The Age of Reformation

The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

Alec Ryrie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351987196
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Age of Reformation charts how religion, politics and social change were always intimately interlinked in the sixteenth century, from the murderous politics of the Tudor court to the building and fragmentation of new religious and social identities in the parishes.

In this book, Alec Ryrie provides an authoritative overview of the religious and political reformations of the sixteenth century. This turbulent century saw Protestantism come to England, Scotland and even Ireland, while the Tudor and Stewart monarchs made their authority felt within and beyond their kingdoms more than any of their predecessors. This book demonstrates how this age of reformations produced not only a new religion, but a new politics – absolutist, yet pluralist, populist yet bound by law.

This new edition has been fully revised and updated and includes expanded sections on Lollardy and anticlericalism, on Henry VIII's early religious views, on several of the rebellions which convulsed Tudor England and on unofficial religion, ranging from Elizabethan Catholicism to incipient atheism.

Drawing on the most recent research, Alec Ryrie explains why these events took the course they did – and why that course was so often an unexpected and unlikely one. It is essential reading for students of early modern British history and the history of the reformation.

1 The world of the parish

Living in early modern Britain

A lost world

The men and women who lived in Britain and Ireland five hundred years ago lived in a world which is lost to us. The difference is a matter not only of the material circumstances of their lives, but of their mental worlds and their imaginations. This is fundamental to any understanding of the religion, politics and society of the sixteenth century.

Imagine an English Rip van Winkle: a peasant who dozed off in the year 1500, overslept and woke up in the modern United Kingdom. He would find himself in an exceptionally strange world. It would be a world filled with giants: the average height of an adult male in the sixteenth century was scarcely over five feet. It would be (as he would notice very quickly) a world filled with food, food in unimaginable quantity and variety. In his own century, our peasant would have derived some 80% of his calorie intake from a single foodstuff – bread. It would be a world filled with light: he would have grown up with nights that were pitch black, and with artificial light that was dim, often prohibitively expensive and which stank. Indeed, the modern world would generally seem strangely devoid of smell – but filled with noise. Our sleeper’s home country was normally quiet. Only thunderstorms, bells and those rare things, crowds, could make truly loud noises. Above all, the sheer numbers of people in the modern world would astonish him. Sixteenth-century England had a population density like that of Highland Scotland today. It was a country of scattered settlements and subsistence farmers. Agricultural productivity was low; a peasant family might need to farm a dozen acres simply to feed themselves. There was almost nothing that we would nowadays call a town. In 1500, London was the only settlement in Britain or Ireland with a population of more than 10,000 people. A handful more breached the 5,000 mark. Only around 3% of the population lived in such metropolises.

The makeup of modern crowds might unsettle him most of all. The numbers of elderly people (over forty) would be surprising. The lack of the visibly sick, crippled and deranged would be more remarkable. Positively disturbing would be the lack of children. He would be familiar with a country where perhaps a third of the whole population was under the age of fifteen, and where babies and children were ever-present. To his eyes, the modern British would look like the survivors of a dreadful child-specific plague.

His world was both smaller and larger than ours. Smaller, for he lived – like some nine-tenths of England’s population – in a community of a hundred or fewer households, often many fewer. He knew all his neighbours and they all knew him. Strangers were instantly recognised as such and treated with some suspicion. Anonymity was rare except in the towns. Even there, privacy in the modern sense scarcely existed, for most houses had more inhabitants than rooms, and their walls could rarely exclude prying eyes, let alone wagging ears. News from the outside world was, in rural areas, occasional and unreliable, although this was beginning to change. Government was distant: a face on a coin, a prayer in church for a king, quarter-sessions held by the county magistrates. More important were the parish priest, the churchwardens and the local lords or gentry. Roads existed, but were ill-maintained and hazardous. Water transport, the only practical means of moving heavy goods, was slow, and there were few navigable rivers. Travel of all kinds was arduous and dangerous.

And yet it was a larger world than our own because its vast emptiness could not be shut out. Britain and Ireland in 1500 were populated by between three and four million people, compared to some seventy million in the early twenty-first century. Wolves, bears and boars were long extinct, and the wild woods had mostly been tamed or chopped down, commemorated only in the towering forests of columns in the great Gothic cathedrals. Yet the natural world remained a place of fear. The notion that wild is beautiful is a very new idea, formed in an age when nature can be kept out by well-insulated walls. The long nights of winter, and the pervasive cold and enforced idleness that went with them, were annually marked by peaks in the death rate. And if there were no wild animals outside, there were wild men. Violent crime was ever-present and policing flimsy and informal. There were worse threats, too, out in the dark: fairies, witches, the Devil himself.

We might smile at such credulity, but the truth was that early modern life was by any standards dangerous and insecure. Life expectancy at birth was somewhere in the thirties, but this is misleading, since comparatively few people actually died at that age. The one significant group who did were mothers: some 6–7% of women died from complications of pregnancy or childbirth. Maternal mortality, however, was a fraction of infant and child mortality, and it is that universal tragedy which skews the statistics. In some times and places, as many as half of children born alive died before the age of fifteen. Those who survived this appalling cull and made it into their teens might, on average, expect to live into their late fifties. But this, too, is a deceptive figure. Old age was not especially uncommon: the tough and the lucky survived into their seventies or eighties. But death rates were high at every age. War and civil unrest regularly claimed civilian lives. By European standards, England escaped lightly, but in Scotland and especially in Ireland the toll of both large-scale and small-scale violence was appalling. War often also aggravated the ever-present problem of food shortages. England, at least, was free of real famine until the very end of our period, the hungry 1590s, but malnutrition was a constant possibility at the bottom of the social scale.

Other hazards were more universal. Simple accidents were a significant cause of death: in an age when water had to be fetched and carried daily, and when bridges were rickety and guardrails non-existent, accidental drowning claimed a great many lives. Those too grand to fetch water risked falling from horses. House fires killed frequently, and also, proverbially, reduced the prosperous to penury within minutes. Perhaps nothing would seem more alien to our sleeping peasant than the modern culture of ‘health and safety’. But most of the worst hazards were simply unavoidable by early modern means. Endemic disease and injuries of all kinds took a regular toll: everything from the new disease of syphilis, through the constant and often fatal problem of dental infections, to the biggest killer of them all, plague.

Plague and its aftermath

Bubonic plague and a series of related diseases arrived in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century without warning, nearly eight centuries after the last major pandemic. Between 1345 and 1352, the ‘Black Death’ killed a third or more of the population across an arc of territory stretching from India to Iceland. It was only the first of a series of outbreaks of plague, some local, some international, which persisted until the seventeenth century. Plague roughly halved the population of Britain and Ireland between 1345 and 1400. Thereafter the population stabilised, but plague continued to prevent a recovery: not by a steady cull, but in occasional large-scale outbreaks. A major visitation of the plague might strike once in a generation and could kill a third of the population of a city in a summer. Nor were rural communities immune. Most Europeans who reached adulthood would live through, or die in, an outbreak of plague.

This extraordinary catastrophe and its long aftermath hangs over the sixteenth century. It is not simply that outbreaks of plague continued to recur, alongside equally lethal epidemic and endemic diseases such as syphilis, influenza and the mysterious, terrifyingly fast killer known as the ‘English sweat’. The post-1350 collapse in population had obvious economic consequences: with fewer people sharing the same amount of land, landlords found themselves relatively impoverished, whereas peasants suddenly had something of a scarcity value. The aftermath of plague in Britain saw the near-total disappearance of serfdom and a boom in the peasantry’s living standards. This is sometimes known as the peasants’ golden age, but we should not get carried away. Peasant poverty had once been absolute and was now merely grinding. Moreover, the price of the golden age was the ever-present threat of sudden, indiscriminating and exceptionally painful death.

The population finally began to rise again in the 1470s or 1480s, as plague slowly retreated and the birth rate rose. By 1500 the recovery was in full spate. The sixteenth century was almost a mirror of the post-plague period. The population rose rapidly: England’s population roughly doubled during the century, to over its pre–Black Death peak. The economy grew, too, but not quite so quickly, as more marginal land came back under cultivation. Land became scarcer, labour cheaper. Generalised inflation pushed up all prices across the century, driven both by a flood of Spanish gold and by population increase, but food prices outstripped others, and the prices of necessities rose faster than those of luxuries. Whatever else this century was, it was not a peasants’ golden age. The well-established inequality of wealth yawned ever wider. On one side of the gulf were landowners, a class which included the wealthiest peasants, the yeomen, who owned enough land to feed themselves and to produce some surplus. The landless were forced into ever-deeper penury. Increasing numbers fell out of the economy altogether, to become paupers and vagrants, a source of regular moral panics throughout the century.

It was a toxic mix of factors: inflation, continued large-scale plague, rising population and growing impoverishment. Of its many consequences, two are particularly worth noticing. The first is enclosure, a long-standing phenomenon which now accelerated dramatically. It is a polite term for an ugly process: landlords’ denying their tenants the use of lands which had previously been available for all (‘common land’) so that they could be farmed intensively for the landlords’ benefit. The most notorious form of enclosure was the conversion of low-quality arable land to sheep farming. Wool was England’s most important export, and sheep, as Thomas More put it, were devouring whole villages. In the long term, enclosure was the foundation of Britain’s later prosperity, since it made much more efficient farming possible. In the short term, however, it seemed to be a means of kicking the peasantry when they were down. The violation of long-standing precedent made its injustice obvious, especially when the wider economic and demographic changes were so imperceptible. Rural anger over enclosure regularly boiled over during the sixteenth century, with important consequences for both politics and religion, but it was not enough to stop the economic logic behind the process.

The second consequence of economic change was felt in the towns. In 1500 the islands’ only real city, London, numbered some 50,000 people, at least five times the size of its nearest rivals, Bristol and Norwich. The largest towns outside England, Edinburgh and Dublin, were smaller still. By 1600, London had swollen to some 200,000 souls, spilling well beyond the old City to begin the process of swallowing the surrounding counties. Other towns were growing too, although none could touch the capital. Such breakneck growth might look like prosperity, but often urban growth was a sign of despair. In the seething, unsanitary conditions of early modern towns, death rates were usually significantly higher than birth rates. Towns only grew through migration from the countryside. The rising rural population left increasing numbers landless and (therefore) destitute: the towns were their only possible destination. Towns were where the rural poor came to die. As a result, the towns became cauldrons of ambition and desperation, churning the supposedly tidy social hierarchies of early modern Britain. They increasingly frightened the respectable elites who nominally ruled them, and who struggled with mixed success to impose moral and economic order. All this made the towns – and above all London – potential engines of social, political and religious instability.

Our long-sleeping peasant, therefore, was probably wise in choosing to snooze through the sixteenth century. In so doing, he avoided likely impoverishment, hunger and early death from any number of causes. Even if he lived into old age, he would likely have done so while suffering from chronic pain or illness of some kind, quite possibly including the virtually untreated problem of mental illness. He would, at least, be poor enough to escape the attentions of the medical profession, an elite who jealously guarded their monopoly, and whose prescriptions were usually unpleasant, frequently useless and occasionally fatal. He would likely fall back on the only painkiller known to the age: alcohol.

His sister would face a slightly different mix of dangers. Women were less likely to be murdered or to engage in certain exceptionally dangerous occupations (soldiering, seafaring, construction). In exchange, they faced the sex-specific danger of maternity, along with more exotic threats such as (later in the century) the faint possibility of being hanged for witchcraft. Yet for all that, women’s life expectancy was slightly better than men’s. This carried its own problems, because in an economy centred on male activity, widows were frequently left destitute. Indeed, women of all ages were more at risk of extreme poverty and malnutrition than men. These calamities drove women as well as men down the desperate path to the cities, which offered one route by which some women could survive: the thriving business of prostitution.

Diversions and hopes

We can only guess at what it was like to live in such a world, although it does seem that the ubiquity of childhood deaths did not dull the pain which bereaved parents felt. Yet sixteenth-century life was not unremittingly grim, nor did peasants pass their lives in earnest discussions of enclosure, inflation and mortality rates. The towns bubbled with diversions as well as with discontent. There were improving civic entertainments, such as mystery and morality plays. There were occasional events of real grandeur, especially in London or Edinburgh, which enjoyed periodic royal entries, coronations, weddings or funerals. There were street traders and entertainers: jugglers, bear-baiters, barbers, minstrels, conjurers, salesmen, con-men. There was a booming book trade, of which we shall hear much more. And mixed with all the rest, shouting for attention, was the Church. The Franciscan friars, an urban order, had been described by their founder as God’s minstrels, and their renown as preachers made them rivals for the best entertainment the secular world had to offer.

If the Church was one provider of entertainment in the towns, in the villages it had a near monopoly. The odd quack or ballad-seller might pass through, but the Church, with its highly visible stone buildings, was ubiquitous. Most people measured time not by days of the month, but by proximity to the major Christian festivals: not just Christmas and Easter, but dozens of holy days scattered through the year. The midsummer feast of St John the Baptist on 24 June was a particular highlight, marked by the lighting of bonfires. Such festivals could be raucous. The ‘church ale’ was one widespread custom: a kind of rowdy, alcohol-fuelled church fête, where the centrepiece was the sale of ale brewed by the churchwardens. Festivals were moments when the normal rules of society were suspended. They were a chance for the hungry to gorge and (a pastime which united all the British nations) to drink themselves into a violent stupor. But they also meant more active reversals of the social order. In a series of events which the social scientists call ‘festivals of inversion’, often at Christmastime, society’s strict hierarchy was deliberately mocked and reversed. As a 1541 royal proclamation disapprovingly described these events:

Children be strangely decked and apparelled to counterfeit priests, bishops, and women, and so be led with songs and dances from house to house, blessing the people and gathering of money, and boys do sing mass and preach in the pulpit.¹

Some feared that the election of boy-bishops on St Nicholas’ Day, or May Queens on May Day, mocked the social hierarchy. In truth it probably reinforced it.

For while the material conditions of our peasant’s life were growing steadily worse, he was not an oppressed proletarian yearning for revolution. Occasionally, he stopped playing at inverting the social order and set about doing it in earnest. Riots and even full-scale peasant rebellions did take place. But while early modern peasants could be sharply aware of injustice, they did not seek to remake their society. The common people’s daydreams took forms like the fantasy land of Cockaigne: a place of permanent festival, where there was always food and never work. No one could conceive of a society whose backbone was not composed of agricultural labourers. Rebellion or riot usually targeted immediate, specific and limited grievances, and wore a conservative face: an attempt to restore matters to how they had once been. The archetype of the common man fighting for justice was the immensely popular figure of Robin Hood, the outlaw who remained loyal to the king. And while the Robin Hood stories mercilessly lampooned corrupt clerics and monks, most versions of the tale also stressed Robin’s true piety. For it was the Church which was both the greatest force for social stability in the early modern world and also (potentially) the greatest threat.

The Church as an institution

The late medieval Church was, and was seen as, two things at once. It was a formidable, wealthy and bureaucratic institution. It was also the city of God and the body of Christ.

The structure

The Church’s institutional face is easier to pin down. By 1500, the Church’s institutions in western Europe were fully mature. The continent was geographically parcelled out into dioceses (administered by bishops), which were subdivided into parishes. There were seventeen dioceses in England, some of them very large and very wealthy by European standards; four in Wales, thirteen in Scotland and thirty-two (mostly small and impoverished) in Ireland. England and Wales comprised about 9,000 parishes, Scotland a further 1,000 and Ireland some 2,500. In theory, the network extended to every inhabited part of the islands. Most Christians met the Church principally in their parish.

A parish was a geographical area tied to a church building (the parish church) and overseen by a parish priest with responsibility for the residents’ spiritual welfare (‘cure of souls’). This system was not always as neat in practice as in theory. In the more remote, upland parts of Britain (although not in Ireland), parishes were sometimes vast and parish churches inaccessible, and subsidiary church buildings (‘chapels of ease’) were rare. The larger English cities had the opposite problem: tiny parishes. The square mile of the City of London contained more than 100 parish churches: in proportion to their populations, Norwich and York had even more. In such cities it was tempting to cross parish boundaries for churchgoing, and relatively easy to slip through the net and avoid churchgoing altogether. Yet with these provisos, the parish remained the basis both of most Christians’ religion and of the Church’s administration.

It was also the basis of the Church’s finances. Although the late medieval church had a great many sources of income, including its vast landholdings, the bedrock of Church finance was the tithe. This was a levy which in theory required that one-tenth of all produce, of any kind, was owed to the parish church. In practice, many payments had been fixed or negotiated down. The payment of tithes still sparked disputes and tension, but surprisingly rarely...