Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620

Claire S. Schen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351952637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The degree to which the English Protestant Reformation was a reflection of genuine popular piety as opposed to a political necessity imposed by the country's rulers has been a source of lively historical debate in recent years. Whilst numerous arguments and documentary sources have been marshalled to explain how this most fundamental restructuring of English society came about, most historians have tended to divide the sixteenth century into pre and post-Reformation halves, reinforcing the inclination to view the Reformation as a watershed between two intellectually and culturally opposed periods. In contrast, this study takes a longer and more integrated approach. Through the prism of charity and lay piety, as expressed in the wills and testaments taken from selected London parishes, it charts the shifting religious ideas about salvation and the nature and causes of poverty in early modern London and England across a hundred and twenty year period. Studying the evolution of lay piety through the long stretch of the period 1500 to 1620, Claire Schen unites pre-Reformation England with that which followed, helping us understand how 'Reformations' or a 'Long Reformation' happened in London. Through the close study of wills and testaments she offers a convincing cultural and social history of sixteenth century Londoners and their responses to religious innovations and changing community policy.

Chapter One
Introduction

In St Botolph's Aldersgate in 1601, the scribe drew upon a verse from Proverbs to begin the new volume of vestry minutes: 'He that hath mercy upon the Poore, rendeth unto the Lord. And the Lord will recompence him that w[hi]ch hee hath given.'¹ A list of benefactors to the poor followed the verse, with their names and details about their donations. The churchwardens in St Botolph's used Scripture to sanction the idea of charity and celebrated the exemplary donations of parishioners to encourage the act of giving. Before the Reformation, parishioners understood that salvation came through good works, including charity, and the intercession of priests, saints and Christians who prayed for the souls of the dead. Without denying the selfless motives for giving, the selfish components, from securing salvation to perpetuating the family name, helped to spur late medieval women and men to charitable acts. After the Reformation, even with purgatory abolished and Catholic acts of mercy or good works discredited, charity remained an important act of faith, beneficial to the individual, useful to society, and pleasing to God. Religion, before and after the Reformation, shaped parishioners' views of poverty and poor relief. Protestant ideas, however, were only part of the powerful influences on London's inhabitants; the spectacular growth of the city and the growth in poverty, whether real or perceived, also shaped responses to the problem of the poor.

'Charity' in the sixteenth century encompassed God's love of humankind, humankind's love of God and neighbour, the specific act of almsgiving, and benevolence to the poor.² I use the term in this study to represent the relief of the poor and the kindness shown to needy kin and neighbours and being 'in charity' to refer to the love between God and humankind, and among humankind. In speaking of the poor, I include the abject poor, their poverty being structural, with the occasionally impoverished, theirs being conjunctural.³ Informal charity and formal poor relief functioned together to alleviate poverty, an ideal encapsulated in the 1598 poor law calling on the parents and children of the lame, blind, impotent and aged to maintain them while also solidifying the formal national law.⁴ Neither alms nor statutory relief were intended to negate social inequality, however. Instead, gifts and formal relief acknowledged, even reified, social distinctions.

Marcel Mauss's theory of the 'gift' demonstrates how charity marked social difference even though it allowed the temporary transcendence of the divide between rich and poor. Mauss described the power of the gift, and the giver, in this way: 'To give is to show one's superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).'⁵ For testators, whose personal returns on charity came only with death, charity elevated the social status of their survivors and imbued their parish or city with the family name. In pre-Reformation London, the poor were likened to Christ and, with testators' salvation linked to almsgiving, impoverished men and women 'repaid' testators with prayers and remembrance. When the poor prayed and processed in black mourning gowns, they returned some of the monetary and other gifts in spiritual 'superiority'. The Reformation, however, succeeded in recasting the poor as client or servant, ornaments at funerals whose own devotions no longer helped testators to pass through the eye of the needle into heaven.⁶

The Reformation did not, however, destroy charity, nor did the imposition of rates for parochial relief undo altruism. Commentators and preachers still urged charity as an example of Christian love and a way to preserve 'community'. As Mauss wrote about gift exchange, 'To refuse to give, to fail to invite, just as to refuse to accept, is tantamount to declaring war; it is to reject the bond of alliance and commonality'.⁷ The connection between parish relief and the stability and governance of metropolitan London has been noted.⁸ Although historians once used 'community' un-self-consciously, recent works have questioned the appropriateness of the term. Robert Tittler's summary of the useful elements of the word – emphasising mutual identity and obligation and yet not precluding 'conflict and disharmony' – accords with the sixteenth-century practice of using charity to blur and mark social difference.⁹ Further, no single community existed in sixteenth-century London where parish, court, guild and neighbourhood intersected and members overlapped. London's history and various communities have been the subject of renewed interest, especially in relation to its companies and its seventeenth-century Puritanism.¹⁰ Despite continuity in the motives behind charity, compassion and Christian love as well as a desire to maintain order, the developments of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did bring real change in the relationship between donors and recipients. The 'artificial yet intimate link between members of the Christian community'¹¹ of the late medieval period grew even weaker as the poor remained in a secondary role, lacking even the power to promise prayers to generous donors.

Although elements of the English case set the country apart, and London's special problems with poverty and charity distinguished it from the rest of the country, reform of poor relief spread across Europe's confessional and geographical lines in the sixteenth century. Catholic and Protestant countries alike fixated on social disorder and saw older notions of charity, particularly indiscriminate almsgiving, slowly erode.¹² The Protestant criticism that first attacked the mendicant orders developed into an attack on begging that most Catholic policy also incorporated.¹³ In general, reform meant relying on a community chest, administering relief through secular leaders, ending unregulated begging, and regulating the poor, though all elements of this reform were not present throughout Europe.¹⁴ While Catholic and Protestant charity exhibited similarities, Protestant relief tended to greater centralization than did Catholic efforts.¹⁵ Paul Slack has noted the special English contributions to widespread reform: rates and work-houses.¹⁶ Historians of England agree that poverty was redefined and that the nascent differentiation between deserving and undeserving poor matured in the sixteenth century, but they disagree on the roots or agents of this historical development.¹⁷ Compared to Continental studies, the spectre of Max Weber's puritan ethic is largely absent in English historiography.¹⁸

The similarities across geographical and confessional boundaries are mirrored by the comparisons across the chronological divide between medieval and early modern society. An historiographical tendency to study either pre- or post-Reformation society and culture has exacerbated the problem of seeing sixteenth-century developments as novel.¹⁹ Notions of the deserving and undeserving poor originated in the medieval period, although the dichotomy was formalized by the developing poor laws.²⁰ Fraternities and religious guilds permitted medieval men and women to balance the obligation to give with the desire for control and discrimination. Donors' fears of the potentially disruptive poor and their resentment of the idle poor existed alongside this emphasis on almsgiving.²¹

Across time and place, the reform of relief and charity sprang from common problems of economic distress, demographic stress and religious or cultural change, but local conditions also influenced the response to these problems. Ingredients for unrest existed in London and the other towns of England in the sixteenth century: sporadic economic crises, a decline in civic ritual, religious uncertainty and rapid population growth. Economic decline in English cities and towns resulted in decay, and less civic ritual in turn exacerbated social difference.²² London's stability in the sixteenth century, despite expansion, economic crises and religious turmoil, has been the object of recent studies.²³ Steve Rappaport emphasizes the crisis of the 1590s, while Ian Archer downplays the extent of economic crisis in that decade. In his study of craft guilds, Rappaport states that the opportunities for social mobility within them lessened the threat of serious unrest. Although the crisis of the 1590s may have brought London closer to riot than at any other time, he paints a picture of a quiet city.²⁴ Archer counters this view, suggesting that an absence of riots after 1595 'may reflect tightened social control rather than the restoration of social calm'. Elites crafted a careful balance among social groups that balanced the 'rulers and ruled', but articulated greater social polarization. Broad-based social involvement in parishes, wards and companies, if not on the court of aldermen, and social policies overseeing the poor promoted stability, Archer argues.²⁵ Bouts of the plague, natural disasters, minor disturbances about the city, and increasing numbers of poor, however, coloured contemporaries' perceptions of increasing urban poverty and disorder. These perceptions encouraged and justified further discrimination in charity and poor relief to relieve the sufferers and punish the idle. The opinions of contemporaries, even if quantitatively incorrect, made a real impact on policy and practice.²⁶

Charity was not just a means to keep civic order, but also an expression of piety. Bequests and poor relief reflected Catholic and Protestant beliefs, providing another way of analysing the course and impact of the English Reformation. Revisionist historians have dismantled the traditional interpretation of the event, or series of events: a popular Protestant Reformation driven by anti-clericalism and popular piety. Revisionists' careful study of lay piety revealed the vitality of a...