1

THE IMITATION OF CHRIST

Before the Rood

THE CARVINGS DEPICT a near-naked man being slowly tortured to death. He has been nailed through the hands and feet to a pair of crossed wooden staves, raised to stand upright in the ground. In his last agonies, he looks outward towards the viewer, or up towards the sky. Sometimes, he has died already, and the eyes are cast down. Blood drips from a freshly opened wound in his right side.

No one in England, in the years around the start of the sixteenth century, could fail to recognize this image. The crucifix – from the Latin, meaning ‘fixed to a cross’ – was to be found in the streets, in private homes, or worn about the person, often at the end of a set of prayer beads known as a rosary. Most commonly, it was seen in churches, themselves often constructed in the shape of a cross, with north and south transepts perpendicular to the main structure. All places of worship, from the grandest city cathedrals to the humble chapels of the remote countryside, displayed a large crucifix, commanding the sight-lines within the building. It rested on a beam, running the upper length of the archway separating the main body of the church, known as the nave, from the east-end chancel, where the sacred mysteries were performed.

This crucifix was referred to as the rood, from an Old English word for cross. A small gallery, the rood loft, was often attached to the beam: it was accessible by stairs, and allowed lit candles to be placed in front of the rood as a gesture of piety and devotion. Under this structure, an ornately carved screen, solid in its bottom half, marked the boundary between nave and chancel.

The death portrayed on the rood was no random act of cruelty and violence. It was an event foreseen by God from before the creation of the world; an event that transformed the relationship between God and the world of living beings he created. According to ancient Hebrew scripture, the first humans, Adam and Eve, defied their Maker and were expelled from the place of paradise he had prepared for them. Their disobedience, theologians believed, constituted an ‘original sin’, a permanent stain on the character of humanity. It demanded some extraordinary act of cleansing and restitution before relations between God and humankind could be restored and it became possible for people to be ‘saved’, for their immortal souls to live eternally with God as he intended.

The ‘Atonement’, the making right of the primordial wrong, was too great a task for humans alone to undertake. God himself decided to assume human flesh, to become ‘incarnated’, the miraculous offspring of a virgin birth, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This man, who lived in Jewish Palestine in the early years of the Roman Empire, was called by his followers the Christ, the anointed one. Jesus, at once true God and true man, taught a code of loving ethical behaviour that challenged the severity of the old Jewish ceremonial law. But the ultimate purpose of his life was his suffering and death, his ‘passion’, at the hands of the Roman authorities in Jerusalem.

Jesus’ act of willing self-sacrifice restored the broken relationship between humanity and God; salvation was possible once more. The gruesome instrument of Roman torture, the cross, became a sign of hope; the day on which Christ suffered became ‘Good’ Friday. A symbolic triumph over death was also a literal one: three days after dying on the cross, Christ rose bodily to life on Easter Sunday. Forty days later, he ascended to his Father in heaven. One day he would return, to judge the world and destroy it, and preside over the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. All people who ever lived would then be resurrected in the body, as Christ had been – some to live with him in glory, others to suffer unspeakable torments in hell, a place of despair, ruled by the fallen angel, Satan. This judgement, or Doom, was often in front of people’s eyes, portrayed in vibrant painting on a plastered surface or wooden board filling the top of the chancel arch: a backdrop to, and forward projection from, the carved figure of the rood.

There was a lot for people to think about when they looked up in church to behold the rood. It spoke of an amazing act of love and generosity performed on their behalf, provoking feelings of gratitude, but perhaps also of unworthiness and guilt. It commemorated an event from the distant past, but reminded people of a present reality, while pointing them towards a literally earth-shattering future. It encapsulated an idea grounded in the incarnation itself: that the powers of the sacred could be localized in physical space, and in material form. Most of all, it represented an invitation and a challenge. Christ’s work of stunning self-sacrifice opened the doorway to heaven, but it did not guarantee entry there. It summoned people to seize the opportunities offered them: to avoid sin and better themselves spiritually, to become more Christ-like, and strive to follow his teachings in their lives. Only in so doing could the healing work of the atonement be made a reality for them as individual Christians; only thus could they be saved.

The enormous convulsion in English social, political and cultural life that came to be known as ‘the Reformation’ was a long collective argument about what was truly involved in the imitation of Christ; about what people needed to do, or avoid doing, in order to achieve salvation. It does not have any single starting point, and too much talk about ‘origins’ or ‘roots’ risks either making it seem inevitable, or reducing its complex and fecund beginnings to a single thread of traceable development.

Christianity was in existence for a millennium and a half before the events described in this book took place. It had endured and survived many previous trials. Attempts to reform Christianity, and by Christians to reform themselves, were as old as the Jesus movement itself. The urge to pursue ‘Reformation’ was a congenital condition of the serious Christian life, and – given the fallible nature of humanity – a perhaps incurable one, but it had led over the centuries to many changes. Christians towards the end of what is conventionally called the Middle Ages often prided themselves on the antiquity of their faith, but theirs in fact was a system of belief and practice undergoing continual evolutionary alteration. There was no static ‘pre-Reformation Catholicism’, into which the Reformation suddenly inserted itself.

‘The Reformation’, indeed, is itself an abstraction – a later attempt to make sense out of a pattern of events whose unfolding mostly seemed fitful and strange to the people living through them. Those events were unpredictable, and not infrequently implausible; but they are not unfathomable. The dramatic changes of the Reformation, which transformed in countless ways the lives of the English people, arose out of the ideals and assumptions of a culture that was intensely serious about an obligation to follow the teachings of Christ, not from one neglectful of it. The changes took the precise forms they did for a variety of social, political and religious reasons this book will do its best to describe and explain. There is no simple explanation for why in the sixteenth century growing numbers of English Christians came to believe that true discipleship of Jesus meant demanding that the sacred figure of the rood be pulled down from its lofty perch, broken into pieces and burned to ashes.

To Be a Christian

Imitation of Christ began with becoming a Christian. That was the easy part. It happened within days of being born, when a baby was baptized in the stone font usually found, in symbolic placement, near the entrance of the church. The ceremony involved a ritual cleansing with water, and the bestowal of a name, while an officiating priest invoked on the child the power of ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’, the three ‘persons’ of a single Trinitarian God.

Baptism could be an elaborate affair. A few days after his birth on 28 June 1491, Henry, second son of King Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth, was baptized in the church of the Observant Franciscan friars at Greenwich, on a specially constructed platform hung with richly embroidered cloths and canopies. The font was made of silver, and the priest was a leading clergyman of the realm, Bishop Richard Fox of Winchester. Yet, spiritually, the little prince did not get anything more out of it than a child of the lowliest of his father’s subjects. In a rite that was part exorcism, the curse of original sin was erased from the infant’s soul; he or she was literally ‘christened’. Mothers remained at home for six weeks after the birth of a child, and fathers generally stayed away from the ceremony. But the godparents, who made statements of faith on the baby’s behalf, would be huddled around the font. A contemporary describes them nervously asking the priest, ‘How say you … is this child christened enough? Hath it his full Christendom?’1

There was always an element of anxiety in an age when so many infants failed to survive their first days and weeks. Babies dying unbaptized were not Christians, could not be saved. Logically, this implied the eternal torments of hell. But, long before 1500, the idea gained near-universal acceptance that their souls went not to hell but to a neighbouring ‘limbo’ (from the Latin for fringe or boundary) – a place without vision of God but equally without pain. Another limbo housed ‘good pagans’ who lived and died before the incarnation of Christ. In an emergency, not just a priest, but anyone – even a female midwife – could validly baptize a child. All this suggests how, over time, the rigid rules of the Church might soften, in response to theological reflection, or the demands of simple humanity; there was flexibility in the system, and a dose of perplexing untidiness.

Baptism illuminates some other core assumptions of Christianity, as it was lived and taught across western Europe in the later Middle Ages. The faith was inclusive, and all-embracing. With the exception of a small number of Jews and a still smaller number of Muslims, no one ‘chose’ to be a Christian. Membership of the Church, and formal profession of Christian faith, was simply coterminous with human community. This makes it profoundly unhelpful to speak, as historians still tend to do, about ‘religion and society’, as it is impossible to identify where the one stopped and the other began.

Perhaps it is even unhelpful to speak about ‘religion’ at all, in the modern sense of a contained sphere of thought and activity, separable from other aspects of experience. Early sixteenth-century people did use the word ‘religion’, but they nearly always meant by it the specialized ritual practices undertaken in monasteries (see Chapter 2). When it came to ordinary ‘lay’ folk, people might praise their faith, piety or devotion – words signifying an intensified presence of universally valued ideals and beliefs that underpinned all social and political order. There were certainly people, perhaps significant numbers of people, who were ‘irreligious’, in the sense of not taking seriously enough the moral demands of their Christian faith. Baptism removed ‘original sin’, but it did not remove the propensity to sinful behaviour that was the common lot and legacy of humankind. Others did not believe precisely what they were supposed to believe, and became stigmatized as ‘heretics’ (see Chapter 4). But it is unlikely that late medieval England contained ‘atheists’ in anything akin to our modern understanding of the term. God’s presence was ubiquitous, and if winning his favour was not always at the forefront of people’s minds, his judgement on them was the inescapable backdrop to their lives.

Baptism also illustrates the means through which God’s presence was sought and experienced. It was a sacrament, one of seven such rituals, which, by the late Middle Ages, the Church had designated with this title. The others were confirmation, marriage, ordination, anointing of the sick (extreme unction), penance (confession) and the eucharist. Sacraments were symbols and more than symbols. They actually effected what they signified: the washing away of sins, in the case of baptism. In the technical jargon of the Church, a sacrament comprised ‘matter’ and ‘form’. The matter was some raw material or point of departure – water, oil for anointing, bread and wine for the eucharist, sorrow for sins, mutual consent, and subsequent consummation, in marriage. The form was a recital of prescribed words. Together they guaranteed God’s life-giving favour to the recipient; they produced the presence of ‘grace’.

Late medieval religion (we can now allow ourselves, with appropriate wariness, to use the word) was profoundly ‘sacramental’. That is, it accepted the idea that material things could be made holy, and that the sacred could be captured in ritual, gesture and spatial experience. Other objects, rites and blessings, of second-tier status, were designated ‘sacramentals’ – they were not assured vehicles of grace, but could convey it if approached in an appropriate spirit of piety. These included church bells; holy water used for the blessing of houses and crops; candles taken home on the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Candlemas), which were believed to offer protection during thunderstorms; ashes daubed on the foreheads of believers at the start of the penitential season of Lent; palm leaves distributed in church at the end of Lent to recreate the entry of Christ into Jerusalem.² In domestic, and sometimes frankly quasi-magical, uses of such objects, the distinctions between Church and society, official and unofficial religion, became blurred still further.

Of the formal sacraments, some, like baptism, were performed only once. Confirmation, as the name implied, supplied a sealing and strengthening of the commitments of baptism. It seems a frequently neglected ritual; perhaps because it could only be performed by a bishop, and bishops had other things to do than tour the parishes offering it. Marriage was another sacrament of the life-cycle; it could be repeated, though not while a first partner lived. Ordination as a priest was firmly once and for all; an alternative to marriage, and, of course, confined to men. The anointing of the sick was also, theoretically, repeatable, should a recipient regain health. But popular belief viewed it as part of the ritual of the deathbed, a final sentence from which there was no coming back.

The two remaining sacraments were also performed on the deathbed, part of a triad of ‘last rites’. But they differed from the others in representing regular, cyclical sources for renewal of grace. Penance regulated the flow of sinfulness in the world. It offered God’s forgiveness in return for penitence and confession of sins to a priest, acting as God’s representative. Theologians argued over whether for the sacrament to take effect people needed to feel genuine sorrow for sins (‘contrition’) or just a desire to want to feel sorry (‘attrition’). The latter interpretation placed more weight on the sacramental power of the priest. But it is unlikely the distinction mattered greatly to most ordinary layfolk, struggling to remember their misdeeds and get over the embarrassment of admitting them to a pastor who was also a neighbour.

The existence of elaborate manuals for confessors, with endless categorizations of sin, and lists of intrusive questions, has led some historians to conclude the transaction was traumatic and spiritually oppressive, inducing in laypeople an obsession with sinfulness and deep anxieties about the likelihood of salvation. It is possible that some were affected in this way: the process was certainly designed to induce feelings of guilt (though also to assuage them).

Yet it seems unlikely that most Christians lived in a semi-permanent state of confession-induced dread. The requirement to confess was no more than an annual one. The duty was nearly always fulfilled in the run-up to Easter, usually in Holy Week (the week preceding Easter Sunday), when the sheer volume of people waiting to make their confessions to hard-pressed priests rendered a detailed grilling improbable. In the bustling Yorkshire town of Doncaster, it was reported, later in Henry VIII’s reign, that the vicar and seven other priests ‘can scarce hear the confessions of the said parishioners from the beginning of Lent unto Palm Sunday’.

Still, we know that some, and perhaps most, early Tudor people took the obligation seriously, using mnemonic systems recommended in the confessors’ manuals. At Faversham in Kent, a man declared an intention to go to his ‘ghostly father’ (a common name for the priest-confessor) and ‘show to him I have sinned in the Seven Deadly Sins and have broken the Ten Commandments, and misspent my Five Wits [senses]’. In Lent 1536, a Londoner likewise ‘rehearsed the Seven Deadly Sins particularly, and then the misspending of his Five Wits’. ‘Have you not,’ the priest wanted to know, ‘sinned in not doing the Five Works of Mercy?’ The man confessed he had: ‘I cry God mercy.’3

Confession was performed before Easter, because it was a prerequisite for full participation in the most important sacrament of all. The eucharist, a Greek word meaning ‘thanksgiving’, was a re-enactment of the Last Supper that Jesus, just before his arrest, shared with his closest followers. According to accounts in three of the four gospels, Jesus took bread, broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying ‘this is my body, do this in memory of me’. He did the same with a cup of wine, ‘this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’ (Matt. 26:26–8; Mark 14:22–4; Luke 22:19–20).

These seemingly clear instructions, from the mouth of God himself, obliged Christians to make this observance a centrepiece of their ritual. By the later Middle Ages it had long since assumed an elaborate ceremonial form, with a priest robed in long vestments – a residue of the formal wear of the late Roman Empire – playing the part of Jesus. The ceremony, like all services, or liturgies, of the medieval Church, was recited in Latin – another hangover from the world of late antiquity, when Latin had been the language of government, the army and of many ordinary people. In England, the ritual was performed, with minor local variations, according to the ‘use’ of various dioceses, principally Salisbury (Sarum). It was known as the mass, from the mysterious closing words of the ancient liturgy, Ite, missa est: ‘Go, it is sent’.

What was being sent, by whom and to whom, was a good question, for the mass was a conduit of communication between worlds. On the one hand, it was an offering made by the Church to God, a sacrifice like the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament. For that reason it was performed at a stone altar, situated at the far east end of the church, behind the rood screen. In a system of sacred topography, east – the direction of Jerusalem, where Christ would return – always signified holiness. The sacrifice, theologians decided, was the same as that offered by Jesus himself. Bread for the mass took the form of flat, unleavened wheaten discs, known as hosts, from the Latin ostia, victim. Every mass, in every church in Christendom, re-enacted and re-constituted Christ’s death on the cross, making this daily event a ‘work’ of extraordinary power.

At the mass God became truly, physically present among his people. When Christ took bread and declared ‘this is my body’, he meant what he said. At the high point of the mass, the priest repeated those words, ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’, and the host in his hands miraculously turned into the actual body of Jesus. Theologians long pondered how, contrary to all evidence of human senses, this could be so. The predominant theory rested on a philosophical distinction (inherited from Aristotle) between the ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’ of an entity; between its true inner nature and its external attributes of colour, shape, smell, taste. The consecration, or ‘sacring’, of bread and wine during the mass was a ‘transubstantiation’, by which their original substance was obliterated and replaced with the body and blood of Christ.

This was, literally, something to see. Immediately after pronouncing the words of consecration, the priest raised the host above his head. Up to this point, laypeople in the nave, unable to follow in detail the low Latin chanting of the priest at his altar beyond the rood screen, concentrated on their own private prayers. A Venetian diplomat, visiting England in about 1500, commented approvingly on the piety of the people: ‘they all attend mass every day … the women carrying long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read taking the Office of Our Lady with them’. But at the elevation, beads and books were laid aside. A sacring bell, rung by the assisting altar server, alerted people to look, and to adore. The main church bells might be tolled, so that people out in the fields or on the roads would know to stop, and make gestures of respect. For those present, it was a moment of direct visual contact with the most sacred of imaginable things. William Hampden, a Buckinghamshire parishioner, wanted to appropriate for himself the moment in perpetuity: his will of 1521 specified his body should be buried ‘within the chancel of Hartwell, before the midst of the high altar, so that the priest may stand upon my feet in the sacring of the mass’.

The consecrated host was – quite appropriately – worshipped, for it was God in material form. Surplus hosts were reserved in a special container, a pyx, suspended above the altar, a focal point of reverence for anyone entering church. The benefits of seeing the host might be more than spiritual: no one would go blind that day, travellers would reach their destination unharmed, expectant mothers give birth in safety. This was not ‘official’ teaching, but was affirmed in numerous respectable sources.4 Here again, the modern instinct might be to recoil at a blurring of the line between religion and magic. But this is to take an anachronistic approach to a world suffused with a sense of God’s power and presence.

To a considerable extent, seeing substituted for another aspect of Christ’s mandate of memory: to eat and drink. Communion for laypeople was required, but no more than annually; taking communion more regularly was a sign of uncommon devotion. It generally took place at Easter, and people made their confession in preparation for it; to consume the body of Christ unworthily was a truly perilous act.

Layfolk received ‘in one kind’ only. Centuries earlier, clerical fears that people might carelessly spill the consecrated wine restricted their consumption to the bread. Laypeople were not – they could be reassured – short-changed. The complete Christ, body and blood, was present under each of the forms. Most were probably content, though the issue’s potential to pick at a lurking sense of grievance was suggested by events in distant Bohemia. Here, in the early fifteenth century, a remarkably successful movement of rebellion, inspired by the dissident priest Jan Hus, made demands for ‘the chalice’ for the laity.

Communion was a spiritual experience, but also a social one. It designated full membership of the local community, and people commonly referred to ‘taking their rights’. Reception was by turn of social precedence, something that also dictated where people sat or stood in the church: ‘religion’ reflected the social and political order, and helped construct it. On Corpus Christi, the special summer feast that celebrated the miracle of the eucharist, in London, Bristol, Coventry, York and elsewhere, the consecrated host was carried in procession through the streets. Townspeople processed by order of rank, with mayor, aldermen and other luminaries marching in their full dignity behind the canopy at the front.

Corpus Christi processions underlined disparities of status between people in urban communities, but were also intended to express an essential unity. Since no one ‘out of charity’ with neighbours was supposed to be allowed to receive communion, this ritual too restored – in theory – harmony within the community. Peace was a declared purpose of every mass, whether there was lay communion or not. After the great prayer of consecration, worshippers exchanged the ‘kiss of peace’. By the later Middle Ages this had assumed more decorous form: an engraved wooden or silver plate, a pax or paxbrede, was passed around for people to kiss in turn.

Such rituals contained a potential for bringing to the surface the social tensions they were intended to dissolve. In 1496, Joanna Dyaca, of the London parish of All Hallows, Staining, cast the pax in fury to the ground because another woman was allowed to kiss it before her. John Browne, of the Essex parish of Theydon-Garnon, went further in 1522, and smashed the pax over the head of the parish clerk, in his anger at being placed lower than he assessed himself in the order of local importance.5

Such histrionic incidents – for which the perpetrators were reported by outraged neighbours – underline rather than undermine the role of ritual and shared faith in articulating a sense of common identity. Another ritual of the mass contributed. Households took turns to bake and present a ‘holy loaf’ to the church: a not insignificant quasi-liturgical role for local women. This was blessed, broken and distributed at the end of mass, sometimes in pieces of varying size reflecting the status of the recipient. People generally understood how this was supposed to work, and there was genuine anger at Hartford, Huntingdonshire, in 1518, where John Kareles habitually took such large pieces of holy bread that his neighbours were left without. His wife was said to be a stirrer of discord, who went running to the vicar with tales about other parishioners.⁶ ‘Community’ in the early sixteenth century was not a state of cosy togetherness. Hell has always been other people. But in struggles to contain and arbitrate the inevitable discords of proximate living, the rituals and symbols of a shared religious culture came invariably to the fore.

The communities where English people lived were extremely diverse. A key requirement of being Christian was to be a member of a parish. The parish was a geographical unit of ecclesiastical administration, about 9,000 of them in the country as a whole. Clusters of parishes formed deaneries, grouped into archdeaconries, which were themselves subdivisions of dioceses, each presided over by a bishop. This bald summary creates a false impression of neatness and order. The parish system came into existence in a haphazard way over the earlier part of the Middle Ages, as landowners endowed churches on their estates. Parishes were thick on the ground over much of southern and midland England, where they were often coterminous with the manor, the basic unit of lordship and agricultural organization. In the north, they were more thinly spread, especially in the moorland regions of counties like Yorkshire, Lancashire or Northumberland. Here, people often worshipped in small dependent chapelries, and had little day-to-day contact with a parish church some dozen or more miles away. In parts of the north, the parish network overlapped with remnants of the old Anglo-Saxon minster system, with large churches staffed by teams of resident priests. There were impressive minsters at Beverley, Ripon, Southwell and other places.

Parishes were most densely clustered in towns, especially long-standing regional centres like Norwich, with about 12,000 inhabitants in the early sixteenth century, and Bristol, Coventry, Exeter and York, with something under 10,000 each. In contrast to France, the German territories of the Holy Roman Empire, or the commercial powerhouses of Italy and the Netherlands, England possessed only one city worthy of the name. London’s population was approaching 50,000 in 1500, and rising rapidly. It had a whopping 107 parish churches within its ancient walls, and another ten in the expanding suburbs. But most English parishioners were rural, not urban; agricultural labourers, not craftsmen or merchants. At the start of the sixteenth century, only about 3 per cent of an English and Welsh population of around two and a half million lived in towns of 5,000 or more inhabitants.7

Membership of a parish meant attending services in its church, confessing and communicating at Easter, paying tithes to its presiding priest, and submitting ultimately to burial in its church or churchyard. Presence at mass, matins and evensong, monitored fitfully by the church courts (see Chapter 3), was required not only on Sundays, but on around forty to fifty special feasts or holy days each year – ‘holidays’ when cessation from all manual labour was expected.

Laypeople’s awareness of time passing was profoundly influenced by the cyclical patterns of the Church’s liturgical calendar.⁸ This was in two halves. The first traced and commemorated the life of Jesus, starting in the season of Advent preceding celebration of Christ’s nativity at the midwinter festival of Christmas. It culminated in ceremonies marking Christ’s death and resurrection – then, as now, a movable feast, with Easter (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox) falling between late March and late April.

Forty days after Easter, the feast of the Ascension celebrated Christ’s return to heaven, and ten days after that, Pentecost (Whitsunday) recalled the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples as they gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem. This was reckoned the real birth-date of the Catholic (Greek: katholikos, universal) Church to which everyone still belonged. The second half of the year, spanning high summer and autumn, was punctuated by numerous feast days honouring the saints: John the Baptist on 24 June; Mary Magdalene on 22 July; the Assumption (bodily ascent into heaven) of the Virgin Mary on 15 August; St Michael and All Angels on 29 September; a remembrance of All Saints on 1 November.

Lent, the period of forty days (recalling time Christ spent in the wilderness) preceding Easter, was a season of solemn fasting, which required abstinence not just from meat, but from dairy products and eggs – items making a welcome reappearance on Easter Sunday. Consumption of meat was also forbidden on all Fridays, in commemoration of Christ’s passion, and on vigils of various other important feasts throughout the year. Marriages were not celebrated in Advent or Lent, and some rigorist confessors suggested to female penitents that Lent was an inappropriate time for them to sleep with their husbands. The liturgical calendar was no high-minded abstraction, but an ordering of daily experience that touched the lives of the laity in numerous domestic and intimate ways.

For the most part, though, it worked with rather than against the grain of everyday life. Rituals were interwoven with the rhythms of the agricultural year. After the extended festivities of Christmas were over the serious business began of ploughing fields ready for planting, though this too had celebratory aspects. On ‘Plough Monday’, immediately following Epiphany, ploughs were festively dragged through village streets. They were often blessed in church, where special plough lights were maintained before the rood or holy sacrament. The sprouting of crops coincided with the feast of the Ascension, and in the preceding week, parishioners would go around the fields with their priests asking God’s blessing and protection for the new shoots. These Rogation processions (Latin: rogare, to beseech) also supplied an occasion to ‘beat the bounds’ of the parish; to remind everyone of its geographical extent by walking around the boundaries – a striking instance of the community defining itself through collective ritual action. Harvests were brought in before the feast of St Michael (Michaelmas), a date when rents were due to be paid, and university and law terms began.

Arguably, Catholicism was a better ‘fit’ for the traditional agricultural communities of late medieval England than for its developing urban centres. Townspeople seem to have leapt on the feast of Corpus Christi (observed in England from 1318) as an opportunity, otherwise barely afforded them by the liturgical calendar, to parade their faith and distinctive social priorities. But the argument should not be pressed too far. All parishes celebrated the same major feasts, as well as the special day of whichever saint was the named patron of their local church.

In any case, the minimal expectations of Catholic Christianity were universal ones. Detailed doctrinal understanding was not high on the list of requirements, though it was generally expected that parishioners would at least learn by heart the paternoster (Our Father), Ave Maria (Hail Mary) and Credo or Creed – the statement of affirmation of core Christian beliefs beginning Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God). True to its incarnational instincts, late medieval Catholicism exhibited a comprehensively ‘embodied belief’, a set of understandings expressed primarily in symbolic gesture and ritual activity.9 The interwovenness of faith and action was the beating heart of a vigorous cultural system. But it was also, potentially, a point of weakness. What if someone were to demand the justification for ceremonies and observances? Many would have struggled to say more than that they did as their forebears had always done. Not everyone would prove satisfied with such an explanation.

The Living and the Dead

On Sunday 9 September 1515, the parishioners of Louth, a small market town on the boundary between the high wolds and low-lying marshlands of Lincolnshire, gathered in front of their parish church of St James. The occasion was the setting of a weathercock, recently purchased at York, on top of the church’s newly completed spire:

There being William Ayleby, parish priest, with many of his brethren priests, there present, hallowing the said weathercock and the stone that it stands upon, and so conveyed upon the said broach [spire]. And then all the priests sung Te Deum Laudamus (We praise thee, O God) with organs, and the churchwardens garred ring [caused to be rung] all the bells, and caused all the people there to have bread and ale. And all to the loving of God, Our Lady and All Saints.

The spire – the tallest of any parish church in England – took fifteen years to construct, and cost the parish the enormous sum of £305 7s. 5d. Various parishioners – Thomas Bradley, Agnes English and others – proudly wanted it put on record that they ‘saw the first stone set upon the steeple, and also the last stone set upon the broach’.¹⁰

Parish churches were more than functional houses of worship. At Louth, and elsewhere, they were communal resources and objects of considerable local pride. Lay parishioners were required by law to keep the church – or at least their part of it, the nave – in good repair, an obligation overseen by part-time officials known as churchwardens. These were chosen by the rest of the parishioners, usually in pairs, on a rotating basis. Accounts kept by churchwardens – of which there are over 200 surviving sets for the period before the Reformation – show that, as at Louth, expenditure frequently went beyond necessary repairs and extended to ambitious schemes of construction and beautification.

Churchwardens were also responsible for ensuring parishes possessed everything necessary for performance of the liturgy, inside and outside the church: chalices and plates for the mass, altar coverings, candles, bells, crosses and processional banners, a variety of service books, vestments in the appropriate liturgical colours – green for ordinary Sundays, purple for Advent and Lent, white for important feasts, red for commemoration of martyrs, black for requiem.

Raising money for these purposes itself nurtured community and lay participation. In some places, particularly London and major urban centres, parishes could rely on rental income from church properties. Small town and rural parishes typically depended on a wider range of fund-generating activities. The commonest was the church ale, which combined marking an appropriate Christian festival with feasting in the churchyard or parish-owned church house, and sale of parish-brewed ale to locals and visitors. At Yatton in Somerset, the thrice-yearly ale paid in the fifteenth century for a complete rebuilding of the nave, and replacement of the wooden rood screen with an elaborately carved stone one.

Another form of fund-raising was the staging of plays and revels, sometimes featuring Robin Hood – an appropriate figure for collection of contributions. Such parish productions were less sophisticated affairs than the (often loosely) biblically based miracle and mystery plays performed in the streets of towns like Chester, Coventry, Wakefield and York under the auspices of local craft guilds. But like them, they helped disseminate Christian knowledge in entertaining form. The small town of Wymondham in Norfolk had an annual play honouring St Thomas Becket; New Romney in Kent staged a regular Whitsuntide passion play; a ‘play of St Swithin’ was acted in the church at Braintree in Essex in 1523.11

Parish churches varied in standards of repair, and in lavishness of equipment for worship. But minimum requirements were usually, and sometimes impressively, exceeded. A 1529 inventory from the parish of Long Melford, in the wealthy wool-producing region of south Suffolk, reveals an embarrassment of liturgical riches. The wardens recorded their possession, among many other items, of fifteen chasubles (the coloured upper garment worn by a priest at mass) and seventeen copes (a cape-like vestment used for processions and various liturgical occasions); thirteen chalices, nineteen silver and brass candlesticks, three gilded paxes, three gilded vessels for burning incense, two silver chrismatories (for oil) – and a relic, encased in silver, of the pillar to which Christ had been bound. Parish churches like this were, literally, treasure houses, and their painstakingly acquired riches fostered understandably proprietorial feelings among leading layfolk. The parishioners of Luddenham in Kent were angered in 1511 by the carelessness of their rector, who ‘dealeth not fairly with the vestments when he putteth them on’. In 1518, the churchwardens of Louth recorded expenses for escorting to trial at Lincoln a priest – perhaps one of those participating in the celebrations of 1515 – who robbed the contents of the parish chest.12

To a great extent, the accumulation of objects in parish churches was the result not of procurement but of benefaction. In wills written at, or near to, the point of death, laypeople in their tens of thousands made gifts of money and valuable things to the parishes where they lived and worshipped. The acquired items, whether a lavish bequest of stained-glass windows or rood screen, or relatively more modest gifts of vestments, chalice or service book, were frequently personalized with the name or coat of arms of the donor. The intention was to prompt priest and people to call to mind the generous benefactors.¹³ This desire to be remembered was more than a natural human impulse; it was interwoven with the process of salvation itself.

To remember the dead meant to pray for them, as the dead were in need of the prayers of the living. Near the heart of late medieval religion, and therefore near the heart of late medieval culture, lay a compelling and unsettling landscape of the imagination: the place known as purgatory, an alternative to hell and the prelude to heaven.

Purgatory was a doctrine that ‘evolved’, achieving its more or less settled form by the late twelfth century. It was, perhaps, the preeminent case of the Church’s responsiveness to pastoral and practical necessities. Most dying humans were too fallible to deserve immediate entry to heaven – an honour traditionally reserved for ascetic saints and heroic martyrs. Yet it was hard to believe that a loving God, who wanted to redeem humanity, would wish the great mass of the morally mediocre to suffer for eternity in hell. Purgatory supplied a logically satisfying method of admitting such people to heaven. The atonement removed the collective barrier to salvation; baptism washed away the individual impediment of original sin, and God’s absolution, delivered via the priest in the sacrament of penance, forgave any further disqualifying (‘mortal’) sins it was human habit to commit.

But legally minded medieval theologians drew a distinction between the guilt attached to a sin, and a penalty or ‘satisfaction’ still due to God for it when the guilt was removed. Penances imposed by priests in confession made a start with this, but most people would end their lives with a great deal of ‘satisfaction’ still due. Purgatory was where the debt would finally be paid.

The existence of purgatory was formally defined by church councils in 1274 and 1439, but official formulations were remarkably vague about what sort of place it was, and what departed souls could expect to experience there. The vacuum was filled by preachers and authors of devotional books who described a place of intense fiery torment; a place, indeed, hardly distinguishable from hell, and often imagined as situated next to it under the earth.

‘Time’ in the next life was a mysterious, almost metaphorical concept. But most Christians, clergy as well as layfolk, expected tariffs due in the ‘prison’ of purgatory to be measurable in tens, hundreds or thousands of years. To anyone facing the prospect of death, it was imperative to consider how that sentence might be reduced. This entailed considerable degrees of diversity and choice. Men and women hoping to reduce time in purgatory were supplicants for mercy, but they were also active consumers, contemplating a range of competing offers of assistance.

One expedient was purchase of an indulgence. These seemed to offer a great deal, in both senses of the phrase. Indulgences were certificates remitting part or all of the satisfaction due for sins, expressed in terms of ‘days’ and ‘years’. They were a logical, even ingenious, conclusion from an attractive premise. All Christians, living and dead, on earth, in purgatory and in heaven, formed part of a single Church – what the Apostles’ Creed called the ‘communion of saints’. Some members of the communion passed into heaven with a superabundance of ‘merit’, more satisfaction than they personally needed. This was pre-eminently true of Christ himself, but also of great saints and martyrs down the ages. Their surplus of satisfaction was available for redistribution to less holy members of the communion of saints, from a ‘Treasury of Merit’ administered by the Church. Only the Pope could offer a plenary indulgence, removing all punishment due for sins – a claim grounded in Christ’s pledge to St Peter and his successors (Matt. 16:19): ‘I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ Other authorities, including bishops, were delegated to remit lesser amounts.

Technically, it was not possible to purchase satisfaction. An indulgence was a reward for performance of some specified good work, or for supporting a worthwhile cause, such as the rebuilding of a church, through making financial contribution. Indulgences were invariably issued for some explicit purpose. Nor were the spiritual benefits automatic, but depended on confession and absolution, and a correct devotional attitude on the part of purchasers.

Nonetheless, ‘pardons’ were everywhere in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England, with many churches and other bodies securing grants to help fund favoured projects. Indulgences were repeatedly offered, for example, for supporting the pious work of repairing the bridge across the River Torridge at Bideford in North Devon. In such cases, the primary motivation of purchasers may have been to assist the cause in question. Yet a widespread and genuine interest in the spiritual benefits is suggested by the frequency with which offers of indulgence appeared in the prayer books for the laity known as primers or Books of Hours, and were displayed on title pages as an inducement to purchase. Many of these were in return for saying specified prayers in front of a picture of Christ surrounded by the instruments of his passion. Promised returns were implausibly large, and entirely bogus, in that they rested on no episcopal or papal grant: 26,000 years or more of remission for successive repetitions of the prayers.14

Similarly questionable guarantees sometimes appeared on memorials. A ‘pardon brass’ of 1506, commemorating Roger and Elizabeth Legh in the church of St Michael, Macclesfield, offered 26,000 years and twenty-six days of remission in purgatory to anyone saying for their souls five paternosters, five aves and a Creed – the prayers everyone was expected to know. Tombs and brasses were routinely emblazoned with the imprecations ‘ora pro anima …’ or ‘pray for the soul of …’ A principal purpose of funerary monuments was to serve as tinderboxes of memory, and spark in by-passers the burning impulse of intercession.

It was an opportunity largely confined to those with sufficient wealth and status to be buried inside churches – churchmen, landed gentry, merchants, the occasional yeoman farmer. The mass of the people were interred in parish churchyards without permanent grave-markers. Tombs, particularly for the gentry, were indicators of rank, and emblems of a family’s enduring social importance. Yet significant numbers of monuments employed a symbolism of humility and vulnerability. Brasses depicting the body in its burial shroud became common in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and some brasses and sculpted figural tombs represented the deceased’s corpse as a skeletal, worm-eaten cadaver – shock tactics, calculated to arouse the pity of spectators, and move them to prayer, as well as remind them of their own impending mortality.

In ways less readily quantified, but paradoxically more dependable than indulgences, the prayers of the living benefited the dead. The prayers of the poor were considered especially beneficial, an inversion of the normal rules of social influence. The London merchant John Hosier was unusually ambitious in hoping 4,800 paupers would attend his burial in 1518, each to receive a penny. But bequests of alms in money or food to the poor at funerals were commonplace. Wills didn’t always explicitly state this was in return for prayers, but the contract was invariably understood. To a modern, utilitarian mind-set, the exchange seems mildly shocking: medieval ‘charity’ was not altruistic, but nakedly self-interested. Once more, we need to move beyond anachronistic ways of thinking. Each element in the transaction – the relief of the poor, the act of prayer, the remission of purgatorial penalties – was intrinsically pleasing to God. The reciprocal flow of benefits was the communion of saints in action.15

The quest for remembrance and prayer was a motivation behind a near-ubiquitous feature of the contemporary scene: the proliferation of guilds and fraternities, voluntary lay associations dedicated to a saint or devotion. Like much in late medieval religion, the diversity of these institutions almost overwhelms their common features. Urban guilds – most notably, the grand ‘livery companies’ of London – were often principally trade associations, regulating the activities of butchers, tanners, coopers or brewers. In some boroughs, like Coventry or Stratford-upon-Avon, guild membership was intimately tied up with governance structures of the town. A few large urban guilds operated on a national scale: Corpus Christi at York, for example, or the guild of Our Lady at Boston in Lincolnshire, which by the end of the fifteenth century was employing ten chaplains and a choir.

The majority of guilds were, literally, parochial, focusing activities on an annual feast, the maintenance of lights before a statue of their saintly patron, and assistance with parish fund-raising activities. Many parishes had more than one such guild, their existence sometimes known to us only through fleeting mention in a will. There were nineteen guilds in the Norfolk port town of Great Yarmouth, and over 150 in London, in the century before the Reformation.16

Parish guilds illustrate the voluntarist impulse in late medieval religion, though doubtless there were sometimes social pressures to join. It is a mistake to see them as symptoms of dissatisfaction with the parish structure, still less with the orthodox teachings of the wider Church. But they show laypeople’s readiness to assume degrees of responsibility for their own salvation. Post-mortem benefits of membership loomed large in people’s minds. Guilds organized your funeral, and guaranteed for it an imposing turn-out of brethren, sometimes clad in distinctive fraternity costume. Most importantly, they arranged masses for the soul of the deceased.

Of all the means of intercession, the mass was most powerful. Because it constituted an application in space and time of Christ’s redemptive death on the cross, the mass came to be seen as a quantifiable unit of spiritual power: two masses were better than one, and a thousand were a thousand times better. Masses themselves were not technically for sale, but priests deserved and expected compensation for their labour. For laypeople, the challenge, within their means, was to maximize the merits of the mass for their soul.

A requiem mass, along with the vespers and matins of the dead known as placebo and dirige, was integral to the burial ritual. One popular supplement was the ‘obit’, an exact recreation of funeral rites, down to the placing of a hearse in the parish church, to take place each year on the anniversary of death. Its ostentatious, performative character was designed to jog memories, prompting participants and onlookers to recollect and pray. Obits were particularly popular in towns, and more than half of those founded in fifteenth-century Bristol were intended to continue ‘as long as the world standeth’.¹⁷

An alternative, and sometimes an addition, was to establish an institution known as a chantry. At their most lavish, these were housed in purpose-built chantry chapels, though most commonly chantry priests conducted their business at subsidiary altars within the parish church. The most serious, or wealthiest, testators left endowments of land or property for a ‘perpetual’ chantry, where a priest and his successors would ‘sing’ for the soul of the founder, and other named beneficiaries, until the world came to an end and purgatory itself was no more. Others left sums for a priest to celebrate masses for a specified period, very often a year.

Some masses might represent better value than others. Trentals were special sets of thirty masses, to be celebrated in the month following death, claimed by their advocates to be uniquely powerful in easing the passage of the soul. There were distinct variants. The Trental of St Gregory, the formula for which was supposedly revealed to the saint by the soul of his suffering mother, was popular in all parts of England in the early sixteenth century. Laypeople showed interest in various other themed ‘votive’ masses: of the Trinity, of the Name of Jesus, of the Five Wounds, or in the set of so-called ‘golden masses’, said to produce souls ‘flying out of purgatory as thick as sparks of fire’.

The glorious untidiness of the system of intercession was its strength and its weakness. Attempts to use data from wills to suggest belief in purgatory was already waning from the late fifteenth century are unconvincing. The percentage of testators endowing masses varied from region to region, but everywhere an acceptance of the need for some form of intercession was the obvious norm. A discernible shift from establishment of permanent chantries to more temporary ones is related to the phenomenon of ‘mortmain’ legislation, which from the end of the fourteenth century made it increasingly difficult and expensive to alienate lands permanently into the ‘dead hand’ of the Church.

Voices of direct criticism were few and muted, though the author of Dives and Pauper, a fifteenth-century commentary on the Ten Commandments, printed in the early 1530s, disapproved of showy devotions claiming to be better than ordinary masses of requiem; he thought the Gregory Trental was the cause of ‘much hypocrisy and much folly’.

Nor do contemporaries seem to have anticipated a view of modern critics: that an economy of salvation based on post-mortem intercession lent itself to the ‘purchase of paradise’, and was intrinsically biased against the poor. Perhaps this was due to widespread acceptance of the notion that the greater pride and sinfulness of the rich weighted the scales against them, and they needed all the help they could get. Chantries were certainly the preserve of the rich, but any bequest to the parish, however modest, led to entry of the donor’s name onto the parish ‘bede roll’ – a list of benefactors read at least annually in full, and in shortened form at the weekly mass, with exhortations to remember and pray.

In theory, no one was entirely and finally forgotten: the feast of All Souls, immediately following All Saints on 2 November, was the occasion of praying for an otherwise nameless army of the dead. It was also, close to the onset of winter, a moment of slippage between worlds, when it was popularly believed the dead might return to make demands on the living. The widespread custom of ringing church bells on the night of Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve) was partly a form of intercession for the dead, partly a means of protection against them.18

Purgatory was ‘the defining doctrine of late medieval Catholicism’, a religion which has even been called ‘a cult of the living in the service of the dead’.19 It was an undeniably dismal prospect: some self-proclaimed authorities talked of devils, skewers, brandings, in addition to purgation by fire – all inflicted over the course of what would seem like centuries and millennia. The suspicion persists that behind the intense devotional activity of late medieval laity lurked a pervasive, unhealthy fear of punishment in store.

Elizabeth, widow of the knight Sir John Bicknell, of South Perrot in Dorset, left precise, anxious instructions in her will of June 1504. After she received the sacrament of extreme unction, and ‘immediately as by man earthly it may be perceived that my soul should be from my body separate’, four ‘discreet priests’ were to begin singing Trentals of St Gregory. Or at least ‘as soon as the law of Holy Church ordaineth, after the appearing of the daylight’ – even in extremis, the rules should be observed. Priests were not supposed to say more than one mass daily, so at other times the chaplains were to recite psalms for her soul, ‘one of them to be occupied night and day’ in the month following her death.

Elizabeth Bicknell clearly aimed to take heaven by storm, and there are other examples of testators demanding large sequences of masses to start as soon as the breath passed from their bodies.²⁰ But such twitchy wills stand out by virtue of their rarity. We cannot finally know the state of mind with which most people approached death, but the general impression is of people sensibly making provision to navigate their way through an inescapable destiny. The most unsettling preaching on the horrors of purgatory was in any case designed to warn people what they could expect if they did not behave better in this life, or arrange suffrages for the next; one writer justified his concern with the punishments of purgatory on the grounds that ‘few it dread’.²¹

For the health of the purgatorial system as a whole, perhaps a greater dormant danger than the terror of the dying was the complacency, and occasional resentment, of the survivors. The demand to be remembered was, potentially, insatiable, absorbing a significant percentage both of individual legacies and of communal resources. The neglectfulness of heirs and executors was a contemporary cliché not entirely without foundation in fact. The Norfolk gentleman John Paston conspicuously failed to establish the chantry asked for by his father, while the sluggishness of John’s own son in making a start on the elaborate tomb he requested was a cause of local scandal through the 1470s.

After decades passed and revenues started to decline, chantries and obits, even those intended to continue while the world endured, were often quietly abandoned, amalgamated, or confiscated by descendants of the original founder. The obligation of memory weighed heavily on people’s time as well as purse strings. In 1497, the London Goldsmiths decided that the twenty-five obits they were required to attend each year were ‘to the great unease and trouble of the wardens and of all the livery’. The number was cut to fourteen – and in an attempt to encourage flagging attendances, drink was to be provided at all of them. Even after such rationalizations, 368 obits were taking place in London through to the later part of Henry VIII’s reign.22

Late medieval Catholicism was not oppressively monolithic. If anything, it was alarmingly unregulated. A religious system that advocated the limitless performance of ‘good works’ as a necessary response to Christ’s offer of salvation encouraged an exponential growth of pious lay initiatives, a dazzling array of devotional choices, and some occasional shameless hucksterism – all illustrated in vibrant colour by the practices of purgatory.

It was certainly not a structure collapsing inevitably under the weight of its own contradictions. Under the umbrella of a broad sacramental orthodoxy, Catholicism managed to contain its divergent energies in generally harmonious tension. But the pursuit of varying objectives, and a lack of consensus about what the real priorities should be, were fissures in the fabric of faith – holes for the rain to find, should the weather ever change. The dynamism of late medieval religion, accelerating not decelerating in the early Tudor decades, encompassed an extraordinary devotional agility, alongside an unexpected, almost imperceptible, but nonetheless real spiritual fragility.

Print, Piety and Pilgrimage

In 1476, after half a lifetime of overseas residence in the service of trade, the merchant William Caxton returned to settle permanently in England. He brought with him a device already widely used in Germany and Italy. It allowed type – small metal blocks in carved forms of letters – to be arranged on a frame, inked, and have their impression conveyed onto pressured sheets of paper. The printing press was a relatively simple technology, and the most revolutionary discovery of the age. It allowed texts, which previously needed to be copied laboriously by hand, to be duplicated quickly, in multiple and standardized copies. It met, and helped fuel, a commercial demand for reading matter, and it slowly began to transform the possibilities for religious practice.

The earliest datable piece of printing to emerge from Caxton’s press was very topical: a 1476 bull of Pope Sixtus IV, which for the first time formally extended the benefits of indulgences to souls already in purgatory. The first proper book Caxton printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a work containing sly satire of an unscrupulous pardoner, hawking indulgences with a comic selection of fake relics. It is unlikely Caxton saw any irony or contradiction: printers produced what they perceived the market wanted, and in around 1500 Caxton’s assistant and successor, the naturalized Englishman Wynkyn de Worde, moved the operation from the governmental centre of Westminster to the commercial hub of the city of London, where other printers were already open for business.²³

Printing both reflected and invigorated lay piety. Almost half the output of de Worde and other early printers comprised religious works of various kinds. The topics mirrored the characteristic breadth and variety of late medieval pious interests: sermons, saints’ lives (hagiographies), treatises on making a good death, accounts – condensed from scripture – of the life of Jesus, garish visions of purgatory, sombre expositions of the penitential psalms. Among the most popular items were primers or Books of Hours, adapted versions of the cycle of monastic prayer ‘offices’, with additional material (such as indulgences) thrown in. Up to the early 1530s, at least 500 separate editions of Books of Hours were produced for the English market, representing tens of thousands of copies in circulation.

The advent of printing, and an associated slow but steady rise in literacy rates, did not create any fundamental divide between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, with the wealthy or literate inclined to look cerebrally down their noses on the sensual and ritual devotions of the masses. Books of Hours and other printed texts often contained devotional images, to be prayed in front of like statues in church. A widely shared frame of religious reference is also suggested by the contents of ‘common-place books’ – compilations of instructive and improving passages – kept in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by some gentry and wealthy merchants, as well as the odd parish churchwarden. These draw on a wide yet common repertoire. There are pious prayers, and dutiful expositions of commandments and sacraments, but also some decidedly unofficial and folkloric elements: charms against the toothache, verse instructions on divination using dice.24 Nonetheless, it would be perverse to maintain that literacy and access to printed books did not open up any new possibilities for religious practice and reflective meditation on the part of the laity.

Exact boundaries between literacy and illiteracy are difficult to establish. Calculations based on the ability of witnesses in legal settings to write their names tend to produce minimal estimates: at the start of the sixteenth century, a 90 per cent illiteracy rate among men, and 99 per cent among women. Yet writing is a harder task than reading, and children might be taught one skill but not the other.

Both skills were certainly more heavily concentrated in towns than in the countryside. In the early sixteenth century, perhaps a third to a half of male Londoners were able to read. The Venetian visitor who saw literate laypeople taking the Office of Our Lady along to mass observed them ‘with some companion reciting it in the church verse by verse, in a low voice, after the manner of churchmen’.

But the dominant mode of lay literacy was not, in fact, that of churchmen. The word literatus, in the earlier Middle Ages, usually meant a ‘clerk’ (clericus, clergyman), and signalled proficiency in Latin. The religious output of the English presses, however, was overwhelmingly vernacular; more technically complex Latin service books tended to be printed on the continent and imported. Books of Hours were Latin texts, but they were increasingly accoutred with translations and paraphrases of the key prayers. There was an unmistakable lay appetite for devotional material in English.25 This did not – necessarily – represent any immediate threat to the teaching or authority of the Church, even when the appetite extended to the bible itself in vernacular translation (see Chapter 4). The materials in demand were almost invariably orthodox in character, intended to foster deeper understanding of the mysteries, and by-ways, of the faith. But their popularity provides further testimony that growing numbers of laymen and women were active participants in the production and consumption of religious culture, not passive receptacles of clerical instruction.

Sometimes, lay religious activism required the great and good to sit up and take notice. In November 1515, a twelve-year-old girl, Anne, daughter of an Essex gentleman, Sir Roger Wentworth, began to suffer violent and disturbing convulsions, seemingly possessed by the devil. The fits lasted until 25 March 1516, Feast of the Annunciation, when Christ’s coming was revealed to the Virgin Mary by the Angel Gabriel. Anne had on that day a radiant vision of Mary, ‘in the picture and stature of the image of Our Lady of Grace in Ipswich’. This was a famous statue, housed in a chapel to which Anne demanded to be taken on pilgrimage. There, over several days, and before a crowd of more than a thousand, she was miraculously cured, while reportedly showing prophetic knowledge of ‘many things said and done at the same time in other places’. Witnesses included the abbot of Bury St Edmunds, so overcome with emotion that he promised to make a pilgrimage there every year on foot, and the nobleman Robert, Lord Curzon, who wrote up an excitable account of the affair.

Speculations as to the ‘real’ cause of Anne’s condition, or her motivation, are not particularly helpful. There were clearly tensions within the family, and her symptoms recurred when her parents initially reneged on a promise to return to the shrine after eleven days. The second visit was yet more spectacular than the first: a crowd of 4,000 gathered to see Anne, and hear her deliver a two-hour sermon, in the course of which she reproached her parents for having ‘put me again to these great pains’.

Anne’s celebrity was short-lived. Despite her father’s objections, she turned to the life of a Franciscan nun, and fourteen years later was reported to be living in a convent ‘well and graciously’. At the time of her cure, the Ipswich chapel’s custodian, Dr John Bailey, preached in the town hailing the greatest miracle since the conversion of England. He perhaps had a vested interest in thinking so, but the affair renewed national interest in the shrine. The following year, Queen Catherine paid a visit there, as did the most important man in England after the King: Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey.²⁶

The affair of the Maid of Ipswich, unusual though it was, reveals a society prepared to believe in the intrusion of the miraculous, even – or perhaps especially – when its conduit was a twelve-year-old girl. Anne’s temporary inversion of the usual hierarchies of age, gender, family and status could be accepted because her messages reinforced orthodox teaching. The crowds she commanded, spanning all social classes, affirmed the importance to them of the saints, and particularly of Christ’s mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Anne’s vision was of a specific, materialized face of the Virgin, ‘Our Lady of Ipswich’. There were other renowned statues that earthed the transcendent Queen of Heaven to a particular piece of English soil. Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk was perhaps the most famous. Others included Our Lady of Doncaster in Yorkshire; of Caversham in Berkshire; Our Lady of Willesden, just to the north-west of London; Our Lady of Worcester; Our Lady of the Tower, set in the city walls of Coventry. Such hubs of devotion suggest ways in which late medieval religion was at once instinctively universal and intensely local.

Pilgrimage in general illuminates this theme. Spiritual journeys to holy places might be expeditions to the exotic and unknown. The holiest of all places was Jerusalem, and a handful of English travellers undertook this risky trek. The courtier Sir Richard Guildford set off for Jerusalem in April 1506, and died there in September. An account of the journey by his chaplain, printed in London in 1511, allowed English readers to experience vicariously the glamorous sights and ceremonies of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, its custodianship uneasily shared between ‘divers sects of Christian men’ – a phenomenon as yet unknown in the Catholic Latin west.

A decade later, a Warwickshire squire, Sir Robert Throckmorton, made the same journey, and likewise failed to return. The will he made on the eve of his departure in May 1518 testified to a strong belief in the power of intercession. Throckmorton established a chantry, and requested masses from the Benedictine monks of Evesham and Augustinian canons of Studley, the Franciscan and Dominican friars at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as the prayers of paupers in the almshouse he had founded at Worcester. The suspicions of some historians, that gentry were not emotionally invested in their local parish church, are dispelled in Throckmorton’s careful prescriptions for St Peter’s, Coughton, the place he wanted to be buried. The east window in the chancel was to be glazed ‘at my cost and charge’ with scenes of Doomsday. Other new windows were to depict the seven sacraments, and seven works of mercy. In detailed instructions for the gilding, painting and placing of new statues in the church, Throckmorton brought the universal symbols of Christian cosmology to the parochial gaze of rural Warwickshire: images of the Trinity; the Annunciation of Gabriel to Mary; the Archangels Michael and Raphael.27

Ardent or adventurous souls also journeyed to the shrine of St James at Compostela in Galicia, or to Rome, in greater numbers than they did to Muslim-occupied Jerusalem. Canterbury attracted pilgrims from across England, as did Walsingham. The presence of relics, a physical remnant of the once-living saint, was the usual allurement. Canterbury, perhaps the only English shrine of truly international significance, possessed the remains of its martyred archbishop, Thomas Becket; Walsingham, a remarkable relic of the milk of the Virgin Mary. Yet the principal draw of the chapel of Our Lady at Walsingham was its statue of an enthroned and crowned Virgin holding the Christ-child on her lap; by the later Middle Ages, an image too could serve as principal physical site of a saint’s sacred power, the role once confined to their relics.

Some shrines were embodiments of regional identity, such as the corpse of St Cuthbert, apostle to the Anglo-Saxon north, in Durham Cathedral. Here, veneration extended beyond the body itself to an important ‘contact relic’: a banner, supposedly incorporating the corporal, or white linen cloth, used by the saint in his celebrations of the mass. On several occasions in the Middle Ages, the banner was carried into victorious battle against the Scots. The shrine at Hereford Cathedral of St Thomas Cantilupe, a holy thirteenth-century bishop, was a similar rallying symbol for the Welsh border country, though its popularity had passed its peak by the early sixteenth century. Saints, like stocks and shares, rose and fell with fashions, and with shrewd or lax management of the assets and public promotion of the shrine.

Much pilgrim traffic was in fact remarkably local, involving distances comparable to travel for buying and selling at the nearest market town, and saints as internationally obscure as St Urith of Chittelhampton (Devon) or St Walstan of Bawburgh (Norfolk). A poem in celebration of Walstan, a putative Saxon prince, written around the turn of the sixteenth century, recorded eleven healing miracles performed at his shrine: four of the fortunate pilgrims came from Bawburgh itself, and another three lived within a half day’s walk.28

The saints were a mixed crew, and performed a variety of roles. As holy people who once inhabited the earth, they were peerless exemplars of Christian living, and as current denizens at the court of heaven, they were in the definitive position to lobby for the interests of devotees. People prayed to saints, including the Virgin Mary, so that they could intercede with Christ on their behalf. In practice, it seems likely that most people thought of saints as possessing and exercising sacred power in their own right. The recorded favours resulting from visits to shrines were overwhelmingly miracles of healing, and it may be that people sometimes took to local saints relatively minor ailments they did not wish to bother St Peter or the Virgin about. Particular specialisms were well known: St Erasmus for bowel complaints, St Apollonia for the toothache, St Margaret of Antioch for help with childbirth.²⁹

Did the cult of saints eclipse the figure of Jesus? It is sometimes suggested that the focus on Christ was blurred in late medieval Christianity, that the real significance of his passion was somehow lost or obscured amidst a blizzard of saints’ legends and questionable ‘superstitious’ devotions.

Yet the subordinate place of saints in a celestial hierarchy was well understood by people like the Hull merchant John Dalton, whose will of 1487 bequeathed his soul to ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ, when it shall depart from my body, and to Our Lady St Mary, St Michael, St John Baptist, St John the Evangelist, St Katherine, and St Barbara and all the holy company and saints of heaven’. By far the most popular ‘cult’ at the start of the sixteenth century, in England as in all other parts of Europe, was the cult of Jesus himself – a cult whose intensity was in fervent advance over the course of the fifteenth century.

At an official and liturgical level, it was encouraged by the institution of new feast days. Papally approved celebrations of the Transfiguration and the Holy Name of Jesus were absorbed into service books and liturgical practice in England in the 1480s and ’90s, and many parishes quickly established Jesus altars, or gilds dedicated to the Holy Name. The great feast of Corpus Christi was also, of course, a supremely ‘Christocentric’ one. Devotions to the Five Wounds and the Lamentation (for Jesus) of the Virgin Mary did not quite make it to the status of fully fledged feasts, but were authorized as special votive celebrations for inclusion in missals (mass books).

The ‘image of pity’, an affecting picture of Christ’s dead upper body, surrounded by instruments of his passion, was widely reproduced in Books of Hours, and also in churches on painted walls, bench-ends, funeral brasses, panels and pyxes. It was closely associated with the image of ‘Our Lady of Pity’, or pietà: a depiction of a grieving mother cradling the lifeless Jesus in her arms, and a much favoured subject for paintings and statues in churches.30

It betrays misunderstanding of the late medieval mind-set to see the cult of the Virgin as a rival focus of devotion, diverting attention from her divine son. In fact, it was itself part of the ‘Christocentric’ impulse, as it was based around Mary’s role in the life of Jesus, and particularly in the passion narrative. Even devotional themes without clear scriptural provenance – such as carvings of Mary’s coronation as Queen of Heaven – placed her in close, and subordinate, proximity to Christ. The phrase, ‘Jesus mercy, Lady help’ came naturally to prayerful lips. The most prominent statue of the Virgin in every English church was one that placed her at the foot of the cross, alongside St John, the disciple Jesus loved, atop the parish rood beam.

The growing popularity of Marian shrines like Walsingham and Ipswich was matched by that of sites associated with the person of Christ. Pilgrims travelling to the Cistercian monastery of Hailes in Gloucestershire could view and venerate a vial containing a portion of the Holy Blood of Jesus. An unsympathetic commentator in the early 1530s observed ‘how they come by flocks out of the west country … And they believe verily that it is the very blood that was in Christ’s body, shed upon the mount of Calvary for our salvation’.

A localized manifestation of the Virgin, in her statues at Walsingham, Willesden, Worcester and elsewhere, was paralleled in the devotion shown to individual wonder-working roods, some of which were credited with containing actual pieces of the True Cross. Pilgrims trooped to the Rood of Bromholm in Norfolk, the Rood of Dovercourt in Essex, the Rood of Bermondsey in Surrey, the ‘Rood of Grace’ at Boxley Abbey in Kent, a great cross at the north door of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. There were further miraculous roods at Brecon and Llangynwyd in Wales, and just across the English border at Chester.31

The devotions to Jesus, just like late medieval popular devotions as a whole, were not moribund, but florid; not sterile, but fertile; not modestly monotone, but confidently cacophonous. For some, it was all too much. Among the plural pieties, sacred materiality and sensuous ritual of late medieval Catholicism, various individuals longed for clarity, simplicity and spiritual purity. Those longings might take rebellious, heretical forms (see Chapter 4), but they need not do. Fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century will-makers, across different regions of England, who asked for burial ‘without any pomp’, were in every likelihood entirely orthodox. So too were the testators in parts of Kent who in the first decades of the sixteenth century requested in disproportionate numbers masses of the Holy Name of Jesus, while conspicuously neglecting other traditional forms of intercession.

Within the ranks of the clergy, there had always been a chorus of austere, moralistic voices, warning against ‘superstition’ in popular piety and a lack of true devotion in the practice of pilgrimage. Such voices were particularly audible around the turn of the fifteenth century, and some of the works produced by restrained and self-consciously reformist Lancastrian Catholics, such as Dives and Pauper, were printed for a new audience in the age of Caxton and his successors. A common refrain was that while images had an instructive value for the unlearned – they were ‘laymen’s books’ – it was necessary to be on vigilant guard lest people start offering them the kind of worship and devotion that was the due of God alone.³²

How, then, amidst the noise and clutter, to live the kind of life God wanted, to practise the imitation of Christ? One book claimed to know the answer. The Imitatio Christi was composed in Latin at the beginning of the fifteenth century, probably by a Dutch monk called Thomas Kempis. Offering guidance for a close spiritual relationship with Jesus, and a disciplined interior life of prayer and self-knowledge, it was received with enthusiasm in pious circles across Europe. In England, the Imitatio circulated in manuscript translation in the fifteenth century, but became better known after Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, commissioned a new translation by William Atkinson, fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, which appeared in 1503.

The Imitatio had little time for lavish saints’ cults, images and pilgrimage, and Atkinson played down and even omitted some passages where Kempis was sharply critical of popular religion and monastic life – such as a tart observation that ‘they that go much on pilgrimage be seldom thereby made perfect and holy’. The censored passages were restored in a second vernacular edition of 1531. Its translator – in keeping with the Imitatio’s themes of humility and self-abnegation – was uncredited, but seems very likely to have been a priest called Richard Whitford. In all, ten printed editions of the two sixteenth-century translations appeared up to 1535.33

Whitford was no radical, dissident or rebel; rather, he was a serious-minded, orthodox member of the Catholic clerical establishment. But his admiration for the stripped-down message of the Imitatio Christi underlines the long-standing concerns in some church circles about a loss of vision and clarity in the presentation of the essential Christian message – anxieties shared by some literate lay readers. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, such concerns were being repackaged in eye-catchingly new ways. The eye-catcher-in-chief was a personal friend of Whitford, and a marvel to Europe as a whole.

Humanists and Barbarians

In early 1512, a group of student-pilgrims made their way from Cambridge to the shrine at Walsingham. They were accompanied by an older mentor, a foreigner resident in England since 1509, and well acquainted with the English and their ways. Erasmus of Rotterdam was a name to conjure with in the first years of the sixteenth century, and its bearer was disinclined to let people forget it: international man of letters, friend of scholars, prelates, kings and popes, runaway monk and lightning-rod of controversy, a self-appointed scourge of ignorance, obscurantism, superstition and abuse of power. Erasmus took up residence in Cambridge in 1511, and in May 1512 wrote to his friend Andrea Ammonio to say ‘I am going to pay a visit to our Lady of Walsingham’, adding ‘I will there hang up a votive offering of a Greek poem.’³⁴ The composition began by praising the Virgin in conventional terms, but where other worshippers brought gifts of silver and gold, requesting health or other blessings, Erasmus offered nothing but the verses themselves, and asked in return for the greatest of rewards, ‘a heart that honours God, and is free from all blemishes’. Here, in a scallop shell, was Erasmus’s religious philosophy, the ‘philosophy of Christ’, as he liked to call it. In place of the fearful, servile and self-interested devotion of the masses, he offered a true piety of the heart, sincere and secure in its love of God.

Years later, Erasmus composed a semi-fictionalized description of the Walsingham visit as one of his set of moralizing tales known as The Colloquies. Its title, ‘A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake’, is ironic, for the intention of the piece is to satirize the greed and corruption of the Augustinian monks administering the shrine, and the superstitious credulity of pilgrims frequenting it. The work contained an account of a second visit, to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, where the emphasis again is on the sumptuous wealth generated by the pilgrim trade, and the superstitious veneration of spiritually doubtful relics.35

Erasmus’s companion on the journey to Canterbury was reportedly even more revolted than he was by the mendacity and superstition of the shrine and relic business. The colloquy calls him ‘Gratian Pullus’: a scholar’s joke, for pullus is both a classical term of endearment, and a Latin word meaning young animal or colt. John Colet (1467–1519) was a renowned preacher, the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, and an educational reformer, who founded St Paul’s School and personally planned its curriculum. Colet was a leading light in England of the movement known to historians as humanism, though the term itself is anachronistic, and the word ‘movement’ gives too great an impression of clarity and organization to what was in fact a mishmash of attitudes and values.

Humanism is inextricably linked with another made-up category of historians, ‘the Renaissance’ – the enthusiastic rediscovery of classical learning that began in Italy in the late fourteenth century. Nineteenth-century writers like the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt associated the Renaissance with the rise of ‘individualism’, with a kind of neo-pagan celebration of the joys of life, and a relative dethroning of God and elevation of humanity. Even if this holds true for Italy (and it is questionable), Erasmus, Colet and those associated with them in England are best described as Christian humanists, eager to apply the insights of Greek and Latin learning, and the critical analysis of texts, to the renewal and reform of the Church. They were not voices crying in the wilderness, but influential opinion-makers, with friends in the highest of places.

Like other early exponents of humanism in England, such as William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and William Lyly, Colet caught the bug in Italy, where he travelled and studied between 1492 and 1495. He was particularly drawn to the writings of the Florentine Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), a leading exponent of the mystical philosophy of neo-platonism. In Plato’s teaching, the ‘Demiurge’ (God) created the world as an image of an eternal archetype, planting the idea of that ultimate reality in the human mind or soul. Neo-platonism concerned itself with how the soul could ‘ascend’ to embrace the divine ideal lying beyond and behind the perishable things of the material world. For Colet, this meant an unceasing effort to imitate Jesus Christ, whose whole life ‘was nothing other than an ascent from this place into heaven’.³⁶ Colet was, quite literally, a perfectionist, considering it the duty of Christians, especially priests, to nurture and radiate an intensely purified holiness.

Conformity to the pattern of Christ through perfection of conduct was the theme of an influential sequence of lectures on the epistles of St Paul that Colet delivered in Oxford in 1496–7. Great claims have been made for these sermons, though they in fact neither revolutionized medieval patterns of scriptural interpretation, nor anticipated the theology of Martin Luther. Nonetheless, Colet saw little role for rites and ceremonies in the process of becoming Christ-like. He emphasized the centrality of scripture as a source of divine grace, and neglected scholarly authorities in order to engage directly with the character and letters of St Paul. Close scrutiny of the written text was characteristic of the humanist approach, as was the impetus to return ad fontes: to the purest, most original sources of the faith.

Colet was obsessively concerned with the failures of the clergy to assume their rightful role in the divine plan, yet there is little indication he trusted the laity to take matters into their own hands. That approach was more characteristic of Erasmus. His hugely popular Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1503) exudes an emphasis on simple Christ-centred piety, unencumbered by complex ritual or ceremonial demands, and nurtured by close engagement with the text of the New Testament. It was a work intended to be owned and read by laypeople.

The title translates as handbook of a Christian knight (or soldier), though Enchiridion can also mean ‘dagger’. When the occasion demanded, Erasmus was not averse to sticking the knife in. During his first stay in England, he worked on a book called Antibarbari – against the barbarians. What Erasmus meant by ‘barbarians’ were people hostile to the studia humanitatis (the ‘humanities’), which in the sixteenth century meant the classically inspired study of rhetoric, grammar, poetry, history and moral philosophy, in addition to, or in place of, a focus on formal theology. Such barbarians were to be found everywhere. Erasmus came across them in the Augustinian monastery at Steyn in the Netherlands, which he entered as a young man in 1487, and from which he departed a few years later, never to return. Throughout his life, Erasmus retained a distaste for the cloistered religious existence, and an almost paranoid conviction that the religious, particularly the friars, were out to get him.

The worst barbarians were high guardians of learning itself: the university teachers of the theology ‘schools’. Medieval academic divinity – scholasticism – was a highly sophisticated and diverse system of didactic and exploratory investigation, combining characteristics of the disciplines we today would call theology and philosophy. Contrary to later myth-making, scholastics never debated the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But they did apply logic and dialectical reasoning to the elucidation of Christian revelation, and to a host of existential and metaphysical problems.

To Erasmus’s way of thinking, scholastics were men who derived their philosophical method from Aristotle, and who mangled the simple truths of the Gospel in a bear-pit of abstract speculations. ‘In saying that you dislike this modern school of divines, who spend their lives on mere subtleties and quibbling of sophistry, you are quite of the same way of thinking as myself,’ Erasmus wrote to Colet in the autumn of 1499.37 It is revealing that Erasmus described the centuries-old traditions of scholastic learning as ‘modern’. In an age suspicious of novelty, the humanists did not consider their approach ‘new learning’, but rather the restoration of an earlier purity and probity.38

The primordial sin of the scholastics, so humanists believed, was their separation of theology from piety. This led, on the one hand, to the pure stream of gospel teaching becoming polluted by human logic and disputatiousness; on the other, to the religion actually practised by the majority descending into empty ceremonies and external rituals, a pointless imitation of styles of devotion found in religious houses. Erasmus was a man of his age in characterizing such worthless externalism as ‘Jewish’. Sound textual and linguistic scholarship, re-establishing the authentic meanings of ancient Christian writings – including the scriptures themselves – was one weapon against the barbarians; another was ridicule and satire.

In England, Erasmus soon found a kindred spirit, a brilliant young London lawyer, rising in city and royal service. Erasmus was introduced to Thomas More in 1499 by his pupil and patron, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, a friend of the More family. Although Erasmus was More’s senior by a decade, they were to become lifelong friends. During a stay at More’s house in 1505, the two men found serious amusement in translating from Greek into Latin the satirical dialogues of Lucian of Samosata, a second-century writer whose works were rediscovered by fifteenth-century humanists. A biting commentator on the popular religion of his day, Lucian’s satires were, Erasmus reflected, ‘most serviceable for the detection and refutation of the impostures of certain persons who even today cheat the populace, either by conjuring up miracles, or with a pretence of holiness’.³⁹

Thomas was Erasmus’s muse for a more famous satirical work of 1511, the Moriae Encomium (Praise of Folly), which punned affectionately on his friend’s surname. Speaking ironically through the figure of Folly, Erasmus castigated the pointless speculations of ‘Thomists, Albertists, Ockhamists and Scotists’ – disciples of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century theologians Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, William of Ockham and Duns Scotus. Among questions they were said to have formally debated are: ‘is it a possible proposition that God the father could hate his son? Could God have taken on the form of a woman, a devil, a donkey, a gourd or a flintstone? Shall we be permitted to eat and drink after the Resurrection?’

The metaphysical subtleties applied by school doctors to the sacraments, and to the technicalities of grace, penance and transubstantiation, would surely have baffled the apostles. Scorn was poured too on the numerous orders of friars and monks, who ‘aren’t interested in being like Christ but in being unlike each other’, as well as on the ‘silliness’ of excessive popular devotion to the saints and their images, ‘encouraged by priests who are not unaware of the profit to be made thereby’.⁴⁰ That all these critiques were, to varying degrees, unfair did not make them any less effective.

In 1516 More published his own counterpart to the Praise of Folly – a description of the recently discovered island of Utopia (Greek: ‘no place’) from the mouth of the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus (‘speaker of nonsense’). This too was a piquant satire of the society, politics and customs of early sixteenth-century Europe, though a more subtle and ambiguous one than that of Erasmus, who seems not to have known quite what to make of it. Despite posterity’s appropriation of the word, Utopia itself is not a perfect society, and modern critics have been perplexed by the layers of irony More wove into the approbation of practices he himself surely disapproved of: rigid control of freedom of movement, euthanasia, religious toleration.

Utopia contains a few jibes at the condition of the Church. There is a playful sideswipe at ‘inventions of our modern logicians’; a laconic observation that the priests of the Utopians are ‘of great holiness, and therefore very few’; an ironic explanation of why, while the Utopians avoid making treaties, Europeans always uphold them because of the respect and reverence everyone feels for the popes, who themselves ‘never promise anything that they do not scrupulously perform’.41

Yet Utopia lacks the programmatic reform agenda found in Praise of Folly and other of Erasmus’s works. More was perfectly capable of exasperation with knuckle-headed friars, such as the Franciscan he encountered in Coventry preaching that anyone saying the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin every day could not be damned.⁴² But he never shared Erasmus’s instinctive disdain for the vowed religious life as a whole. As a young man More resided for some months with the London Carthusians, possibly testing a vocation to the cloister. Even at the knot of its closest personal threads, humanism was never a tapestry of a single tint.

If his ‘philosophy of Christ’ was to become a widely lived reality, Erasmus believed it could only be on the basis of renewed engagement with the original source text of Christian faith, the New Testament. The idea that medieval religious culture ignored or marginalized the bible is profoundly misguided; on the contrary, vast intellectual and pastoral efforts were devoted to its interpretation.⁴³ For Erasmus, however, the issue was not so much attention to scripture per se, as the quality of the bible on offer. The standard Latin version used by the Church was the Vulgate (Latin, vulgatus: popular or common) translation made by St Jerome in the fourth century. For some time, its merits had been under the critical lens of humanist scholarship. The Roman humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) set himself the task of comparing the Greek against the Latin Vulgate and found hundreds of minor errors. Erasmus came across Valla’s Adnotationes (Annotations) in a monastic library near Louvain, and published them in 1505.⁴⁴

He later decided to prepare a new Latin translation, or at least a corrected version of the Vulgate, and publish it alongside a version of the Greek original. This was an endeavour with a remarkably English pedigree. Having acquired sufficient knowledge of the Greek language, Erasmus began the project during his visit to England in 1505–6, using Greek and Latin manuscripts lent to him by Colet from the library of St Paul’s. The bulk of the work on the Greek edition was undertaken during an extended Cambridge stay in 1511–14. In February 1512, Erasmus claimed to have been ‘almost entirely transformed into an Englishman’.45

Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum was published at Basel in February 1516: a parallel Greek and Latin text of the New Testament, with 450 pages of appended notes. It was an instant sensation. Everything about it was controversial, starting with the title. Instrumentum means in classical Latin a tool, piece of equipment or furniture, and Erasmus thus seemed to be making a bold claim about the significance of his endeavour (it became the Novum Testamentum again in a second edition of 1519). His prefatory Paraclesis – exhortation or admonition – was a clarion call for the philosophy of Christ. His was ‘a new and wonderful philosophy’, requiring only a pious and open mind, and a pure and simple faith; it rendered redundant ‘those huge commentaries of the interpreters at odds with one another’.

Looking beyond his present labours, Erasmus issued a call for Holy Scripture to be available in vernacular languages – even those of the ‘Scots and Irish’, no doubt the most obscure and barbarous European peoples to which Erasmus’s Anglophile mind could run. The gospels and epistles should be read by ‘even the lowliest women’. Would that ‘the farmer sing some portion of them at the plough, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind!’ Indeed, anyone who encouraged others to charity, simplicity of life, forgiveness of wrongs, and to welcome the embrace of death should be considered a theologian, even if they were a common labourer or weaver. And if preachers were to teach this philosophy, then Christendom would not be disturbed by almost continuous war, men would not drive themselves frantic in pursuit of riches, and every subject under the sun would cease to resound with ‘noisy disputation’. It was a powerful and provocative manifesto: return to the life-giving sources of the Christian message; back to basics.⁴⁶

Taking a leaf out of Valla’s book, Erasmus believed the task of establishing correct meaning from the original biblical languages belonged to scholarly philologists, not theologians. Some of Erasmus’s translation choices were nonetheless heavy with theological implication, which his notes were not chary of pointing out. Metanoiete – John the Baptist’s imperative command in expectation of the kingdom of God (Matt. 3:2) – was rendered by the Vulgate as poenitentiam agite (do penance). Erasmus proposed as a better Latin translation resipiscite (repent) or ad mentem redite (turn to yourself). The text was taken by the ‘common herd’ of theologians as a proof-text for confession and sacramental penance, but Erasmus argued the Greek term had nothing to do with ‘the prescribed penalties by which one atones for sins’.

Similarly, his notes marvelled that Christ’s words to Peter (‘thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’; Matt. 16:18) had been ‘twisted’ by theologians, ‘making it refer to the Roman Pontiff’ rather than to Peter’s faith, or to all Christians, or to Christ himself.47 Most controversial, however, was Erasmus’s decision, in the second edition of 1519, to translate the resounding opening to St John’s Gospel – ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ – using sermo rather than verbum for the Greek logos. Sermo carried added connotations of communication, dialogue or conversation, which Erasmus considered more fitting than the one-dimensional ‘word’ of verbum. This was typical of humanist educational ideals, and notions of spiritual improvement through colloquy and discussion: Christ was the ‘argument’ of God!

The ‘barbarians’ did not take this lying down. After publication of the Annotations, Erasmus was told of a Dominican friar complaining tearfully to his congregation that all his efforts to defend the faith were for nothing: ‘what is left for us, except to throw our books into the fire, now that men have arisen who write new books to put right the Paternoster and the Magnificat? [prayer of Mary; Luke 1: 46–55]’⁴⁸ A more notable critic, going on the offensive even before the Novum Instrumentum was published, was Martin van Dorp of the Theology Faculty at Louvain, a body notable for lack of enthusiasm about Erasmus. Dorp feared attacking the Vulgate would undermine the teachings of the Church: how could God have allowed it to continue in error for more than a thousand years? And what of the authority of theological texts and decrees of councils based on the established translation? More rallied to Erasmus’s defence in an emollient Letter to Dorp (1515), but was soon warning him that other critics in England, including the Provincial of the Franciscans, Henry Standish, were conspiring to find and attack errors in the Novum Instrumentum, fuelling Erasmus’s paranoia about the malevolent hostility of friars.⁴⁹

Reports reached Erasmus of one Cambridge college where the fellows had sworn by solemn resolution that no copy of his New Testament be allowed into the precincts, whether ‘by horse, boat, wagon or porter’. Such men, he scoffed, hadn’t read the book: ‘they have merely heard over their cups or in little gatherings in the marketplace that a new book has come out which tries to peck the crow’s eyes out and give the theologians a taste of their own medicine’.⁵⁰ There was little enthusiasm for Erasmus either at Merton College, Oxford, where the intellectual tone had been set by almost a quarter century under the wardenship of Richard Fitzjames, an earnest and irascible West Countryman. In 1506 Fitzjames was appointed bishop of London, and though details are hazy, he was sufficiently perturbed by the reformist critiques of Erasmus’s friend Colet to threaten in 1513 to bring heresy charges against him. Erasmus thought the bishop ‘an insuperably superstitious Scotist’.51

Not all of Erasmus’s critics, in England or elsewhere, were ignorant backwoodsmen, or unreconstructed scholastic theologians. Dorp had respectable humanist credentials, and Erasmus sparred over details of the translation with the leading French humanist, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Even Fitzjames had a volume of Cicero in his generally old-fashioned library.⁵² Embarrassingly for both Erasmus and Thomas More, the most vocal English critic was a mutual friend, Edward Lee, who actually assisted Erasmus with his work on the New Testament, but took umbrage when his suggestions were ignored, and published in pique a heavily critical set of Annotations on the Annotations of the New Testament. Despite More’s attempts at mediation, the feud festered nastily for years. Robert Ridley, fellow of King’s Hall, Cambridge, and a humanist scholar who avidly read Erasmus’s works, was also less than completely bowled over. His marginal comments reveal a deep concern about the corrosive effect of Erasmus’s freewheeling scholarship on traditional piety. An observation that ‘Erasmus is always blind about the monastic life and the monastery’ was not wide of the mark.⁵³

Erasmus and his English allies were scarcely a small, heroic insurgency withstanding a massive establishment backlash. In the main, it was the critics of the Novum Instrumentum who felt threatened and beleaguered. If humanist scholarship was the thin end of a dangerous wedge, most guardians of orthodoxy seem not to have realized it. Erasmus himself boasted in a letter of July 1514 that ‘there isn’t a bishop in England but rejoices to be greeted by me’, adding that the archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, was ‘so devoted to me that he could be no more loving if he were my father or my brother’. What was more, the King himself ‘still speaks often of me, with as much admiration and devotion as anyone else’.

Colleges, Trojans and Greeks

In 1516, Cambridge acquaintances rushed to congratulate Erasmus on the appearance of the New Testament. John Watson, fellow of Peterhouse, told him his notes had ‘placed mightily in your debt every student of Our Lord’. Henry Bullock, a close friend and future vice-chancellor of the university, waxed lyrical: ‘great gods, how clever it is, how clearly reasoned, and to all men of sound judgement how pleasing and how indispensable!’ The current chancellor, Bishop John Fisher, wrote in more measured but still enthusiastic tones: ‘in the translation of the New Testament, made by you for the common profit of all, no man of sense could find offence’.

The printing of the Novum Testamentum in 1519 was publicly endorsed by no lower an authority than Pope Leo X, to whom Erasmus tactfully dedicated the first edition in 1516. Erasmus could wave a pile of supportive letters from a clutch of leading prelates and secular rulers, including Francis I of France and Henry VIII. In a letter of 1519, he reported with satisfaction how Henry intervened to ‘put to silence’ certain ‘rascals’ attacking the study of Greek at Oxford.54

This episode, recounted at greater length in a letter of Thomas More to the university authorities in March 1518, involved a self-styled group of ‘Trojans’, who set themselves to oppose all forms of ‘polite learning’, and specifically the introduction of the teaching of Greek.⁵⁵ Some academics will always oppose changes to the curriculum. But, at both Oxford and Cambridge, Christian humanism was in the ascendant in the early years of the sixteenth century, and was, for now, at the service of a profoundly Catholic vision of Christian reformation.

Oxford and Cambridge were ecclesiastical institutions, providing for the education of clergymen to serve the needs of Church and state. The handful of colleges in both places were endowed institutions comprising groups of scholars attached to the ‘higher’ faculties of Theology, Medicine and Law. Those studying in the Faculty of Arts – whom we today would call undergraduates – were more loosely affiliated, and usually housed in halls or private lodgings. The various religious houses in the university towns, particularly those of Franciscan and Dominican friars, were historically of great significance, especially in the Faculty of Theology, though by the later fifteenth century the friars did not enjoy the academic prestige they once did. Other religious communities sent members to study at the universities; the Benedictines maintained houses of study at both Oxford and Cambridge in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁵⁶

A loosening grip of the religious orders was accompanied by an intensification of the collegiate system. Six new colleges were founded between 1495 and 1525: at Cambridge, Jesus (1496), Christ’s (1506) and St John’s (1511); at Oxford, Brasenose (1512), Corpus Christi (1517) and Cardinal (1525). In each case, a wealthy founder endowed the institution in the hope of advancing the cause of learning, and of helping their own soul through the prayers of beneficiaries.

New foundations represented an opportunity to reshape priorities. This was particularly evident in the activities of one of the early sixteenth century’s most remarkable double acts: that of Lady Margaret Beaufort and her chaplain and confessor, Bishop John Fisher. Lady Margaret lived through more ‘history’ than anyone should reasonably be expected to. Born in 1443 during the last act of the Hundred Years War, her royal ancestry – she was a great-granddaughter, by the illegitimate line, of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster – made her a dynastic and marital asset during more than three decades of Wars of the Roses. Married four times, her only child (by Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond) emerged victorious at Bosworth in 1485, and she survived to see her grandson ascend the throne in 1509.

A woman of the pronounced piety characteristic of a number of fifteenth-century aristocratic ladies, Lady Margaret was deeply impressed by the devout and learned John Fisher, a young Cambridge don of Yorkshire extraction, whom she met when he was visiting the court on university business in 1495–6. Margaret wanted to do good, and Fisher was the man to show her how, steering her benefactions away from the conventional chantry foundations she had begun to make, and towards support of education on a lavish scale. At Fisher’s prompting, in 1497 Lady Margaret endowed professorships in divinity at Oxford and Cambridge; the first Cambridge Lady Margaret Professor was Fisher himself. Margaret’s largesse to the struggling mid-fifteenth-century Cambridge foundation of God’s House transformed it into the impressive Christ’s College. Legacies in her will produced, under Fisher’s close supervision, the still more imposing St John’s. She stepped in earlier to secure the legal and financial status of Jesus College, founded by the devout and learned bishop of Ely, John Alcock. Jesus was established on the site of the moribund Benedictine nunnery of St Radegund. St John’s too was a phoenix from the ashes of an earlier foundation: the Hospital of St John run by a skeleton staff of Augustinian canons. ‘Top-up’ funding in the early 1520s came through the dissolution of small and ill-disciplined nunneries at Higham in Kent and Broomhill in Berkshire.

The suppressions were indicative of new priorities in the world of institutionalized religion. Changes of emphasis were still more apparent in Oxford in 1525, when Cardinal Wolsey planted his lavish new foundation of Cardinal College on top of the Augustinian priory of St Frideswide, the endowment secured by the suppression of no fewer than a further twenty-one small religious houses from across the Midlands and the south-east.57

Another changing priority was a greater emphasis on preaching. In 1504 Henry VII granted his mother the right to establish a university preachership at Cambridge: holders of the post were to give six sermons a year, including one at the high-profile London pulpit of St Paul’s Cross, or another city church. Shortly prior to this, Thomas Cabold, fellow of Gonville, secured a notable grant of favour from the notorious Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Twelve preachers, and two from Cabold’s own college, were licensed to go annually from Cambridge to preach in any diocese in the country. Over the next eighteen years some 175 such licences were granted, to a roll-call of the university’s great and good. Fisher’s foundation statutes for St John’s laid down that a quarter of the fellows were to preach regularly to the people in English, giving them ‘the fruit of their studies’.⁵⁸

Notwithstanding rear-guard action by the Oxford ‘Trojans’, the wooden horse of Greek language teaching, and with it a more open spirit of critical enquiry, was brought firmly within the walls of both Cambridge and Oxford by the middle of the second decade of the sixteenth century, along with admiration for the more polished neoclassical Latin that was the international humanist idiom. In 1516, Fisher, already in his late forties, led his juniors by example in beginning to learn the Greek language.

The following year, Fisher’s friend Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, sought to atone for a lifetime of government service away from the pastoral needs of his diocese by founding Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Originally intended as a base for the Benedictines of the cathedral priory in Winchester, Fox was persuaded by his friend Bishop Hugh Oldham of Exeter not to lavish his money on ‘a company of bussing [chattering] monks’. Instead, Corpus was to be a showcase of Christian humanist scholarship. Fox’s statutes provided for lecturers in Greek and Latin, to speak publicly on the Old and New Testaments in a cycle of alternate years. Their interpretations should imitate ‘holy and ancient doctors’ – Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Origen, Chrysostom – in preference to those ‘in time and therefore doctrine much more recent’, such as the Franciscan Nicolas of Lyra, and the Dominican Hugo of Vienne. The term used, posterior, had implications of ‘inferior’ as well as ‘later’.59

This was a slap in the face to the friars, and music to Erasmian ears. The Greek lectureship briefly galvanized the Oxford Trojans, with a preacher at St Mary’s Church castigating the advocates of Greek learning as heretics.⁶⁰ But the big guns of Church and state were massed on the side of Agamemnon. On the recommendation of Henry VIII himself, Cambridge appointed Richard Croke as Lecturer in Greek in 1517. He came hotfoot from Germany, where he had introduced study of the language at Leipzig, and declined a job offer at the dull provincial university of Wittenberg – somewhere about to become a much more interesting location. Erasmus enthused in December 1517 that ‘Cambridge is a changed place. The university there has no use for this hair-splitting [old-fashioned scholastic theology], which is more conducive to wrangling than religion.’⁶¹

Yet it is unlikely that Erasmus’s sense of a sharp fork in the road – the dead end of scholasticism or the shining path of the studia humanitatis – was widely shared by English intellectuals. The wills and library lists of university scholars from these years, like that of Fisher’s mentor, William Melton, fellow of Michaelhouse, reveal humanist and scholastic works frequently sitting together on the shelves – Aquinas and Duns Scotus alongside Valla, Erasmus and More’s Utopia. Only in later and very different times would ‘Dunce’ become a synonym for ignoramus.

Humphrey Walkenden of Queens’ College, a friend of Erasmus, lectured on Scotus’s Sentences in 1519–20. Fisher’s revised statutes for St John’s specified a regular Hebrew lecture, but allowed the master and senior fellows to substitute one in (good) Latin on Scotus if that seemed more useful to the students. Wolsey’s statutes for Cardinal College prescribed daily public lectures on Roman and Greek rhetoric or poetry, and students were to study the works of Plautus and Terence. But scholastic philosophy and logic remained at the heart of the curriculum, and a new professor of theology was to spend half his time expounding scripture; half exploring the ‘subtle questions’ of Duns Scotus.

In an address of 1519, Richard Croke, the Cambridge Greek specialist, extolled the study of classical literature, painting it as preferable to the traditional university curriculum. But at the same time he praised Scotus and Aquinas, urging that attention to classical writers should supplement not supplant traditional theological authorities. This seems to have been the instinct of Robert Joseph, an Oxford-educated humanist monk of Evesham Abbey, who wrote a few years later to chide a correspondent for calling the teaching of the Scotists ‘dirty puddles’. Joseph condemned those ‘who spend their whole life weaving syllogisms out of Scotist subtleties’, but he was reluctant to throw the baby out with the puddle water. ‘I would treat Scotus and the Scotists so as to take ideas from them, but take a pure Latinity from more cultivated works.’62

Scholastic message, humanist packaging. For some, enthusiasm for Latin and Greek letters was little more than a fashionable pose, a semblance of style over substance. But for significant numbers of leading clergymen – Colet, Fisher and other English admirers of Erasmus like the new (1522) bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall – the renewal of learning was a token of great moral earnestness, a mainspring of a longed-for revitalization of faith through profound meditation on the life and passion of Jesus.

Late medieval Catholicism was defined by tradition but not enshrined in timelessness. Powerful currents of renewal and regeneration were in motion in early Tudor England, the tidal stirrings of an English Catholic Reformation eager to wash away unsightly encrustations from the abiding rock of the Church. Among pious, literate and attentive laypeople, expectations of a purer practice of the faith were undoubtedly being heightened. But as things looked from episcopal palaces, and from the cloisters and quadrangles of Cambridge and Oxford, this was to be a reformation of the institution undertaken and led by the institutionalized themselves. The clergy, greater and less, must rise to the challenge of their calling, inspire the laity to greater clarity of Christian vision, and reinvigorate the life of the Church. The extent to which they would prove eager for, or equal to, the task was to be of profound significance for the very different directions reform would in the end take.