Historical Dictionary of the Elizabethan World

Britain, Ireland, Europe and America

John Wagner, John Wagner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136597619
• Edition: 1

No period of British history generates such deep interest as the reign of Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. The individuals and events of that era continue to be popular topics for contemporary literature and film, and Elizabethan drama, poetry, and music are studied and enjoyed everywhere by students, scholars, and the general public.The Historical Dictionary of the Elizabeth World provides clear definitions and descriptions of people, events, institutions, ideas, and terminology relating in some significant way to the Elizabethan period. The first dictionary of history to focus exclusively on the reign of Elizabeth I, the Dictionary is also the first to take a broad trans-Atlantic approach to the period by including relevant individuals and terms from Irish, Scottish, Welsh, American, and Western European history.Editors' Choice: Reference

HISTORICAL DICTIONARY
of the

ELIZABETHAN
WORLD

Britain, Ireland, Europe, and America

Accession Day

The anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession to the throne on 17 November 1558 was one of the few truly secular HOLIDAYS in the English CALENDAR. In the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign, Accession Day, also known as Queen’s Day or Coronation Day, was celebrated with the ringing of bells and the building of bonfires. After the defeat of the NORTHERN REBELLION in 1570, the anniversary became a day of national thanksgiving and festival. The Accession Day tilts, elaborate tournaments held before thousands of spectators at the Westminster tilt-yard, allowed young courtiers to display their martial prowess and their devotion to queen and country (see COURT; VIRGIN QUEEN). After the start of the war with SPAIN in 1585, the holiday became a patriotic celebration of Protestant England and its glorious queen (see PROTESTANTISM). Accession Day celebrations were revived under Elizabeth’s successor, JAMES I, when her reign began to be seen as a golden age of national greatness. The date remained emotionally significant and was an occasion for patriotic celebrations well into the eighteenth century. See also CHRISTMAS; EASTER; WESTMINSTER PALACE.

Further Reading: David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.

Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days. See “BOOK OF MARTYRS.”

admiral. See OFFICERS OF STATE.

admonition controversy

The admonition controversy was an acrimonious pamphlet debate between English Protestants over the best form of church governance and the proper relationship of church and state. The controversy began in 1572 when Elizabeth suppressed a parliamentary bill that would have allowed Anglican bishops to exempt ministers from using sections of the BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER to which they objected.

After the queen killed the measure, two Puritan preachers in LONDON, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, published a pamphlet entitled Admonition to the Parliament. Although cast in the form of an address to PARLIAMENT, the Admonition was a vehicle for presenting the authors’ views to the general public. The pamphlet was well received, going through several editions by the end of 1572. Wilcox’s portion of the work was moderate and restrained, but Field castigated the ANGLICAN CHURCH in no uncertain terms, denouncing its practices and the Prayer Book as “popish” (i.e., Roman Catholic) and attacking its bishops as ungodly. Field’s harsh tone led many PURITANS, including John FOXE and Thomas LEVER, to denounce the pamphlet.

In November 1572, after city authorities had imprisoned Wilcox and Field, an anonymous Second Admonition appeared in London. Archbishop Matthew PARKER commissioned John WHITGIFT, vice-chancellor of Cambridge (see UNIVERSITIES), to respond to the second pamphlet. Whitgift’s Answer to a Certain Libel Instituted, an Admonition to the Parliament prompted a reply from Thomas CARTWRIGHT, a former divinity professor at Cambridge who had been deprived of his position by Whitgift in 1570 for his criticisms of the Anglican Church. Cartwright’s Reply to an Answer Made of M Doctor Whitgift against the Admonition was published in April 1573, only a year after he had returned from European exile. Although Cartwright fled again in December 1573 when a warrant was issued for his arrest, the pamphlet war continued, with Whitgift publishing his Defense of the Answer to the Admonition in 1574, and Cartwright publishing his Second Reply in 1575 and his The Rest of the Second Reply in 1577. In his writings, Whitgift supported the royal supremacy by making no distinction between the English Church and a Christian commonwealth (see SUPREMACY, ROYAL), while Cartwright advocated a presbyterian church distinct from a state whose officials would be subordinate to church leaders in spiritual matters. The admonition controversy split the Puritans and demonstrated the depth of some Puritans’ opposition to the ANGLICAN SETTLEMENT of 1559. See also CATHOLICISM, ENGLISH; PRESBYTERIAN MOVEMENT; PROTESTANTISM.

Further Reading: Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990; Donald Joseph McGinn, The Admonition Controversy, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949.

advowson

An advowson was the right to appoint a clergyman to a BENEFICE. The right could be held by church officials, such as bishops, or by laypeople, from the monarch to town corporations and individual property owners. Laypeople began acquiring rights of advowson in the Middle Ages when landholders built churches on their own property and appointed the priests to serve those churches. Also, after the dissolution of the English monasteries in the 1530s (see REFORMATION, ENGLISH), many advowsons passed to the Crown or to the lay purchaser of the former monastic lands. An advowson was treated under the law as a piece of property, the ownership of which could be transferred by sale or grant. Patrons who were unwilling to sell their advowson outright could sell the right to make a one-time appointment to the benefice they controlled. In this way, many Elizabethans of even relatively small means could provide positions in the English Church for relatives or friends or could appoint a clergyman who upheld their particular doctrinal views.

The Reformation made control of advowsons extremely important. For example, under Elizabeth, Puritan clergymen were sometimes dismissed from their benefices by their bishops for refusing to conform to the doctrine or practice of the ANGLICAN CHURCH as established by the queen and PARLIAMENT. Puritan nobles and gentlemen (see GENTRY) could use their advowsons to appoint these dismissed ministers and preachers to positions under their control, thereby circumventing both the Crown and the ecclesiastical hierarchy and maintaining the propagation of Puritan thought and practice. See also ANGLICAN SETTLEMENT; COMMON LAW; LECTURESHIPS; PURITANS.

Further Reading: Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990; A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd ed., University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989; Rosemary O’Day and Felicity Heal, eds., Princes and Paupers in the English Church 1500–1800, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981.

agriculture

Agriculture was the heart of the Elizabethan economy, employing a far greater percentage of the English POPULATION than any other industry or occupation. Except for fish, wine, spices, and certain fruits, Elizabethan England grew or produced all the food and most of the raw materials the English people required, including hides for leather, wool for the CLOTH INDUSTRY, hemp for naval supplies, tallow for candles and soap, and horses for transport.

The most important feature of agriculture in the Elizabethan era was its transformation from production mainly for the subsistence of the farmer or the local community to production for sale to wider markets. This change was the result of a rapidly growing population, which caused a steep rise during the Elizabethan period in both the demand for food and in its price. Small peasant farmers gave way to gentleman and yeoman farmers (see GENTRY; SOCIAL HIERARCHY) whose larger acreages allowed them to produce grain surpluses that could be sold in LONDON and other parts of the kingdom where demand outstripped supply.

Enhancing this demand was the growth of the English cloth industry, which thrived on the increased production of English wool-growers. As more rural workers engaged in the manufacture of cloth, they joined the growing populations of London and other towns in swelling the percentage of English people who relied on others to grow their food. As a result of this demand, new farming methods (such as better crop rotation techniques) were devised to improve yields, and marginal lands, some of which had been out of production since the Black Death depopulation of the fourteenth century (see PLAGUE), were brought back under cultivation.

Many gentleman and yeoman farmers practiced enclosure, whereby land that had been pasture for common use by a village was enclosed with a hedge or fence and given over by the landlord to the production of grain for the commercial market. Enclosure sometimes added to the economic hardship of husbandmen or cottagers, who often lost the land they rented when their gentry landlords realized that it would be more profitable to grow grain and hire workers than to rent out the land. As the price of grain rose, the government increased its regulation of the market to ensure adequate supplies, for even small local shortages could lead to disorder. Except for the 1590s, when bad harvests required grain imports, English agriculture supplied the ordinary needs of the nation during the Elizabethan period.

Further Reading: C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700: Vol. 1: People, Land and Towns, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Penry Williams, Life in Tudor England, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964; Joyce Youings, Sixteenth-Century England, New York: Penguin Books, 1984.

Alba, Duke of. See ALVAREZ DE TOLEDO, FERNANDEZ, DUKE OF ALVA.

AlençON, Duke of. See VALOIS, FRANCIS (HERCULES), DUKE OF ALENçon.

Allen, William (1532–1594)

William Allen, an English scholar, polemicist, and priest, was instrumental in founding and directing the mission for the reconversion of Protestant Elizabethan England to the Roman Catholic Church. Allen’s promising career in the English Catholic Church under MARY I was cut short by the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 and the restoration of a Protestant English Church and the royal supremacy in 1559 (see ANGLICAN SETTLEMENT; CATHOLICISM, ENGLISH; SUPREMACY, ROYAL). Allen refused to take the oath of supremacy enjoined upon English clerics by PARLIAMENT and fled to Europe in 1561. He returned the following year to Lancashire, where he worked to bring lapsed Catholics back to the faith.

In 1565, he left England again, never to return. He founded an English college at Douai in the NETHERLANDS in 1568 for training English missionary priests and for educating the sons of English Catholic families (see SEMINARY PRIESTS). Allen established similar institutions in Rome in 1575 and in Valladolid, SPAIN, in 1589. He also organized the first JESUIT MISSION to England in 1580. Pope Sixtus V made him a cardinal in 1587.

Allen was deeply involved in Catholic plots against the Protestant English government and urged PHILIP II of Spain to launch the ARMADA against England. When the Armada finally sailed in 1588, Allen published An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland, Concerning the Present Wars …, which urged English Catholics to rise up against Elizabeth and support the Spanish invaders. In several other works published in the 1580s, some in response to tracts published by the English government, Allen developed and refined an ideology for the politically aggressive faction within English Catholicism. Allen’s death in Rome in 1594 left the English Catholic mission without a leader and led to the controversial appointment by the pope of an archpriest (see ARCHPRIEST CONTROVERSY). See also BLACKWELL, GEORGE; CAMPION, EDMUND; PARSONS, ROBERT; PROTESTANTISM; SOUTHWELL, ROBERT.

Further Reading: John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976; Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Alleyn, Edward (1566–1626)

Edward Alleyn was one of the most popular actors on the Elizabethan stage and a shareholder in several important LONDON theatres. Born in London, Alleyn began acting in the 1580s, becoming a member of the Earl of Worcester’s Company (known as Worcester’s Men) in 1583 and the Lord Admiral’s Company (known as the Admiral’s Men) in 1589. In 1592, the Lord Admiral’s Company joined with Lord Strange’s Men (see CHAMBERLAIN’S MEN), a troupe that included William SHAKESPEARE. Alleyn was the combined company’s leading actor at Philip HENSLOWE’s Rose Theatre in Southwark, a London suburb on the south bank of the Thames, and on tour in the shires during the London PLAGUE...