From Catholic To Protestant

Religion and the People in Tudor and Stuart England

Doreen Margaret Rosman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135365417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This work, aimed at students unfamiliar with religious ideas and terminology, attempts to convey the centrality of religion to people's lives in early modern England, and to understand why people were prepared to die and kill for their faith.

CHAPTER ONE

Religion and daily life in the early sixteenth century

Five hundred years ago the church was part of the fabric of everyday life in a way it has long ceased to be. Wherever people looked they saw religious symbols. At parish boundaries, at street crossings, at stiles and on bridges, carved crosses and statues of saints proclaimed that God was guarding those who lived there and travellers who journeyed through. The year was structured round religious festivals, not just Christmas and Easter, which survive as public holidays today, but many others commemorating key episodes in the life of Jesus and the birth of the church. Interspersed among the major festivals were vast numbers of saints’ days. These constituted the most commonly recognized calendar in a largely unlettered age: people planning to meet or fixing a date by which a debt might be paid made arrangements with reference to Peter’s-tide, the Eve of St Agnes, or the fair that met on a particular saint’s day. On important holy days (the origin of holidays) work ceased or was substantially reduced so that people could attend religious services, feasts, revels and sports. During some festivals, pageants and plays on biblical themes were performed at different venues within each town. Often there were street parades, with accompanying handbells, banners and processional crosses.

This chapter aims to outline the belief system that lay behind these practices and to explain how people thought. This is not to imply that belief was uniform: the last section will attempt to explore the diversity of religious attitudes. But early modern people shared widespread assumptions that are alien to our society: this chapter seeks to elucidate those assumptions and communicate something of what it felt like to hold such beliefs.

Beliefs and practices

In the early sixteenth century belief was a corporate and not just a personal matter. Religious rituals were an expression of communal solidarity, ways of securing the welfare of the community. This was most clearly demonstrated at rogationtide when parishioners marched round the boundaries of their parish, demarcating them by hitting the ground with sticks. This affirmed their right to land that might otherwise be claimed by neighbouring communities. The rogationtide marchers believed that the security of their community depended not just on relationships with bordering parishes but on God’s favour and protection. A major function of the rite was to beseech his blessing on the newly planted crops. (The word “rogation” derives from the Latin verb to ask, rogare.) It was also designed to drive out evil spirits that might hinder growth or destroy neighbourliness. The devil, an evil force opposed to God, was believed constantly to watch for opportunities of disturbing the peace, of harming the unwary, and of distracting Christians from trust in God. Vividly depicted on wallpaintings and woodcuts, he was very much part of popular consciousness. At rogationtide an image of a dragon was carried round some parishes, its long cloth tail docked on the final day of the festival to show that diabolic power could not ultimately prevail against that of God.

The cosmic battle between God and the devil was believed to go back to the beginning of time. Human lives were part of the battleground. Misled by the devil, the first human beings had turned away from their creator as did all later generations. God had sent his son, Jesus Christ, to earth to share human life and bring sinful people back to him. Over the centuries many different theories had been put forward about how this was achieved. John Bossy has summarized what the Church taught around 1500, a set of beliefs that reflect the corporate nature of people’s thinking. When offence had been given, compensation had to be paid, but this need not be done by the individual concerned; kin could pay instead. (In outlying parts of Europe clans still demanded restitution for harm done to their own members from the community of those who had wronged them.) When Jesus died on a cross he was standing in for his kin; his death was offered to God as redress for the offence caused by the disobedience of the rest of humankind (Bossy 1985:3–6).

What Christ had done was re-enacted every time “Mass”, the central act of Christian worship, was celebrated. Congregations watched as priests raised wafer bread and wine aloft: these were symbols of the broken body and spilt blood of Jesus. But they were more than mere symbols for at the moment of elevation the bread and wine were believed to be transformed into that body and blood. To receive the bread or “host” at these “communion” services was a particularly important religious act, a way of communing with God. At most services the people only watched, but it was widely assumed that merely to be present brought one closer to God. To see him in this, his chosen form, was to draw near to his power. The great feast of Corpus Christi, honouring the body of Christ offered in the Mass, was one of the most enthusiastically supported festivals of the year. The one occasion on which ordinary people regularly received the host at communion was Easter Sunday, the celebration of Jesus’ rising from the dead. During the season of Lent, the 40 days before Easter, diets had been restricted as a reminder of Christ’s suffering. On Easter Day parishioners, who had shared the common Lenten discipline, broke their fast together as they received communion. In so doing they affirmed that they were at peace with God and with each other.

Before receiving the host, people were expected to confess their sins to a priest, thereby admitting their wrongdoing to God. As a sign of their penitence they had to perform acts of penance, which generally took the form of set prayers and alms-giving. Having pronounced the penance, the priest laid his hand on the person’s head and declared God’s forgiveness in an act of absolution. Absolved from sin, penitents were reconciled to God, and, if dying, were ready to receive communion and other rites of the church prior to meeting their maker.

Death was an ever-present reality. It could not be distanced or largely ignored as tends to happen today, and so it was integrated into people’s understanding of life. Instead of being seen as an end, death was regarded as part of a continuum, a staging-post on a journey that continued after life on this earth had ceased. What happened after death was graphically depicted in “doom paintings”, a dominant feature of many churches. These huge murals portrayed the Last Judgement at the close of time when all would be consigned either to heaven or to hell. Christ was the central figure in most doom paintings: he was portrayed seated in majesty, his hands, scarred by the nails of crucifixion, raised in judgement and blessing. To his left was depicted the fate of those who had continued in wickedness, scorningChristian teaching or impenitently indulging in the seven deadly sins of pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, anger and sloth. Nimble, gloating demons were poised, pitchforks ready, to hurl the great and the destitute, proud church officials and obdurate heretics, down into the gaping mouth of hell. On his right those whom Christ had redeemed were shown rising naked from their graves, watched by smiling, trumpet-bearing angels who waited to escort them to the ram-parts of the heavenly kingdom.

In addition to heaven and hell, the church taught that there was an intermediate state of purgatory which those destined for heaven entered as soon as they died. Christ’s mercy was such that even the most depraved person who repented could ultimately expect to be received into bliss. First, however, fallible human beings had to be made fit for life with God. One function of purgatory was to cleanse and to purify. In English thought greater emphasis was placed on its other, more retributive, purpose. Forgiveness did not preclude penalties for the forgiven sinner still had debts to pay. The acts of penance which penitents performed each time they went to confession were not only signs to God that they really were sorry; they were also ways of making amends for their wrongdoing. The idea of purgatory had developed in the course of the Middle Ages because most people were not in a position to offer God adequate recompense for their failure to live in his way. It provided an opportunity after death for people to pay penalties which penance had not fully satisfied on earth.

Since purgatory was a place of pain it was desirable to ensure that the time spent there was as short as possible. One obvious step was to make as much restitution to God as possible before death. Giving to the poor and endowing religious foundations were recognized ways of paying one’s debt; by so doing the avaricious learnt to control their greed. Prayers, attendance at extra Masses, and pilgrimages to shrines of saints were also acceptable offerings; these fostered devotion and a God-centred frame of mind. From the mid-fourteenth century “indulgences” began to be granted to those who performed these acts. The pope (the head of the church) or his representative confirmed that by going on a particular pilgrimage, by saying certain prayers, by contributing funds to a new church, an individual would gain remission, specified in terms of days or years, from the expected sentence in purgatory. However alien this may seem to modern minds, the emotions involved may not have been radically different from those whichoperate today. The desire to know that effort will be rewarded was no doubt as strong in the past as it is now, and indulgences catered for this need. They reassured people that their endeavours to avoid future suffering would bear fruit.

Indulgences were not designed to operate mechanically: in the eyes of the church authorities, penitence was essential. The pope’s confirmation that the performance of specified acts reduced time in purgatory was meant to encourage piety. Instructions in prayer books stressed that prayers had to be said with inner devotion if the indulgences attached to them were to be obtained. But inevitably practice degenerated: some Christians doubtless assumed that mere repetition was enough; others probably contributed to charity to gain an indulgence with scant regard for the cause they were supporting. That they were willing to do so shows how strong a hold purgatory had on popular imagination.

Another way of shortening time in purgatory was through prayers for the dead. Many chantries were built. These were chapels, often inside a church, in which Masses were regularly sung (hence chantry) for the soul of the founder. People making wills frequently set aside sums of money to pay a priest to offer a specified number of Masses, at which prayers would be said for their souls. Many joined guilds or fraternities, one of whose functions was to cater for members’ needs after death. The guild ensured that prayers were regularly said for the repose of the dead person’s soul and often took responsibility for providing a funeral. Each craft had its own guild but in addition there were many fraternities operating at most levels of society, open to men and women of any craft and none. New ones were regularly formed and some people belonged to several. Much of the socioreligious festivity of late medieval England was organized by the guilds.

The guilds are a good illustration of the communal nature of society. Some imposed strict moral codes on their members; most required them to perform certain duties such as attending the annual guild Mass and feast, and the funerals of fellow members. Guilds were mutual insurance societies both for this life and for that to come. Their funds were used to provide benefits to members who suffered disaster or destitution. Living members of guilds prayed for the souls of those who had passed on, knowing that others in turn would pray for them. Just as Christ had compensated for the wrongdoing of his kin by dying on the cross, so members of the surrogate family of the guild offered reparation to God in the form of prayers for the sins of fellow members.

The sense of kin and community transcended the grave. The dead were seen as part of society and were sometimes enrolled retrospectively as members of guilds so that surviving members could take responsibility for their after-death needs. Those who worshipped in parish churches were surrounded by mementos of their predecessors. Many of the decorative items that enhanced worship were gifts of previous parishioners, for whose souls those still living were regularly invited to pray. Any offering, however small, ensured that the donor’s name was inscribed on the bede roll, a list of benefactors that was read out once a year, a clear affirmation that the parish community extended both sides of the permeable barrier of death.

Members of the wider community of faithful souls were also commemorated in the local church. There were paintings and carvings of Mary the mother of Jesus, the disciples and early fathers of the church. Statues of saints were wedged into every nook and cranny. When people asked the saints to pray for them they were addressing not abstractions but men and women of whom they had a clear visual image. As the prayers of the living could aid the dead, so the prayers of those in heaven could affect the wellbeing of those on earth. Just as they might choose to consult appropriate specialists on earth, so people approached saints who were believed to be sympathetic towards particular ills. St Erasmus who was disembowelled understood the distress of bowel complaints; St Apollonia who was tortured by having her teeth knocked out was an obvious source of appeal for sufferers from toothache. As on earth, supplicants sought help from someone with whom they had connections or felt particularly at ease, the patron saint of their guild or church, or the saint by whose statue they regularly knelt. Saints seemed more accessible than a holy God who, like an earthly potentate, was best approached through intermediaries. It was assumed that requests were more likely to be granted if they were made by those who had already gained God’s approval.

Part of the appeal of the saints was that they offered hope of protection and healing in a world in which women and men were constantly at risk from ills they could do little to avert: childbirth, disease and plague. Christians who had lived holy lives became channels through which God’s power might pass to others. Desperate people whose existence was made intolerable by harrowing illness or handicap limped, crawled or were led to shrines of saints all over England, leaving wax models of themselves and wax replicas of the afflicted parts of their bodies as offerings. That crutches were also left suggests that some at least found relief from their suffering.

How people thought

To understand these beliefs we need to recognize that awareness of the supernatural was very much part of everyday life. Miracles were regularly proclaimed. The finding of lost possessions, recovery from sickness, resumption of egg-laying by hens were all attributed to saintly intervention, showing how closely the supernatural was integrated with the natural in popular thought. The modern tendency to segregate sacred and secular would have seemed most strange to early sixteenth-century people, for God, the devil, and their respective squadrons were believed to be busily at work in the world.

This meant that religious and worldly concerns were inextricably linked. It is inappropriate to ask whether something was done for religious or secular reasons because people at the time would not have made that distinction. Financing a chantry chapel was a statement of social status and a reflection of religious concern. Guilds served both a religious and a socio-economic function. A man might become a member of a religious order, entering a monastery for the rest of his life, both to gain security and to serve God through a life of prayer. Medieval people did not need psychoanalysts to tell them about multiple motives; this was part of the God-given nature of the world. By his beneficent arrangement any one action could serve a multiplicity of purposes. Pilgrimages were fun and a means of benefiting one’s soul. Religious festivals were an expression of belief and a way of enjoying oneself which could involve getting drunk. People were not embarrassed as some of their descendants have been by the juxtaposition of bawdiness and piety in the mystery (trade) plays performed by craft guilds during religious festivals: the holy was not curtained off from the rest of life but integrated with it. When making his will, one man

saw the community drink as an opportunity to have prayers said for his soul. He left three acres of meadow and one acre of arable to hold “one drynkynge evermore to be kept the twysday in the rogacon weke at Pekworth Crosse to the Intent to be prayd for ever more and to be parte taker of prayers and suffragis there sayd” (Hanawalt 1986:260).

“His bequest”, Barbara Hanawalt concludes, “would have provided a generous quantity of beer.”

If secular and sacred were integrated so too were the material and the spiritual. By becoming a human being Christ had shown that supernatural power could operate through things earthly and temporal. It was believed that such power was particularly focused in certain holy objects, most obviously the consecrated bread and wine, but also candles and water that had been blessed by priests for ritual purposes, and a multiplicity of relics: bones from saints’ bodies, fragments of the cross on which Christ died, and even drops of his blood. Pilgrimages were made to centres where relics were housed, and on appropriate commemorative days, safely encased in decorative caskets, they were paraded round the streets for popular veneration.

The reverence accorded to such things reminds us that people invested both objects and words with greater power than we do. Sacred objects and holy words were crucial weapons in the battle that was constantly waged between good and evil, God and the devil. Since all human beings were born in sin, it was important that newborn children were brought quickly under the protection of Christ by being “baptized”. This meant that the baby was immersed in holy water and marked by the sign of the cross: “do not dare to violate, o cursed devil”, announced the officiating priest, “this sign of the holy cross which we now make on her forehead” (quoted, Duffy 1992:280). The water, the gesture and the prayer were more than mere symbols; in the eyes of those watching they created a cordon of protection around the vulnerable child. People regularly made the sign of the cross on their breasts and foreheads. At rogationtide the processional cross was taken into the fields, since its physical presence was believed to bring blessing to the corn. At the same time extracts from the Gospels were recited over the newly sown crops, for certain passages of scripture were conceived to be particularly powerful weapons against evil.

Objects could operate as proxies for the presence of their owners. To light candles in front of statues of saints was to leave some mark of oneself in their presence, identifying donors with the prayers that were being offered even when unable to be present. Objects associated with saints carried their power to those in need: in some parishes women were able to borrow lying-in girdles linked to particular saints to see them through the dangers of childbirth. Since power inhered in objects, placing oneself in the vicinity of or even touching the relic of a saint was likely to be more effective than prayer alone.

In a partially literate society belief was expressed by tangible and visible means as well as by the written and spoken word. The liturgy or order of service of the church was highly dramatic, using action and symbol to retell and re-enact the message of the Gospels. At Candlemas, 2 February, parishioners processed with lighted candles round the church, commemorating the occasion when the infant Christ was greeted in the temple as “a light to lighten the Gentiles”, a light that the forces of darkness could not overcome. The candles were believed to provide protection against evil. Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem was celebrated on the Sunday before Easter by processions round the churchyard with the congregation waving branches reminiscent of the palms with which welcoming crowds had strewn his way. These “palms” were burnt and the ashes from them daubed on people’s foreheads at the start of the next Lent (Ash Wednesday) as a sign of penitence and a reminder that human beings come from and return to dust. “Creeping to the cross” was a common Good Friday ritual: as Christ had staggered through the streets of Jerusalem carrying his cross, so worshippers went forward barefoot and on their knees to kiss the foot of the cross. At the end of the day the cross was wrapped in linen cloths, like the body once removed from it, and “buried” with the host in a special Easter sepulchre; parishioners watched over this until Easter morning when the cross was triumphantly raised and carried round the church in celebration of the resurrection. Through the symbolic actions of church services, a community that could not read was familiarized with the stories and teaching of the Bible.

The images with which churches abounded served the same function. The mellow greyness we associate with medieval churches does not reflect their appearance in their prime for roofs and walls were often brightly painted; pictures and motifs, carvings and sculpture were displayed all round the building, each telling their own story. Above and around the great central arch there was often a doom painting. Beneath it was a “rood screen”, a wood or stone partition, carved or painted with images of saints, and surmounted by a great crucifix (the rood). This carving of the dying Christ upon the cross, flanked by images of his mother and St John, was a constant reminder at the focal point of the church of the central tenet of the Christian faith.

It is important to realize that these images were not mere illustrations of the biblical message. They were themselves primary means of communication. Drawing on the writings of Reginald Pecock, a fifteenth-century Bishop of Chichester, Margaret Aston comments

Sight was the highest of the senses, seeing better than hearing … He [Pecock] explained how much less painful and laborious it was to learn the outline of a story from a visual depiction than from a text… As long as it was taken for granted that reading necessitated hearing (muttering or mouthing, if not vocalizing the word on the page) the speed of comprehension was naturally slow: slower than it is for those whose familiarity with letters is such that the written (or printed) words themselves become electric signals, direct referents of reality, more nearly comparable to the painted depiction (Aston 1984:116–17).

Words had their place, but they were one form of communication among many. At the very least people were likely to know by heart a few basic prayers, the Paternoster (Lord’s Prayer) and the Ave (Hail Mary). While services were in Latin, sermons were preached in English occasionally by parish priests and more regularly by friars, members of preaching orders, who travelled the country addressing the people on religious matters. Devotional books were becoming available in increasing numbers. But these were not necessarily treated as books are today. Ea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography