No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
‘Truth Never Needed the Protection of Forgery’: Sainthood and Miracles in Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ (1625)*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Robert Hegge’s ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Dunholme’ was one of many texts produced in the early modern period which portrayed and assessed the Anglo-Saxon Church and its saints. This Protestant antiquarian work fits into a wider tradition in which the medieval past was studied, evaluated and employed in religious polemic. The pre-Reformation Church often played a dual role; as Helen Parish has shown, the institution simultaneously provided Protestant writers with historical proof of Catholicism’s league with the Antichrist, while also offering an outlet through which to trace proto-Protestant resistance, and thereby provide the reformed faith with a past. The Anglo-Saxon era was especially significant in religious polemic; during this time scholars could find documented evidence of England’s successful conversion to Christianity when Pope Gregory the Great sent his missionary, Augustine, to Canterbury. The See of Rome’s irrefutable involvement in the propagation of the faith provided Catholic scholars with compelling evidence which not only proved their Church’s prolonged existence in the land, but also offered historic precedent for England’s subordination to Rome. In contrast, reformed writers engaged in an uneasy relationship with the period. Preferring to locate the nation’s Christian origins in apostolic times, they typically interpreted Gregory’s conversion mission as marking the moment at which Catholic vice began to creep into the land and lay waste to a pure primitive proto-Protestant faith. In order to legitimize the establishment of the Church of England, Catholicism’s English foundations needed to be challenged. Reformers increasingly placed emphasis upon the existence of a proto-Protestant ‘strand’ that predated, but continued to exist within, the Anglo-Saxon Church. Until the Norman Conquest, this Church gradually fell prey to Rome’s encroaching corruption, and enjoyed only a marginal existence prior to the Henrician Reformation in the 1530s. Thus Protestants had a fraught and often ambiguous relationship with the Anglo-Saxon past; they simultaneously sought to trace their own ancestry within it while exposing its many vices. This paper seeks to address one such vice, which was the subject of a principal criticism levied by reformers against their Catholic adversaries: the unfounded creation and veneration of saints. Protestants considered the degree of significance the medieval cult of saints had attached to venerating such individuals as a form of idolatry, and, consequently, the topic found its way into countless Reformation works. However, as this essay argues, reformed attitudes towards sainthood could often be ambivalent. Texts such as Hegge’s prove to be extremely revealing of such ambiguous attitudes: his own relationship with the saints Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede appears indistinct and, in numerous instances, his understanding of sanctity was somewhat contradictory.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2011
References
1 Other versions of this manuscript exist; however, this paper only deals with London, BL, Add. MS 27423, Robert Hegge, ‘History of St. Cuthbert’s Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre, and Durham’ (1625). Subsequent references to Hegge’s work are to this manuscript. For other versions, see esp. BL, Sloane MS 1322, Robert Hegge, ‘The Legend of St. Cuthbert, with the Antiquities of the Church of Durham’ (1628); Durham, Cathedral Library, Add. MS 62, R. H., ‘Saint Cuthbert or the Histories of his Churches at Lindisfarne, Cuncacestre & Dunholme’ (after 1627); Oxford, Bodl., Madan MS 36593, R. H., ‘Saint Cuthbert or the Histories of his Churches at Lindis farne, Cuncacestre & Dunholme’ (1626).
2 Parish, Helen L., Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church (London, 2005).Google Scholar
3 For early modern attitudes to the Anglo-Saxon Church, see esp. S. J. Barnett, ‘Where was your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined’, ChH 68 (1999), 14–41; Frantzen, Allen J., ‘Bede and Bawdy Bale’, in idem and Niles, John D., eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville, FL, 1997), 17–39 Google Scholar; Heal, Felicity, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemic in the National Past’, Huntington Library Quarterly 68.1/2 (2005), 109–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kidd, Colin, British Identities before Nationalism (Cambridge, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacDougall, Hugh A., Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons and Anglo-Saxons (Montreal, ON, 1982)Google Scholar; Milton, Anthony, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, Benedict Scott, ‘John Foxe and the Anglo-Saxons’, in Highley, Christopher and King, John. N., eds, John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), 54–72 Google Scholar; Williams, Glanmor, ‘Some Protestant Views of early British Church History’, in idem, ed., Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff, 1967), 207–19 Google Scholar. On antiquarianism more broadly, see esp. Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; Woolf, Daniel, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1300–1730 (Oxford, 2003).Google Scholar
4 ODNB, s.n. ‘Hegge, Robert’, <http://www.oxforddnb.com>, last accessed 30 April 2009; Pattendon, Philip, ‘Robert Hegge of Durham and his St. Cuthbert’, Transactions of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland 5 (1980), 107–23.Google Scholar
5 An extensive, though as yet unpublished, overview of Robert Hegge’s sources has been conducted by Margaret Harvey.
6 Tyacke, Nicholas, Anti-Calvinists. The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987), 119–20.Google Scholar
7 Hegge, Robert, The Legend of St Cuthbert, ed. Taylor, J. B. (Sunderland, 1816), 61Google Scholar, quoted in Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 120.
8 Bodl., Rowlinson, MS D. 821, fol. 4, in Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 118.
9 Michael Questier provides an insightful discussion of religious beliefs in the early seventeenth century in his ‘Arminianism, Catholicism and Puritanism in England during the 1630s’, Historical Journal 49 (2006), 53–78; Anthony Milton’s Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge, 1995) discusses the reassessment of the medieval Church under Archbishop Laud and his circle.
10 For similar texts, see Bale, John, The Actes of Englysh Votaryes (Antwerp, 1546)Google Scholar; Clapham, John, The Historie of Great Britannie (London, 1606)Google Scholar; Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments (London, 1570)Google Scholar; Holinshed, Raphael, The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles (London, 1587)Google Scholar; Speed, John, The History of Great Britaine (London, 1611).Google Scholar
11 Hegge, ‘History’, 14–17.
12 For further information on St Cuthbert’s life, see Colgrave, Bertram, ed. and trans., Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ODNB, s.n. ‘Cuthbert [St Cuthbert]’ <http://www.oxforddnb.com>, last accessed 20 November 2009,+last+accessed+20+November+2009>Google Scholar; Wallace-Hadrill, John Michael, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1988).Google Scholar
13 Hegge, ‘History’, 17.
14 Ibid. 15.
15 Harsnett, Samuel, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603)Google Scholar, ed. and repr. by Brownlow, F.W. as Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (London, 1993). 191–335.Google Scholar
16 Hegge, ‘History’, 17.
17 Ibid. 21–2.
18 Ibid. 24.
19 Ibid. 22–3.
20 Dan. 4: 37.
21 Hegge, ‘History’, 32—3.
22 Many thanks to Bill Sheils who commented on this point when this paper was presented at the Ecclesiastical History Society’s Summer Meeting in 2009. See also, in this volume, Aude de Mézerac-Zanetti, ‘Liturgical Changes to the Cult of Saints under Henry VIII’, 181–92.
23 Davies, C. S. L., ‘Popular Religion and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, in Fletcher, Anthony and Stevenson, John, eds, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1985), 58–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 87. The banner, however, was not used during the Northern Rising of 1569 as Katherine Whittingham, John Calvin’s sister and wife to the dean, had previously supervised its burning. For the destruction of St Cuthbert’s banner, see Fowler, A., ed., The Rites of Durham (Durham, 1903), 27, 217Google Scholar; Kesselring, K.J., ‘“A Cold Pye for the Papists”: Constructing and Containing the Northern Rising of 1569’, Journal of British Studies 43 (2004), 417–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 426 n.; Marcombe, David, ‘A Rude and Heady People: The Local Community and the Rebellion of the Northern Earles’, in idem, ed., The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 1494–1660 (Nottingham, 1987), 117–51 Google Scholar, at 134.
24 Woolf, Social Circulation, 186.
25 Hegge, ‘History’, 4–5.
26 Ibid. 5–6.
27 Ibid. 7–8.
28 Freeman, Thomas S. and Mayer, Thomas F., eds, Martyrs and Martyrdom in England 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007)Google Scholar; Gregory, Brad S., Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1999).Google Scholar
29 Bede’s importance to Durham is discussed in Matthew, Donald, ‘Durham and the Anglo-Norman World’, in Rollason, David, Harvey, Margaret and Prestwich, Michael, eds, Anglo-Norman Durham (Woodbridge, 1998), 1–22 Google Scholar, at 14–15.
30 Hegge, ‘History’, 32.
31 Hegge, Robert, The Legend of St. Cuthbert with the Antiquities of the Church of Durham (London, 1663).Google Scholar