The Pre-Reformation Church in England 1400-1530

Christopher Harper-Bill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317888130
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Offers a concise synthesis of the valuable research accomplished in recent years which has transformed our view of religious belief and practice in pre-Reformation England. The author argues that the church was neither in a state of crisis, nor were its members clamouring for change, let alone `reformation' during the early years of Henry VIII's reign.

Part One:
The Background

1
The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages

The late Middle Ages was a period of crisis, which is not to say that it was a time of decline. During the fourteenth century the buoyant confidence which had been the main characteristic of the expansionist western European society of the previous two hundred years was shattered by a concatenation of apparent disasters. The fall of Acre in 1291 marked the end of the crusader states on the mainland of Asia, and henceforth holy war was to be defensive, designed to stem Islamic incursions into Europe, but constantly hampered by the rivalries of western kings and princes. The flourishing economy of the thirteenth century, when land-hunger had resulted in the cultivation of the most marginal lands, suddenly collapsed with the deterioration of the climate, and Europe had suffered a series of appalling harvests and consequent famines in the second decade of the fourteenth century before her weakened population was for the first time in 1347 attacked by the plague known as the Black Death. In 1337 the simmering hostility between the kings of France and England erupted into open confrontation, and most other western powers were drawn into the endemic conflict which has become known as the Hundred Years War. The coincidence of warfare and pestilence which swept the Continent would have been enough to dispel the theological optimism of the central Middle Ages without a simultaneous crisis of authority within the church.

The arrest at Anagni in 1303 of Pope Boniface VIII by the agents of the king of France has long been regarded as a watershed in the history of the Catholic church, a reversal of that papal domination of western European religion established during the great reform movement of the late eleventh century and associated with Pope Gregory VII (1073—85). Many kings, including those of England, had in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries been able, in practice, to limit papal authority within their territories. Anagni is symptomatic, therefore, not so much of a recovery of real power over the church by the western monarchies, as of a fundamental shift of attitudes. In the late eleventh century secular rulers had been stripped of their ritual functions as king-priests, the religious leaders of their people, and they had responded by developing bureaucratic forms of government which compensated for their loss of theocratic authority (85). The recovery and reception in the thirteenth century, through contact with Islam, of the political thought of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle led to the questioning of the papal assertion that the secular power had been established merely as a remedy for evil, necessary because of man’s sinful nature and therefore reluctantly tolerated by God. An alternative view was now proposed, that the state was the result of man’s natural tendency towards association, which was positively approved by God. The king was rehabilitated: no longer was power even in theory mediated to him by the pope, but rather it was granted to him by the voice of the people, which was equated with the voice of God. When Boniface VIII clashed with King Philip IV over the royal right to tax and exercise jurisdiction over the clergy of France, he was confronted not only by superior physical force, which was the perennial problem of the Papacy, but by an independently-based ideology of the state which owed nothing to papal interpretation of the Bible. Henceforth the king of France acted as religious leader of his people with little reference to the pope. The English king, more limited in his initiatives because of the effective balance of political power between crown, aristocracy, and the gentry and merchant classes represented in the emergent House of Commons, quietly tightened his control over the resources of the church within his realm, excusing himself to the pope by pleading the anti-papalism of Parliament which, despite his devotion to the Holy See, he was allegedly incapable of restraining (76).

In 1309 Pope Clement V established the Papacy at Avignon, in territory long held by the bishops of Rome. In view of the chronic disorder of the papal states in central Italy, this was a sensible move. From Avignon was financed a long and ultimately successful campaign to reduce the patrimony of St Peter around Rome to obedience and order. The machinery of ecclesiastical government did not collapse, rather its efficiency was enhanced; but the increasing sophistication displayed in the extraction from the western church of that money essential for the financing of central Italian campaigns caused the alienation of those whose purses were lightened by papal taxation. Also antagonised were those who experienced the erosion of their own resources of patronage at the hands of popes who, desperate to provide for their servants and to win support, expanded to the limits their plenitude of power in reserving to themselves appointment to an ever-extended range of lucrative ecclesiastical positions. This resentment was especially pronounced in England, where it was believed that the popes were the creatures of the enemy, the French king. English hostility was officially expressed in the passing by Parliament of the Statute of Provisors (1351), which forbade petitioning for or acceptance of papal appointment to ecclesiastical benefices (although this prohibition was ignored by the crown when papal initiative was to the advantage of royal servants), and the Statute of Praemunire (1353), which prohibited appeals to the papal court in any matter which might be interpreted as pertaining to royal jurisdiction. The spiritual authority of the Papacy was not in any way attacked: there was no challenge to its position as supreme arbiter in matters of faith, doctrine and religious practice. The church, however, was rooted in the land; it had been endowed by kings, lords and communities for the spiritual welfare of the people. Because the church had enormous economic assets and individual churches were held in English law to be pieces of real estate, the property and patronage rights of the English people, and most particularly of the king, must be safeguarded (23, 76). Since papal bureaucrats, operating according to the canon law of the church, in fact shared this view of churches as property, king and pope operated according to the same premises, and if their relationship was punctuated by clashes over the delineation of their respective rights, normality was a process of mutual accommodation.

English lamentation over the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ of the Papacy at Avignon was prompted by nationalistic and financial motives. A major crisis of spiritual authority was occasioned by the outbreak in 1378 of the Great Schism (70). Almost immediately after the return of the papal court to Rome, a group of French cardinals challenged the validity of the election of the Italian Pope Urban VI, and themselves elected one of their number as Pope Clement VII. A schism in the Papacy was not unprecedented: for periods amounting to fifty years during the twelfth century there had been rival claimants to the throne of St Peter, but it had usually been reasonably certain which one was the rightful pontiff and which one the creature of the German emperor, who was seeking to impose his own authority on central Italy. Now there was no such certainty. The situation was considerably aggravated by the political divisions of western Europe: since France and her allies recognised Clement VII and his successors who resettled at Avignon, so those powers which were allied to England acknowledged the Roman line. Secular governments and great ecclesiastical bodies were, at a price, able to extract numerous concessions from the rival popes, each of whom was desperate to retain the loyalty of his supporters and whose spiritual revenues had been halved by the division of western Christendom into two obediences. This is not to say that the Schism was welcomed and cynically exploited. Throughout western Europe there was profound malaise, for it was an obvious scandal that the seamless robe of Christ which was the church should thus be rent apart. Universities, cathedral chapters and even secular governments devoted much agonised thought and effort to the resolution of the crisis, which prompted the fundamental question: where did ultimate authority within the church reside – in the pope, or in the college of cardinals who elected him, or in the whole body of bishops, or within the Christian community at large, acting through its representatives? There gradually emerged a consensus that only a general council of the church could resolve this impasse, and thus was inaugurated the period in the church’s history known as the Conciliar Movement. According to the law of the church, however, only the pope could summon a general council. When the cardinals of both obediences at last seized the initiative and convened a council at Pisa in 1409, the outcome was not the resolution of the Schism, for neither pope acceptcd his deposition, but rather the creation of a third line of rival popes inaugurated by the election by the disillusioned cardinals of Pope Alexander V.

This chaos was resolved by the intervention of the Emperor Sigismund, who enjoyed far greater prestige and wielded more power than his immediate predecessors. He convened another general council at Constance in 1414 which, after the removal of the contending popes, three years later re-established an undivided Papacy by the election of Martin V. In this council the English delegates exercised a disproportionate influence, because of Henry V’s spectacular military successes in France, and it was they who, operating under royal direction, ensured that a new and undisputed pope should be elected before any reforms were implemented. The reward for this was the English Concordat of 1418, by which Martin V formally conceded to the king the authority over the church in his realm which his predecessors had in fact enjoyed throughout the past century, and which was scarcely diminished by the pope’s subsequent attempts to recover some measure of control over English ecclesiastical appointments.

The Council of Constance had proclaimed the overriding authority within the church of general councils, which should be held frequently. The Restoration Papacy was determined to reassert its own untrammelled position within the church. The two opposing theories of ecclesiastical government were brought into open conflict when the Council of Basle, summoned reluctantly in 1431, was almost immediately dissolved by Pope Eugenius IV but remained in session, ultimately initiating another potential schism by the election of its own ‘pope’. The kings of western Europe, however, alarmed that rejection of the monarchical authority of the pope within the church might create a precedent for the restriction of their own powers, threw in their lot with the Papacy. The Council of Basle continued to meet until 1449, but it had long since become an irrelevance. The papal attitude to conciliarism is summarised by the decree of Pope Pius II in 1460, in which he stated that it was execrable to believe in the superiority of council over pope.

The popes of the Renaissance did not abdicate their spiritual responsibilities. They continued to legislate for the Christian commonwealth; they strove to organise the crusade so desperately needed for the defence of western Christendom after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453; and they built anew in the latest style to the greater glory of God. They were, however, constantly bedevilled by two horrific spectres – that the resurrection of conciliarism would jeopardise their spiritual authority, limited as that was in practice after the concordats with the various nations; and that the incursions of the Great Powers into Italy would destroy the autonomy of the papal states and reduce the pope to the role of domestic chaplain to the secular master of the peninsula, constrained by temporal domination to abandon his universal functions in favour of partisan action. Popes such as Alexander VI (1492-1503) and Julius II (1503-13) were violently criticised by contemporary writers for conduct far removed from the apostolic ideal; yet in the light of fifteenth-century developments their determination to maximise their power in central Italy, which was the keynote of their pontificates, was a rational and expedient policy. The use of Machiavellian strategies by the ruler of Rome was essential if the independence of the Vicar of Christ was to be maintained. The fusion of the two threats to the Papacy came with the summoning by the French king of a general council of the church at Pisa in 151 i; the motivation was overtly political, and he received little support outside his own dominions. The Fifth Lateran Council, which met from 1512 to 1517, was convened by the pope as a riposte to King Louis XIFs initiative, but it was also the scene of profoundly serious discussion of the general reform of the church. Little was achieved, largely because the pope was haunted by the prospect of the diminution of his plenitude of power, and that little was also circumscribed by the vested interests of his own bureaucrats. Pope Leo X’s experience of the council was such that he did not see fit to convene another assembly to meet the challenge of Martin Luther.

In the absence of papal support in the later Middle Ages for the numerous initiatives for a general reform of the church ‘in head and members’, there were many localised campaigns for spiritual regeneration. In the Low Countries and the Rhineland there emerged in the late fourteenth century a movement which became known as the Devotio Moderna (the modern devotion), whose key text was the significantly entitled The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. The adherents of the movement—men and women who, despite the suspicions of some contemporary ecclesiastics, remained strictly within the bounds of orthodoxy – attempted to live a common life based on the model of the monastic piety of the twelfth century, yet unrestrained by religious vows. The only evidence for such communities in England – where they were short-lived – comes from Norwich (88), but the ethos of intense meditation and strict morality was imported and fused with the native tradition of disciplined mysticism to influence the devotional lives of numerous literate English households. There was a continent-wide revival of strict forms of regular* life, characterised by the expansion of the Carthusian Order, the most austere of the traditional forms of the enclosed life; by the foundation of new orders such as the Bridgettines (established in 1378); and by the reform of many of the old orders by the institution of Observant wings, which adhered rigidly to the letter of their Rules and rejected the alleged laxity of modern times. The English province of the Carthusian Order was probably the most vigorous in Europe, and the Bridgettine house at Syon by the Thames was a centre of English spirituality; but of the Observant branches only that of the Franciscans was introduced into the kingdom in the late fifteenth century. The contribution of humanist scholars to reform, which consisted mainly of the establishment of authentic and purified texts and the criticism, more or less good-humoured, of so-called superstitious accretions to religion, had little effect on the beliefs or practice of the generality of Christians, but these innovatory scholars were influential in the court circles of western Europe, and certainly in that of England in the early sixteenth century (63). The greatest of the Christian humanists, Desiderius Erasmus, who like most of his fellows remained an orthodox if discriminating Catholic, found hospitality in England and established a wide circle of friends and correspondents there.

The most effective reform, however, was that implemented on a national basis. By the early sixteenth century, although the spiritual unity of western Europe had been marred only by the existence of the separatist Hussite church in Bohemia, the organisation of the Latin church had become fragmented, so that the period from 1449 to 1517 has been characterised as ‘the era of national churches’ (70). Control of ecclesiastical finances and the selection of senior personnel was increasingly the prerogative of kings and other secular powers. What could be accomplished was demonstrated by the wide-ranging reforms achieved in the Spanish church by Cardinal Ximenez, who presided over it from 1495 to 1517 by the will of the pious queen, Isabella of Castille. He created an ambience in which humanist scholarship and intense mystical piety could flourish within the environment of fiercely orthodox religion and monarchical authoritarianism.

Such royal initiative for religious reform had been shown in England by King Henry V (1413-22), who was as eager to increase the effectiveness of the militia of Christ within his kingdom as he was to promote that of his temporal armies on the battlefields of France (110) The impetus was lost with his tragically premature death. Henry VI shared his father’s intense piety, but his long minority, followed by his bouts of imbecility, resulted in his loss of control of the crown’s extensive patronage, that most essential tool of government, and the quality of episcopal appointments temporarily declined as the leaders of factions around the court installed their own nominees. However, the vicissitudes of the English monarchy between 1399 and 1485 and the unfortunate involvement of ecclesiastics in the internecine strife which characterised Henry Vi’s reign do not appear to have resulted in a breakdown of clerical discipline or a crisis of faith, financial investment in the church continued unabated in the middle years of the fifteenth century, and the laity continued to resort voluntarily to the church courts for the resolution of their disputes. When strong royal control of the church was reimposed by Edward IV (1461-83) and Henry VII (1485-1509), the able bishops whom they appointed were set at the head of a church which was, in its fundamental aspects, a healthy organism. There were, indeed, constant impassioned pleas for reform in England as on the Continent, but these should not be accepted uncritically as an indictment. They may be seen, rather, as a reflection of rising demands and expectations of performance which were clothed in conventional rhetoric, and as a sign of the vigour of the Roman church in its provinces which survived the crisis of authority at the centre.

Part Two:
Analysis

2
The English Church, the Crown and the Papacy

Royal power

The firm control exercised by the crown over the church in England on the eve of the Reformation was no novelty, and until Henry VIII broke with Rome, the Tudor monarchs acted in accordance with long-established custom. From before the Norman Conquest English kings had shown an intense and obtrusive interest in the personnel, the finances and the spiritual efficacy of the church within their realm. The vigorous assertion by the Papacy and its advocates in the late eleventh century of the supreme authority of Rome within a western European church in which national frontiers were merely convenient divisions of a unified Christian commonwealth had done little, in the long term, to diminish royal power. Papal competence in matters of doctrine and moral jurisdiction was recognised, but even in the aftermath of the confrontation between Henry II and Thomas Becket those rights which were most profitable or useful to the king were little diminished. The Papacy might threaten to depose rulers who contravened its interpretation of the plan for the government of Christian society outlined by God in the Bible, but it was only when kings were thought by their own subjects to have flouted social and constitutional conventions that papal declaration of the divine law might threaten the position of a ruler who had already sacrificed the support of his vassals. The decline of papal prestige in the later Middle Ages lessened even this constraint (36, 85).

The long papal residence at Avignon and the assumption, general if incorrect, that the pope was the creature of the king of France fostered a nationalistic view of the English church. From the reign of Edward I prayers and processions for the success of the king in war had regularly been staged throughout the realm. Such liturgical propaganda became more frequent from the outbreak of the Hundred Years War. By the 1350s a popular verse held that the pope had become French, but Jesus had become English. The Chancellor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editorial Foreword
• Note On Referencing System
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One The Background
• Part Two Analysis
• Part Three Assessment
• Part Four Documents
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Bibliographical Update for Revised Edition
• Index