The Shaping of a Community

The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–1560

Beat A. Kümin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781859281642
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351881982
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

This book offers a new perspective to the current debate about popular religious attitudes in Tudor England, laying particular emphasis on the social and secular dimensions of parish life. The argument focuses on the role of the laity and especially on the office of churchwarden. It assesses the rising levels of parish income, the importance of the social context for fund-raising strategies, and the growing expenditure on priests, voluntary activities and administrative duties. The final part discusses the Reformation-related reduction in religious options and the intensifying trend towards oligarchical parish regimes and official local government responsibilities. Wherever possible, the English situation is put into sharper focus by comparisons with local ecclesiastical life on the Continent and appendices provide a detailed financial analysis for a large number of parishes.

Chapter One
Introduction

Compared to the title pages of early printed books, with their meticulous description of subject matter, source material, and methodology, those of contemporary historical studies tend to be rather less elaborate. The present one is a case in point, and a closer definition of the basis and scope of the inquiry must be the first priority of these opening passages. Three notions in particular should be addressed. First, to associate the 'rise' of the English parish with the years between 1400 and 1560 does not imply that the subject can be understood without a closer look at previous centuries. On the contrary, the creation of the parochial network was an achievement of the high Middle Ages, and both the formulation of canonical duties and the emergence of the main parochial institutions date from before the fifteenth century. By 1400, the rise of the parish was well under way, but the vagaries of source survival prohibit any comparative or quantitative analysis of the process for the early stages. And yet, there are more than just documentary reasons to suggest that the process continued and arguably intensified during the following century and a half. As will be shown in more detail below, this period witnessed the commitment of increasing resources to the parish, the development of new liturgical and social customs, a growth in secular and voluntary communal activities, and, famously, the 'great age of parish church rebuilding'. From the mid-sixteenth century, Tudor legislation added the finishing touches to the shaping of the community by turning it into a local government unit. This, however, amounted to a fundamental redefinition of its role, and the start of the Elizabethan reign can serve as a convenient cut-off point for our purposes. Due to the gradual emergence of other types of parochial records, the expansion of statutory communal responsibilities, and the definitive break with the old religious ways too many parameters changed, and any further analysis would have to adopt radically different approaches. 'Reformation', to clarify the second notion, should thus be taken to refer only to the early and repeatedly reversed changes under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary Tudor.

Third, the use of the term 'community may have to be justified. Due to its recent proliferation and indiscriminate application to all sorts of social groups it has become rather meaningless to some observers.¹ Here, however, 'parish community' appears not as an anachronistic transfer of anthropological terminology or as part of a sinister plot to obscure the potential for conflict in local society, but as a common-sense acknowledgement of the existence of a geographically defined religious and social unit with certain collective responsibilities and the capability to act, sue, and be represented as a quasi-corporate body.² It reflects the fact that it could nurture 'pride' and 'intense loyalty' among its members,³ as well as the observation that much of late medieval worship was of a distinctly 'corporate' nature.⁴ These three points, I hope, will help to put the following argument in perspective.

The scientific interest in the religious life of the later Middle Ages is of course no recent phenomenon. Historians of all denominations have studied a wide variety of aspects, focusing on idiosyncratic beliefs of individuals as well as attempting to come to an understanding of popular piety.⁵ In the late 1960s, the emphasis shifted noticeably towards the unorthodox and pagan, based on the assumption of a significant gap between the teachings of the official Church and the religious feelings of the population at large. Rather than as an age of faith, Jean Delumeau interpreted the Middle Ages as only superficially Christianized, and Keith Thomas's influential work unearthed an impressive amount of magical elements in contemporary religious practice.⁶ There was also a strong interest in minorities and heretical movements, of which England possessed one of the foremost examples. Much valuable and interesting work has since been done on the Lollards, their geographical spread, writings, and social background.⁷

However, such approaches can be criticized for adopting a somewhat reductionist and selective view of the later Middle Ages. Orthodox, everyday religious activities are much more difficult to trace in historical sources, simply because neither chronicler nor ecclesiastical judge found them worth recording. Any attempt to arrive at a general assessment valid for as large a section of society as possible must therefore resist the temptation to extrapolate from the extravagant or exceptional. At the very least, existing sources of ordinary religious life have to be incorporated alongside other evidence. Naturally, these do rarely answer the sort of questions that present-day historians would like to ask, and, given that their raison d'être was often administrative and practical, they can be repetitive, tedious, and confusing. Yet means and ways have to be found to make them accessible and manageable. This is the process that this study seeks to contribute to.

In the sphere of English Reformation history, A. G. Dickens's pioneering work displayed some of the methodological bias described above.⁸ To this day, he focuses on early signs of religious discontent, anticlericalism, and heretical doctrines, in spite of the challenges of his revisionist critics and their blunt statement that the English people 'did not want the Reformation'.⁹ The historiographical debate has become rather inflexible, with Dickens trying to provide more and more cases of committed Protestants, and the revisionists pointing out how divided a nation England remained deep into the reign of Elizabeth.¹⁰ At present, the problem does not seem to lend itself to a satisfactory solution, and the choice of an appropriate approach to reassess developments at the grass-roots level is far from obvious.¹¹ For a long time, wills were considered to be the way forward. Countless local studies have focused on the interpretation and quantitative analysis of preambles, charting slower or faster progress of reformed ideas, but recently the voices urging methodological caution have become more and more prominent.¹² The source should not be discarded of course, but for a balanced analysis of the pre- and early Reformation periods, it has to be supplemented by the records of collective and communal institutions. The revisionists have led the way by exploring fraternity registers and (very selectively) churchwardens' accounts.¹³ Here we can hope for some insight into the elusive processes of negotiation, conflict management, elections, and everyday administration which involved more than just individuals or selected social groups. Given the lack of a sharp contemporary distinction between the secular and ecclesiastical, they should also allow us a glimpse at both of these spheres.

In the former, the study of local communities is nothing new. In line with their economic and cultural importance, townspeople have always attracted a great deal of interest, and as early as 1922, Joan Wake stressed that an analysis of village life demanded more than a look at seigneurial sources.¹⁴ A quick glance at recent work suggests that this advice has now been heeded.¹⁵ Robert Goheen may have gone furthest when he called for a revision of the historical convention that peasants cannot understand political issues, that they are mere objects and unworthy of special analysis. A new definition of consciousness, he argued with reference to Gilbert Ryle and Jean Paul Sartre, should reflect that 'the mind is now understood to include the ability to act intelligently, and not just to theorize action'.¹⁶

In the realm of religious history, the equivalent social unit is the parish, which has now clearly emerged as the main point of reference for the analysis of everyday devotional and social life.¹⁷ This is an astonishing development: it is not that long ago since John Bossy asserted 'that the Church of the last medieval centuries was not in actual fact a parochially grounded institution',¹⁸ and as recently as 1988, it was still appropriate to regret that hardly anything had been written on this local 'focus of loyalty as well as of administration, or on the unique blend of secular and ecclesiastical that underpinned it'.¹⁹ In the same year, however, there were signs of change even in as unlikely a field as the study of 'popular culture', when one of its protagonists conceded that the parish was 'perhaps the most essential organizational form of social exchange'.²⁰ And by 1995, an impressive amount of conference papers, essays, and monographs have been written which tackle the subject from a variety of different angles.²¹ Furthermore, much valuable research has been undertaken in neighbouring areas. There are now up-to-date accounts of the complex relationships between clergymen and their communities,²² revisionist summaries of the political progress of the Reformation,²³ reconstructions of the origin and development of communal customs and rituals,²⁴ and new approaches to the liturgical and devotional life of late medieval and early Tudor parishioners.²⁵ At the same time, the whole image of the late Middle Ages as a period of stagnation or decline has been markedly revised. Summarizing accounts of church institutions, undistracted by the long shadow of the Reformation, can nowadays use positive terms to describe the state of diocesan administration, ecclesiastical courts, or the parish clergy.²⁶

It goes without saying that this book cannot attempt to do justice to all of these new developments in equal measure. Its scope and perspective is more adequately defined by a few juxtapositions: community rather than individual, social rather than theological, orthodox rather than unorthodox, laity rather than clergy, horizontal rather than vertical, and long-term rather than short-term. To put it briefly: it looks at a period of English history through the eyes and sources of parishioners in their collective capacity, or, more precisely, through the records of their wardens. It cannot pretend to cover each and every aspect of parochial life, not even all those of a collective nature, but it assesses the principal communal office. The political and religious influence of princes or bishops, in contrast, appears only indirectly. This is not to deny their impact on parochial life, be it by means of injunctions, visitations, legislation or jurisdiction, but the priority here is to assess how these signals were received, modified, or resisted by people whose experiences went beyond contacts with their ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables, figures and maps
• Preface
• Notes and abbreviations
• Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Community of the Parish
• 3 Communal Resources and Responsibilities
• 4 Parochial Substructure
• 5 The Social Context
• 6 Mid-Sixteenth-Century Change
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: The Communalization of Late Medieval Society
• Appendix 1 An alphabetical list of English churchwardens' accounts c. 1300-1547
• Appendix 2 Categories and definitions used in the figures and tables
• Appendix 3 Detailed income/expenditure analysis for the case studies in the sample
• Appendix 4 Sources of revenue (i) and main items of expenditure (ii) in ten parishes
• Bibliography
• Index