Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England

With an Edition of Richard Fox's Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517

Barry Collett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351936705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This gendered translation of the Benedictine Rule for women in 1517 is also a handbook for women on exercising authority, management skills and the art of good governance, including monastic property and relations with the outside world. Barry Collett here provides a modern facsimile edition of Fox's translation, written in the tumbling phrases of passionate prose that make Fox stand out as a literary figure of the English Renaissance. Collett also provides an extensive introduction that argues that Fox's experience as an administrator and senior political adviser with special responsibility for foreign affairs, mainly with Scotland and France, the political situation in 1516, and social concerns Fox shared with Thomas More, all provide keys to understanding this translation of the rule. Richard Fox was king's secretary, Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Winchester, and founder of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He was an administrator who reflected much on the proper exercise of authority and responsibility at all levels, especially through negotiated co-operation. He strongly supported monastic reforms, and when a group of abbesses requested a translation for sisters unable to understand Latin, this was his response. It provides a unique window into the world of female spirituality just a few months before Luther's reformation began. The exercise of God-given authority by women is described in the same-possibly stronger-terms as for men. Fox expressed no reservations about the exercise of authority by women. His indifference to sexual distinctions arose, paradoxically, from his preoccupation with the skilful use of God-given functioning of authority in a hierarchical society.

Chapter 1

English Society and Here begynneth: the Question of Good Governance in 1516

The quality of governance in 1516

Richard Fox’s version of the Benedictine Rule for women, Here begynneth the Rule of seynt Benet, is a remarkable window into the lives of early modern Englishwomen. In 1516, three abbesses and a prioress of the diocese of Winchester asked Fox, their bishop, to translate into English the Latin Benedictine Rule, which was originally written in Italy about AD 640 for the guidance of St Benedict’s monks. Fox made his translation during the autumn and winter of 1516. He put words into female form and deliberately crafted his phrases in ways that would make his version of the Rule so readable and vivid that the nuns of the diocese of Winchester would immediately understand it and its implications, and shape their lives by it.

Here begynneth gave the nuns much more than a straight translation of the original text. Fox expanded the sparse Latin into tumbling, vivid English prose, giving emphases where there were little or none in the Latin, and adding many phrases and sentences of his own commentary. It was published in January 1517, on the very eve of the Reformation, only seven months before Luther posted his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg. As a result Here begynneth is a window into the contemporary spirituality and religious vocation of nuns. In particular, his acceptance of women holding and exercising authority within their vocation is significant because Fox himself knew what authority was about: he had held high office for thirty years as secretary and adviser to Henry VII and Lord Privy Seal, and held marked views on proper leadership and the efficient discharge of personal authority.

There is comparatively little biographical evidence about Fox, despite his importance as an official of the Tudor regime. Almost nothing has survived from before 1485 when he was thirty-seven years old, and even for the period after 1485, when he began his politically active life, the remaining evidence survives only in a few personal letters, administrative drafts, instructions, state documents, legal material, the statutes of Corpus Christi College, and the two small works he published. Fox was almost the last of the English late medieval bishop-politicians (the last was his own protégé and successor, Thomas Wolsey), and as we might expect, he believed that his work in the exercise of political authority was God’s work. He therefore tried to integrate the ideas and practices of government, Church and universities, and for this purpose he adapted Italian humanist ideas about politics, religion and learning for English conditions, putting ideas into practice with detailed planning and hard work. His translation of the Rule is infused by this deliberate humanist combination of ideas and practicality.

In 1484, Richard Fox had been a mature-age graduate student in Paris when he joined the court-in-exile of the young Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond and became an important figure in Henry’s negotiations with the French government and plans for the invasion of England. Fox sailed with Richmond’s army, said regimental prayers when they landed on the Welsh coast, travelled with Henry across Wales and England, and was present at the battle of Bosworth on 22 August 1485. When the victorious Henry VII set up court in London, Fox worked as his secretary and Keeper of the Privy Seal, serving the new Tudor regime with conspicuous efficiency. As his reward, he was made successively Bishop of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham and Winchester.

In 1509 Henry VII died and was succeeded by his son Henry VIII. By then Fox had been at the centre of Tudor government for twenty-four years and he continued to serve at court, but although he remained Lord Privy Seal and a powerful adviser he was increasingly ill at ease in the government of the new king. He was strongly opposed to the young Henry’s invasion of France in 1513, and at the same time his work as Privy Seal became hampered by factional rivalries, notably by his conflict with the Lord Treasurer, Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (who was made Duke of Norfolk on 1 February 1514 as a reward for his victory at Flodden Field).¹ Their arguments arose not only from policy differences but also from personality tensions between Richard Fox the pacifist and Thomas Howard the victorious warrior of Flodden. The King, who stood to lose from such personal conflict within his council, tried to reconcile disagreements and provocations between the two men, but without success. Edward Herbert described the King’s attempts at conciliation as the ‘wiping out of blots which sometimes makes them worse’, so that there were personal injuries that were not fully satisfied: ‘therefore they stood still at a distance’. The burden of Fox’s political complaint about Norfolk was that by 1513 the Lord Treasurer was fast dissipating the considerable crown resources built up under Henry VII and, moreover, was spending the money in such ways as ‘got him many friends and followers’ and extended his power. Thomas Howard retorted that all spending was being done properly in accordance with the King’s express orders, and that Fox’s accusations arose from envy.²

Beyond the disagreement with Norfolk, Fox was distressed by a wider development within the style of government. He had been accustomed to a more or less unified government of which he had been a key member, and he was now faced by a movement away from generally consensual government towards open factional politics. As a consequence of that change he and his older colleagues from the reign of Henry VII, who had once been at the centre of power, were becoming merely members of one faction.

Fox and his colleague Sir Thomas Lovell then tried to gain an advantage by promoting the young Thomas Wolsey, a protégé of Fox. Wolsey, like Fox, had made his way up from a relatively poor background through energy, ability and a ‘quick mind and stirring wit’. They brought Wolsey from a minor position at court into the centre of government in the expectation that he would help them to control the factional conflicts now threatening their concepts of governance and authority. Wolsey immediately and vigorously began to make his presence felt, pleasing Henry with both his jollities and his seriousness in tackling tasks. Unlike Fox, Wolsey seemed to have no reservations about waging war, and in 1513 and 1514 brilliantly organized supplies for the military expedition to France, making himself a rising star in the royal service. According to Edward Herbert, Wolsey ‘began to tell the King that he should sometimes follow his studies in School Divinity, and sometimes take his pleasure, and leave the care of public affairs to him; promising that what was amiss in his kingdom should be rectified … whereby he became so perfect a Courtier that he had soon attained the height of favour’. ‘Particularly’, added Herbert, ‘he desired to reduce all businesses to himself’.³

Fox had advanced Wolsey as a force to help control factionalism, but his protégé’s rapid rise in the King’s service instead created new factional groupings and made things worse at court. Fox can only have watched with dismay as Wolsey gained the King’s favour, grew increasingly powerful, filled offices of state with his dependants and accumulated conspicuous wealth.⁴ After 1514, Fox’s influence waned even further. Both he and his rival the Duke of Norfolk, despite still holding office, began to be treated with some neglect at court, even disrespect. Fox’s world was coming apart: disillusioned with the activity of ambitious factions and with the poor quality and undue influence of the aristocracy at court, he was also facing the fact that he and friends with a similar cast of mind were losing their influence. Moreover, his eyesight was now rapidly fading.

By 1514 Henry’s partially successful invasion of France had ended, and the King began to make plans for a second invasion. In the event, diplomatic moves delayed the second invasion until 1522, but in 1515 and 1516 it was still being actively planned and Anglo-French relations were very tense. At the same time the English government was experiencing difficulties in persuading the Emperor Maximilian to invade in Italy and expel the French from Milan and then invade France. Henry sent Richard Pace on a secret mission to arrange to finance 20,000 Swiss mercenaries for the operation at a cost to England of 120,000 crowns.⁵

In common with William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, and John Colet, the Dean of St Paul’s, Fox advised against continuing the war because the proposed expedition would be extremely expensive and would almost certainly cause political dislocation and social unrest.⁶ Nevertheless, during 1515 and early 1516 Fox and Warham, despite their objections, reluctantly involved themselves in the invasion plans for a time, but during the spring and summer of 1516, as the plans degenerated into a ‘quarrelsome disarray’ between the allied parties, both men gradually withdrew from court and spent much more time in their dioceses. In 1516 the Venetian ambassador Sebastiano Giustiniani reported that the two prelates had ‘for many months’ been away from the court as a protest against ‘treasure spent in vain’. He also reported that the proposed invasion of France was Wolsey’s policy and that at court there was strong opposition to it, and that there were loud murmurs and discontent throughout England.

The ambassador had his own career reasons to emphasize the extent of opposition at the English court to the Anglo-Hapsburg alliance of October 1515 against France and Venice; he was almost certainly mistaken in seeing Wolsey as the sole author of the policy, and he underestimated royal and aristocratic support for the expedition. Nevertheless, although the ambassador’s diplomatic despatches may have been exaggerated, they had some basis in observable events. In October and early November 1516, about the time that the nuns of Winchester diocese were asking Fox to translate the Rule, Giustiniani reported to Venice that all the nobility were opposed to the policy, that ‘the people complained extremely of the new imposts’ levied to finance the war, and that the absence of Fox and others from the decision-making processes was causing ‘incredible surprise and universal dissatisfaction’.⁷

Fox’s opposition to war was deep, as shown much later, when in 1522 he was asked again to be involved in war preparations, but declined on the grounds of his old age and, more especially, his conscience: he feared that if he were to die ‘being in any such meddling of the war, I think I should die in despair’.⁸ The progress of the war policy, its administration and his own withdrawal from court must have created a very difficult situation for Fox because in his eyes the King and Wolsey were pursuing policies which he believed to be ruinously expensive, of doubtful political value, of dubious morality, and destabilizing to all ranks of society, whilst all he could do was to protest.

We have no clear picture of early Henrician court factions, but their existence and effects were obvious. The court of Henry VIII continued to be divided by quarrelling between factions of the increasingly powerful and influential nobility, and new groups created by the turbulence surrounding Wolsey’s rapid advancement to power.⁹ The extent and intensity of factional conflicts have been debated by historians, but it is apparent that contending groups and individuals were being controlled and exploited by both the King and Wolsey. In practice, factional groups were frequently complicated by cross-loyalties and ambivalent relationships: for example, despite their reservations about Wolsey’s vigorous support of the war, Fox and Colet continued to support his political career, especially his efforts to replace Warham as Chancellor. Similarly, political positions and oppositions could be ambivalent: Henry himself accepted, or was even disturbed by Colet’s trenchant criticisms in 1515 of the proposed invasion of France.¹⁰ From Fox’s point of view, Henry VIII, his sovereign, and Thomas Wolsey, his own protégé, by now Archbishop of York, a cardinal and about to be appointed Lord Chancellor, were not making sound moral, financial or political decisions, which created divisions of loyalty within Fox himself. His withdrawal from the royal court in 1516 was therefore a reluctant act of passive disobedience to the legitimate authority of both his monarch and Wolsey.

Fox’s personal unrest was matched by waves of chronic social unrest amongst the lower orders in London. During 1516 and early in 1517, in tune with anti-French belligerence at court, citizens and apprentices protested that their livelihood was being taken away from them by ‘the diligence and industry of strangers’, claiming that foreigners had shown poor Londoners ‘divers contempts, affronts and injuries’. This hostility, directed mainly against the French and Dutch communities which constituted about 5 per cent of London’s population, developed into outbreaks of xenophobic violence inflated by the sermons of Dr Beale and the speeches of John Lincoln, a pedlar. Dr Beale prefaced a sermon at St Paul’s cross on Easter Tuesday with a patriotic exhortation to all ‘Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal’, and Lincoln made several speeches in which he incited his audience of apprentices and citizens by using passages from Scripture, which, so it was said, he distorted to his purpose. By the time Fox began his translation, late in 1516, there had been several violent episodes in London and other cities, in which foreigners had been abused, assaulted and robbed. The violence increased into the early months of 1517, and there were scattered attacks and rumours of a massacre of aliens to take place on May Day, in response to which the King’s Council imposed a 9.00 p.m. curfew in London.

The disorders came to a head in London late in the evening of May-eve (30 April) 1517 about three months after Fox’s book was published. An alderman tried to arrest two apprentices in Cheapside for playing at buckerels on the street after the curfew hour of 9 o’clock.¹¹ The youths did not know of, or did not accept, the curfew recently imposed, and retorted that there was an ancient custom which gave them liberty to remain on the streets for May-eve. When the alderman insisted, the young men cried out ‘apprentices and clubs’ which brought about 1,000 younger men out on streets of Cheapside, and the alderman retreated. The crowd broke open a prison and released prisoners who had been committed for abusing and assaulting foreigners. The mayor and the sheriffs could not quell the commotion, nor could Thomas More, who was respected by the populace because he himself was a native of London as well as the former judge of the Sheriffs court. The crowd attacked foreigners’ houses at St Martin le Grand, a privileged liberty where many aliens lived; they assaulted and robbed several people and may have been responsible for one or more deaths, although the evidence is uncertain. The crowd’s intensifying antagon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 English Society and Here begynneth: the Question of Good Governance in 1516
• 2 The Monastic Life and Here begynneth: the Ambivalence of the Monastic Vocation
• 3 Making the Translation During the Autumn and Winter of 1516
• 4 Here begynneth and the Early Modern Englishwoman
• 5 Three Epilogues: Fox, the Nuns and the Book
• Editorial Notes
• Here begynneth the Rule of seynt Benet: Richard Fox’s Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517
• Bibliography
• Index