October (2017) is the 500th anniversary month of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. To celebrate I’m doing a series of episodes this month on the Reformation in England. This week we’re looking at the Medieval English church pre-1520.
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Episode Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora podcast network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is Episode 87. It’s the first in a four-part series on the English Reformation that I’m doing this year. It’s the 500th anniversary coming up of the Ninety-five Theses. So this first episode is English Catholicism before Cranmer and Cromwell. And I’ll be looking at the English church before the English Reformation.
First off, I need to thank my patrons, I have amazing patrons thank you to Cathy, Juergen Ashley, Kendra, Anne Boleyn also known as Jessica, Elizabeth, Cynthia, Judy, Laura, Barbara, Sharkiva, Amy, Alison, Joanne Kathy, Christine, Anetta, Candice, Rebecca from TudorsDynasty.com, Al, and Shandor, and my newest patron Mary, I love you guys! You’re awesome. To find out how you can join this exclusive list, head on over to Englandcast.com and click on the Donate and Support button at the top menu.
Last, the Agora podcast of the month. Each October we do “Agoraphobia”. Agoraphobia, so spooky! Each Agora member does a short podcast on something scary. And it’s for Halloween. Mine is on a particular Yorkshire witch, they’re released every week. So check on the Facebook page Facebook.com/AgoraPodcastNetwork, and you’ll see when the new episodes come out.
So it’s hard to imagine when we look at England in 1580, how upside-down religion had become in only 50 years. England in 1530 was still a place where the universal Catholic Church dictated every aspect of a person’s life from the time they were born until they died. England in 1580 was a much different place. It’s my goal in the next several episodes to trace the narrative of how a country went from a monarch who basked in the Pope-bestowed title “Defender of the Faith” to one in which monarchs were excommunicated. English Catholics were viewed as potential Spanish army, and priests were regularly hung, and even tortured. How did all of that happen in 50 years? Let’s find out, shall we?
This first episode is going to look at England before the Reformation. 25 years ago, Eamon Duffy published a book called The Stripping of the Altars. Duffy is an Irishman. He’s a Catholic, and his book uses detailed scholarship to paint a picture of Catholic England circa 1520 as a vibrant and alive place. The universal church gave spiritual light and life to people and met the spiritual needs of the population. Now, this idea was revolutionary at the time because prior to that, the main narrative in the historiography was that the English Reformation was inevitable. There was this march towards Lutheranism. And nothing could have stopped that, that England already had a history of yearning for reform with the lords of the 15th century, and that Henry VIII only hastened along what would have happened anyway. We now see that this may be a misguided approach and the role of the Catholic church was much more important than was previously thought in 1500. The English Catholic church was a regional part of this huge European Catholic church, which was ruled by Rome. It was like a large corporation with Rome as the headquarters. It gave England and Europe its identity as part of Christendom. The church in England was organized into two provinces with Archbishop of Canterbury and York. And then there were 21 dioceses, and then varying degrees of middle management to keep the business analogy going, moving all the way down to the local level of 9000 parishes, each with a parish church. Then there was also the side network with 750 monasteries and nunneries. The clergy represented something like 4% of the entire population, about 8% of the male population. They had an entirely separate and parallel universe with their own church courts, their own funding sources. They were huge landowners in England, they had their own organizational structure separate from that of the monarchy. And those two had actually come into conflict in the past quite commonly, and famously with Thomas à Becket, who had been a close ally of Henry II when he was a businessman. But then once Henry appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury, thinking he was going to have an ally, his loyalties actually shifted to Rome and Thomas met an untimely and famous death when Henry bemoaned this annoying priest said “will no one rid me of him?”, and several of his men decided to get royal fever and rode off to Canterbury and killed Thomas Becket quite brutally. So these churches were supported by fees, dues, tides, endowments, and they lived in their own little universe. How did this fit into the fabric of everyday life for most people? Let’s talk about the basic ideas of medieval Christianity.
The basic tenets of Christianity as understood through the Catholic church were that humans were born into sin or born into sin immediately. This was why midwives had the power to baptize. Women had the power to baptize. Because if you were in a pregnancy, if you were in labor where the baby wasn’t going to survive, they wanted that baby to be baptized immediately. That baby was born into sin, so even if that baby was only going to live for a minute, when it came out of the womb, it would be baptized. So this sin, this original sin was redeemed through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. It was through His Holy Church, that you developed a relationship with God, with Jesus, with the heavenly saints, who could aid you on your path to spiritual salvation and allow you to receive the grace and the forgiveness that your soul needed in order to gain a heavenly eternal life. So you were born. You’re baptized into the church as soon as possible. You would participate throughout your life in the church, participate in the sacraments of the church, like marriage, which would bind you more fully and deeply with the church community. And then when you died, you received the last rites. When your body passed, your soul would likely go to purgatory. This is where your soul would be purged, purgatory – purging of your sins until it was seen as ready to join the heavenly host in the eternal wonderment that is having only those souls who repeatedly refused the grace that was offered to them would be completely barred from heaven so you could get through purgatory. And this is really, really important.
The entire point of much of the activity of the medieval church was to make your time in purgatory shorter, to ease the transition of your soul from this difficult time of purging through to heaven. This is why people did things like leave endowments, go on pilgrimage, etc. So there were a number of ways that you could build on your relationship with the saints beyond simply worshiping in church. You could make a pilgrimage somewhere like Our Lady of Walsingham, which was meant to be a replica of Jesus’s home in Nazareth built by a wealthy widow just after the Norman invasion. This was one of the most popular places to go on pilgrimage in England. They actually used to call the Walsingham Way because they believed it pointed to Walsingham. So you would visit these places, you would commune with the saints while you were there, these saints became real to you. They were a huge part of your life. Parish churches at the time were filled with statues of the saints, with relics of the saints, things like pieces of the True Cross or St. Cuthbert’s fingernails.
While we in our post-enlightenment mindset can look at these relics and disparage them as superstitious. For most people, this was entirely real, not for most, for everybody, this was real. People would hang their rosary beads from the statues of the saints, they would pray to the saints to intercede on behalf of their loved ones who had died, in return, the saints would provide comfort to them. We talked in the episode on pregnancy and childbirth, about how women would use special girdles that had belonged to the saints, they provided spiritual comfort to women in labor. With that spiritual comfort, there’s certainly the idea that they would get physical comfort having their spiritual need be met. As an indirect result, different saints had different ailments that they would watch out for. People would call on Saint Apollonia for a toothache, Saint Barbara for thunder. So it was almost like a medicine cabinet of saints, right? So if you’re having this problem, you pray to these saints.
We can gauge the vibrancy of the late medieval church through several kinds of records. First, their wills. You can tell how important a place is by the money or gifts that were left to it in people’s wills. So everybody, mostly everybody left something to the church. If you had anything to leave at all, you left it to the church either for the upkeep of the church itself or for masses to be sung. Wealthy nobles would leave endowments and help fund colleges. So many of the colleges at Cambridge and Oxford were funded through the endowments of wealthy nobles. They would leave money for masses to be sung for their souls and for all of Christendom. Even poor people would leave a set of rosary beads or something that had belonged to them to help with the upkeep of the church. And at this time, people actually gave more to the church than they gave to anyone else including their manorial lords.
There’s also the participation in guilds. Guilds in this period were like various kinds of groups and churches, now fraternities or things like youth groups or women’s prayer groups, Bible study groups, etc. They would keep Christianity alive in the community. They would have functions to help with the poor with diseases. Whenever there was a need like that one of these guilds would step in and do something about it. Even poor people would often donate something as small as an animal a chicken or something to the guild, they would take turns watching after the animals that belonged to the guild and then if they butcher them or sold them, the profits would go to the guild. In London, they were 81 of these voluntary guilds in 1520. There are women’s guilds, young people’s guilds, all kinds of guilds, and some of them almost became very socially exclusive too.
So a system like this left much open for criticism. The money, like we said that people spent in the church at this time, was for making the experience of purgatory easier and faster. So if there was no purgatory hanging over people’s heads, would they still donate this much time and energy? The Protestants were quick to point out the purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible. This was one of the main criticisms of the church that they use the threat of purgatory to get more money out of people. There’s also the risk of everything becoming robotic – you give to the church, you recite your prayers, your rosary, and you don’t have to think about it too much. It’s just kind of on autopilot. And that was also something that the Protestants, the Evangelicals stressed, was having this personal relationship with the divine having something that could touch you deeply, rather than going through saints who would intercede on your behalf, having something where you are responsible for your relationship with God rather than giving that away.
And certainly, the biggest complaint was that a system like this left open tons of room for corruption. There were issues around clerical sexual misconduct from priests who were meant to be celibate. It’s kind of a running joke, to tell not celibate the clergy were. Spiritual courts were also resented, particularly by secular lawyers, because often they had jurisdiction over anything church or sacrament-related, like marriages or wills. So if people wanted to do something involving in anything that could be considered church-related, the church courts would take over and so the secular lawyers had a problem with that. Also, there was the ever ongoing problem of conspicuous consumption with the wealth of leading clergy like somebody like Cardinal Wolsey.
Cardinal Wolsey, unfortunately for him, he came at a really bad time in history. Because after the Wars of the Roses, there weren’t a lot of nobility left, and the nobility that were there, they saw themselves as very important, they should be the leaders of the kingdom, not some upstart like Wolsey, like who is he anyway, right? And so unfortunately for him, he was also a very proud man. And he built palaces that were greater than the kings, he had a mistress, he had children, it wasn’t good for him that the nobles at the time really, really resented his power more than they may have with someone else in a different time period.
So there was a fair amount of anti-clericalism. But most people never made that jump from being against the clergy to forming a new religion. That’s like a huge jump. So clergy were often not well-educated. They had all these failings, all these conflicts, but they had the sufficient skills that they needed to perform the religious services. They didn’t need to educate people, they needed to perform the rituals in the masses. They had a sacred power simply by their ordination to perform the sacraments. They had the power to administer the last rites to absolve sin. And that is what made them special. Henry VIII himself said Eustace Chapuys the Imperial ambassador in 1529, he said that the only power that the clergy had over layman was an absolution from sin. So even Henry saw these clergy as the people who were responsible for absolving people from sin. And this also, Diarmaid MacCulloch says that this could have made the universal church seem little more than a trade union of confessors. And if that’s how you saw them, then who was responsible for administering that trade union if they were simply confessors? Then couldn’t their union be administered through a local – king, rather than somebody in Rome?
Henry himself attacked the benefit of clergy and of sanctuary. So these were two ways that criminals were able to get out of punishment for their crimes at this time, and this shows the power of the church courts. So if someone was sentenced to death, they could often claim benefit of clergy. And so if they were waiting to be hung, and if they could read a Bible verse then they would be given over to church courts, because the idea was that if you were clergy, you were educated. So if you could read a Bible verse, it meant you were educated. So ergo ipso facto, you were clergy, and boom, you’re either given to the church courts or you’re freed. You could also claim sanctuary in a church and this is something we hear about -the very famous stories of Elizabeth Woodville, when her husband is gone from the kingdom she has to claim sanctuary, or when Richard III usurped, she had to claim sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Owen Tudor claimed sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. What did that mean? What that meant was that you go into the church, you say, “I’m here to claim sanctuary”, and then certain rules were triggered. So you had a certain amount of time period to be in the church, and then you either be given over to authorities or often you would be banished. You could choose to enter the church. So there were different rules that were set aside based on what you were accused of, and so there were limits, but was very popular for people to try to claim sanctuary. There was a church along the route from the Tower of London to Tyburn, where condemned prisoners would often make a break for them to try to seek sanctuary there. So these were the things that were open to criticism.
Criticism came from a couple of different places. First was from the reformers within the church itself. There was the Dean of St. Paul’s in London, John Colet and he was very worried about the failings. He gave a famous sermon to the leading clergy in 1511. He talked about the pride and worldliness in the church. He was part of this reformist tradition in the church that every once in a while things would get so bad, you’d have a period where people within the church would rise up, they would demand that the clergy, or the clergy live up to the standards of their profession. Thomas More was also part of this group. He wanted to reform so were others like Bishop Fisher, Cuthbert Tunstall of London, Bishop of London. These were people with reforming tendencies, but they were not willing to challenge the authority of the church itself and they all died Catholics.
On the other end of the scale, there were civilian critics who disliked the church authority, and these were heretics. They were known as Lollards. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe. He was a 14th-century theologian, he died in 1384. They were an underground heretical set, they survived for over a century despite regular persecution. They seem like when we talk about what they believe, they seem like early Protestants, they disliked the privileges of the church. They disliked the reference to the saints, praying to the saints, they saw that as idolatrous. They did not believe in purgatory. They believed purgatory was false. They also disagreed with transubstantiation and this would be something that people would argue about for decades. Transubstantiation is believing that the bread and the wine literally turned to the body and blood of Christ during communion, the Lollards believed instead, the communion was a representation, was a time for remembrance, they saw masses for the souls, as this money-making scheme that the church has come up with to make the priests rich, and they relied only on the authority of the Bible. And because of that, it’s very important, they translated the New Testament into English. And copies of these translations were circulated amongst the large groups. They were big in London, in East Anglia. And every once in a while they were subject to purges and raids.
So those records then show us where their participation was the highest, or at least where the records of their participation are the highest. In 1521, there was a purge in Buckinghamshire that brought in 400 people. In general, what would happen, people were only very occasionally burned, what would happen is most people would recant. And then they would quietly go back to their own beliefs when the pressure was off. But every once in a while somebody was burned to make an example of them. The very early Protestants found themselves somewhere in the middle between these two, they were educated. So they weren’t part of the kind of Lollard civilian group. They were educated, generally part of Cambridge or Oxford, Cambridge especially was famous for the early Protestant movement. These were men like Cranmer was in Cambridge. They actually took an interest in Luther’s books. Luther’s books were available in the early years after 1517. They weren’t banned until the early 1520’s. So these people would read what was going on in Germany, and some of them were very sympathetic to it.
So they met at a place called the White Horse Tavern. And these meetings were known as “Little Germany” because they were reading these books that were smuggled from Germany. Also, somebody who’s more famous is William Tyndale. He was the first translator of a published version of the New Testament into English. And interestingly, he wanted to go through the route of traditional religion. He didn’t necessarily want to be outside of the traditional religion world. He initially went to Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, to talk to him about doing a translation of the New Testament. But Tunstall didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to back him. He thought that there was too much risk that it would be associated with the Lollards and so Tyndale went elsewhere. He found patronage from a merchant who sent him abroad. He became a Lutheran and printed in his translation in Germany and copies of it were smuggled in. So it’s one of those history mysteries to think about. What might have happened if Cuthbert Tunstall had supported Tyndale? How that might have changed things?
So most of these early Protestant groups were based in Cambridge in East Anglia, London, and Kent, and these are the areas that are most easily reached by the trade routes from Germany and the Netherlands with the cloth trade. So these are areas that are experiencing more outside influences. And so it’s kind of no accident that they were then the places that became Protestants faster. So there was this underground network where the Protestants and the Lollards kind of hooked up with each other to start this religious underground network. And then the debate, of course, is would this network have gained on its own the power and the strength that would have been needed to challenge the religious status quo? They were a very tiny minority, they were dissidents, there was a network but they were tiny and we’ll never know whether they would have been able to do it on their own or not, of course, because an outside event got thrown in and that outside event, of course, was Henry VIII needing a divorce and not being able to get one from the Pope. So that then means that this tiny network of Protestants of religious dissidents wins the day. So in terms of numbers, they were small, in terms of money, they were small and all of that, but they won. And in large part, it’s because of this outside event that happened that was beyond anybody’s control of Henry being fed up with the Pope and the convenience of religious beliefs that supported Henry in his need to dissolve his marriage.
So that’s where we are this week. And then next week, I’m going to focus on the dissolution of the monasteries and on the Henrician Reformation itself, on Henry’s great outlook, and on what he believed, and he believed a lot of different things. He went back and forth a lot, so that often neither side was happy with him. Nobody was completely happy with Henry. And we’ll also talk about the dissolution of the monasteries. So thanks so much for listening. Links for everything including the books and the videos that I’m using this month are at Englandcast.com, and I will talk to you next week. Bye, bye!
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