On 20 November 1534, while the Morebath burglar prepared his tinderbox and ladder for the raid on St Sidwell's shoe, the clerks of the House of Commons were copying and engrossing a short piece of legislation which had finally completed its slow way through parliament that same week. The Act of Supremacy declared that ‘the king, our sovereign Lord, his heirs and successors, kings of this realm, shall be taken, accepted and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia'.1 This was the crowning moment of the revolution in religious affairs which had been gathering momentum over the previous five years. The Act translated into statute an already accomplished practical transfer of all the jurisdictional powers of the Pope to a layman, the King of England. By it, the liberties of the Church of England from secular interference that had been guaranteed by Magna Carta were repudiated in favour of total control by the Crown, and the English church's thousand-year-old allegiance to the Holy See was formally brought to an end.
The progress of the Reformation in England to this point had been by no means a foregone conclusion. When Martin Luther's attack on the Catholic Church and the authority of the Pope first began to spread outside Germany, the pious King of England had been one of the most determined and most organised opponents of the new teachings. Henry and his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, had mobilised the theologians of Oxford and Cambridge to preach and write against Luther. The reformer's books were publicly burned in London, and his English followers pursued and executed. William Tyndale's superb translation of the New Testament, with its pugnaciously anti-Catholic footnotes, was banned and burned, and Tyndale became a hunted man. Henry himself published a competent defence of the seven sacraments against Luther, for which in 1521 the grateful Pope Leo X granted him the title Defender of the Faith. The antiProtestant treatises of England's leading theologian, John Fisher, bishop of Rochester and chaplain to Henry's formidable grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, carried Henry's arms on their title-page. When Wolsey fell from power in 1529, he was replaced as Lord Chancellor by the devout Catholic layman Thomas More, and over the next four years More was to write more than a million words in exhaustive, fierce and often funny defence of traditional Catholicism, and in denunciation of the reformers.2
But Wolsey's fall from favour was itself the by-product of a problem that was to take England from loyal defence of the papacy into the Protestant camp, namely, the king's divorce. Henry had succeeded to the throne because of the untimely death in 1502 of his elder brother, Prince Arthur. As Prince of Wales, Arthur had contracted a dynastic marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, and after Arthur's death King Henry VII had decided that in the interests of continued alliance with Spain, the young prince Henry should marry his brother's widow. Such a marriage, however, was forbidden by church law, and so a papal dispensation was needed: the warrior Pope Julius II duly obliged, and on becoming king in 1509 Henry proceeded with the marriage. A dynastic marriage, however, must above all things serve the dynasty. None of Henry and Catherine's male children survived, and Henry could not contemplate entrusting the still shaky future of the parvenu Tudor monarchy to a girl, their one living child, Princess Mary. He genuinely worried that his marriage to his brother's widow, despite the papal dispensation, might have broken the natural law and so have angered God: more to the point, he wanted a son, and knew now that his ageing Spanish queen would not provide one. By the mid-1520s, Henry's eye had lighted on a sprightly frenchified court lady named Anne Boleyn, and he decided to seek a divorce. This time, however, the pope (Clement VII) would not cooperate, and the failure of a special papal legation to deliver the desired result in 1529 led to Cardinal Wolsey's disgrace.
From 1529 Henry pursued two different but complementary strategies to secure his freedom from Catherine and the right to marry Anne. The first was suggested by an obscure Cambridge don named Thomas Cranmer, who proposed that the theologians of Europe should be consulted on the validity of the original dispensation: if the weight of scholarly opinion was that natural law forbade such a marriage, then the Pope's dispensation was invalid and the marriage to Catherine null and void. A campaign of bribery and intimidation began to secure the desired opinion from Oxford and Cambridge, and from a selection of European faculties of theology, presumably with the ultimate aim of using these to persuade or browbeat the pope. Simultaneously, Henry and his ministers set about stirring up anti-clerical feeling in the country and squeezing the English church in every way possible so as to bring pressure on Rome, which would naturally fear that this hitherto devoutly Catholic country was about to go over to the Reformation. At this stage Henry himself remained firmly Catholic, though increasingly hostile to the pope, but Anne Boleyn held genuinely Protestant opinions and was surrounded by Protestant clients.3 The king himself needed the help of servants favourable to reform, above all Thomas Cromwell, who gradually came to fill the vacuum left by the fall of Wolsey and the refusal of Wolsey's successor as Chancellor, Thomas More, to support the divorce. While the increasingly impatient king smouldered, Cromwell encouraged a circle of radical writers and publicists, some of whom had been in danger of arrest and execution for heresy in the 1520s but who were now given their head. Protestant books were still being banned by proclamation in 1529, and occasionally thereafter. From then on, however, anti-clerical and anti-Catholic material began to appear under official auspices, ‘cum privilegio regali' [with royal protection], and a stream of measures masterminded by Cromwell and aimed against church and clergy was pushed through parliament or established by proclamation. The clergy put up only a feeble resistance, and one by one the demands of the Crown were accepted. Appeals to Rome were forbidden, and the pope's right to issue dispensations in England denied; payment of any church taxes to the papacy was outlawed, and the Convocation of the Clergy agreed to submit all ecclesiastical legislation to the Crown for approval. Thomas More, unable to accept this dismantling of the church's authority and independence, resigned the Lord Chancellorship immediately after the ‘Submission of the Clergy' on 15 May 1532.4
By the beginning of 1533 Anne was pregnant and Henry urgently needed his divorce. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, who had watched the assault on the church with growing dismay but little effective resistance, had died in August 1532. Urged on by Anne, Henry nominated as Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, a cautious but convinced Protestant with a German wife, and the pope, desperately hoping to fend off an open breach with Henry, issued the Bulls needed for his consecration. Once safely in office, Cranmer pronounced the king's first marriage invalid, and Anne, who had already been secretly married to Henry, was crowned Queen in June 1533. Early in 1534 an Act of Succession was passed, repudiating Queen Catherine, bastardising the Princess Mary, and settling the succession on the children of Henry and Anne. Every man in England over the age of 14 was required to take an oath accepting the provisions of the Act. In April, Thomas More and John Fisher, who both refused the oath, were arrested and placed in the Tower: they were to emerge only for trial and execution.
Royal commissioners were appointed all over the country to administer the oath to the adult male population. Though not exhaustive, its enforcement was thorough, and Sir Christopher and his leading parishioners would have taken a break from clearing their church for the new pews to make their way to Bampton or Tiverton sometime in the early summer of 1534 to take this oath, their first direct encounter with the changes which were about to shatter their world.
But if this was the first time that the events unfolding at court and in London had impinged on them directly, it was certainly not the first they had heard of reformation. Devon was a solidly traditionalist county, in religion like everything else. The native English heresy, Lollardy, had made almost no inroads there, and though some of the Franciscan friars in Exeter flirted briefly with the new ideas from Germany, and one of them, their Warden John Cardmaker, was eventually to die for the Protestant faith under Queen Mary, the Lutheran message found very little support in the diocese at large. Protestantism had indeed surfaced in Exeter itself in 1531 in the person of Thomas Benet, a Cambridge graduate and former priest, who had fled with his wife to the anonymity of a post as a private schoolmaster in Butcher Row in the city. The exact extent of Benet's Protestantism is not clear, but he certainly believed the pope to be antichrist, and condemned the ‘false traditions' of Catholicism, in particular the veneration of the saints.5 In October 1531 Benet, who had hitherto prudently kept his opinions quiet, took to posting bills against the pope with sealing wax on the door of the cathedral. The anonymous bill-sticker was solemnly excommunicated in a show-piece ceremony in the cathedral, at which Benet gave himself away by laughing. He was eventually arrested, tried and, after debate with Gregory Basset, one of the Exeter Franciscans who had himself briefly favoured Luther, was found guilty of heresy, and on refusing to recant, burnt at the stake by the sheriff of Devon at Livery Dole, outside the city limits. Benet's refusal to invoke the Virgin before his execution antagonised the officials and the crowd who had come to watch, and who now surged forward to throw fuel on his pyre: as the Elizabethan Protestant chronicler John Hooker commented with justifiable bitterness, ‘such was the devilish rage of the blind people, that well was he or she that could catch a stick or furze to cast into the fire'.6
Morebath will certainly have heard news of so notable a county event as the burning of a heretic, and despite the horror of his death, Benet's hostility to the cult of the saints was not calculated to appeal to the devotees of St Sidwell. Echoes of the remoter aspects of Henry's revolution must also have reached them. Their own bishop, John Veysey, one of Henry's favourite courtiers and a skilled diplomat, was also an absentee: his responsibilities as President of the Council of Wales from 1525 to 1534 meant he was rarely in Exeter, and from 1527 his permanent residence was in his native midland town of Sutton Coldfield. After 1534 Veysey came regularly to Exeter for ordinations and visitations, and the diocese was well enough administered by his officials and archdeacons. Like most of the rest of the Henrician episcopate, however, he was to acquiesce unresistingly in every one of Henry's moves against the church. But John Clerk, the bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Bath and Wells, whose borders were less than two miles from Morebath church, was a very different character. Sir Christopher's clerical friends in Brushford and Dulverton will have been agog in December 1530 at the news of the arrest of their bishop, along with Bishops Fisher of Rochester and West of Ely, for appealing to the pope against the anticlerical legislation of the early sessions of the Reformation parliament.7 Bishop Clerk, moreover, was the only bishop who explicitly refused his assent to the Submission of the Clergy (other opponents, including John Fisher, absented themselves from the crucial session of Convocation on 15 May 1532).8 One of Clerk's chaplains in 1533 let slip that ‘he trusted to see the day that my Lord of Canterbury should be burned', and he was almost certainly speaking his Bishop's mind as well as his own.9 In Morebath's immediate neighbourhood, therefore, as in most of the West Country, the ethos of religious reform fashionable at the court of Queen Anne was viewed with deep suspicion, by clergy ‘not inclined to the fashion of the world as it goeth now'.10
But whatever their reservations, slowly the king's religious policies began to impinge on them, for while John Creche carved and the ailing John Painter prepared to gild Morebath's new crucifix, Cromwell pushed on with the extension of reform measures into the parishes. The best preacher in the West Country, the radical Protestant Hugh Latimer, was sent to Exeter in June 1534 to preach the king's supremacy over the church. He preached at the church of St Mary Major on its dedication day, to the annoyance of the clergy there who grumbled that the sermon would interfere with the processions and other ceremonies. The crowd which came to hear him was so great that ‘glass wyndowes were broken open for people to hear the sermon'. Hooker, the Elizabethan Protestant historian of Exeter, considered that Latimer's preaching had been much appreciated – ‘the more he was heard the more he was lyked';11 this was wishful thinking, in fact. Despite the crowds, Latimer had a hostile reception, being resisted by the Franciscans who would not let him into their church, and he was denounced by some of his hearers as a ‘heretic knave' and threatened with being pulled down by the ears. Latimer had to abandon one of his sermons because of a spectacular nosebleed, which was of course gleefully hailed as the judgement of God on his heresies.12
In June 1535 a proclamation spelled out the implications of the abolition of ‘the abuses of the Bishop of Rome, his authority and jurisdiction'. Clergy were commanded to teach the Royal Supremacy to their people, and to ‘cause all manner prayers, orisons, rubrics, canons in mass books, and all other books used in the churches, wherein the said Bishop of Rome is named or his presumptuous and proud pomp and authority preferred, utterly to be abolished, eradicated and erased out, and his name and memory to be nevermore (except to his contumely and reproach) remembered'.13 It was for just such anti-papal language that Thomas Benet had been howled down by angry Exeter citizens at his arrest four years earlier, and which had made the people eager to bring sticks to hasten his burning. Now what had been rank heresy was royal and episcopal policy. In obedience to this proclamation, Sir Christopher, like the rest of the parish clergy of England, will have been required by the bishop's official to scrape or cut the pope's name out of the Canon of the Mass in his mass-book, and to cease to bid the parish to pray for him each Sunday. The list compiled for the collection of the Pope's Pence in Morebath in the very year of Benet's arrest, was now redundant, the relic of an outlawed allegiance.14
We have no way of knowing what the people of Devon and of Morebath made of this royal volte-face. The restoration of the pope's authority was perhaps implicit in the rebels' demands in 1549,15 but may have been included at the prompting of papally minded priests. Generally speaking, the English laity seem to have taken the shedding of papal authority in their stride, something for princes and bishops to worry about, not the man in the pew. Sir Christopher did not record his feelings about any of these changes, but given his general religious conservativism, he is unlikely to have approved. He is even less likely to have liked the innovatory clerical tax of First Fruits and Tenths introduced in 1535, and designed to create a permanent new source of royal revenue by taking one tenth of every beneficed cleric's annual income. To implement it county commissioners carried out the most thorough survey of clerical incomes ever devised, the ‘Valor Ecclesiasticus', a painfully concrete expression of Henry's understanding of his Headship of the church.16
The following year brought further radicalisation, in the form first of the dissolution of the smaller monasteries of England, and then, in August, of a series of measures directed against ‘abuses' in the practice of religion in the parishes. The Dissolution was to end in the total abolition of the monastic life in England by 1540, though to begin with Henry probably had only a partial confiscation in mind, motivated mainly by the Crown's financial need. It was not popular in the West Country. In Exeter in the summer of 1535 the women of the city rallied to the priory of St Nicholas, the first of the city's religious houses to be dissolved, and, as it happened, one noted for its charity to the poor. The enraged women, ‘some with spikes, some with shovels, some with pikes, and some with such tools as they could get', trapped the workmen who had been ordered by the royal commissioners to dismantle the roodloft of the priory church. Two of these workmen were Breton carpenters, evidently Huguenots (French Protestants) who had boasted that they would pull down the crucifix ‘with all the saints there, naming them to be idols'. The women stoned one of the men, who leapt from a tower to escape, breaking a rib in the process. One of the city aldermen, John Blackaller, came to the workman's aid, ‘thinking what with fair words and what with foul words to have stayed and pacified the women': he too, however, was set upon by the women, who ‘gave him a blow and set him packing'. In the end, they had to be dispersed by the mayor at the head of an armed posse.17
There was no such rallying of the local population when Barlinch was dissolved, in February 1536, and it is impossible to say how the parish viewed the disappearance of the monastic community whose prior had been their Lord of the Manor for centuries, and the patron who had appointed Sir Christopher to his post. We have no way of telling whether the monks were good or bad landlords, though Barlinch was certainly not notable for its largesse to the parish. Its total contribution to the campaign of repairs and equipping of the building in the 1520s and 1530s was the piffling sum of 3/4d donated towards covering the chancel roof, though the prior did contribute two out of the ten oak trees used to make the new seating in 1534, which he was not obliged to do. Their other possible contribution to Morebath's amenities, Master Juyne's school, had very probably long since closed. Barlinch's disappearance did in fact bring one concrete benefit to the parish. By 1537, the year of the clerkship dispute, the monastic buildings had been acquired by the Somerset landowner Hugh Paulet, who was dismantling them for their materials. In a friendly gesture to mark the transfer of the lordship, the manorial bailiff, John Dysse, offered the parish one of the stained glass windows from the priory church, worth, as Sir Christopher noted, ‘with the yre [iron] gere and stone and all yn valure of £3, to pray for hys M[aster] (Hu Powlyth) and him'.18 With the help of a glazier the window was removed from the unroofed priory, loaded on to five wains, and trundled down to Morebath church: its installation there (towards the cost of which Paulet contributed nothing) was not completed until 1538.19
It is perhaps unlikely that anyone in Morebath wept bitter tears over the disappearance of their local monastery, though some, including their priest, may have shaken their heads over the attack on religious life that it represented. The attitudes of the man and woman in the pew towards the Dissolution are hard to assess, and must often have been ambivalent. But Morebath's acquisition of a window from the spoil of Barlinch should not be taken as a sign of approval. In the 1560s, a generation after the Dissolution, a Yorkshire yeoman who had been part of a syndicate which had bought up the timber and bells from the steeple of Roche Abbey was asked by his son ‘whether he thought well of the religious persons and the religion that was then used'. When he replied that he had indeed thought well of the monks, having had no occasion to think otherwise, his son asked ‘then how came it to pass you was so ready to destroy and spoil the thing you thought well of? What could I do, said He: might I not as well as others have some profit of the Spoil of the Abbey? For I did see all would away: and therefore I did as others did.’20
The reform measures of August 1536 touched parish life more closely, and were the clearest sign so far of the extent of the revolution represented by the Royal Supremacy. Henry had appointed Thomas Cromwell, a layman, his ‘Vicegerent in spirituals', effectively chief executive of the Church. To the scandal of religious conservatives, Cromwell presided in Convocation, and the bishops found themselves subordinated to him. The Supremacy was now used to implement rationalising reforms of religious observance which struck at the heart of traditional religion. On 11 August Cromwell promulgated an act of Convocation abolishing all the holy days which fell in the Westminster law terms or during the harvest period from the beginning of July to the end of September, with the exceptions of the feasts of the Virgin and the Apostles, St George's Day, the nativity of St John the Baptist and All Saints Day. The abolished days, it was claimed, had been damaging to the country's economy, stopping vital work and impoverishing workers. Services might still be held on the abrogated days, but people were to go to work as usual, and the services were not to be solemnly rung, nor announced as days of obligation to the people beforehand.
This was a potentially explosive measure, which caused very widespread discontent throughout England. At a stroke, the act abolished or demoted most of the major regional festivals, many of which were the most important social events as well as religious celebrations of the year, focuses of local religious feeling and regional pride, and the occasions for fairs and markets crucial to local economies.21 Cromwell went on to issue a set of injunctions requiring the clergy to preach the Supremacy, and to expound the recently approved ‘Ten Articles' (a mildly Protestant formulary of faith agreed in Convocation). The injunctions also required parents and employers to catechise their children and servants on the Lord's Prayer, Creed and Ten Commandments in English rather than the traditional Latin, insisted on strict compliance with the act for abrogation of the feast days, and attacked the alleged superstitions surrounding the cult of pilgrimage and images, declaring that ‘it shall profit more their soul's health, if they do bestow that on the poor and needy, which they would have bestowed upon the said images or relics'. Every parson or rector of a church was to provide a bible in Latin and English, to be placed in the church for anyone who wished to read.22
Once again, Sir Christopher's attitude to these measures was probably ambivalent. He was himself decently educated and, as his account book amply demonstrates, the hortatory mode came naturally to him. He is likely to have taken seriously the injunction to catechise the young people of Morebath. In the Elizabethan period, his bishop would note both his learning and his conscientious preaching, a rarity in that part of Devon at any point in the sixteenth century.23 But he must certainly have looked askance at most of the other injunctions, which agitated conservative laity and clergy everywhere. Resentment was strongest in the north of England, where official endorsement of what had formerly been considered heresy was perceived as a prelude to an attack on the religion of the parishes. In October 1536 this discontent crystallised into the protest movement known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, which spread through much of northern and north-western England, an open rebellion that came close to toppling the Tudor monarchy before it was suppressed in the spring of 1537.24 The very self-description of the protest, as a ‘Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth', was a challenge to the hostility to pilgrimage and the cult of the saints enacted in the Royal Injunctions and elaborated in the propaganda emanating from Cromwell's circle. So one of the Pilgrim ballads prayed:
Christ crucifyd!
For they woundes wide
Us commens guyde!
Which pilgremes be
Thru godes grace,
For to purchace
Olde welth and peax
Of the Spiritualtie.25
The ‘Pontefract articles' containing the rebels' demands called for the acknowledgement of the pope's supremacy in spirituals, the restoration of the monasteries, the abolition of first-fruits and tenths, a campaign to ‘annul and destroy' the heresies of Luther and others, and the punishment of Cromwell as chief of the ‘maynteners of the false sect of those heretiques and the first inventors and bryngands in of them'.26
There was a great deal of popular support for the cause of the ‘Northern men' throughout England,27 and not least in the West Country. Cromwell's monastic visitors for Cornwall reported widespread anger there about the suppression of local feastdays, and in April 1537 alarming reports came of a banner of the Five Wounds of Jesus, like those carried by the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace, which had been commissioned at St Keverne parish in Cornwall. It portrayed the people kneeling ‘making this petition to the picture of Christ that it would please the King's grace that they might have their holydays'. And all this came close to Morebath too, for in the same month, Sir Thomas Denys, the sheriff of Devon who had presided at the burning of Thomas Benet, reported that rumours about the activities of the ‘Northern Men' were rife in the Tiverton area.28
The summer of 1537 brought a new Protestant champion to the region in the person of the able but combative Dr Simon Heynes, the new Dean of the cathedral. Heynes was President of Queens' College, Cambridge, and a former vice-chancellor of the University. He was a vigorous and effective anti-papal preacher, well thought of at court, and in 1538 was to be sent by the king on an embassy to Charles V. He was also a convinced and eager reformer, whose appointment over the head of a popular local candidate ensured him a frosty reception in Exeter from the bishop downwards. Not in the least intimidated, Heynes at once set about antagonising his colleagues in the cathedral chapter by his blatant lack of respect for tradition and his ill-concealed contempt for their reactionary rejection of the ‘new learning' of the Reformation. In part their dislike of him was rooted in the realisation that his appointment posed a threat to the cathedral itself. Like many Tudor Protestants, Heynes disapproved of the waste and superstition he thought implicit in the elaborate liturgical splendours of cathedral worship. He therefore proposed to the king a radical reduction of the cathedral staff, and the replacement of the dean and chapter by a college composed of a pastor and twelve preachers, all graduates in theology, who would expound the gospel in the cathedral and round the diocese: he wanted some of the cathedral resources ploughed into an almshouse for twenty-four old soldiers, a free grammar school and a song-school.29
Heynes was particularly dismayed by the backwardness of the cathedral chapter and the Devon clergy at large. He found the canons had utterly ignored the Injunctions of 1536, of which there was no copy to be found in the cathedral, and he reported to Cromwell that ‘if I had them (it was said) … they imported nothing else but that we should do as we have done in times past, and live after the old fashion'. The people of Exeter, he told Cromwell ‘I like … very well', but not the clergy: ‘as far as I have yet seen, the priests of this country are a strange kind, very few of them well-persuaded or anything learned.' Behind this religious inertia he detected a general resistance to royal policy: Devon was ‘a perilous country, for God's love let the King's grace look to it in time'.30 And Heynes's reforming zeal was directed especially at the sort of observances which lay at the heart of the piety of Morebath. Among the aspects of traditional Catholicism which he most detested was the cult of images. In the course of a wide-ranging memorandum on reform composed in 1537, Heynes asked with particular urgency:
If it may appear that the common people have a greater affiance or trust in outward rites or ceremonies than they ought to have, and that they esteem more virtue in images and adorning of them, kissing their feet or offering candles unto them, than they ought to esteem, and that yet the curates knowing the same, and fearing the loss of their offerings, do rather encourage the people to continue after this sort, than teach them the truth in the premises according to Scripture; what the king's highness and his parliament may do, and what they are bound in conscience to do, in such a case?31
Heynes's question, what the king was obliged in conscience to do to suppress the cult of the saints, was symptomatic of the agenda of both Cranmer and Cromwell and of the ascendant reform party at Court, with whom he was in close touch. They were clear that the flow of royal reform had now set definitively against what Cranmer called the ‘phantasy of ceremonies, pilgrimage, purgatory, saints, images, works and such like, as hath these three or four hundred years been corruptly taught'.32 The dismantling of shrines and pilgrimage sites therefore progressed through 1537 and the early part of 1538, and there were a series of elaborate ceremonies in London in which notable images were publicly ‘humiliated' and burned.33
Morebath's bishop, Veysey of Exeter, was certainly no Protestant – he was still granting indulgences to the laity of his diocese for contributions to pious works as late as Christmas Day 1536, a fact which suggests not only an unblinkingly conservative understanding of Christianity, but also a certain lack of grip on the direction of official religious policy.34 Nevertheless, in May 1538 Veysey too issued a set of injunctions for the diocese of Exeter, somewhat belatedly designed to endorse and enforce the royal injunctions of 1536 in the West Country. Accordingly, Veysey's document was partly aimed at specific abuses like the drunken all-night wakes held after funerals in Cornwall, but was mainly concerned with the local implementation of the more generally applicable provisions of the 1536 injunctions. Veysey therefore required his clergy to preach regularly in favour of the Royal Supremacy and ‘to utterly abolish and extirpe the usurped power of the bishop of Rome'. His treatment of the cult of images was brief but emphatic in its claim that ‘many of the unlearned people of my diocese have been much blinded, following many times their own superstitious fantasies': from now on the standard of teaching about images was to be the exposition of the Second Commandment (against worship of images) contained in the recently published ‘Institution of a Christian Man', an official formulation of the Church of England's faith known as the ‘Bishops' Book'.35 Veysey here was acting in concert with the other bishops, but the requirement that the Bishops' Book become the standard of teaching on images was in fact a move in a decidedly Protestant direction. Though traditionalist bishops like Stokesley of London and Tunstall of Durham had a hand in its production, on this issue the Bishops' Book adopted a sternly reformed position, insisting that ‘we be utterly forbidden to make or have any similitude or image, to the intent to bow down to it or worship it', and grudgingly allowing the existence of statues and pictures in church only as a regrettable concession to the dullness of men's wits and the persistence of ‘gentility' or paganism within popular Christianity.36
The progress of reform can be measured by the fact that all the bishops, even so unreconstructed an establishment conservative as Veysey, found themselves obliged to enforce so dramatic a break with traditional pieties. Conservatives everywhere reacted to all this with outrage, and traditionalist clergy used the pulpit to advocate resistance to the new religious mood. The vicar of Tysehurst in Essex urged his parishioners to continue in the old ways, offering candles to St Loy for their horses and to St Antony for their pigs and cattle: the spirit of reformation and its emphasis on the bible ‘is but trick and go, Lightly it came and lightly it will begone again'. Morebath, where candles burned still before the newly gilded statues of Loy and Anthony, would have cheered.37 In September 1538, however, Cromwell swept aside conservative resentments by issuing his second set of royal injunctions, the most radical exercise of the Supremacy to date, and a further sharp move leftward for the English Reformation. Some of these injunctions essentially reiterated or strengthened the provisions of the royal injunctions of 1536, for example prescribing detailed regulations for regular catechising and examination of the laity in the fundamentals of the faith, and enjoining strict conformity to the royal abrogation of feast days. But the injunctions also included much that was new, requiring clergy and parishioners between them to provide and set up publicly in church ‘one whole book of the whole bible of the largest volume', the newly approved ‘Great Bible', which was not in fact published until the following year, and warning clergy to exhort the laity to read it. From now on also every incumbent was to maintain a register of weddings, christenings and burials. To keep this register-book safe, the parish was to provide a coffer with two locks and keys, one to be held by the wardens and the other by the priest, and the priest was to fill in the register every week in the presence of the wardens.
The most radical aspect of the new injunctions, however, was the heightened ferocity of their language against the cult of images. All parish clergy were now instructed to preach a sermon at least once a quarter declaring ‘the very Gospel of Christ', in which they were to exhort their people to works of charity, mercy and faith prescribed in Scripture, ‘and not to repose their trust and affiance in any other works devised by men's phantasies, besides Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition'. If there were in any church any ‘feigned images' which had been abused in this way ‘with pilgrimages or offerings of anything made therunto … ye shall, for avoiding that most detestable sin of idolatry, forthwith take down and delay, and shall suffer from henceforth no candles, tapers or picture but only the light that commonly goeth across the church by the rood loft, the light before the sacrament of the altar, and the light about the sepulchre, which for the adorning of the church and divine service ye shall suffer to remain'.38
These directives against images were so many arrows aimed at the heart of Sir Christopher Trychay. Since his arrival in Morebath, he had coaxed the pieties of the parish into precisely those expresssions of the cult of the saints which the injunctions now denounced as ‘mens phantasies', contrary to Scripture. Twenty years of pious investment and communal effort – Margery Lake's and Jekyn at Moore's altar cloths and basins, Joan Hillyer of Bampton's candlestick trimmed with flowers before St Sidwell, Elenor Nicoll's silver shoe and the beads donated to Our Lady and St Sidwell by Joan Rumbelow, Joan Hukeley, Alison Zaer and Richard Oblye, the hives of bees donated by William Potter and by the priest's own mother and father, not to mention the endless programme of renovation and maintenance of lights and statues – all those tokens of the tenderness and hope which Morebath had invested in its saints were now expressly declared unchristian, and placed outside the law. The compilers of the injunctions, moreover, clearly had priests like Sir Christopher firmly in their sights, and were determined that they should eat humble pie for their ignorance and blindness. Injunction ten insisted that:
If ye have heretofore declared to your parishioners anything to the exalting or setting forth … of images, or any such superstition, ye shall now openly afore the same recant and reprove the same, shewing them (as the truth is) that ye did the same upon no ground of scripture, but as one that being led and seduced by a common error and abuse crept into the church, through the sufferance and avarice of such as felt profit by the same.39
The injunctions were to become a battleground between reformers and their opponents. Conservatives argued that they merely banned abuse: images might remain as laymen's books, provided no pilgrimage was made to them nor candles burned before them. Only notorious images like those at the centre of shrines need be removed, and the conservative archbishop of York was careful to say that such images should merely be ‘deposed and sequestered from the sight of man', which might mean no more than storing them safely in a cupboard, and a long way short of the burning or breaking which Protestants felt was the proper fate of graven idols, and which the use of the word ‘delay' in the injunctions was probably intended to imply. Evangelicals like Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop Shaxton of Salisbury, by contrast, used the injunctions as an excuse for a wholesale assault on all images, and Cranmer antagonised the monks of Canterbury by removing and destroying statues which they claimed had never been ‘abused' with pilgrimage or cult.40
These disputes were replicated in Devon, where Dean Heynes, armed with the injunctions, set zealously about cleansing his cathedral and the city from the sin of idolatry. According to his enemies he caused 20 marks worth of damage (£13/6/d) to the choir books of the cathedral in his zeal to remove all mention of the pope and of St Thomas Becket, he deposed the image of Christ which dominated the exterior of the church of St Mary Major, and he destroyed handsome images in the Cathedral which the angry canons claimed had never been superstitiously abused. He rooted up £40 worth of brass and iron memorials (which presumably had images of saints) and stripped of its brass and inscriptions the tomb of Edmund Lacy, a medieval bishop of Exeter locally venerated as a saint, round whose burial-place pilgrims had left many wax votive offerings in gratitude for healings. He went beyond the injunctions too in extinguishing the light before the Blessed Sacrament, which at Exeter the Dean had traditionally paid for, and which the injunctions had explicitly commanded should be allowed to continue.41 Nor was Heynes's radical action confined to the cathedral. He was appointed by Cromwell one of the Royal Commissioners charged with enforcing the injunctions in the diocese of Exeter, and in the spring of 1539 gained further weight as a member of the Council of the West under Lord Russell. Unsurprisingly he found himself ‘marvelous hated and maligned at' as he set about carrying his unpopular campaign against the idols into the parishes.42
Morebath must have been one of the first communities in the West Country to be affected by these moves; indeed, mysteriously, their impact was felt there even before the injunctions were in the public domain. Cromwell had the text of the injunctions in something like their final form by the beginning of September 1538 – a note on the draft says that they were ‘exhibited' on 5 September, which may be the date on which he showed them to the king in Kent, though it is hard to be sure. They were sent to Archbishop Cranmer on 30 September 1538, and the Archbishop issued his mandate for their publication on 11 October.43 Almost a month earlier, however, on Sunday 15 September, Sir Christopher had presented the annual accounts of St Anthony's store and Our Lady's store to the parish, with the usual elaborate sheep-count: it is plain from both accounts that Morebath had already been informed about the content of the injunctions, and had begun a damage limitation exercise in response to them.
We can be sure of this because both accounts reveal that for the first time ever, the lights in front of the images of Morebath church had been extinguished, and the devotional ornaments hung about Our Lady's statue had been stripped away. Up until 1538, Saint Anthony's wardens invariably report their chief expense for each year as being ‘for wex for the hole ere and for makyn be fore Sent Antoni'.44 The maintenance of the light was of course the principal raison d'être of this and all the other stores. In this September account of 1538, however, John Smyth and Richard Raw reported that ‘for wex and wyk and makyn for the hole ere' they had spent ‘nil'.45 This does not mean that there had been no light before St Anthony all that year. The wardens of the stores normally bought the new year's supply of wax shortly before the accounting date, when all their receipts were in: what we learn here, therefore, is that no new candles had been bought that September for the coming year, 1538–9. In the same way, John Tayler and Thomas Rumbelow, Our Lady's wardens, reported that they too had spent nothing ‘for the makyn of the taper a fore our Lady and wyke and wex for this ere'.46 They also reported that the beads of coral and silver presented by Katherine Robbyns to Our Lady's statue had been sold for 4/10d, and bought by Christian, the wife of Katherine's executor and residuary legatee, John Tutlake. ‘Tutlackis wyffe' had evidently long coveted ‘our Lady's bedis', and now she had them. The money from the sale of the beads was given to Harry Hurley in trust for the black vestments ‘and so to have … Kateryn Robyns [name] in these vestmentis for the gefth'.47
There can be no question that these moves, the reversal of the whole direction of Morebath's devotional activity over the previous eighteen years, can only have been a response to the Injunctions' prohibition of lights before images, and their further attack on the ‘saying over of a number of beads'. But how did the parishioners of Morebath know what had yet to be formally published by Cranmer and his suffragans, and why did they act so promptly on them? The date of the account, 15 September 1538, almost a month before the promulgation of the Injunctions, is not in doubt, for on 9 March 1539 the Four Men referred back to this account as having been presented ‘at Rowdemas', that is, around the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which falls on 14 September.48 There is only one plausible explanation, and that is that Dean Heynes, whose 1537 memorandum on reform had so vehemently targeted the popular cult of images, and who was a trusted lieutenant of Cranmer and Cromwell, must have had a hand in the drafting and finalising of the 1538 Injunctions, or at any rate have been aware of their contents. If so, he must then have hurried back to Devon in the first or second week of September, armed with an as yet unpromulgated reforming instrument for the rooting out of ‘idolatry': the ink can scarcely have been dry before they were imposed on Morebath.
The probability that the extinguishing of the lights of Morebath church in September 1538 represents some limited initiative against the cult of the saints by Dean Heynes is strengthened when we consider the High Wardens' account read to the parish on 24 November 1538.49 This account, made in the name of the wardens Thomas Norman and Richard Hukeley, barely registers the currents of reform which were stirring the diocese and the whole of England that winter. The wardens busy themselves with routine expenditure – the money owed to the plumber for maintenance work ‘to a mend all fawtis a pon the church', to Chylcote and his man for work on the bells, to John Creche for washing the tabernacles. There are no expenses whatever in implementation of the positive provisions of the Injunctions – the buying of the bible or the register book and its coffer, for example. But the specifically negative aspect of the Injunctions, their attack on the cult of the saints, is registered. The wardens make a final report on the sheep of St Sidwell and of Jesus ‘that the hye wardyng ys charged with all a fore this', but also note that ‘ys for the wolle of the store of Jhesu and of Sent Sydwyll … our Wardyn of the churche scheppe schall make a reconyng son at hys a cownte'. Our Lady's sheep, St Sidwell's sheep, and all the sheep of the other stores are from henceforth ‘the church sheep', and this demotion of the saints as proprieters of the animals whose wool maintained their lights is the only aspect of the 1538 injunctions to have been absorbed by the end of the year. In the main body of the account, the priest busily pursues projects for the adornment of the altars and images inaugurated in previous years: the implications of the attack on images have clearly not yet fully dawned on him. So he upbraids parishioners who have not yet honoured promises made in previous years for donations to pay for paintings around the church's altars, painting which may have included scenes from the life and legends of Sidwell and George, but which at any rate were now destined never to be completed. John Waters had promised to complete his wife's bequest to the adornment of St Sidwell's altar, ‘to this yntent to have hys wyfe ys name a pon the church boke to be prayd for every Palme Sonday ut ceter', and William Timewell at Wood had promised to pay for the painting of the ceiling over the high altar: so the priest reminds them testily,
Item John Waterus remember yor promysse to the syde auter as ys expressyd the ere be fore a pon Harry Hurlys cownte.
Item Willam at Wode remember your paynter for the hye auter in yor vs [5/=] a cordyng to you promysse of the laste ere a pon Harry Hurlys a cownte.50
Item John Waters remember your promise to the side altar as is expressed the year before upon Harry Hurley's account.
Item, William at Wood remember your painter for the high altar in your 5/= according to your promise of the last year, upon Harry Hurley's account.
In early Tudor England the year ran not from 1 January to 31 December, but from 25 March to 24 March of the year following. The last accounts of the year 1538, therefore, were made on Sunday 9 March 1539, when the Maiden Wardens, the warden of St Sunday, and the Four Men presented their reports to the parish. The Maiden account once more reveals the new situation: the usual gathering is simply ‘of devocion', not as the account routinely stated ‘of devocion to Our Laydy lyght': they are said to have spent their money not, as previously, ‘for the taper be fore our Lady and a nother a fore the hye crosse and a nother a fore sent Sydwyll', but merely on ‘wex and wyk and makyn for the hole ere (with the taper a fore the hye crosse)'.51 John Norman presented his account for the store of St Sunday: alone of all the stores, he was still spending money on wax before a statue. Possibly the account was in arrear, or possibly the fact that St Sunday was a figure of Christ, not an ordinary saint, meant that the parish had not been clear whether the provisions of the injunctions applied here also. By the time his account was presented, however, they knew that this lamp too must be extinguished. St Sunday's store was wound up, and noting that the store was 6/1d in credit, the priest added that,
for this mony the iiij men schall cownt here after and our lady wardyn schall cownte for these scheppe and all wother scheppe concernyng the churche in future.
Not[e]: Lett all the churche scheppe in future be put yn our Lady merke full what store so ever they be of.52
for this money the Four Men shall account hereafter and Our Lady's Warden shall account for these sheep and all other sheep concerning the church in future.
Note: Let all the church sheep in future be put in Our Lady's mark, full what store soever they be of.
It is however in the account of the Four Men, presented the same day, that the full impact of the 1538 Injunctions is to be seen. Much of the account was concerned with the never-ending process of repair and renewal of the building – the last payments to Creche for the work on the High Cross and the scaffolding that had required, the complete retiling of the church floor, with all the expenses involved in quarrying and carrying and dressing and laying of stone, the installation or repair of several windows including the one ‘by the figar of Jhesu', the repair of the church house. But the Four Men had also paid out for the systematic equipping of the church in accordance with the injunctions: they spent 13/4d on ‘the churche boke callyd the bybyll', and paid 16d for its carriage from Exeter. The string and canvas wrapping in which the book came was thriftily sold again. This was Cranmer's Great Bible ‘of the largest volume', but they also paid three shillings for ‘the boke of the new testament in inglis and yn latyn … the wyche we ware cumawndyd to by at Mychelmas laste paste by the kynggis injuncion', actually stipulated in the 1536 not the 1538 Injunctions, but which Veysey had only recently reminded his clergy they must provide. They paid 12d for ‘a boke to wrytt there namys yn that be crystenyd and wedded or buryed a cordyng to the kynggis injuncions'. They bought six boards for 14d ‘to make our churche coffer with all', to keep the register book in, bought nails and hinges for it for 10d, they paid Lousemore and his man 12d to make up the coffer, and paid Stebbe 18d for setting in the two locks required by the injunctions.53
Morebath's obedience in all this was strikingly prompt. Many Devon parishes dragged their feet over one aspect or another of the 1538 Injunctions. Bishop Veysey complained bitterly in October 1539 of the persistence in the diocese of the celebration of abrogated feastdays and of ‘superstitious' observances surrounding the cult of the saints, for example the refusal of carters and smiths to work on the feast of St Loy.54 The positive reform provisions of the Injunctions were also widely ignored, with many parishes making no attempt to provide an English bible. The villages of Camborne and Stratton, and even the large and bustling town of Ashburton, did not acquire their copies of the Great Bible until 1541, and probably only then under pressure from a Royal Proclamation of 6 May that year, which threatened the ‘many towns and parishes within this realm' which have ‘negligently omitted their duties' with a fine of 40/= for every month they were without the Bible after the feast of All Saints.55
By contrast, from mid-September 1538 Morebath seems obediently and completely to have abandoned the active promotion of the cult of the saints which had hitherto been the most striking feature of its devotional life, and in the year that followed the parish dutifully equipped itself with all the books and other items required by the Injunctions. The accounts for 1539 reveal the systematic working out of the implications of the Injunctions, and the drastic modification of the parish's internal structures to accommodate itself to them. This involved the disappearance of most of Morebath's stores, and the alteration of those that remained so that they could not be accused of illegality. The first casualty of this process had been the absorption of the sheep of the stores of Sidwell, Jesus and St Sunday into a single church flock administered by Our Lady's wardens: after their last accounts in 1538, all these stores simply disappeared. The Alms Light, the candle burned before the High Cross in memory of the parish dead, particularly the impoverished dead who had no other memorial, was abolished on 18 May 1539, when its last warden, the widow Joan Goodman, paid 19d for the previous year's wax and handed the 2/8d that remained in the stock to the Three Men to help to pay for a theologically unexceptionable project, the purchase of a new cope.56 The next to go was St Anthony's store, whose wardens accounted for the last time on 21 September, reporting that they had spent nothing that year, indicating the extinguishing of St Anthony's light. Once again the wardens handed over all the funds remaining in the stock to the Three Men, and the Vicar noted ‘and sic [thus] ys this store dyschargyd'.57
Two of the three stores that remained, the Young Men and the Maidens, were not of course dedicated to any saint, but even they were modified to remove any reference to the cult of the saints. The Young Men had maintained three lights, two tapers before the High Cross and one before St George: in 1539 they paid only for two tapers before the cross: from the following year they resumed payment for three tapers, but all now before the cross.58 The Maidens had also maintained three tapers, before St Sidwell, Our Lady, and the High Cross: they now switched their main provision to the Sepulchre light in honour of the Blessed Sacrament at Easter, and to maintaining two tapers before the High Cross, like the Young Men.59 But this deliberate process of adaptation was at its most explicit in the store of Our Lady, dedicated of course to the chief of all saints, the Virgin Mary, but too central in the parish's financial and spiritual economy simply to be abolished. Instead, it was secularised by the removal of Our Lady's patronage. The Wardens for 1539, William Leddon and Robert at Hayne, accounted to the parish on Sunday 26 October. The priest headed the transcript in the book ‘Our Ladis store' as usual, and duly wrote out, for the last time, the internally rhymed devotional hexameter with which he always began Our Lady's account: ‘Auxilium nos fer pia nunc Sancta Virgo Maria', [bring us help now, o tender Blessed Virgin Mary]. He immediately signalled the new situation, however, by adding ‘et deinceps sent iorge', literally ‘and next, St George', but in this context implying rather deinde, ‘from now on', a momentous transfer of patronage from the Virgin to the parish saint, and the symbolic equivalent of the transition from ‘Our Lady's sheep' to ‘the church sheep'.60 That transition was spelled out in the heading which named the wardens ‘beyng wardyns of the churche scheppe (quod in praeteritis esset de stanzo beate marie)' [which (were) formerly of the store of the blessed Mary].
The High Wardens' accounts for that year, presented to the parish on 2 November, reflect the same process of adaptation, reminding the parishioners ‘that ys for the scheppe of the store of Jhesu and of Sent Sydwyll the Wardyns of the churche scheppe doth answer for', and redirecting benefactions which had been earmarked for now outlawed and therefore abandoned projects, like the paintings for St Sidwell's altar. The purchase of a new cope had become the central parish project, alongside the slowly growing Black Vestment fund, and all the benefactions of that year, whatever their original object, were channelled into one or other of these two funds. So the priest told the parish that although ‘Waterus promysse to the syde auter ys all loste and gon', yet ‘ys for Richard Webber for the bequest of hys son John towardes our cope the 4 Men schall answer for a pon there a cownte ijs [2/=] the wyche he had thofth [thought] to bestow hyt a pon the payntyyng of the syde auter'.61 We can measure the extent of Sir Christopher's deliberation, in the apparently innocent reiterated phrase ‘the syde auter' here, which had first made its appearance in the accounts of the previous year. Behind its use lies not merely caution but a deafening silence, for this of course was the altar on which he had placed the gilded image of his beloved St Sidwell, on which his parishioners and family had lavished their devotional giving, and which largely by his agency over the previous twenty years had been transformed from ‘the altar of Jhesu' into ‘Sent Sydwyll's auter'. What he thought of the retrospective outlawing and disparagement of so much that had seemed tender and important to him and his people, we can only guess. His carefully neutral phrase ‘the syde auter' certainly reflected no instantaneous conversion to reformed views, but he was not to speak publicly of St Sidwell before the parish, except to record the sale of her altar's ornaments,62 for another fifteen years.
We can be quite sure that Sir Christopher had not lost his belief in the intercession of the saints. The final account of each of the stores is headed with the usual pious invocation of the patron, and for the rest of Henry's reign, the priest would go on writing at the head of each year's High Wardens' accounts ‘Sancte Iorge ora pro nobis' [St George pray for us].63 Over the next two years he was to display some of his old enthusiasm for new projects in encouraging bequests to pay William Hurley ‘the next tyme that he goeth to London' to buy ‘a banner of sylke of sent iorge', which he expected the parish at large to underwrite – ‘and yff yt coste more mony ye must be content to ley more to hyt and yff hyt coste lesse ye schall have that ys lefte'.64 This new banner was itself an intriguing monument to the priest's cautious exploration of the geography of the new devotional landscape after the passing of the royal bulldozer of the 1538 Injunctions – the banner was needed presumably because the existing parish banner had an image of St Sidwell on one side in addition to that of St George on the other.65 As his invocations at the head of the High Wardens' account each year show, Sir Christopher clearly thought pious deference towards the parish patron was still permitted, even if overt demonstrations of devotion to other saints were not.
Yet precisely because it is clear that Sir Christopher remained a firm believer in the intercession of the saints, the extent and promptness of Morebath's conformity to the letter of the 1538 Injunctions becomes all the more striking. Elsewhere in Devon many parishes made no such wholesale attempts at accommodation. Though the lights were almost certainly extinguished before all the statues in the county within a year or two of their outlawing, in many communities the stores founded to maintain those lights went on functioning, their resources now being channelled into the general needs of the parish. The stores of Our Lady, St Julian and the High Cross were all still functioning at Ashburton in 1546, the stores of St Catherine, St Michael and the High Cross at Chagford till at least the same year, the stores of St Peter, Holy Rood and the High Cross were still operating at Broadhempston in 1547, the stores of Our Lady and St John survived at Woodland as late as 1549, and at South Tawton the stores of Jhesu, St Mary, St George and St Andrew were operating into the early 1550s.66 These examples all come from the south of the county, and there may have been local differences in the process of visitation and enforcement. At Morebath there is another possible hint of externally imposed compliance. In 1539, the year of all these other major realignments in the parish's piety, the wardens sold off the rood loft cloth, presumably the cloth used to veil the images on the roodloft in Lent.67 The ceremonies of Lent and Holy Week in which this cloth was used remained part of the official worship of the English church for the remainder of Henry's reign, and went on being celebrated everywhere. If the disposal of the cloth at Morebath was connected to the implementation of the Injunctions, therefore, which is by no means certain, it must have been because it was decorated in a way which was thought to infringe them. It was common for such cloths to have texts painted on them as well as images, and the Morebath cloth may have been painted or embroidered with lines in praise of the saints, or from one of the liturgical hymns in honour of the cross used in Holy Week, such as the Vexilla Regis. This hymn in praise of the image of the cross would certainly have been considered a manifestation of superstitious cult by a zealot like Heynes, who had used the Injunctions as his warrant for ripping funeral brasses out of the floor of Exeter cathedral, precisely because they had images or inscriptions honouring the saints.
But all this is speculation. Though the parish's pre-emptive extinguishing of the tapers before its saints in September 1538 strongly suggests some such intervention by Heynes or one of his associates, indeed is hard to explain on any other hypothesis, we cannot be sure that Morebath was in fact under greater pressure than any other north Devon parish. And the subsequent prompt and wholesale character of its compliance may well lie not in outside interference but in the priest's habitual punctilious and clear-sighted attention to detail and in the parish's equally habitual law-abidingness. Both were to be sorely tried in the years ahead.
Whatever their source, the attempt to establish some sort of normality in the wake of the Injunctions and the drastic reduction of Morebath's stores was only partially successful. The Maidens could now in theory continue to organise ‘the getheryng of the sepulture lyghth with wother lyghth a fore the hye crosse', but this activity was now without any intrinsic devotional rationale. There had been an obvious symbolic congruence in the gathering of the girls of Morebath ‘of devotion' to provide lights before virginal patrons like Our Lady and St Sidwell: by contrast, the allocation of responsibility for the sepulchre light to them was purely arbitrary, and it did not work. Free-will offerings to the Maiden store dry up, leaving only meagre obligatory contributions to a parish expense. The Maiden's annual collection ‘of devocion' had raised 7/6d on average through the 1530s.68 In stark contrast, the Maiden Wardens raised just 22d in 1540 for the sepulchre light, and only a miserable 2d ‘of devocion'. The following year they raised a mere 16d for the sepulchre light, but nothing at all ‘of devocion', and the parish faced facts by appointing no new wardens for the following year.69 The store was wound up, part of its small stock being handed over to help pay for a streamer of silk for use in parish processions, the remainder of the gathering for the sepulchre money being put aside to relieve the needs of a poor woman, Margaret Isak.70
This petering out of the Maiden store, not with a bang but a whimper, is symptomatic of a process of cooling and disenchantment within the devotional life of Morebath in the remaining years of Henry's reign. With the extinguishing of the lights and the abandonment of the patronage of the saints over the two remaining stores, a dimension of warmth and humanity evident in the accounts up to that point, fades a little. The statues of the saints remained in their tabernacles and were decently maintained, for through the early 1540s John Creche was paid 8d a year ‘for clensyng of the imagery of the churche', a task for which in 1542 he was offered payment in kind, in the form of the old statues of Mary and John from the High Cross which had been replaced in 1538 (he declined the offer and took cash).71 But with the ending of their cult, the offering to the images of candles and flowers, the gifts of beads and kerchiefs and wedding-rings, they had dwindled from presences to not much more than furniture. The very phrase, ‘the imagery of the churche', at one level of course simply a convenient collective abstraction, is itself a measure of that process of disenchantment. The images recede, paraphernalia to be referred to in bulk, not loved individuals invoked by name, as they routinely were when in the 1520s and 30s workmen had been paid for ‘settyng yn of a borde about Jhesu', ‘for the new gyltyng of sent Sydwyll', ‘to sett up the canstyck a fore sent iorge and a nother a fore sent sonday', ‘for the gyltyng of sent loy', ‘for dressyng of the stondyng of Sent Anne'.72 With the injunctions of 1538, the images lose not only their power to charm or comfort, but even their names.
And as with the images, so with the people. For now an extraordinary change comes over the accounts in Sir Christopher's book. With the single exception of the Maiden Wardens' accounts, he had to this point invariably presented the accounts of all the stores of Morebath, as well as those of the High Wardens and the Four Men, in the person of the accounting warden. Each of the accounts, therefore, was an exercise in symbolic ventriloquism in which the priest, whose distinctive tone of voice is never for a moment in abeyance, and who certainly read the accounts aloud on the wardens' behalf, nevertheless effaces himself within the phrasing of the accounts themselves in order to allow the wardens to seem to speak in their own right. ‘Item we ressevyd of the wolde wardyns ye laste ere at the begynnyng of our a cownte … ijs ijd [2/2d]' … ‘Memorandum that y William at Pole ressevyd at the begynning of my wardynscheppe of the wolde wardyns xxijs jd ob [22/11/2d]'.… ‘I Thomas Rumbelow have ressevyd.…’73
From 1540 onwards, however, all the accounts are presented in the third person: ‘yn the begynning of there ere they ressevyd of the wolde Wardyns xiijs & xd [13/4d] Item they made frely of there ale all cost quytte lvs & vjd ob [55/61/2d].’74 It is hard to put one's finger on the exact significance of this shift, and there is a danger of reading too much into it. At one level, certainly, nothing much had happened, since Sir Christopher had been no less responsible for the drafting and presentation of the old accounts than he was for the new, in which his authorship is more frankly acknowledged. Yet his parishioners must have been acutely conscious of it, and it can hardly be doubted that the change is somehow related to the upheavals which had flowed from the Injunction of 1538, or that the shift in phrasing reflects some subtler shift in relationships. To put the matter at its lowest, far fewer parishioners in Morebath now shouldered responsibility for the community's affairs. The number of those elected annually to office and responsibility in the parish had dwindled from twelve to six, and there were no longer any girls or young women among them. That meant fewer chores, but also fewer opportunities for influence, and a narrowing of the number of those in charge of parish business. It is as if with the disappearance of the stores and the receding of the saints, the community of the parish also reconfigured itself, and was less broadly and less personally conceived.
From 1540, however, the pressure for religious change in the country at large and in Devon in particular, eased, as conservative influences gained the King's ear at court. Henry, having taken as his fifth queen the voluptuous Catherine Howard, a member of one of the most conservative of aristocratic clans, distanced himself from the evangelical cause. Morebath continued its careful conformity, replacing its first version of the Great Bible in 1542 with a grander copy, bound with bosses to protect its cover as it lay, available for public reading, chained to its desk in the church.75 Yet the passage of the Act of Six Articles in the summer of 1539, with its reaffirmation of the doctrine of transubstantiation, its veto on clerical marriage and its ferocious and quite new provision for the mandatory burning of heretics without the option of recantation, represented a disastrous setback for the reformed cause. In its wake the leading evangelical bishops, Shaxton and Latimer, resigned their sees, and within a year the chief promoter of reformation, Thomas Cromwell, had been disgraced and beheaded. The roller-coaster of faction would continue to rise and fall, Henry would toy with reform again in a fresh campaign against images and shrines, and the king would play Evangelicals and Catholics off against each other for the rest of his reign. Cranmer, despite an unsuccessful plot designed to compromise him as a heretic in 1543, remained high in Henry's favour at Canterbury. On the whole, however, the early 1540s were a time of conservative regrouping and optimism.76 In Morebath, Sir Christopher sat down early in 1541 with the account book and his own notes, and compiled an exhaustive list of every gift given to the church since his arrival twenty-years before, so that ‘here after schall ye see and knoo how this churche was prevaylyd by the dethe of all these persons that here after ys expressyd by name'.77 This striking piece of stocktaking has an element of the elegiac about it, and was certainly a potent gesture of pietas to a past so recently and so rudely shaken. But despite the uncertainties through which the parish was still passing, it was also a sign of some confidence in a future in which the bounty of the dead would continue to evoke gratitude and prayer, and hence was worth recording.
For as Sir Christopher's gesture suggests, the national slackening of the pressure for reform was amply reflected in Devon, where Simon Heynes's influence had peaked and was now rapidly waning. From July 1540 the fiery Dean was on the defensive in his perennial struggles against the canons of the cathedral, who charged him with vandalism and malicious damage because of his iconoclastic activities. The outcome of that case is unknown, but Heynes was clearly rattled and withdrew from Exeter. His enemies there pursued him, and with Cromwell his patron dead, and given the increasingly conservative climate at court, they had him on the run. In March 1543 he was hauled before the Privy Council, accused of ‘lewde and seditious preaching and the sowing otherwise of many erronious opinions', and clapped in the Fleet Prison, where he remained until July, when he was released but bound over to keep the peace for the vast sum of 5000 marks.78 As the historian of Exeter Cathedral has commented, ‘How they must have gloated over the news in Exeter: the dean in prison for heresy!’79 They may have gloated a little in Morebath too: at any rate, conservatives all round the county will have slept easier for the knowledge that the chief local activist in the upheavals which followed the injunctions had been routed, at least for the present. Morebath bought a chain for its Great Bible that year, to prevent its removal from the church: the chain might have been symbolic of the restraint now set upon the Reformation, for in May 1543 Parliament passed an ‘Act for the Advancement of True Religion' aimed at heretical preaching and unauthorised translations of the scripture. In addition, however, it forbade bible-reading altogether by ‘women … artificers, prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degrees of yeomen or under, husbandmen or labourers', a prohibition which would have included most of the inhabitants of Morebath.80 Evangelicals were understandably bitter at this assault on the popular base of the Reformation: ‘Died not Christ as well for craftsmen and poor men as for gentlemen and rich men, and would not Christ that the poor labouring men should have wherewith they might comfort their souls …?’81
In this cooler atmosphere, parochial solidarities reasserted themselves at Morebath, and in 1542 found an expression as demanding as any of the major projects of the 1530s. Among the casualties of the 1538 Injunctions were the many small non-parochial chapels, especially common in the West Country and usually housing a venerated image, visited in pilgrimage on feast days or as a rogation-tide ‘station' for the ceremony of beating the bounds.82 There had been a chapel of this sort, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, at Bury, the hamlet immediately north of Morebath across the Somerset border, and which was now of course redundant. In 1542 Morebath bought this chapel, dismantled it, and used its materials for a total rebuilding of the church house, together with the window from the church replaced by Hugh Paulet's stained glass from Barlinch. In the course of this work, the ale-house was equipped with an entirely new chimney and fireplace, new doors and new windows, new tables and cupboards, and was completely re-thatched. The project took up most of the summer, and required the help not merely of a carpenter from Brushford and Quycke the mason from Bampton, but of most of the householders of the parish, who donated money, building materials or labour, spent days delving stone in one or other of the three local quarries, Lodvin, Black Pool (Blackpole) or Grants (Grownte), felled oak trees at Hukeley to act as buttresses and dragged them to Morebath town, fetched shingle or sand or sacks of lime, and ferried stone in panniers on the backs of horses during harvest time, when labour was especially precious and hard to come by. It was the sort of cooperative venture which warmed the cockles of Sir Christopher's heart, and he lovingly documented every detail of it in the account of the Three Men presented on 29 October 1542.83 He names twenty-five householders who contributed money, materials or service to the project, specifies minutely the nature of their contribution, sets a price on the materials or work they gave, and finally notes that they donated this freely – he uses the Latin words ‘dedit', ‘he gave', or ‘hoc' or ‘omnia dedit', he gave this or gave it all, to make this point. The sequence the list follows is essentially the same as the sheep counts, and as in the sheep counts, the effect is like a litany in which the unity of the parish is displayed and celebrated. The list, which notes the gift of labour made by poor men like Marke of Exbridge as well as the larger gifts of the strong farmers, is prefaced with a rubric which explains its significance: in it ‘ye schall se furder devocion of diversse perssons of this parysse to the churche howsse with out the wyche devocion we hadd not been abyll to pay and redd men clenely as they ofth to be':
Richard Hucly fownd a man at Lowdven quare and a nother to Blackpole quare and payd for the fettyng of a sack of lyme sum xiiijd [14d] quod dedit.
Jone Morsse caryd ij [2] lowde of stone fro Grownte quare for the wyche sche askyd xvjd [16d] and omnia dedit.
Mark gave halfe a days work at Blackpole quare jd [1d] quod dedit.…
John Tymwell at Borston was a hole day at Blackpole quare for the wyche was countyd in iiijd [4d] and that he gave.
Thomas Borrage caryd 3 lowde of stone fro Blackpole and fett the jame stone for the chimny at Courte and for this he demawndyd xvjd [16d] and omnia dedit.…
Thomas Norman fett 2 lowde of stone at Blackpole quare and was at Bere [Bury] to se the chapyll with William at Wode and for this he askyd xd [10d] and all he gave …
Willaim Leddon fett a sack of lyme (iiijd) [4d] and that he gave.
Richard Hukeley found a man at Lodvin quarry and another to Black Pool quarry and paid for the fetching of a sack of lime sum 14d which he gave.
Joan Morsse carried two loads of stone from Grants quarry for the which she asked 16d and gave it all.
Marke gave half a day's work at Black Pool quarry 1d, which he gave.
John Timewell at Burston was a whole day at Black Pool quarry for the which was counted in 4d and that he gave.
Thomas Borrage caryd 3 load of stone from Black Pool and fetched the jamb stone for the chimney at Court, and for this he demanded 16d, and gave it all.
Thomas Norman fetched 2 loads of stone at Black Pool quarry and was at Bury to see the chapel with William at Wood, and for this he asked 10d, and all that he gave …
William Leddon fetched a sack of lime (4d) and that he gave.
But the list was also punctuated, as the sheep counts always were, by the names of five householders who had refused to join in this communal enterprise. Sir Christopher names and shames: ‘Jone Goodman nothyng. Richard Don nil … Robert at Hayne nothyng … Richard Raw nothyng. William at Combe nil'.
The church house was the centre of conviviality and shared feasting in the parish, the place where the parish sat down together to drink and unwind.84 Since the abolition of the stores, the ales organised there were now, along with the church sheep, the major surviving element in the church's reduced finances. One might consider it the secular equivalent of the church, except that to apply the notion of secularity at all to such a building in a community where the spiritual and the material intertwined so tightly as they did at Morebath, is itself perhaps to commit a category error. The high moral and religious charge which the rebuilding of the church house carried for Sir Christopher, as an exercise of communal charity and mutuality, is implicit in his repeated use of the technical religious term ‘devocion' to describe their generosity. It is most clearly on display in his opening description of the contributions of two of the Three Men, the moving spirits in the project:
William Tymwell at Wode fett ij [2] lowd of tymber at Hucly and on with Jone Morsse and fownde a man iij [3] days at Blackpole quare and fett ij sackis of lyme and for all this he demanndyd iijs & iiijd [3/4d] and all he gave: and a gayn he was at Bere [Bury] to se the chapyll on day and a nother day he went to Grownte quare to se work goo forth and also went to Brussard [Brushford] for the carpynter and many tymes went a bout the parysse for horssis and sackis to cary lyme and for all that he taketh never jd by sydis wother days and halffe days.…
John Norman at Courte caryd on lowd of tymber fro Courte wode to make the clavell with all and ij lowd of scaffoll timber and gave hyt and fellyd hyt and fett ij sackis of lyme and was iij days at Blackpole quare and fownde hem selfe and for all this he askyd iijs & iiijd [3/4d] and all he gave: by sydis many wother days and halffe days that he was here yn hervyste tyme to helppe to provyd stuff that the worke mayth goo forthe: and takyth not jd for his labor
But yff they schuld y don this for mony they wold not y don hyt and gevyn such atendans not for a angyll and nobyll85 a pece of them and yff hyt hadd not byn to the churche.
William Timewell at Wood fetched two loads of timber at Hukeley and one with Joan Morsse and found a man three days at Black Pool quarry and fetched two sacks of lime and for all this he demanded 3/4d and all he gave: and again he was at Bury to see the chapel one day and another day he went to Grants quarry to see work go forth, and also went to Brushford for the carpenter and many times went about the parish for horses and sacks to carry lime and for all that he taketh never a penny besides other days and half days …
John Norman at Court carried one load of timber from Court wood to make the lintel withal, and two loads of scaffold timber, and gave it, and felled it, and fetched two sacks of lime and was three days at Black Pool quarry and provided his own food and for all this he asked 3/4d, and he gave it all: besides many other days and half days that he was here in harvest time to help to provide stuff that the work might go forward: and taketh not a penny for his labour.
But if they should have done this for money, they would not have done it, and given such attendance, not for an angel and a noble apiece for them, if it had not been to the church.
Morebath's saints were gone: but for a little longer, its harmonies held.
