The disappearance of plague is a more baffling, and contentious, phenomenon. At times in the past, ‘biological’ explanations have been proposed: that either rats or humans developed immunity to the disease, or that the black rats which carry the fatal species of flea were replaced by brown rats, which do not. Both arguments fail, for plague vanished in Britain before the arrival of brown rats and it is not logical that British rats or people should have developed the immunity before those in the rest of Europe while those in Africa and Asia failed to do so. The most plausible alternative is that suggested by Paul Slack in the 1980s: that the local and national systems of cordoning off infected areas were enforced with so much efficiency that in the end they cordoned off the island. This would certainly explain in turn the slow and fitful retreat of the disease from the rest of Europe, as such measures were brought into effect there. Although directed by central and local government, they required the cooperation of the whole population, as even smugglers came to understand the deadly risks of non-compliance.
If correct, these conclusions provide one of the clearest ripostes possible to one of the most influential bodies of historical thought during the 1960s and early 1970s, the Annales school of French scholars. This emphasized the great degree to which medieval and early modern human beings were conditioned by their environment and subjected to its demands; this story would illustrate instead the degree to which, eventually, they could rise to the challenges of that environment and overcome them. They did so, moreover, not because of any inspired leadership from above but because of a massive effort of collective and shared will. In doing so, they made one of the most valuable transitions from the medieval to the modern European worlds, and supplied one of the finest reproofs to the assertion that human beings are individually marvellous, but in a crowd, hopeless.
Popular Religion
The traditional narrative of the English and Scottish Reformations is one of an epic struggle between the warring creeds of Catholicism and Protestantism, ending with a victory to the latter, in a society in which virtually all people believed unquestioningly in the Christian religion. More subtle and recent formulations would emphasize the differences that existed within the two opposed faiths as well as between them, and the large number of people who remained uncommitted to either. None the less, these formulations still operate within the framework of the accepted model. There is, however, another way of approaching early modern British religion, which emphasizes the similar problems faced by all kinds of devout Catholic and Protestant when dealing with the bulk of their compatriots. This is also rooted firmly in contemporary sources, which in this respect remain fairly consistent from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in insisting that the real problems of British Christianity lay in the poverty, ignorance and amorality of the clergy and the ungodliness and indifference of the laity.
Recent research has done much to investigate and conceptualize these claims, made, inevitably, by the most self-consciously devout and reformist of British Christians at each stage of this period. It confirms that this was, indeed, a Christian society, and that there is absolutely no evidence of the practice of any rival religion within it. There is a great deal of evidence, on the other hand, for the incorporation into Christian forms of beliefs and actions handed on from ancient paganism, as there is all over medieval Europe: after all, early Christianity depended on such borrowings for the shape and decorations of its churches, the timing of many of its seasonal festivals, and other major features. The Reformation was designed in part to clear away as many of these as possible, and some of the local manifestations of them can be as startling to modern historians as they were to reformers. One of the most colourful was at Clynnog Fawr, on the Lleyn Peninsula at the far north-western end of Wales, where Henry VIII’s agents found that cattle were being offered at the shrine of the local saint, as if to a pagan god. The clearing of most of these borrowings out of the English and Scottish Churches had the effect of making still starker the continued survival of such relics of paganism in folk customs outside of the official religion, in which reformers had less interest. Until the end of the nineteenth century, for example, farmers in parts of western Britain, from Cornwall to the Isle of Man and the Western Isles continued to burn one animal in a herd stricken by disease in the belief that this sacrifice would protect the rest.
None the less, it remains true that Christianity was the only religion self-consciously practised by the early modern British. It is more difficult to tell how well they practised it. There were apparently occasional pockets of complete ignorance or indifference: as late as 1679 the chaplain at Newgate Prison, London, tried to comfort thirteen criminals about to be hanged, and found that they had never heard of Christ. More commonly, people had done so but had little actual knowledge of him. Famous preachers loved to harp on this theme, to the entertainment and scandal of their flocks. In the fourteenth century, John Bromyard told of how he (pompously) asked a shepherd if he knew of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. He got the answer that the man knew the father and son well enough, for he tended their sheep, but that there was no holy ghost in his village. In the 1640s, John Shaw, given care of a parish in the Furness Fells at the top of Lancashire, asked an old man how he knew Christ, and was told that he did so only from a play that he had seen in a nearby town, which he thought wonderful but could not quite understand. Such anecdotes retain their colour, but the evidence of visitation records is that by the early seventeenth century, at least, the regular practice of catechizing young people, carried on by parish clergy, had dinned the basic teachings of Christianity into the vast majority of the population.
The problem then encountered is whether that vast majority subsequently paid much attention to the teachings. There is slight evidence for some outright disbelief among the educated, though it is always alleged by enemies of those concerned because the penalty for an open expression of atheism was death. Sir Walter Raleigh was said to have denied the immortality of the soul, and the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was reported to have called Christ a homosexual and his apostles idiots. The records of English church courts contain several examples of blasphemous jokes told by local people, often oiled by drink. More common was inattention. The same records, and those of Scottish kirk sessions, abound with accusations of misbehaviour during services: fighting, jostling, coughing, spitting, breaking wind, joking, chatting, flirting, abusing or simply falling sound asleep. Preachers regularly complained that ordinary people were just not much interested in religion. The famous Protestant bishop Hugh Latimer, eventually burned during Mary’s reign, complained that most knew the stories of Robin Hood much better than those of the Bible; seventy years later, in 1607, a minister in the Midlands said precisely the same thing.
Behind all this friction lay a major shift in the concept of religion. Until the Reformation there had been no compulsion on the British laity to attend church regularly. Churches, as pagan temples had been, were regarded as special buildings set aside for the honour of a deity, reinforced in this case by saints, in which ceremonies were kept going by special officials, in the Christian context a professional clergy. These made the regular sacrifice of the mass on behalf of the laity, while the latter were freed thereby to attend services frequently if they wished, or else to get on with their daily lives. In the years 1540–42, the parish of St Giles, in the Essex town of Colchester, kept records of attendance, and found that about half of its adult inhabitants did show up on most Sundays and major holy days, while at Easter almost all of them crowded the church. This again was an ancient, and pagan, pattern – that most residents of an area came to religious rites at great seasonal festivals – though it is not clear whether the Colchester level of regular attendance was typical. With the Reformation, however, parishioners were expected to be present every Sunday unless prevented by serious misfortune, this being the easiest way in which dissent from the established religion could be detected and punished. Alongside weekly attendance came a s
hift in the focus of the service, from ceremony (embodied in the mass) to sermons. Hitherto, ordinary people had been most accustomed to hear these from experts, mostly the friars, as special events; now they had to submit to them weekly, from parish clergy of greatly varying abilities in this respect. Churches were unheated, and although they were now increasingly supplied with seating in response to the new physical strains on the congregation, these were often the preserve of wealthier parishioners. While all this caused friction and discomfort, it is important also not to underestimate the appeal of a good preacher, who could represent marvellous entertainment as well as edification. In Scotland in particular, where the new religion placed an even heavier emphasis on sermons than in England, the best preaching ministers produced overcrowded churches.
The records of church courts and kirk sessions reveal a further fault-line which sometimes ran between clergy and parishioners, and sometimes between different kinds of laity, with ministers taking one side or the other. Everybody agreed that the main job description of a clergyman was to be a good spiritual leader to his community, pious, sober and responsible; but not on what that meant in practice. A great many of the laity, almost certainly the majority, wanted a kindly pastor who comforted the sick, troubled and dying, reconciled quarrelling neighbours and united and pacified the community. More zealous Protestants expected a crusading evangelist who was prepared to bruise consciences, excoriate the sinful and negligent, and praise the most godly of his flock as an example to the others. Such behaviour was always divisive, and often produced serious resentment; but on the other hand the more pacific and inclusive kind of clergyman could be denounced by his more strenuously pious parishioners for laxity and cowardice.
In their need to ensure a better-trained and better-behaved parish clergy, the post-Reformation British churches turned to the remedy that their medieval predecessor had provided: higher education. It was applied energetically, so that by 1640 the majority of ministers in every southern and midland English diocese seem to have been graduates, almost half of those in the North and Wales, and virtually all those in the Scottish Lowlands. This success, however, created new difficulties. The universities taught theology, and none of the pastoral skills needed to run a happy parish, so that the new graduates often found themselves condemned to a lifetime of boredom and frustration among rural people with whom they had nothing in common and who resented them as intellectual snobs. One young minister appointed to a Leicestershire village was informed by its elders on arrival that ‘all learning was foolish other than that which would make the pot boil’. He adapted to their ways, and their language, and prospered, but many others were less flexible.
To these intellectual strains were joined others of a more practical kind. Since the parish system was settled in the first half of the Middle Ages, its clergy were supported by tithes, payments levied on parishioners in accordance with their presumed wealth, supplemented by fees for extra spiritual services and sometimes by special lands. It had always contained many livings which yielded meagre profits, and the number of these was greatly increased by the process of appropriation. This consisted of the delivery of parish benefices to the care of religious houses, which would put in clergy to whom they would pay a fixed salary taken out of the full income of the living. By 1500 a majority of the parishes in Britain had been given this treatment, so that those in which the incumbent had the full profit were comparatively rare. Even the full profit of many livings was inadequate, and so clergy sometimes increased their income by taking on more than one at a time.
With the Reformation, and the dissolution of the monasteries, the parish tithes that they had owned passed to nobles and gentry along with their lands, and were treated as another source of income. Clergy on fixed salaries ran into the great inflation of the sixteenth century, and so became progressively poorer. Conflict over the payment of tithes boomed, owing to new tensions between parishioners and landowners, landowners and clergy, and clergy and parishioners. At its worst, the latter could produce cases such as that of the minister responsible for St Katherine Cree in London during the 1630s, who informed his congregation that they were ‘frogs, hogs, dogs and devils’, or the one at North Stoke, Somerset, in 1631, who called his people ‘gypsies and cheats’. None the less, if the job of a parish clergyman was harder, it was also more prestigious and challenging. By the 1620s the level of recruitment had returned to what it had been 100 years before, with slightly more applicants than livings. More and more sons of gentry were entering the Church, as the social status of a minister was upgraded with the level of education he required. It is a heartening reminder that men do not, indeed, live by bread alone.
However it is possible to make a case that the clergy were the main losers in the Reformation process. With the removal of monks, nuns and friars, the proportion of clerics in the population was much reduced, while lay control was imposed on those who remained and lay people increasingly felt able to think about theology for themselves. The special status of churchmen was largely removed, with the abolition of their special clothing (outside of service time), their consecration with holy oil, and their inability to marry. The laity was now admitted to the whole of a church, instead of being screened off from its most sacred part, the chancel. In 1500 the Church owned about a third of the landed wealth of Britain; in 1600 it was left with about a fifteenth. In 1500, universities were essentially priestly seminaries; a century later they were also becoming playgrounds for young gentry. The laity acquired the power to appoint ministers to a huge number of parish livings, and town councils and parish vestries instituted a new kind of cleric – the lecturer – a preacher whom they hired and paid directly. By 1640 nine-tenths of London parishes had these in addition to ministers, forming almost a parallel clergy.
On the other hand, lay people were also losers in the Reformation, which swept away religious guilds and chantries, institutions which they had controlled completely. The new laws compelling church attendance meant that they were forced to listen weekly to a parish clergyman who was no longer offering up a ritual on their behalf but preaching down to them. From the mid-1550s churchmen were given the right to control schoolmasters, and their greater degree of education meant that they could lead and dominate village communities in a way never known before. So is there an overall balance sheet that can be constructed out of these conflicting bodies of information? Indeed there is: it was the wealthier laity who gained at the expense of the clergy, and the clergy who were recompensed with more power over the poorer laity. At village level this was signalled by the replacement of parish guilds, which could include anybody, with the select vestry, a committee which ran the parish and was confined to its richer inhabitants.
A case could also be made that women did particularly badly from reform. It swept them out of power in heaven, by abolishing the cult of the saints, of whom so many were female. It swept them out of the Church, by dissolving nunneries and ending the tradition of solitary female mystics such as Lady Julian of Norwich. Women had been equal members of guilds, but were not admitted to vestries or Scottish kirk sessions, and ceased to be appointed as parish officers. Once more, this pattern of loss was not evenly distributed; gentlewomen continued to have a voice in religious matters by writing or translating devotional works, and retained private chaplains who served and celebrated them. It was poorer women who were most obviously disempowered. Viewed simply in terms of social and economic power, the true short-term victims of the process of Reformation were the common people of Britain, and especially the female majority of them. In some respects the religious history of the 1640s was to represent a rebellion against just this state of affairs.
In the long term, the victory was to go to the forces of scepticism, disbelief and secularism. From the late seventeenth century onwards, a majority of the British slowly came to believe in a kinder and more remote Christian God, who interfered less often and less directly in the lives of humans. This new concept of deity carried with it a much
reduced tendency to literal belief in the interventions upon earth of his agents, angels and devils. At the end of the same century, the British state commenced a parallel retreat from the attempt to force its subjects to attend the established Church, and they were able increasingly to treat religion, to an even greater extent than before the Reformation, as a service of which they could avail themselves at need. The religious professionals, and the instinctively devout, were left to engage with it full-time. All these major trends, leading directly up to the present, spiritually pluralist and voluntary society, were evident before the Stuart period closed in 1714.
A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Page 18
