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Training in Superstition? Monasteries and Popular Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2007

MARTIN HEALE
MARTIN HEALE
Affiliation:
School of History, University of Liverpool, 9 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7WZ; e-mail: mrvheale@liverpool.ac.uk
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Abstract

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 417 - 439
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 The most important works of this period include D. Knowles, The religious orders in England, iii, Cambridge 1959; G. W. O. Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, London 1966; J. Youings, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, London 1971; and G. R. Elton, Reform and Reformation, London 1977, ch. x.

2 G. G. Coulton, Five centuries of religion, London 1923–50. A not dissimilar approach, again strongly emphasising reported faults, is taken by G. Baskerville, English monks and the suppression of the monasteries, London 1937.

3 Youings, Dissolution, 14.

4 Knowles, Religious orders, esp. vol. iii. 458–68.

5 R. Hoyle, ‘The origins of the Dissolution of the Monasteries’, Historical Journal xxxviii (1995), 275–305 at pp. 276–7; Pettegree, A., ‘A. G. Dickens and his critics: a new narrative of the English Reformation’, Historical Research lxxvii (2004), 39–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 48.

6 E. Duffy, The voices of Morebath, New Haven 2001, 90–1.

7 R. N. Swanson, ‘The pre-Reformation Church’, in A. Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation world, London 2000, 9–30 at pp. 16–17; F. Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland, Oxford 2003, esp. pp. 45–59.

8 C. Haigh, English reformations: religion, politics and society under the Tudors, Oxford 1993, 130; Woodward, Dissolution, 50; Knowles, Religious orders, iii. 203.

9 For example, Thomas Starkey, A dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer (Camden 4th ser. xxxvii, 1989), 133–4; The colloquies of Erasmus, ed. N. Bailey, London 1878, ii. 29–31.

10 Stone, L., ‘The political programme of Thomas Cromwell’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research xxiv (1951), 1–18Google Scholar; Haigh, English reformations, 130–2.

11 For example, M. Oliva, The convent and the community in late medieval England, Woodbridge 1998; J. Gribbin, The Premonstratensian order in late medieval England, Woodbridge 2001; and P. Lee, Nunneries, learning and spirituality in late medieval English society: the Dominican priory of Dartford, York 2001.

12 See, for example, J. Clark, ‘The religious orders in pre-Reformation England’, in J. Clark (ed.), The religious orders in pre-Reformation England, Woodbridge 2002, 3–33, and A monastic renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his circle, c. 1350–1440, Oxford 2004; Oliva, Convent and the community, chs v–vi; and Rushton, N., ‘Monastic charitable provision in Tudor England: quantifying and qualifying poor relief in the early sixteenth century’, Continuity and Change xvi (2001), 9–44Google Scholar.

13 For example J. Clark, ‘Selling the holy places: monastic efforts to win back the people in fifteenth-century England’, in T. Thornton (ed.), Social attitudes and political structures in the fifteenth century, Stroud 2000, 13–32; and M. Heale, The dependent priories of medieval English monasteries, Woodbridge 2004, ch. v, and ‘Veneration and renovation at a small Norfolk priory: Norwich, St Leonard'sin the fifteenth century’, Historical Research lxxvi (2003), 431–49Google Scholar.

14 For a dissenting voice see B. Thompson, ‘Monasteries, society and reform in late medieval England’, in Clark, Religious orders, 165–95. The vitality of current research on medieval British monasticism is amply recorded in the Monastic Research Bulletin (annual publication of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York).

15 G. Bernard, ‘The piety of Henry viii’, in N. Amos and others (eds), The education of a Christian society: humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands, Aldershot 1999, 62–88.

16 Ibid. 70–1; Calendar of the letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. Brewer and others, London 1864–1932 (hereinafter cited as LP), xii/1, no. 479.

17 Colloquies, ii. 1–37, 366–7: the quotation comes from Erasmus' note to the reader ‘Concerning the profitableness of colloquies’. The king's questioning of the suitability of the title ‘religious’ for monks and nuns in his letter to Norfolk was another Erasmian trope: see, for example, The essential Erasmus, ed. J. Dolan, New York 1964, 148.

18 D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a life, New Haven 1996, 178; N. Wyse, A consolacyon for Christen people to repayre agayn the Lordes temple, London 1538 (RSTC 26063), quoted in Marshall, P., ‘Forgery and miracles in the reign of Henry viii’, Past and Present clxxviii (2003), 39–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 58. For other examples of this evangelical critique see H. Parish, Monks, miracles and magic: Reformation representations of the medieval Church, London–New York 2005, 50–2.

19 Marshall, ‘Forgery and miracles’, 39–73.

20 Youings, Dissolution, 149–52; LP x, no. 364, pp. 137–44.

21 Formularies of faith, ed. C. Lloyd, Oxford 1856, 370.

22 P. Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642, London 2003, 46.

23 G. Bernard, ‘Vitality and vulnerability in the late medieval Church: pilgrimage on the eve of the break with Rome’, in J. Watts (ed.), The end of the Middle Ages? England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Stroud 1998, 199–233.

24 B. Nilson, Cathedral shrines of medieval England, Woodbridge 1998; Clark, ‘Selling the holy places’, 13–32.

25 Nilson, Cathedral shrines, 210–31, 164–5.

26 Clark, ‘Selling the holy places’, 23–6.

27 In particular see D. Webb, Pilgrimage in medieval England, London 2000; E. Duffy, ‘The dynamics of pilgrimage in late medieval England’, in C. Morris and P. Roberts (eds), Pilgrimage: the English experience from Becket to Bunyan, Cambridge 2002, 164–77; and R. Marks, Image and devotion in late medieval England, Stroud 2004.

28 The contribution of smaller monasteries to lay religion has rarely been thought worth exploring. For more positive recent appraisals of the lesser religious house see Heale, Dependent priories, and L. Rasmussen, ‘Why small monastic houses should have a history’, Midland History xxviii (2003), 1–27.

29 VCH, Hampshire, ii. 178. For the numerous relics displayed by the monasteries of south-west England see R. Whiting, The blind devotion of the people: popular religion and the English Reformation, Cambridge 1989, 55–6.

30 LP x, no. 364, pp. 137–44. Thurgarton, Haltemprice and Clementhorpe priories are also named as centres of pilgrimage by the Compendium.

31 E. Duffy, The stripping of the altars, New Haven 1992, 385.

32 Webb, Pilgrimage, esp. ch. v.

33 Calendar of entries in the papal registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland: papal letters, 1198–1492, London 1893–1998, v. 257–8, 253; xi. 146; xiii. 445–6; Webb, Pilgrimage, 98–9, 107.

34 Webb, Pilgrimage, 94, 96.

35 LP iii/1, no. 1285, pp. 495–505; Bernard, ‘Vitality and vulnerability’, 216.

36 R. Swanson, Catholic England: faith, religion and observance before the Reformation, Manchester 1993, 195.

37 Hart, R., ‘The shrines and pilgrimages of the county of Norfolk’, Norfolk Archaeology vi (1864), 277–94Google Scholar at p. 277; Heale, ‘Veneration and renovation’, 431–49.

38 Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, DCN 2/4; C. Haigh and D. Loades, ‘The fortunes of the shrine of St Mary of Caversham’, Oxoniensia xlvi (1981), 62–72; DCN 2/1; English Episcopal Acta, VI: Norwich, 1070–1214, ed. C. Harper-Bill, Oxford 1990, no. 336, pp. 268–9; Valor ecclesiasticus temp. Henrici VIII auctoritate regia institutus, ed. J. Caley and J. Hunter, London 1810–34, iii. 226.

39 VCH, Northamptonshire, ii. 148–9; Fairbank, F., ‘The Carmelites of Doncaster’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal xiii (1894), 262–70Google Scholar, 558–9.

40 B. Spencer, Pilgrim souvenirs and secular badges: medieval finds from excavations in London, London 1998, 196–8, and Pilgrim souvenirs and secular badges, Salisbury 1990, 46–7.

41 The fifteenth-century cult of John Wharton, parish priest of St Oswald's, Durham, provides a similar example, with the cathedral priory receiving the income from offerings to the shrine: Nilson, Cathedral shrines, 161–2, 228.

42 In particular see Spencer, Pilgrim souvenirs (1990, 1998), and M. Mitchiner, Medieval pilgrim and secular badges, London 1986.

43 Mitchiner, Pilgrim and secular badges. Large numbers of pilgrim souvenirs from the non-monastic late medieval cults of Henry vi and John Schorne at Windsor have also been found.

44 R. Horrox, The Black Death, Manchester 1994, 148–9.

45 The Lisle letters, ed. M. St Clare Byrne, Chicago 1981, v, nos 1129, 1131, pp. 77–8, 79–81.

46 LP xii/2, no. 1231, pp. 432–3; D. Gwynne-Jones, ‘Brecon Cathedral, c. 1093–1537: the church of the Holy Rood’, Brycheiniog xxiv (1990–2), 23–37 at pp. 26–9; G. Williams, ‘Poets and pilgrims in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Wales’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1991), 69–98 at p. 83.

47 The itinerary of John Leland, ed. L. Toulmin Smith, London 1907–10, i. 180, 165, 190, 280, 284; iii. 92.

48 Marks, Image and devotion, 197–8, 204–7. Tudur Aled attributes the construction of the beautiful late medieval chapel at Holywell to Abbot Thomas Pennant of Basingwerk, rather than to the Stanleys or Lady Margaret Beaufort: ‘Heaven's chrism is at the source of the stream,/In Beuno's place, in Pennant's hand./For the same abbot we hope/That God sees his glory and his work./May it be in the choir of York, or in Non's city,/That he finishes the Well's arch.’ I am very grateful to Tristan Gray Hulse for drawing my attention to this reference, which comes from Two medieval welsh poems, ed. T. Charles-Edwards, Llandyul 1971.

49 For a fuller discussion of this evidence see Heale, Dependent priories, 218–27.

50 DCN 2/6, 2/4.

51 DCN 2/1/69–88.

52 DCN 2/3; Heale, ‘Veneration and renovation’, 431–49.

53 Heale, Dependent priories, 223.

54 The charters of endowment, inventories, and account rolls of the priory of Finchale, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Society vi, 1837), nos i-ccccxvi; Devon Record Office, W1258M, G4/53/1–5.

55 Heale, Dependent priories, 230–1n.

56 Nilson, Cathedral shrines, 210–31.

57 Valor ecclesiasticus, iii. 388.

58 Ibid. iii. 220–7; i. 7–16.

59 Ibid. ii. 453–6; iv. 232–4; iii. 344–5; i. 424–8. For details of some of the lesser oblations recorded in the Valor see D. Robinson, The geography of Augustinian settlement in medieval England and Wales (British Archaeological Reports, British Series lxxx, 1980), 173, 259.

60 DCN 2/1/78–91.

61 DCN 2/3/105–39.

62 Nilson, Cathedral shrines, 228.

63 This is an argument made in R. Whiting, Local responses to the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1998, 84–9, but in few other works on the subject.

64 Fairbank, ‘Carmelites of Doncaster’, 558–9.

65 Valor ecclesiasticus, iii. 285; v. 301–3.

66 Ibid. i. 79–80; P. Marshall, ‘The rood of Boxley, the blood of Hailes, and the defence of the Henrician Church’, this Journal xlvi (1995), 689–96.

67 R. Whiting, ‘Abominable idols: images and image-breaking under Henry viii’, this Journal xxxiii (1982), 30–47 at p. 38; LP xiii/1, no. 634(ii), p. 235; Valor ecclesiasticus, ii. 355; iv. 393.

68 R. W. Dunning, ‘The last days of Cleeve Abbey’, in C. Barron and C. Harper-Bill (eds), The Church in pre-Reformation society: essays in honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, Woodbridge 1985, 58–67 at pp. 66–7; Valor ecclesiasticus, i. 217–18.

69 Income recorded from the main shrine of Thomas Becket totalled £667 in 1350/1, whereas monetary gifts to the shrine of Archbishop Scrope at York reached £150 in 1419: Nilson, Cathedral shrines, 214; J. Hughes, Pastors and visionaries: religion and secular life in late medieval Yorkshire, Woodbridge 1988, 306.

70 Heale, Dependent priories, 226; Serjeantson, R. and Longden, H., ‘The parish churches and religious houses of Northamptonshire: their dedications, altars, images and lights’, Archaeological Journal lxx (1913), 217–452CrossRefGoogle Scholar at p. 264.

71 Webb, Pilgrimage, 157–8, and ‘The saint of Newington: who was Robert le Bouser?’, Archaeologia Cantiana cxix (2000), 173–88.

72 Chronica monasterii S. Albani. Ypodigma Neustriae, a Thoma Walsingham, ed. H. T. Riley (Rolls Series xxviii/7, 1876), 414–15; Hughes, Pastors and visionaries, 306. The political cults of Edward ii and Thomas of Lancaster were also managed by monasteries, Gloucester Abbey and Pontefract Priory respectively: S. Walker, ‘Political saints in later medieval England’, in R. Britnell and A. Pollard (eds), The McFarlane legacy: studies in late medieval politics and society, Stroud 1995, 77–106.

73 See p. 429 above.

74 DCN 2/1/70–91. For an account of the structure and design of the chapel of the Red Mount see Marks, Image and devotion, 203–4.

75 N. Orme, ‘Bishop Grandisson and popular religion’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association cxxiv (1992), 107–18.

76 Thomas More, A dialogue concerning heresies, ed. T. Lawler and others, New Haven 1981, 85–6. The religious houses concerned were St Albans Abbey, Leominster Priory and the Dominican priory of Jetzer in Switzerland.

77 Webb, Pilgrimage, 148–51.

78 What follows relies heavily on Marks, Image and devotion, 203–4.

79 Selections from English Wycliffite writings, ed. A. Hudson, Cambridge 1978, 84.

80 In what appears to be a comparable case, the canons of Buckenham (with very similar means to the monks of Lynn) spent almost £35 between 1486 and 1491 on renovating and adorning the chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary in their house. The Valor ecclesiasticus records offerings of 10s. per year to an image of the Virgin in the priory in 1535, and so it is quite possible that this expenditure was related to the priory's saint cult: Norfolk Record Office, Norwich, ms Rye 74, fos 49v, 72v; Valor ecclesiasticus, iii. 316. I am very grateful to Mr Paul Rutledge for drawing this example to my attention.

81 E. Shagan, Popular politics and the English Reformation, Cambridge 2003, 67–9. Shagan has also drawn attention (pp. 75–8) to the role of the religious, and particularly Dr Edward Bocking (Barton's confessor and ‘public-relations man’), in spreading her cult.

82 V. Turner and E. Turner, Image and pilgrimage in Christian culture: anthropological perspectives, Oxford 1978, ch. i. See also Duffy, Stripping of the altars, 190–200, and Theilmann, J., ‘Communitas among fifteenth-century pilgrims’, Historical Reflections xi (1984), 253–70Google Scholar.

83 Duffy, ‘Dynamics of pilgrimage’, 177.

84 Chronica monasterii de Melsa, ed. E. A. Bond (Rolls Series xliii, 1866–8), iii. 35–6.

85 Webb, Pilgrimage, ch. v; Duffy, Voices of Morebath, 73–8; Whiting, Blind devotion of the people, 55; Calendar of papal letters, xv, no. 740, p. 391.

86 Whiting, ‘Abominable images’, 38; Gwynne-Jones, ‘Brecon Cathedral’, 23–37.

87 More, Dialogue concerning heresies, 52.

88 See, for instance, the well-known dispute over the Fraisthorpe Virgin in early fourteenth-century Yorkshire: Webb, Pilgrimage, 147–8; Marks, Image and devotion, 209–10; K. Kamerick, Popular piety and art in the late Middle Ages: image worship and idolatry in England, 1350–1500, New York 2002, 107–12.

89 Marshall, Reformation England, 45; cf. R. Rex, Henry VIII and the English Reformation, Basingstoke 1993, 173–5.

90 Youings, Dissolution, 13.