVIII’s Church
• Constantly tested authority at a parish level
• Response was generally consistent
• When royal will was clear, work carried out obediently
• Hutton – English/Welsh ‘a limited capacity to sustain any
beliefs attacked by both leading Churchmen and by the
Crown’
• Remarkable capacity of the monarchy to compel obedience
• Duty – outgrowth of Orders/hierarchy
• Own desires/needs less significant to the body politic
• ‘Grumbling Reformation’ – not a particularly dramatic
narrative
• Obedience not = agreement; compliance not necessarily passive.
CITIES:
• Interests of lay rulers better served by acquiescence
than by challenging royal will
• CONFORMITY CONCEALS A WIDE RANGE OF DETAILED
RESPONSES
• Variety & breadth:
• York – conservative city
• Charge of disobedience following the Pilgrimage of Grace
• Subsequently an ostentatious display of obedience
• But revelled in the return of the Mass under Mary
• Bristol – made a virtue of neutrality
• 1530s: disputes between corporation & clergy triggered by Latimer’s
sermons
• Authorities pulled back from pursuing further reform; explicit in
following royal will as closely as possible
• 1540 – ask Cromwell to send visitor to ensure things done correctly
• Norwich
• McClendon – ‘quiet Reformation’
• Kett’s rebellion suggested that true feelings may be elsewhere
DISOBEDIENCE:
• Considerable indication of a reluctance to change:
• Anecdotal, not empirical
• Speedy return to Catholicism under Mary
• Reluctance to go beyond the law in reform
• Anger:
• Cromwell received plenty of information about hostility to attacks
on imagery in 1530s
• 1543, Chilham (Kent): vicar ordered to destroy the Rood; used the
King’s Book to protect images; locked officials out of the church;
JPs protected them.
• Clergy under considerable pressure:
• Lay anger at clerical conformity; 1549 Western Rebellion triggered
by the new liturgy
• Beverley, 1536 – curate read injunctions against Saints’ Days;
parishioners responded that ‘they would have their holydays bid
and kept as before’.
• Were these issues of ‘evangelical’ or ‘conservative’
beliefs/principals; or the reactions of communities who had been
organising their own religious lives for generations and resented
outside encroachment?
ICONOCLASM (OR, HOW IT HAPPENED):
Sale:
• Parishes involved – sell objects
• Not happen TO them – shaped it.
• Objects associated with saints/
the Mass
• Range of motivations:
• Evangelism/Protestantism
• Compliance with official policy
• Paying for new objects they were
required to purchase
• Prevent that State getting its hands
on their wealth
• BUT – emotion?
• Keep their goods in the community
• People taking ownership of objects
donated by their kin
• Often given back to the Church
under Mary
• Much of this material no longer in the
Church; but certainly in the parish
Concealment:
• Objects buried/pasted over
(whitewashing needed
repeating):
• Wakefield – 25 alabaster images in
the loft
• Flawford (Nottingham) – 3 images
hidden under the floor of the
chancel
• Commissioners wise to them:
• Morebath – vicar had to appear 4
times before they were satisfied he
had not hidden the Church
vestments
• ‘Cooking’ the books – rich parishes
making meagre returns
• Wycombe (Bucks) – wardens
concealed 3 sets of
vestments/Catholic liturgical books/3
crosses/altar cloths/ 2 censors/ 9
candelsticks
•
Could have carried out the Mass if
they had wanted to.
THEFT & DESPOILING:
• ‘Why not’?
• Someone is going to profit from this
• A pre-Reformation problem – Reformation a market for
opportunists:
• Essex returns – some churches robbed repeatedly in EVI’s reign
• Hertfordshire – commissioners issued a special report on theft
• Dissolution an example to follow?
• Legitimised looting
• Combined with persistent evangelical propaganda against
sacred objects
• Easy to move into the mental space to loot it
DIVISION & CONFLICT:
• Opportunism:
• A lot of ‘stuff’ now on the
market
• Kerrrrching!
• Buy at knock-down prices
• Corruption?
• Great Bromley, principal
purchaser William Cardinal (Lord
Mayor & the royal commissioner
for Church goods)
• ‘Community’ ruptured:
• Divisions between those who
supported reform; and those
who did not
• Those who profited from the
dismantling of late medieval
Catholicism; and those who
did not
• Marian legacy:
• Recriminations – scarred the
community
• Marian churchwarden on
Stanford-in-the-Vale:
Edwardian ‘wicked time of
schism’ in reference to
previous wardens’ accounts
• Marian legacy:
• Corpus Christianorum
• Mass – a rite of peace
• Charity of Christ unified the
community
• Kiss of peace in the pax ensured
the ending of feuds
• Ending it caused dissention
INCULCATING THE NEW:
• Removing the old much more successful than
implementing the new.
• Churchwardens’ accounts show much, much
slower to purchase new aspects of liturgy:
• Prayer books
• Bibles
• Erasmus’s Paraphrases
Considerable foot-dragging……..
Church Court records reveal a disinclination to reform
beneath the surface of compliance.
MARIAN JOY:
• True colours?
• Theology not religion – for
those on the ground,
tradition spoke volumes
• Society feared change:
why?
• Truth = universal; universal =
unchanging – what always
true must be true.
• The Mass:
• Miles Hogarde – return to a
time when England lived in
‘marvellous love and amity,
in true dealing and honest
simplicity’
• Mass heart of this system
• Unity in Church
• Assimilation of God within the
community
• Galvanize support for Mary:
• Summer 1553, spontaneous
celebration
• Even though still technically
illegal
• Ireland – John Bale horrified to
see clergy/laity arrive with old
trappings – ‘they mustered forth
in general procession most
gorgeously all the town over’.
• Restored with vigour under Mary:
• Centre of Catholicism
• Works righteousness (not Faith
Alone)
• Power of priests as mediators –
need the Church to channel
grace.
• Purchase of Mass
paraphernalia/ altars
• Structural work – rebuild
altars/purchase correct texts
‘NOTHING HAPPENED’; OR A ‘BROKEN
CATHOLICISM’?
• Big question: was pre-Reformation traditional
Catholicism changed by experience of
conflict/persecution
• Unsubtle to conclude ‘no impact’:
• Pre-Henrician Catholicism not simply ‘restored’
• Institutional changes
• Economic considerations (made it impossible)
• Two considerations:
• 1) Time was short – Mary d.1558
• 2) Monasteries/Chantries a dramatic blow
• Revolution in landholding/MPs reluctant to restore
• Significant impact for concepts of death
‘NOTHING HAPPENED’; OR A ‘BROKEN
CATHOLICISM’?
• Will-making shows a decline
of belief in purgatory and
the saints:
• Prayers for the dead/to saints
changing
• Obits/bede rolls/provisions for
intercessory prayers not regain preReformation levels
• Decline of chantries – porous nature
of natural/supernatural changed
• Within the Church – the Rood took
precedent over saints’ images
• Christocentrism
• Wills suggest moves towards a more
Christocentric form of devotion
• A response to the challenge of
reform?
• Joan Holder (1556) – bequeathed
soul to ‘God my creator and
redeemer unto whose mercy I
commit myself unto, trusting by the
merits of his passion to inherit the
kingdom of heaven to pray for me’.
• ‘Broken Catholicism’?
• Not ‘restored’ but ‘re-vitalised’
• New fervours of piety defined
Mary’s Church
• Not conservatism, but a
Reformation in its own light
• Anticipating Trent?
• Many reforms undertaken at
Trent present in Marian England
• Mary an agent of reform; not a
bulwark of conservatism
• Christian Humanism vital