LIGHTS OF THE WORLD
Like People, Like Priest
YOU ARE THE salt of the earth … You are the light of the world … Your light must shine so brightly before men that they can see your good works.’ Jesus’ words were addressed to his disciples, but they had special meaning for those who saw themselves as the apostles’ direct descendants: the priests and bishops leading Christ’s Church upon earth.
Priests were men set apart. At ordination, they were anointed with oil by a bishop, vested in the priestly robes of stole and chasuble, and presented with bread and a chalice. New priests took on a sacramental ‘character’, becoming walking icons of Christ. They alone were empowered to re-enact at mass Jesus’ role at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body … this is my blood.’
The clergy looked different. Priests shaved the upper crown of the head, a ‘tonsure’ leaving a circlet of hair calling to mind Christ’s crown of thorns. Clerical cheeks were clean-shaven, in an age when beards were becoming fashionable again among those – like the young Henry VIII – important enough to have their portraits painted. Beards were signs of masculinity and virility, but priests were supposed to shun the familiar company of women. Virginity, so the clergy taught, pleased God more than marriage. Even the humblest priest qualified for the Latin honorific Dominus (lord), rendered into English as ‘Sir’. Most ‘Sir Johns’ and ‘Sir Roberts’ in the early sixteenth century were parish priests, not chivalric knights. The honour came with heavy responsibility. Nearly everyone would have agreed with Thomas Crabbe, a parishioner of Axminster in Devon, that ‘every man must needs have a priest at his coming into the world, and a priest at his departing’.
In one sense, priests did not need to be good. Theologians taught that sacraments worked ex opere operato, not ex opere operantis – that is, by virtue of the ritual itself, not the personal merits of the celebrant. The mass of an immoral priest was as valid as that of a living saint.
Nonetheless, the biblical author of the Book of Hosea surely had it right: ‘like people, like priest’. The spiritual and moral well-being of society depended on the clergy. ‘Reformation of holy Church’, insisted one author, required the ‘reformation of curates and good heads of holy Church’. It was evident to Bishop Fisher that ‘all fear of God, also the contempt of God cometh and is grounded of the clergy … if the clergy live desolately in manner, as they should give no account of their life past and done before, will not the lay people do the same?’
The responsibility sat heavily on the shoulders of reform-minded clerics. In 1510, Archbishop William Warham presided over a meeting of the Convocation of Canterbury – a gathering, sitting alongside the secular Parliament, of bishops, abbots and other clergy. Convocations (there was a separate one for the northern province of York) often restricted themselves to financial matters, but this one passed constitutions on clerical reform, regulation of chaplains, clerical dress and simony – the crime of buying or selling spiritual office.1 Around the same time, Fisher’s mentor, William Melton, preached a hard-hitting sermon to new ordinands in the diocese of York. Melton was no anticlerical: he believed priests were ‘celsior angelis’ (higher than angels). But he feared the ideal was undermined by multitudes of ‘ill-educated’ and ‘stupid’ clergy, getting drunk in taverns and wasting time on secular pursuits. Good humanist that he was, Melton saw solutions in Latin learning, and study of the scriptures. And he begged unworthy candidates to refrain from coming forward, anticipating the dictum of Thomas More’s Utopia – fewer yet holier priests. Utopian indeed, for York was a diocese churning out record priestly numbers in the first years of the sixteenth century.
Foremost among the counsellors of perfection was the man who approved Melton’s sermon for publication, Dean Colet of London. In his Oxford lectures on St Paul, Colet spoke excoriatingly of churchmen ‘profoundly ignorant of the teaching of the Gospels’, and obsessed with pursuit of wealth under self-serving slogans: ‘the rights of the Church, the heritage of Christ, the property of the priesthood’. Priests, he bemoaned, now hardly differed at all from laymen ‘except by our tonsured hair and crown’.
Colet revisited the theme in February 1512, preaching at Warham’s invitation at the opening of Convocation.2 It was an eye-opening address, designed – quite possibly with Warham’s approval – to knock the complacency out of his distinguished audience, and inspire them to ‘reformation of the Church’s estate’. Only when the clergy, ‘the light of the world’, put their own house in order could there be ‘reformation of the lay’s part’. Four evils blighted the Church: devilish pride, carnal concupiscence, secular business and worldly covetousness (especially grasping after tithes and promotions). New legislation was not needed, merely enforcement of existing laws, and careful screening of candidates: the ‘broad gate of holy orders’ was itself ‘the well of evils’. Priests were the essential instruments of reformation, and also the principal obstacles to it.
Colet’s diatribe was once regarded as a reliable description of the woeful condition of the institutional Church. More recent assessments have concluded his prognosis and prescriptions were at best impossibly idealistic, and at worst downright unfair. They have noted too the apparent hypocrisy of Colet’s own position as a non-resident ‘pluralist’: his glittering scholarly career was funded by revenues from a rich Suffolk rectory, and canonries at York and Salisbury.3
It was all very well for reformers to demand fewer and better priests, but the Church needed large numbers of them, a result of lay demand for services. In addition to staffing the 9,000 or so parishes, and numerous dependent chapelries, priests were needed as chaplains for fraternities, and to sing endless numbers of intercessory masses. The result was a wave of ordinations around the turn of the sixteenth century: not including monks and friars, an average of 187 priests were ordained annually at York between 1501 and 1527; 126 per annum for the diocese of Lincoln in 1514–21. The total number of clergy in England may have been about 40,000 in the parishes, with another 10,000 or so in the religious orders. Everyone knew some priests, for they were to be found in all places and all walks of life.
Priesthood required no formal training. Significant numbers attended one or other of the universities, but those with degrees, or any experience of higher education, remained a small minority of the body as a whole. Graduates were well represented in the upper echelons, in diocesan administration, and among the rectors and vicars appointed to the wealthiest parishes or ‘benefices’. Clergy in London were the best educated, and, in light of relatively high literacy rates among their parishioners, perhaps needed to be: between 1479 and 1529 some 60 per cent of priests appointed to benefices in the capital were graduates. The proportion among the beneficed clergy was much lower elsewhere: a figure of around one in six presented to parishes in Norwich diocese in 1503–28 was probably typical. It was everywhere minimal among the unbeneficed – curates and parish priests performing much of the actual work in the parishes.4 These acquired what learning they had at one of the grammar schools springing up across England from the later fifteenth century, or received some instruction from their local curate and picked up tricks of the trade serving as altar boys in the parish church.
Humanists scoffed at the priestly proletariat. Thomas More’s whip-smart daughter, Margaret Roper, in the preface to her translation of a treatise by Erasmus, defended the teaching of classical languages to women against accusations it would lead to over-familiarity with priests. ‘Nowadays a man could not devise a better way to keep his wife safe from them, than if he should teach her the Latin and Greek tongue.’ In 1517, the priest and diplomat Richard Pace, about to succeed Colet as dean of St Paul’s, lifted an anecdote from a letter of Erasmus and fathered it on ‘a certain boorish English priest’. This character possessed a badly printed missal, and thus in the mass always said the nonsense word mumpsimus rather than sumpsimus (‘we have taken up’). When corrected, the priest swore he would not give up his old mumpsimus for some newfangled sumpsimus.
Apocryphal tales of this sort did the rounds in sophisticated circles. John Mason, English ambassador in Spain, a former protégé of Thomas More, recalled in the early 1530s the story of an English priest so scrupulously pious that he would not suffer the name of Satan to appear anywhere in his mass book. Striking it out and substituting the name of God had predictably comic results: abrenuncio Deo et omnibus operibus eius – I renounce God and all his works.5
It seems unlikely that many priests were functionally illiterate in Latin. Their job involved daily recital of Latin services, in a Church using the language for countless legal and administrative purposes. And even if they were, it provoked few objections from the laity. Of more than 1,000 parishes in the vast diocese of Lincoln, ‘visited’ (inspected) by Bishop William Atwater and his deputies between 1514 and 1521, only two registered complaints that their curate was ‘ignorant’.
Parish clergy come rather well out of the early sixteenth-century visitation material. Complaints about pastoral performance surfaced in a mere forty-one (4 per cent) of the Lincoln parishes overseen by Atwater, and other dioceses for which we have records – Canterbury, Chichester, Norwich, Winchester – produce only isolated cases of priestly neglect and nastiness.
Pluralism was certainly widespread: revenues from parishes and cathedral canonries eased the ascent of well-connected clerics making their way up the administrative ladder in Church or state. A consequence was non-residence: 14 per cent of rectors and vicars were absent from the Kent parishes visited by Archbishop Warham in 1511, and about a quarter of the incumbents in Lincoln diocese in 1518 did not reside.6 If parishes were properly served by deputies, it was not necessarily a pastoral disaster. Nonetheless, reforming bishops were keen to crack down on unlicensed pluralism, particularly where incumbents abandoned unglamorous rural livings for the bright lights of the capital. In February 1521, an official sent by John Worthial, diocesan chancellor of the disciplinarian Bishop Robert Sherburne of Chichester, tracked down a priest ‘fussing and croaking in London’ and forced him to return and reside.7
Colet was right about relentless pursuit of tithes; few issues were as likely to get lay backs up. Tithing was in theory straightforward: an obligation based on biblical precedent to support the clergy with an annual offering of 10 per cent of all profits and produce. In practice, it could be immensely complicated. What was a tenth of three calves, or a dozen eggs? Tricky enough in the agricultural contexts for which they were designed, tithe arrangements in urban areas, particularly London, could be fraught and difficult, as priests struggled to keep track of shifting rents and wages.
It is easy enough to rack up examples of conflict – legal, verbal and sometimes physical – between clergy and parishioners, and a handful of parishes were convulsed by intractable disputes. Yet tithing in the main worked, regulated at the local level by custom and compromise, and commutation of hard-to-tithe items into fixed money payments. Church court records reveal remarkably few parishes producing tithe suits in any given year: ten on average from the 1,148 parishes in the diocese of Norwich in the early 1520s; two from 339 Winchester parishes in 1527; four from 650 Lichfield parishes in 1530. No doubt people rarely paid more than they ought, and often paid less than they owed. But the principle was seldom directly questioned. In the first three decades of the sixteenth century, well over half the laypeople making wills gestured towards virtue by setting aside small sums for ‘tithes forgotten’.8
The moral character of priests – so close to the heart of reformers like Colet – eludes statistical certainty. The extent to which young men pursued ordination with a genuine sense of spiritual vocation was rarely commented on in individual cases. Without doubt, the most challenging obligation was to live celibate and chaste. Early medieval parish clergy were routinely married, and serious attempts to enforce clerical celibacy were first undertaken in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as part of the reform movement initiated by the energetic Pope Gregory VII. This had mixed results: de facto clerical marriage was never eradicated in medieval Wales and Ireland, and in parts of Switzerland clerical ‘concubinage’ was effectively institutionalized, the bishops making tidy sums from fining their clergy, and legitimizing their children.
In England, for whatever reason, Gregorian ideals took firmer root. Bishop Fox’s boast that he never tolerated ‘manifest fornication’ is borne out by visitation evidence: Winchester produced only eleven allegations from 230 parishes inspected in 1527–8. There were five complaints from 478 Suffolk parishes in 1499, and nine from 260 Kentish ones in 1511. Bishop Atwater’s officials in Lincoln diocese were scrupulous in requiring the churchwardens to tell them whether priests had any ‘suspect woman’ (mulier suspecte) in the parsonage. By a generous interpretation, that might mean any female under forty who was not a close blood relation, including domestic servants. In any case, the figures are low: a minimum of twenty-five and maximum of 102 priests from 1,006 parishes were suspected to be up to no good.9
These findings suggest that, on average, well over 90 per cent of clergy were routinely maintaining chaste lives. Later Protestants (and some modern psychologists) would be frankly unbelieving that such an ‘unnatural’ state of affairs could have pertained. It may well be that the incidence of sexual activity was higher than the visitation evidence implies – if laypeople turned a strategically blind eye to the situation of priests living quietly with their housekeepers who were in other ways good pastors. Yet, in contrast to modern western society, the prestige of virginity was high, and strong cultural pressures operated in its favour.
An evidential audit of the late medieval clergy is likely to conclude that laypeople were broadly content, and priests were doing a good job. But optimistic generalizations about overall popular ‘satisfaction’ with the clergy risk skating too quickly over the aspirations and frustrations of key constituencies, and over some persistent and uneasy questions pertaining to clerical roles and rank.
Princes and Paupers
The priesthood’s collective claim to present an icon of Christ to the people was mocked by disparities of wealth, status and power. At the apex were the bishops, ecclesiastical lords holding significant landed estates. By European standards, dioceses were large: there were only seventeen for the whole of England; a further four for Wales. They were also exceptionally wealthy: twelve of the forty richest bishoprics in Europe were said to have been English. The diocese of Lincoln was worth £3,300 a year to its holder; that of Ely, £2,134. Combined tenure of York and Durham supplied Thomas Wolsey with about £5,000 a year in the 1520s, which he supplemented with the abbacy of St Albans, fees as Lord Chancellor and a lavish pension from the King of France. Wolsey, the worldliest of early Tudor bishops, enjoyed an income on a par with the greatest secular nobles. By contrast, the least worldly, John Fisher, occupied the smallest and poorest English diocese: Rochester brought him a measly £300 a year.10
A handful of parishes were worth more than £100 a year, and tended to go to well-connected, often absentee, careerists. Most parish livings were valued at under £15, vicarages (where the right to collect most of the tithes belonged to a local monastery) usually considerably less than rectories. The majority of the beneficed clergy enjoyed an income roughly on a par with comfortably off yeoman farmers, the class from which many of them originated. The prevalence, in the wills of rectors and vicars, of livestock, agricultural implements, and loads of wheat, barley and hay, shows that many felt the need to supplement the income from tithes, and did not devote all their energies to the performance of sacred duties.
Curates, and the assistants usually called ‘parish priests’, drew salaries ranging from £4 to £6 per annum – little more than an unskilled agricultural labourer. Chantry priests did a little better, but not much. Unbeneficed clergy of all kinds needed to supplement their salaries, engaging in secular occupations, picking up fees for occasional masses, or signing up for extra parish duties at Easter and Christmas.11
There was no formal career structure, no reasonable expectation that a curate would ever secure promotion to a parish living, let alone one of the higher dignities. Yet unlike other social and political entities, the Church did not operate under rules of hereditary succession, and it permitted a degree of social mobility found in no other walk of life. Only two early Tudor bishops were children of noblemen: the idle and disreputable James Stanley, bishop of Ely (1506–1515), was the sixth son of the Earl of Derby, while the learned and serious Edmund Audley of Salisbury (1502–1524) was a second son of Lord Audley. The others came of mixed gentry, merchant and yeoman backgrounds. Wolsey, as his enemies never tired of whispering, was a ‘butcher’s cur’, the son of an Ipswich tradesman.12
In the importance it afforded to patronage and clientage, the Church embraced rather than resisted the values of the secular world. Advancement depended on whom you knew, and on what they might do for you in return for what they imagined you could do for them. The power to nominate priests to vacant parish livings did not, in the main, belong to bishops. This right, called an ‘advowson’ (from the Latin advocatio, I summon or call), originally pertained to lords of manors establishing parishes on their lands. By the later Middle Ages it had become a piece of property, to be inherited, sold or rented out by the turn.
Much patronage was in the hands of religious houses. This was the result of a medieval pattern whereby decaying parishes became ‘appropriated’ to an outside body, usually a monastery, which as corporate rector appointed a permanent deputy, or ‘vicar’. In the East Riding of Yorkshire, monasteries presented to just over 50 per cent of the 165 parishes, collegiate churches to 8.5 per cent, and assorted other ecclesiastics to 18.2 per cent. Various lay patrons had 17.6 per cent of advowsons, though fewer than 2 per cent were in the hands of the crown. A mere four belonged to the archbishop of York. In Essex, by contrast, 37.4 per cent of advowson numbers were in the hands of laymen, with 8.4 per cent for the bishop and 4.6 per cent for the King. But just about everywhere, religious houses were the largest category of patron, and a significant proportion was in lay hands.13
The figures underestimate the reach of royal patronage, for a petitioning letter from the King was not lightly ignored. Bishops could reject a candidate as unsuitable, though they had little control over the appointments process as a whole. Nobles promoted their chaplains; crown and churchmen put forward servants and officials. Gentry families looked after their own: Colet was presented to the Suffolk rectory of Dennington by his cousin, Sir William Knevet, and to that of Thurning in Northamptonshire by his father, Sir Henry Colet. From the 1440s to the 1550s, the Longley family of Cheshire ensured one of that name was rector of Prestwich. Bishops, even reforming ones, acknowledged the claims of blood. John Longland of Lincoln paved the glittering career path of his nephew, the diplomat Richard Pate, while Warham showered preferment on a namesake who might have been an illegitimate son rather than a nephew. Even the saintly John Fisher appointed his nephew Henry White to a Suffolk living in 1514.14
Where a clergyman’s relatives, or agents acting on his behalf, purchased a ‘right of next presentation’, the result was perilously close to simony. Henry VII’s councillor, Edmund Dudley, castigated simony and pluralism in a reforming treatise, The Tree of Commonwealth, composed in the Tower at the start of Henry VIII’s reign. Yet Dudley himself was involved in such transactions on behalf of clients, relatives and royal servants.15 It was a system in which everyone could see the potential for abuse, but from which even would-be reformers could seldom easily extricate themselves.
Further down the social scale, the stakes were lower, but opportunities for patronage over the clergy were considerable. Middle-ranking laity appointed priests to serve as fraternity chaplains, and engaged them to sing intercessory masses. In many parishes, the wages of the curate or parish priest were paid, not by the rector, but by churchwardens, who hired in extra clerical manpower at Easter. Laypeople owed deference to the ‘lights of the world’, but often exercised considerable practical authority over them. At times, the lowly social status of priests bred a familiarity perilously close to contempt. References to priests known locally as ‘Little Sir John’ or ‘Black Sir John’ hardly suggest a sense of awe in the face of the charisma conferred by ordination.16
Dumb Dogs and Pulpit Men
Priests were technicians of salvation, distributors of sacramental grace. But they were also supposed to be instructors in knowledge and virtue. The 1281 decree of archbishop of Canterbury John Pecham, De Informacione Simplicium (On the instruction of the unlearned), better known by its frank opening words Ignorantia Sacerdotum (the ignorance of priests), ordered that clergy with cure of souls should preach in English four times a year, on the Creed, the Ten Commandments, Christ’s precept to love God and neighbour, the seven works of mercy, seven deadly sins and seven sacraments. Conscientious bishops like Fox of Winchester and Nicholas West of Ely still enforced its provisions in the 1520s. It inspired the composition of helpful sermon compilations: the Quattuor Sermones, the Festial of John Mirk, the Exonoratorium Curatorum. Along with the Sermones Discipuli of the German Dominican friar Johannes Herolt, these were the books most frequently found in the wills of early sixteenth-century English clergy.
There was a difference between trotting out a pre-packaged homily from one of these volumes, or from the ever-popular collection of saints’ lives, The Golden Legend, and composing an inspirational sermon of one’s own. Most priests were not up to the latter task. The specialists in set-piece, outdoor sermons were the friars, who delivered them at market or churchyard crosses. Cathedrals were important too. Even if the bishop was not himself a habitual preacher, cathedral clergy made the diocesan mother church a centre of God’s Word, and went on tours of surrounding parishes.17
Even if only a minority did it regularly, the notion that every priest was, potentially, a preacher of God’s Word was a familiar one, with not the slightest whiff of heresy about it. Later Protestants had a tag for those who could or would not preach, a category into which they thrust almost the whole of the medieval priesthood: ‘dumb dogs’. It was no new coinage. In William Langland’s prophetic Piers Plowman, abbots, priors, priests and curates are reminded of a duty ‘to teach and preach to all mankind’. Its neglect has layfolk calling them ‘dumb hounds’ – an echo of Isaiah 56:10: ‘here are none but blind watchmen; here are dumb dogs that cannot bark’. These were not the eccentric views of a visionary outsider: the standard compilation of canon law for the late medieval English Church, William Lyndwood’s Provinciale, admonished rectors and vicars to fulfil their obligation to preach, lest they justly be accounted dumb dogs.
How much laypeople wanted to be barked at is another matter. There were just four complaints of neglect of preaching from Lincoln parishes in 1517–31 – reflecting either an extraordinary level of diligence by the clergy, or, more likely, a lack of concern on the part of rural laity. Quarterly sermons were mandated, but there was no legal requirement for Sunday homilies. Nonetheless, the growing number of both pulpits and pews in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century parish churches points to their emergence as a more regular and expected feature of weekly worship.18
Complaints by preachers that audiences were slothful about coming to sermons, and inattentive when they got there, are to be found in nearly every surviving medieval sermon collection. There was a formulaic, self-regarding aspect to this – the faithful preacher serves as a prophet without honour. Yet the churchwardens of Bishophill near York admitted in 1481 that ‘when the Word of God is declared in the said church, and the said parishioners have warning to come hear it, the most part of them cometh not at all’.
Whether or not most people got excited about sermons, some layfolk certainly did. Enthusiasm for preaching was rife among the merchant classes of London and the major provincial towns. In the early fifteenth century, Margery Kempe, visionary and pious troublemaker, declared that, if she had the money, she would give a gold coin ‘to have every day a sermon’. She reported ‘much multitude of people’ assembling for the preaching of a monk at York, and ‘much people gathered to hear the sermon’ of a holy friar at King’s Lynn in Norfolk. On this occasion, the preacher ‘spoke much of Our Lord’s passion’, and Margery, as was her habit, wept tears of pure devotion.19
Townsfolk’s zeal for preaching showed no sign of waning over the ensuing decades, particularly in London, where the famous outdoor pulpit on the north side of St Paul’s Cathedral attracted big crowds. Preaching there in 1497, Bishop Alcock observed with pride how ‘many a noble sermon is said in this place in the year’. In 1508, a saintly Franciscan Observant, Friar Donald, expounded there the letters of St Paul, as Colet did in Oxford.
London preaching made a strong impression, but did not always produce peace and charity. In 1517, a xenophobic sermon at St Mary Spital triggered ‘Evil May Day’, when resident aliens were set upon in the streets by rioting apprentices. The lead plotter, John Lincoln, recruited an Augustinian canon, Dr Bell, to preach on the Tuesday of Easter Week on the Psalm Coelum coeli Domino: terram autem dedit filiis hominum (‘The heaven of heaven is the Lord’s: but the earth he has given to the children of men’). Bell drew the lesson that ‘this land was given to Englishmen, and as birds would defend their nest, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves’.20
The public, persuasive character of sermons accounts for their regular appearance in the wills of urban worthies. Bertram Dawson, wealthy alderman of York, left 3s. 4d. in 1515 to ‘the doctor that shall show the Word of God at my eight day’ (i.e. the conclusion of an extended week of funeral celebrations). The London merchant tailor, and former sheriff, James Wilford, left money in 1526 for a learned Franciscan to preach every Good Friday in perpetuity ‘a sermon of the passion of Our Lord’ at his parish church of St Bartholomew the Less. Another sheriff, John Thurston, made the substantial bequest of £40 in 1520 to support two scholars ‘studying holy divinity’ at Oxford and Cambridge, so that ‘the faith of Christ may be increased’. His widow, Dame Elizabeth, augmented the provision in her will, with further exhibitions to scholars, priests and students, ‘being pulpit men’.
Such bequests were hardly proto-Protestant. These sermons were one element of a package of commemoration and intercession for the donor’s soul. The same approach, on a more lavish scale, was taken by Henry VII, whose elaborate schema for regular preaching on Sundays and feast days at Westminster Abbey, established in 1504, was part and parcel of a sumptuous chantry. Chantry foundations with specific provisions for preaching were never the norm, but they proliferated from the later fifteenth century, and it is likely there was at least one in every decent-sized provincial town. Sermons of all sorts, at Paul’s Cross and elsewhere, conventionally started with the bidding of the bedes, which called to remembrance the needs of living and dead. Pulpits were engines of intercessory prayer, as much as they were beacons of edification – a fact graphically illustrated by the 1529 will of the Devon merchant John Lane, which contained bequests to no fewer than one hundred churches ‘to pray for me in their pulpits’.21
Yet it is significant that Elizabeth Thurston described her favoured priests as ‘pulpit men’. A feeling was growing, among both laypeople and clergy, that an ability to expound the Word of God was the highest and purest manifestation of the priestly calling. John Fisher, himself a maestro of the preacher’s art, strongly encouraged Erasmus in his project of compiling a handbook on the techniques of preaching, Ecclesiastae sive de ratione concionandi. Finally published in 1535, Erasmus’s treatise put forward an evangelical, charismatic vision of the sermon, in which the Holy Spirit flowed through the words of the eloquent preacher to fill the hearts of his auditors. All priests, not just a cadre of specialists, were called to exercise this ministry.
Like many medieval theologians, Fisher saw Word and Sacrament as complementary, not competing, channels of grace. The Imitation of Christ, in William Atkinson’s translation, thanked God equally for the gift of the eucharist ‘to the refreshing of my soul and body’, and for putting ‘before my faith the light of thy holy word’.
Yet sometimes people were willing explicitly to juxtapose these twin priestly vocations. Dives and Pauper, printed three times between 1493 and 1536, articulated a high doctrine of the importance of preaching. God’s Word was ‘life and salvation of man’s soul’, and persons trying to hinder preaching were nothing less than ‘manslayers ghostly’. In a choice between hearing a sermon and attending a mass, one should forgo the latter, for ‘it is more profitable to hear God’s Word in preaching than to hear any mass’.22
Dives and Pauper was a text on the uncomfortable edges of orthodoxy. But its take on the respective merits of mass and sermon was neither eccentric nor unique. The great revivalist preacher of fifteenth-century Italy, Bernardino of Siena, told audiences that if it came to it ‘you should let the mass go, rather than the sermon. … There is less peril for your soul in not hearing mass than in not hearing the sermon.’ The message was repeated by the most impeccably orthodox of early Tudor Englishmen (actually, most probably a Welshman by birth), the Bridgettine monk Richard Whitford. His advice to heads of households was to ensure that everyone under their authority was present ‘if there be a sermon any time of the day’, and to ‘let them ever keep the preachings rather than the mass, if (by case) they may not hear both’.23
There was no inherent incompatibility between priests’ sacramental roles and their duty to edify and instruct. But the clergy were obliged to carry a mixed bundle of expectations, and their mission was complicated by what could often seem a mismatch between exalted ideals and a frequently shabby reality. Laypeople’s utter dependence on priests for securing salvation, and their awareness – heightened by the jeremiads of clerical reformers – that priests were typically frail and fallible human beings was a source of tension that could be creative and constructive, but could also fuel recrimination and resentment. The future Protestant insistence on the clergyman’s identity as a preacher grew out of, as much as it reacted against, the evolving attitudes of the late Middle Ages. Long before the Reformation, spirited conversations were underway about what priests were really for, and whether their privileges were really justified.
Questions of purpose and identity dogged the steps of the ‘regular’ clergy: the monks and friars, as well as nuns, living in community under authority of a religious superior, and the discipline of a rule (regula), as opposed to the ‘secular’ clergy out in the world (seculum). To contemporaries, they were simply ‘the religious’. Their lives of communal prayer – an Opus Dei (work of God) structured by vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – were to be conspicuous casualties of the Reformation. Yet many of the first generation of Reformation rebels, including Luther himself, were members of religious orders. The capacity of late medieval Catholicism to mould and nurture its own critics is nowhere on clearer display.
There were perhaps 10,000 persons ‘in religion’ at the start of the sixteenth century, in around 900 separate establishments. Recruitment to individual houses went up and down, but the aggregate numbers were not on any path of long-term decline, and may in fact have been higher than ever.24 The only safe generalization about the religious orders is that they were extraordinarily diverse, even within broad bands of distinction between contemplative monks and nuns, ‘enclosed’ (in theory) within their cloisters, and the friars, usually based in towns, and pursuing more active vocations of preaching and hearing confessions. The friars or ‘mendicants’ (mendicare, to beg) lived off the alms and offerings of the laity, in contrast to the landed estates of ‘possessioner’ orders. About a quarter of the religious were ‘canons regular’, communities of priests observing the rule of St Augustine. The Austin canons were thought of as monks, but resembled friars in their engagement with the world.
The backbone of the monastic establishment were the Benedictines or Black Monks. In a situation virtually unique to England, they supplied personnel for nine priories that were also cathedral churches, including Canterbury, Durham and Winchester. The other cathedrals, except for Augustinian Carlisle, had a secular dean and chapter. Many of the wealthiest and most prestigious houses, such as Westminster and St Albans, were Benedictine.
The Cistercians or White Monks, prided themselves on greater austerity and simplicity of life, and situated their houses away from centres of habitation, at Rievaulx and Fountains in North Yorkshire, or Tintern in the secluded Wye Valley along the Welsh border. Stricter still were the Carthusians, with a slim total of nine ‘Charterhouses’. There was one house of Bridgettines, an order founded by St Bridget of Sweden: Syon Abbey at Isleworth in Middlesex. Syon’s location, and its distinctive character as a double-house of monks and nuns, lent it visibility and prestige. Most nuns followed the Benedictine rule, though some were Cistercian or Augustinian. Their vocation provided a rare opportunity, in a deeply patriarchal society, to pursue lives of status and dignity independent of immediate male oversight.
Friars might be – depending on the colour of their habits – White, Black or Grey: Carmelite, Dominican or Franciscan. The Franciscans were split between the main branch, and a reformed group of ‘Observant’ Franciscans, pledged to a stricter observance of the rule of St Francis. Between 1482 and 1507, six Observant houses were established in England, largely through royal patronage; there were nearly ten times that number of ‘Conventual’ friaries. There were also Augustinian friars (Luther’s order), as well as smaller numbers of Friars of the Holy Cross (‘Crutched Friars’), and Trinitarian Friars who specialized in redeeming Christian captives held by Muslims. Rounding out the roster was the single English affiliation to a crusading order. The Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem had their priory at Clerkenwell, just north of London, while their properties were administered from widely scattered dependent houses known as commanderies.25
In later years, reformers would contemptuously dismiss the religious orders as a rabble of contending ‘sects’, obsessed with their own rites, ceremonies and privileges. There were, undoubtedly, rivalries and tensions. Conventual Franciscans, three of whose houses were transferred to the Observants by royal command in 1499, nursed an understandable grievance. Yet the most serious turf wars were not among the various religious orders, but between the secular clergy and the mendicants. The friars’ pastoral activities, as preachers and confessors, had the potential, so parish clergy feared, to draw their congregations away. Much of the sometimes vitriolic ‘anti-fraternal’ satire of the Middle Ages originated in circles sympathetic to the secular clergy.26
The sheer diversity of religious life complicates assessments of its overall health. Visitations can be enjoyably mined for eye-catching scandal. At Littlemore (Oxfordshire) in 1517, the prioress had borne a child to the nuns’ chaplain, and ordered the sisters to remain quiet about it. The wealthy Benedictine abbey of Ramsey in Cambridgeshire was in a sad state that same year. Numbers were down, and formation of the junior monks was shamefully neglected. The seniors swore and gambled, under the oversight of a drunken, bad-tempered prior. Matters were scarcely better at Walsingham Priory in 1514, about the time Erasmus visited the shrine. The canons were said to spend their nights drinking and singing in the household of the seneschal’s (lay steward’s) wife.
Revelations of criminal or sexual misbehaviour were always, however, relatively few, and disproportionately affected smaller houses, where patterns of orderly life and discipline were harder to maintain. More pervasive were reports suggesting a wearied attrition of religious fervour and community feeling. Bishops uncovered numerous cases of absenteeism, services at irregular times, monks gossiping after compline, financial mismanagement, or abbots and priors leading disengaged, leisured lives in comfortable abbatial chambers. Bishop Alcock took it for granted that as a fish dies outside water, ‘so a man or woman of religion being without their cloister is dead in their souls’.27 Yet almost everywhere there was neglect of ‘enclosure’, and much toing and froing between religious community and lay society. If English monasticism was ‘corrupt’, it was the corruption of comfort, convention and compromise, rather than of depravity, decadence and dissipation. There is not much evidence there had ever been a monastic ‘golden age’ when such problems did not exist.
‘Worldliness’ might in any case more charitably be interpreted as a pragmatic readjustment to the expectations of a changing world. Monasteries hired professional singers to enhance their liturgy, and professional scribes to spruce up their manuscripts. Libraries, in the larger houses at least, were well stocked and expanding, and several monasteries, particularly cathedral priories, established schools for instruction of local children.
English monasticism was not irretrievably stuck in the past. Hardly any early printing presses were found outside London. But the few that were belonged to the Benedictines: in the 1520s and ’30s books were produced on presses at Abingdon, Tavistock, St Augustine’s Canterbury and St Albans. The early sixteenth century was a heyday of monastic building: new chantries at Tewkesbury, Peterborough and St Albans; new towers at Shap, Furness, Bolton, Canterbury and – an exquisite survival – at Fountains; rebuilt cloisters at Hailes and Lacock; extensive refurbishments at Westminster, Chester, Sherborne, Winchcombe, Evesham and Glastonbury; a brand new abbey church, never completed, at Bath.28
Bishops, Legate and Reform
Whatever judgement historians might make, many contemporaries believed the reform of religious orders to be an urgently pressing task. There were several strands to this. One was the attitude of Erasmus – unsympathetic towards monasticism as a whole, and still, in the later 1520s, complaining to English correspondents about the malevolence towards him of monks and friars. There are echoes in a manuscript treatise of the early 1530s, a fictional Dialogue between Pole and Lupset. It was written by Erasmus’s admirer, Thomas Starkey, secretary to the aristocratic scholar Reginald Pole, and a friend of the humanist churchman Thomas Lupset. Starkey did not advocate abolishing monasteries, but he considered them full of ‘ill occupied’ persons, and in need of ‘good reformation’. It would be better if only mature men and not youths were admitted, so there might be ‘fewer in number religious men, but better in life’. Overall, monasteries played a very marginal role in Starkey’s conception of the well-ordered Christian commonwealth, and nunneries didn’t enter his consciousness at all.
This was not the attitude of reform-minded bishops, who took very seriously their responsibility to elevate standards of monastic life. Longland of Lincoln generally left parish visitations to his deputies, but visited many of the 111 religious houses in his diocese personally. In extreme cases, Longland removed superiors – such as the abbess of Elstow in Bedfordshire, who ignored orders to enforce communal dining, and allowed the sisters to wear unseemly low-cut dresses.29
The willingness of bishops – Alcock of Ely, Fox of Winchester, Fisher of Rochester – to suppress religious houses in order to endow university colleges did not reflect a low opinion of religious life. In 1497, Alcock published a sermon preached at the consecration of some nuns. He explained the matrimonial symbolism of their profession, and promised that if they continued faithfully as spouses of Christ, their jointure (marriage settlement) would ‘exceed all rewards that can be thought’. In 1517, Fox translated the Benedictine rule into English for the benefit of nuns of his diocese. Fisher routinely took in person the professions of new monks, hermits and nuns. His 1522 suppression of the Benedictine nunnery of Higham marked the expiry of efforts, stretching over a decade, to reform the behaviour of its inmates. Fisher reconfirmed his concern for the spiritual formation of nuns at the very end of his life, when, incarcerated in the Tower, he composed two devotional treatises for his half-sister, Elizabeth White, a Dominican nun of Dartford.30
Cardinal Wolsey’s suppressions of religious houses in the cause of education were on a scale larger than any other bishop’s. In his last months in office, in 1528–9, he secured papal bulls allowing further suppressions to add to the endowments of Eton and Cambridge. He was also empowered to dissolve and amalgamate houses with fewer than twelve inmates, and to establish an undetermined number of new dioceses using monastic churches and wealth – measures that, had they not been overtaken by events, would have left the map of monastic England substantially redrawn.
Wolsey was less than scrupulous about only dissolving houses shown to be incapable of reform. The Benedictine priory of Daventry, suppressed in 1525, came quite well out of a recent visitation, and there is no evidence of very much amiss with the Augustinian community of St Frideswide’s, Oxford, the kernel of the new foundation for Cardinal College. Wolsey’s absentee abbotship of wealthy St Albans was also a flagrant contradiction of his expressed concern for reform.31
Wolsey’s credentials as monastic reformer are not entirely negligible. In 1519, he issued detailed constitutions for the Austin canons, a back-to-basics manifesto whose provisions included a ban on polyphonic music – ‘wanton melodies’ that ‘flatter the ear’ – in favour of good, old-fashioned monastic plainchant. Heads of Augustinian, Benedictine and Cistercian houses were summoned to a meeting in November that year to discuss matters ‘concerning their reformation’, and for the Benedictines a new set of statutes was issued. The text does not survive, but it was demanding enough to provoke a letter of protest, arguing that ‘if everything in the reformation of the order should tend to excessive austerity and rigour, we should not have the monks (at least not a decent and sufficient number) to inhabit so many and so great monasteries’. It was simply unreasonable to expect everyone to emulate the ascetic rigour of Carthusians, Bridgettines and Franciscan Observants.
This cri de coeur is often regarded as a patent self-indictment of mainstream monasticism, though one might choose to see it as recognition of the variegated character of religious life, and a sensible warning against letting the best become enemy of the good. Nonetheless, a rhetoric of monastic reformation was in the ascendant at the start of Henry VIII’s second decade. The Benedictines of Westminster must have squirmed in the choir stalls in January 1519, when Wolsey visited their abbey, and Longland preached from Genesis 18:21: ‘I will go down and see whether they have deserved the ill report that has reached me.’32
Monastic reform was not just a moral question, but a jurisdictional and political one. It was an obstacle to disciplinary oversight that so many houses could claim immunity from episcopal visitation. The ‘exempt’ orders included all the friars, the Premonstratensian canons, Cistercians, Carthusians and almost three dozen ‘Cluniac’ priories, under the supervision of the reformed Benedictine Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy. In addition, some of the most prestigious Benedictine abbeys – Glastonbury, St Albans, Evesham, Malmesbury – claimed exempt status on the basis of treasured papal privileges. Freedom from episcopal oversight need not mean moral anarchy. Exempt orders were responsible for organizing their own inspection regimes, and surviving evidence proves this could be done conscientiously and effectively.33 Bishops, however, resented infringement of their jurisdictional powers. Wolsey, flush with royal favour, was in a unique position to do something about it.
In 1518, with Henry VIII’s backing, Wolsey secured from Leo X appointment as legate a latere in England – a representative sent ‘from the side’ of the Holy Father. The formal basis for the request was a need to reform the religious orders. The legateship, made permanent in 1524, conferred the right to issue new constitutions and depose unworthy heads. Wolsey interfered repeatedly in monastic elections, and removed at least eight unsuitable superiors. Legateship also empowered Wolsey to visit exempt houses, and though he exercised the right only sporadically, bishops could turn to him for help. Longland, for example, appealed to Wolsey in 1528 to get rid of the philandering Dominican prior of King’s Langley, Hertfordshire.34
The one exemplary demonstration of legatine power against an exempt order underlines the contradictory character of ‘reform’ in the early Tudor Church. The targets were, of all people, the Observant Franciscans of Greenwich – by virtually unanimous consent the most devout and disciplined of the friars. The house at Greenwich was closely associated with the court: a foundation of Edward IV, it lay adjacent to the royal palace. It was where Prince Henry was baptized in 1491, and where he married Catherine of Aragon in 1509. Their daughter Mary was in turn baptized in the chapel at Greenwich in 1516.
For the Observants, episcopal oversight did not seem like a prescription for spiritual health. On the contrary, after their controversial split from the main branch of the order in the early fifteenth century, Observants repeatedly resisted bishops’ attempts to suppress their distinctive identity. Their best guarantee of survival was the direct endorsement of the papacy, and they jealously guarded their independence from jurisdictions short of Rome itself.
Their loyalty was only tepidly rewarded. Clement VII begged Wolsey not to stir up trouble by visiting the order, but nonetheless issued a bull in August 1524, specifically empowering him to override the Observants’ exemptions. The visitation took place in January 1525, prompting a mass walkout by nineteen of the brethren. They were brought to heel by excommunication, and incarceration in the porter’s lodge at Wolsey’s London residence. The visitation did nothing to enhance spiritual standards, and succeeded only in stirring factionalism and ill will among the community. That was to erupt again in the following decade, when the order faced a much greater crisis of identity and obedience.35
Observance and Imitation
The sorry episode at Greenwich points to a noticeable deficiency of religious life in the generation before the break with Rome: the failure of English monasticism to manifest much internally generated revival, or participate wholeheartedly in reform movements sweeping other parts of the western Church. Religious orders across Europe in the fifteenth century were gripped by the spirit of ‘Observance’ – reform as return to an imagined past.
Observantism was most influential among the Franciscans. By the start of the sixteenth century, Observant houses matched Conventual ones in most provinces of the order, and in some places achieved dominance. In Ireland, two-thirds of Franciscan houses became Observant, and in Spain observance was imposed on all Franciscans by the ascetic friar, royal minister, and Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) – a much more plausible symbol of ecclesiastical reform than his English counterpart, Wolsey. In 1517, Leo X took the step of declaring Observant Franciscans to be the true heirs of St Francis, henceforth to elect the minister general of the order. The Conventuals were reconstituted as a separate and subordinate branch.36
Of these convulsions, there was little sign in England. The Franciscan Observants were established late, on a limited scale, and as a result of direct royal patronage. Perhaps there was no gaping crisis of Franciscan vision demanding redress. It is hard to imagine an English equivalent to the situation confronting Cisneros in Andalusia, where, rather than give up their concubines, 400 friars fled to North Africa and converted to Islam. But neither was there much urgency about internal regeneration. The English friars were learned enough, in a traditional kind of way, and produced solid and seemingly popular sermons. But their ranks produced no superstar revivalist preacher, no English equivalent of Bernardino of Siena, John of Capistrano, Vincent Ferrer or Girolamo Savonarola.
Across Europe, the Observant movement also deeply influenced the Dominicans, Carmelites and Augustinian friars. In the early sixteenth century, the Observant Augustinians produced a great reforming prior general, Giles of Viterbo, who in 1512 delivered a prophetic plea for Church reform at the opening of the Fifth Lateran Council.37 Yet none of the English friaries, with the limited exception of the Franciscans, attached themselves to the Observant movement at all. English Benedictines were equally immune to the bug of strict observance spreading through the provinces of the order in the fifteenth century, and associated particularly with the houses of Subiaco in central Italy and Melk in Lower Austria.38 In an era of incessant talk about ‘reformation’ in the English Church, the religious orders were conspicuously backward at coming forward.
Reasons for the retardation of Observant renewal in English religious life are not immediately obvious. Ironically, it may in part be a backhanded tribute to the fact that standards were not so shockingly low as to demand urgent remedial action. The untypical (in European terms) power of the English bishops, who had little desire to see the proliferation of assertively independent-minded reform movements within their dioceses, may also have been a factor. Yet a culture of contentment and complacency, and a relative deficit of charismatic leadership, left the religious houses, the wealthiest and most institutionally exposed sector of the English Church, ill-prepared to play much more than a passive, onlooking role, when the world they had known began, suddenly, to shift on its axes.
Monks were primarily concerned with the worship of God, and with salvation of their own souls. Yet a compelling argument in favour of religious life was its ability to inspire wider society to higher levels of spirituality. Reform currents among the Augustinian canons in the later Middle Ages – which again failed to make headway across the Channel – impacted strongly on the lives of the laity. From the late fourteenth century, the Observant house at Windesheim near Deventer in the Netherlands was epicentre of a reform movement spanning Augustinian priories in the Low Countries, Rhineland, Saxony and Switzerland. From this nexus emerged the most influential book of late medieval spiritual direction. Thomas Kempis, sub-prior of Mount St Agnes, near Zwolle in the Dutch province of Overijssel, is likeliest candidate for authorship of the Imitatio Christi (see pp. 28–9).
Both the Imitatio and the wider Windesheim congregation were linked to the Devotio Moderna (modern devotion), a movement of spiritual renewal embracing both clergy and laity and producing ‘brethren of the common life’ – groups of laypeople living lives of prayer and chastity in community without formal vows. These were similar to earlier groups of beguines (female) and beghards (male) in Germany and the Low Countries, which, despite arousing suspicions of heresy, survived with official support into the Reformation period and beyond. There is some sparse and scattered evidence for informal communities of pious laywomen in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but these seem to have been neither widespread nor of long duration. England also missed out on establishment of ‘tertiary’ groupings of the mendicant orders, found in France, Germany and Italy. Tertiaries constituted a lay third branch, after the friars and the nuns, committed to regular recitation of the divine office, and extensive charitable work.
English people were not, then, much inspired to imitate the pattern of the cloister in specific forms of organization, preferring the more relaxed model of parish fraternities. But they were not entirely indifferent to the values of religious life. The Book of Hours or primer was after all based on monastic forms of prayer. There is also evidence in some elite circles of a shared reading culture, with books passing between nuns and aristocratic and gentry women.39
A monastic-style spirituality was successfully ‘marketed’ for the laity by the one off-shoot of reformed Augustinianism to establish a toe-hold in England: the Bridgettine house of Syon. In addition to overseeing the spiritual health of the community’s nuns, the brothers had pastoral responsibility for pious laymen and women visiting or staying within the precincts. The Bridgettines also assigned themselves a more ambitious spiritual responsibility. Through preaching and the medium of print, they aimed to reach out to a constituency of pious lay questers. A miscellany of prayers and exhortations in English, published by the Syon brother Thomas Betson in 1500, was designed to be ‘meedful [meritorious] to religious people as to the laypeople’. Bridgettines were advocates of what the fourteenth-century mystic Walter Hilton dubbed the mixed or ‘medled’ life, a balanced vocation of meditative contemplation and external, charitable action. It was promoted between 1494 and 1533 in four successive editions of Hilton’s vernacular Scala perfectionis (ladder of perfection), and in an extracted text of 1530.40
In the same tradition stood Richard Whitford’s Werke for Housholders, a book that went through a remarkable seven editions between 1530 and 1537. Whitford prescribed a ‘customable course of good and profitable exercise’ for responsible heads of lay households, with demanding, but not absurdly unmanageable, expectations. The day should begin with elaborate makings of the sign of the cross, and end with a detailed mental inspection of ‘work, word or thought’. A practical-minded man, who spent years in the world as a secular priest, Whitford recognized that where people roomed together, and such shows of piety were performed, ‘some would laugh us to scorn and mock us’.
Thoughtful expositions of religious life, framed with attentive lay audiences in view, were also produced by Whitford’s fellow-Bridgettine, William Bonde, in his Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526) and Directory of Conscience (1527). A third Syon monk, John Fewterer, offered lay readers his Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion (1534), a deeply Christocentric reflection on the mixed life. Fewterer, as Confessor General of the Abbey, and in partnership with a redoubtable abbess, Agnes Jordan, spearheaded a concerted, commercially savvy campaign of vernacular publication. The period of their joint headship witnessed publication of eleven of fourteen English printed books emanating from Syon.41
The wills of wealthy Londoners expressed admiration for the Bridgettines. Other beneficiaries were the Observants of Greenwich and Richmond, and the Charterhouses of London and Sheen. Carthusians are the exception to the rule of cyclical stagnation and reform characterizing the religious orders. There were no Carthusians ‘of the observance’. As a later pope was to put it, numquam reformata quia numquam deformata (never reformed because never deformed).
Like Syon, the London Charterhouse was a powerhouse of lay spiritual direction. The young Thomas More lodged with (or close to) the Carthusians, ‘religiously living there without vow about four years’. Carthusians were often ‘late vocations’, either laymen of status looking to withdraw from the cares of the world, or priests and monks seeking more authentic forms of religious expression. With limited places, and plenty of applicants to fill them, the order could afford to be picky. In 1522, Lord Clifford wrote to Prior John Wilson of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, soliciting a place there for his chaplain; Wilson courteously but firmly explained that the house could accept no novices without evidence of a long-standing vocation to the Carthusian life. A cell was potentially free, but there were already four applicants for it.42
The Carthusians were relatively little affected by the humanist enthusiasms of the first years of the sixteenth century, remaining closer to a native tradition of mystical contemplation found in works like The Cloud of Unknowing. John Batmanson, a brother of the London Charterhouse, was egged on by Edward Lee to attack Erasmus’s New Testament, and earned a put-down from Thomas More, admiration for the Carthusians notwithstanding, as ‘an unlearned, obscure little monk’.
They lacked the panache and polish of the Syon brethren, but Carthusians were also concerned with making spiritual literature available to the laity. The Pomander of Prayer, a work going rapidly through four editions in 1528–32, was written by a ‘devout father of the Charterhouse of Sheen’. The author explained how he chose to write in English so that he might instruct ‘the unlearned that lack knowledge of holy scripture’. There was no flurry of new Carthusian books to match the Bridgettine output, but an older vernacular work, Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyfe of Jesu Criste, remained popular with lay readers.
Carthusians were the monks you knew were going to heaven. Even Erasmus was capable of writing respectfully about their vocation. English laypeople voted, not so much with their feet, as with their corpses, requesting burial in Carthusian houses in considerable numbers. If this was not possible, they requested the prayers and suffrages of the order.43 Like the Bridgettines and Franciscan Observants, these exemplars of the monastic ideal combined sanctification of their own lives with a mission of spiritual service to the wider Church. Perhaps this raised the reputation of the monastic body as a whole in the eyes of the laity; more likely it simply showed up the shortcomings of the others.
The Cloister and the World
There is little clear evidence of admiration or rejection of monasticism as a whole because people did not experience it as a whole. They interacted with individual houses, and individual religious, in a wide variety of settings. Monasteries were major landowners, usually leasing rather than farming their estates. They were notable local employers, engaging gentlemen as bailiffs and stewards at the top end, and recruiting domestic servants in significant numbers at the other. The Benedictine nuns of St Michael’s, Stamford, in Northamptonshire employed a valet, cook, gardener, carter, porter, brewster, shepherd, oxherd and swineherd, along with a host of other, unspecified servants. On the payroll at the great Benedictine house of Westminster were nearly a hundred servants to care for the community of fifty brethren, a figure not including personal attendants paid for out of monks’ private funds.44
The number of laypeople reliant on religious houses rises when we include those in possession of a corrody – an annuity, or an allowance of food, drink and accommodation, given in return for gifts of land or a cash down payment. There were fewer of these by the 1530s than in earlier centuries: perhaps a national average of one corrodian per ten religious. Yet in Devon the ratio was just under 1:3, and it could determine the ambience of individual houses. Eight corrodians lived alongside eight nuns at Thetford Priory, Norfolk in 1532.45
Such schemes were not motivated by altruism: like modern medical insurers, monasteries stood to gain if laypeople died shortly after claiming on the policy. Yet they were a needed and valued social service. Just as valued was the tradition of monastic hospitality to travellers, though this was open to exploitation from social elites, happy to be entertained comfortably while on the road with their retinues. An Augustinian chronicler at Butley Priory in Suffolk recorded with evident pride multiple visits to his house between 1526 and 1534 by the Duke of Norfolk, and the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, though these must have been a very significant drain on priory finances.
Less easy to subvert was the obligation to give alms to paupers. After a long stretch of historical scepticism, modern research is inclined to think its scale was significant, and that it provided an important safety net for local indigents: nationally, about 7 per cent of monastic revenue was disbursed annually to the poor, along with informal distribution of foodstuffs at abbey gates.46
Most communities were rooted in a locality. Recruitment drew heavily on the vicinity and the hinterland, a pattern traceable by the Benedictine habit of adopting birthplace as a new surname ‘in religion’. A succession of remarkable superiors – William Selling, Richard Kidderminster, Hugh Faringdon, John Feckenham – were professed at houses less than a day’s ride from the villages giving them their name. Nunneries too recruited from the locality, and predominantly from middling social backgrounds: they were not ‘dumping grounds’ for unmarriable aristocratic daughters. A few houses – Syon, most notably – were socially exclusive, but most relied for recruits on the merchant classes and the lower ‘parish gentry’.47
Unsurprisingly, the religious remained in contact with their local kinsfolk; a perennial visitation complaint was of monks giving to family members the excess food earmarked for distribution to the poor. Ties of kindred and affinity, and the significance for economic and social activity, meant laypeople often valued the presence of local houses. In July 1525, a delegation of sixteen inhabitants from Tonbridge in Kent appeared in front of Archbishop Warham to denounce Wolsey’s recent suppression of the Augustinian priory. There was still more vigorous protest that summer at Bayham in Sussex, where a former canon of the Premonstratensian abbey orchestrated a riot of 100 persons to restore religious life.48
Bequests in wills supply a rough-and-ready index of the standing of the religious orders. These were much less common than to parish churches, and do not appear to have been subject to strong social convention. Yet this in itself speaks for the authenticity of the bequests that were made. In the 1520s, a substantial minority of testators remembered one or more monastic houses. In the dioceses of Exeter, London, York and Durham, some 17–18 per cent did so, as did 15 per cent in the diocese of Salisbury and 11 per cent in Lincolnshire, though the figure was markedly, and somewhat inexplicably, lower in Suffolk (3 per cent).
The friars did better. In Yorkshire and County Durham, 28 per cent of wills made bequests to them in the 1520s, as did nearly a quarter in Devon and Cornwall and in Lincolnshire. In urban settings, the friars’ natural habitat, proportions were noticeably higher: 43 per cent in London in 1523–5; 47 per cent in Norwich in 1490–1517; 33 per cent in York in 1501–36, and 38 per cent in Salisbury over the same period. Especially among the gentry, who had more choice and flexibility in such matters, requests to be buried in friary churches were common.49
Nearly all religious houses offered a special form of association through issuing letters of confraternity, assigning the recipient a fraternal status and a promised share of spiritual benefits. These could be a form of favour-seeking with the great and good: in 1502 Durham Cathedral Priory issued letters of confraternity to Lady Margaret Beaufort, and also to her advisor, Henry VII’s tough councillor and enforcer, Sir Reginald Bray, who probably had need of them. Such grants formed part of a nexus of good relations between the prominent gentry of a county and its leading religious institutions – the Warwickshire and Worcestershire landowner Sir Robert Throckmorton was admitted in 1491, along with his wife and infant son, to confraternity with Evesham Abbey. Other grants of confraternity were proactively sought, or sold for cash – an illustration of how material, spiritual and social bonds between religious houses and lay society were inextricably intertwined.50
The ties that bind sometimes chafe. Laypeople periodically quarrelled with abbeys over tithes and tenancies. Competition to control local resources could turn nasty. In 1527, 300 rioters in Devon destroyed a weir on the River Tamar, maintained by the Benedictines of Tavistock Abbey. Several English towns were monastic boroughs, where inhabitants were subject to the jurisdiction of an abbot’s court and paid tolls on markets and mills. Assertions of independence and self-governance by townspeople caused tensions, and occasional violence, in a number of these places in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Most such disputes had run their course by the later fifteenth century. But some were stubbornly persistent. The townsmen of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk pursued a series of unsuccessful lawsuits against the abbey into the 1480s and ’90s, while those at Reading kept up legal pressure until a settlement was finally reached in 1507.51
Negative stereotypes of monks and friars circulated widely in late medieval England – a lively and evergreen cultural phenomenon, seemingly consumed for pleasure and recreation as much as articulated in righteous anger. Multiple editions of the Canterbury Tales were printed around the turn of the sixteenth century (1478, 1484, 1492, 1498, 1526). Perennially popular were ballads of Robin Hood, which pitted a bold and pious outlaw, the name of the Virgin ever on his lips, against corpulent, uncharitable and grasping Benedictines.52
Lively Chauceresque satire of hypocritical friars and pardoners was revived at the start of the 1530s in the knockabout interludes of the musician and playwright John Heywood. But an existing taste for it is revealed by English translations of the German humanist Sebastian Brandt’s popular 1494 verse satire, The Ship of Fools. One (via the French) was made by Wynkyn de Worde’s assistant Henry Watson in 1509. Another, also in 1509, was produced by Alexander Barclay, an erudite priest of the collegiate church of Ottery St Mary in Devon. Along with other ranks of society, the religious orders come in for a sharp lashing: ‘O holy Benet, Francis and Augustine, see how your children despiseth your doctrine!’53 There was more in the same vein in the rhymester-priest John Skelton’s 1522 verse, Colyn Cloute – a poetic blunderbuss of playfully satirical invective, aimed indiscriminately at clergy failing to meet the exalted standards Skelton knew he himself fell short of: delinquent bishops, ignorant parish priests, worldly monks, gluttonous hypocrite friars, determined to grasp for every passing penny. ‘All is fish that cometh to the net.’
Around the turn of the 1530s, Colyn Cloute, along with Speke Parrot, another Skelton poem strongly critical of the clergy, was copied into the commonplace book of the London mercer John Collins. Other anonymous verses in his compilation attributed ‘The Ruin of a Realm’ to rule of ‘spiritual men’, and beseeched Christ to ‘amend our priests and make them good’. In affluent urban circles, priestly shortcomings were, literally, proverbial. The expression ‘as tender as a parson’s leman [i.e. concubine]’ appeared in an early sixteenth-century collection of aphorisms. Another proverb is preserved for us by Thomas More: ‘if a woman be fair then she is young, and if a priest be good then he is old’. More himself professed exasperation that, if a good priest preached, ‘a short tale shall serve us … but let a lewd friar be taken with a wench, we will jest and rail upon the whole order all the year after!’54
Is all this evidence of widespread ‘anticlericalism’? There was no swelling tide of seething resentment, poised to sweep all vestiges of the old order away. It is clear that most anticlerical talk, even of the jokey variety, was the expression, not the negation, of a genuine Catholic piety – an echo of disappointed expectation. Alongside the anticlerical verses, John Collins inscribed miracle stories and prayers for souls in purgatory into his manuscript volume, carefully heading each page ‘Jesus’. There were similar juxtapositions in other early sixteenth-century commonplace books.
Authors of overtly anticlerical writings were generally not disenfranchised rebels, but religious insiders, with strong connections to the institutional Church. Heywood was a pious, orthodox Catholic of Erasmian stamp, a relative and protégé of Thomas More. Like More, he was a married layman. But his brother was an Augustinian friar (and two sons were in later decades to become Jesuit priests). Skelton and Barclay were well-connected scholar-priests with links to the court. Despite – or perhaps because of – the critiques of religious orders in his Ship of Fools translation, Barclay went on to become, successively, a Benedictine monk and an Observant Franciscan. Watson’s translation even claimed to have been undertaken at ‘the enticement and exhortation of the excellent Princess Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby’. Whether the pious Lady Margaret Beaufort really sponsored the exercise is dubious, but readers were not expected to find anything incongruous in the claim.55
Yet if anticlerical feelings were typically orthodox and idealistic, that did not make them innocuous or inert. Impatience with the shortcomings of the clergy was a sentiment energized by the zeal of its own self-evident rightness. It was a product of the centrality of sacramental priesthood to the spiritual objectives of society, and of the entrenched position of clergymen across swathes of social, economic and cultural life. Hopes for salvation in the next world, and for the triumph of virtue in this, required good priests. But the religious needs of society also demanded there must be many priests. England was not Utopia, where the priests were very good and very few. Anticlericalism was the unavoidable by-product of a widespread craving for reform, and its significance for eventual Reformation should not be underestimated.
The church authorities were hopeful the circle could be squared. Archbishops and bishops would gradually bring about ‘reformation of the Church’s estate’ by vigilant and ever more comprehensive regimes of inspection, by acquiring greater control over patterns of clerical appointments, by exercising to the full the disciplinary powers of the church courts – in other words, by asserting and enhancing the political and jurisdictional authority of bishops within the realm. Lay society, from the palace to the parish, had things to say about that.