Commonwealth and the English Reformation

Protestantism and the Politics of Religious Change in the Gloucester Vale, 1483�1560

Ben Lowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781409400455
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351950381
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Whilst much recent research has dealt with the popular response to the religious change ushered in during the mid-Tudor period, this book focuses not just on the response to broad liturgical and doctrinal change, but also looks at how theological and reform messages could be utilized among local leaders and civic elites. It is this cohort that has often been neglected in previous efforts to ascertain the often elusive position of the common woman or man. Using the Vale of Gloucester as a case study, the book refocuses attention onto the concept of "commonwealth" and links it to a gradual, but long-standing dissatisfaction with local religious houses. It shows how monasteries, endowed initially out of the charitable impulses of elites, increasingly came to depend on lay stewards to remain viable. During the economic downturn of the mid-Tudor period, when urban and landed elites refocused their attention on restoring the commonwealth which they believed had broken down, they increasingly viewed the charity offered by religious houses as insufficient to meet the local needs. In such a climate the Protestant social gospel seemed to provide a valid alternative to which many people gravitated. Holding to scrutiny the revisionist revolution of the past twenty years, the book reopens debate and challenges conventional thinking about the ways the traditional church lost influence in the late middle ages, positing the idea that the problems with the religious houses were not just the creation of the reformers but had rather a long history. In so doing it offers a more complete picture of reform that goes beyond head-counting by looking at the political relationships and how they were affected by religious ideas to bring about change.

Chapter 1
Government, Business and Urban Politics in Late Medieval Gloucester

In one of his last published forays into the popular Reformation debate, A.G. Dickens contended that the early “heartland of the English Reformation” consisted of a crescent that stretched from Norwich to East Sussex, and a western offshoot out of the Thames Valley that included Gloucestershire. Dickens was particularly aggrieved at the revisionist overemphasis on the large, more cosmopolitan cities, such as London and Bristol, as the sole pockets of reform, “since without any doubt another special locus classicus of early English Protestantism was the minor urban or near-urban community: the smallish weaving town, the even smaller market town, the large, semi-industrial village,” such as Gloucester and its environs.¹ It is no surprise that a port town would have been more likely to come into contact with early Protestant ideas, but Gloucester was not at the center of an international mercantile community, say in the way its neighbor Bristol was, and besides, contact with heresy did not automatically translate into widespread adoption of it. What then contributed to Gloucester’s early reception of the Reformation—at least among town elites and surrounding gentry?

To understand the willingness of many residents of Gloucester to embrace reform in the formative years of English Protestantism, we need begin with the larger late medieval historical context and see what combination of factors might have encouraged town leaders to embrace not just the royal supremacy, but the process of ongoing reform itself. By the time the strongly evangelical bishop John Hooper arrived in the town in the spring of 1551, the previous 70 years had proved particularly tumultuous, even disruptive, for many of the town’s citizens. Historically, Gloucester had been ruled by business elites, and hard times had led to numerous clashes between borough officials and competing ecclesiastical interests, which were only exacerbated by the various dislocations precipitated by the Black Death and its aftermath.

Gloucester’s Geography and Early History

Gloucester began as one of Britain’s earliest Roman settlements and continued to thrive throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. After the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror continued the custom of holding Christmas court in the town, built a castle there and in 1089 sent the Norman monk, Serlo, to restore the old Saxon monastery of St. Peter that had been founded in 681. Before long, Gloucester grew in size and prominence; and it was here in 1216 that Henry III became the only king to be crowned outside London. By the fourteenth century the abbey had also been the setting for numerous parliaments.

Medieval Gloucester took on a shape that was typical for comparable towns of its size and scope. There were four major roads in each direction, with corresponding gates at the old town wall and moat that brought travelers into central Gloucester, converging at the High Cross, where predictably, Southgate, Eastgate, Northgate and Westgate streets met.

Figure 1.1 John Speed’s map of the City of Gloucester (1611)

Inside or just outside the walls were the usual markets, shops and inns, along with 11 parish churches, four monasteries, two priories, three hospitals and numerous parish chantries. At this time, the town was mainly an industrial center, producing a wide range of goods for distribution to the surrounding countryside. The famous docks—which signaled Gloucester’s emergence as a port—were constructed by Elizabethan charter only at the end of the sixteenth century. Until then, most local products destined for overseas trade first had to make their way to the nearby port city of Bristol. Located on the Severn River, Gloucester was an important crossroads near South Wales and linked in trade with Bristol and the emerging market towns of Cheltenham, Tewkesbury, Cirencester, Painswick and Newent. The ironworks based in the nearby Forest of Dean, proved the dominant industry for much of the middle ages.

Moving out from the city, Gloucestershire was one of the “most gentrified areas in the country,” due in large part to its geography and to the church possessing much of the land in the county before the dissolutions.² The geography is such that Gloucester sits near the middle of the county, with the Forest of Dean to the west and southwest, the Cotswolds to the east and southeast, and the Severn Vale (including Gloucester) extending north and northwest to the Malvern Hills at the Herefordshire and Worcestershire borders. These natural boundaries left few large tracts of fertile land for personal development by small farmers, and most of these were south of Gloucester on the east side of the Severn River or just north of the city. As we will see, many of these properties radiated out of Gloucester and were owned by the two largest religious establishments in the city, St. Peter’s Abbey and Llanthony Priory. Each monastery controlled most advowsons to the parish churches and leased lands to tenants engaged in farming or animal husbandry. This situation produced a twofold effect on the county’s history by the sixteenth century. For one, many of the local gentry were in close proximity to Gloucester and had become very involved in its internal politics, often contributing to and patronizing religious endowments. At the same time, however, such cooperation could easily turn into competition and conflict, especially when economic forces put the squeeze on property values. In both town and country there was a growing impression by the later middle ages that the religious institutions themselves were incapable of managing their lands productively, especially as the population of monks declined, along with their ability to maintain their properties.

Gloucester’s Business Community

Before looking at the effect of the late medieval demographic crisis in greater detail we need first to draw a picture of Gloucester’s business community as it took shape in the high middle ages. Gloucester was a major provincial town in the West Midlands and, as would be expected, the commercial orientation of the town was linked to the availability of natural resources in the area and to the potential for market exchange. Gloucester also had served as a military base for royal campaigns into Wales.³ The Forest of Dean supplied wood for shipbuilding at the Severn ports of Bristol, Newnham, Lydney and Gloucester, as well as iron used to produce armaments, needles and bells. The Cotswolds provided grazing grounds for sheep, many flocks of which belonged to neighboring abbeys, including Tewkesbury, Winchcombe and Gloucester (St. Peter’s). Benedictine monasteries in the Midlands often developed economies on their estates by establishing new towns, such as Northleach, which St. Peter’s founded in the early thirteenth century.⁴

The timber, ironmaking and woolen industries thus became the foundation of Gloucester’s commercial prosperity, although for a time there were also significant industries linked to the Gascon wine trade and the export of grain.⁵ Gloucester Abbey had an extensive array of manorial demesnes that supplied the monks but also brought in much additional revenue from its sales in local market towns as well as some overseas trade.⁶ Gloucester was the nucleus of the area’s local commerce, with the markets at Painswick and Newent, six and eight miles away respectively, being the largest satellites used to distribute goods further inland. Numerous fairs were also held throughout the year, again, some sponsored by the monasteries, while within Gloucester, there was also the municipal guildhall, or Boothall on Westgate Street, where wool and tanned goods were mostly sold. As markets contracted in the later middle ages, eventually all cloth had to be sold within the Boothall.

Aside from the well-to-do merchants, there were numerous artisans in the town to serve the inhabitants and frequent visitors as well as the immediate local market. Both groups were organized into guilds, with the merchants providing most of the burgesses to the Common Council. A 1327 subsidy assessment indicates, unsurprisingly, that the highest payers came from the companies of merchants, drapers, tanners, dyers and goldsmiths. The two major organizations of businessmen were the Guild Merchant and the Commune (Common Council). Craftsmen could only belong to the former, with membership enabling them to buy and sell without paying toll or custom.⁷ Guilds typically had close relationships with the parish churches, with several maintaining chantries by paying the income of the priests who were praying for the departed souls. Often there was some kind of connection to the trade itself; for example, the Tanners’ Guild supported the chantry in the chapel of St. Clement, the patron saint of tanners, located in the church of St. John the Baptist.⁸

Urban Land Tenure

In addition to its business character, the nature of tenancy in Gloucester serves as an important indicator of the amount of economic control wielded by the local ecclesiastical establishment. In the high middle ages there was a dynamic property market in English towns, including Gloucester, especially when linked to commercial sites, where there was significant investment in new buildings. The bailiffs and community were granted both jurisdictional rights over the town and the fee farm, which meant buying out the lords’ rights by commuting all royal rent for properties owned by the king to a set amount that would be paid annually into the exchequer. Any additional rents went directly to the town and to local landlords and not to Westminster. The king was therefore not the great beneficiary of property revenue, even though he was the immediate lord and had residual rights. Instead he obtained more from tolls, taxes and incidents of justice. Yet lay magnates holding property in the town under the king or as lords in their own right could use the income to support magnificent lifestyles on their estates, to influence urban politics or to maintain town residences. Such rents could be hard to collect and supervise if the estates were far from the town.⁹

Religious houses in town tended to benefit the most from rental income, and here it was rather convenient to collect. Aside from gaining enhanced income from rents and capital improvements to the land, large Benedictine abbeys such as St. Peter’s used their position as ecclesiastical lords to augment their political might in the absence of military power. Developing a “geographically coherent estate around the abbey, and the development of an urban market centre at the core of the estate, most frequently at the gates of the abbey complex itself,” gave the abbot social and political standing in the area. Abbots usually had large incomes that were needed to offset tenants selling surplus produce in neighboring local markets, to pay rents and fines, and also “to indulge their passion for building and to secure legal protections whenever their jurisdiction was challenged.”¹⁰

In the middle ages rents were more than just the “right to occupy,” they were also obligatory fixed payments by both urban and rural inhabitants to local overlords who offered protection. If these rents were due to the king or the king’s lords, they were known as landgable, or landgavel. With the rise of free tenancy and the grant of charters that gave Gloucester and other towns like it the fee farm in the thirteenth century, measures such as the Statute of Mortmain (1279) were used to control any alienation of land to the church that might negatively impact royal revenues.¹¹ St. Peter’s carried out its major expansion of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries through grants just outside the north, east and south gates.¹² As the population of Gloucester grew, the great property-owning abbey found that the only way to increase its ground rent would be to develop previously arable or common lands on its estates. Doing this, however, led to animosities and conflicts that could sometimes escalate into anticlerical violence.¹³

Effects of the Black Death

The economic crises and demographic dislocations of the fourteenth century severely affected Gloucester and its neighbors, as it did the rest of nation. A recent calculation approximates that between 1377 and 1524–1525, Gloucester’s population declined by 29 percent (to about 3,029), which while significant was less than the national average. How were towns like Gloucester able to fashion new economic and social strategies that enabled them to remain relatively prosperous?¹⁴

The Hundred Years War and bubonic plague significantly interrupted both the wine trade (for a time) and the movement of English wool to the Calais staple and the Low Countries, which led to a renewed push to produce woolen cloth that could be sold abroad directly by English traders. This turn of events benefitted Bristol and Southampton, from where much of this cloth was shipped by the end of the fifteenth century. New industries connected to cloth manufacture such as weaving and capmaking rose, therefore, to both economic and political prominence in Gloucester. In addition, records show that the town became even more of a distribution center for the region as an influx of people from the countryside sold surplus raw materials for industry and foodstuffs for town consumption. The grain trade became particularly lucrative and led to a successful forestalling of the Gloucester market at the turn of the fifteenth century. Local gentry came to the town to buy luxury goods, such as wines, and also almonds, pepper, oil, dates and raisins, and for dyers, woad, madder, alum and soap.¹⁵

There are indications that the town’s expanded role in supplying these important goods helped to revitalize Gloucester’s economy along new lines. More goods were brought upriver from Bristol and made their way to the surrounding countryside (and as far away as London) through distribution networks originating in Gloucester. After 1400 there were complaints that the bailiffs were stopping or illegally levying tolls on boats going up the river, which eve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Government, Business and Urban Politics in Late Medieval Gloucester
• 2 Gloucester’s Ecclesiastical Community and Education during the Middle Ages
• 3 Gloucestershire’s Leading Gentlemen before the Reformation
• 4 The Gloucester Vale on the Eve of the Reformation (1520–1540)
• 5 Gloucester during the Great Transfer (1536–1551)
• 6 The Gloucestershire Gentry during the Great Transfer (1540–1551)
• 7 Commonwealth and Reform: Bishop Hooper in Gloucester (1551–1555)
• 8 A Troubled City (1555 and Beyond)
• Appendix A: Gloucester City and County Officials (1500–1562)
• Appendix B: Major Estates and Parishes of Gloucestershire Gentry (1500–1560)
• Appendix C: Genealogical Chart of Gloucestershire’s Leading Families in the Sixteenth Century
• Appendix D: Wills and Bequests of Gloucester Magistrates and Prominent Gloucestershire Gentry Active 1541–1562
• Bibliography
• Index