Brigden London and the Reformation

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32261-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 688 Seiten

London and the Reformation (1989) was the first book by Susan Brigden (later to win the prestigious Wolfson Prize for her Thomas Wyatt: The Heart's Forest). It tells of London's sixteenth-century transformation by a new faith that was both fervently evangelised and fiercely resisted, as a succession of governments and monarchs - Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary - vied for control. London's disproportionate size and wealth, its mix of social forces and high politics, and the strength of its religious sectors made the capital a key factor in the reception of the English Reformation. Brigden draws upon rich archival sources to examine how these religious dilemmas were confronted. 'A tour de force of historical narrative... which can be read with both pleasure and profit by scholars and non-scholars alike.' Times Literary Supplement 'Magisterial... richly detailed... teeming with the vivid street language of the sixteenth century.' London Review of Books

Susan Brigden, Fellow and Tutor of Lincoln College and Reader in the University of Oxford, is author of London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989) and New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors1485-1603 (Penguin Press, 2000).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brigden, Susan

Leseproben

I The Catholic Community

THE LAITY

The City Churches

WITHIN THE ancient walls of the City of London on the eve of the Reformation were just over a hundred parish churches, a cathedral, and thirty-nine religious houses. The panoramas of sixteenth-century London show their spires and towers and steeples dominating the skyline.1 Among secular buildings in late medieval London only the Guildhall and the Tower could compare in beauty or grandeur with the churches. No layman aspired to build to rival the Church: those who did might be punished for their vainglory. When Sir John Champneys, Lord Mayor in 1534, added a ‘high tower of brick’ to his house in Tower Street (‘the first … in any private man’s house to overlook his neighbours in this City’), ‘this delight of his eye was punished with blindness’.2 Generation after generation of Londoners gave of their wealth and labour towards edifying the churches where they celebrated. If concern to build and decorate churches, and determination to adorn their City with religious artefacts, were marks of faith, then the citizens of London were of a remarkable piety. The very street names were religious: Ave Maria Lane, Rood Lane, Creed Lane, Pater Noster Row.

In London ‘there was in every corner a cross set’.3 Most famous of these was the Eleanor Cross in Cheapside which was gilded and adorned with images—of the Virgin and Child, of Christ’s Resurrection, with the arms of its donor ‘embraced by angels’. For each great occasion of public ceremonial—the entry of Emperor Charles V or Philip of Spain, the coronations of Anne Boleyn and Edward VI—this cross was specially regilded.4 Every parish church had a cross on its spire or tower—save St Michael Cornhill where an image of the patron stood—and a preaching cross in its churchyard. St Paul’s Cross was the first pulpit of the realm, and it was from this cross that the changes of the Reformation were expounded. These parish crosses were venerated. At St Mary Magdalen Milk Street in 1449 there stood a cross in the churchyard which was ‘worshipped by the parishioners there as crosses be commonly worshipped in other churchyards’.5 The ‘Rood of Northern’ at the north door of St Paul’s, allegedly carved by St Joseph of Arimathea and discovered during a flood of the Thames in the days of the fabled King Lucius, became a favourite object of devotion because miracles were performed there.6 John Paston wrote to his mother in 1465: ‘I pray you visit the Rood of North door and Saint Saviour at Bermondsey, while ye abide in London, and let my sister Margery go with you to pray to them that she may have a good husband ere she come home again.’7 Crucifixes were everywhere as a remembrance of Christ’s passion, and the strongest defence against the temptations of man’s ‘ghostly enemy’, the Devil. They were not to be worshipped for themselves, but venerated just as the King’s seal was venerated: not for love of the seal itself but for love of the man who owned it. The rood, so the fourteenth-century homilist John Mirk insisted, was ‘the King’s seal of Heaven’.8

Images and paintings of saints were ‘lewd men’s books’, for there were ‘many thousands of people’ who could not imagine in their hearts how Christ died on the cross to redeem mankind until they learnt this truth from pictures of His passion.9 At the opening of his Dialogue concerning Heresies Sir Thomas More appealed to the legend that Christ inspired St Luke to paint the ‘lovely visage of Our Blessed Lady’ as proof that images are pleasing to God.10 More knew by his own experience that miracles were performed at the shrines of saints to reveal divine power to the faithful. He had seen how Sir Roger Wentworth’s twelve-year-old daughter, ‘tormented by our ghostly enemy the Devil, raving with despising and blasphemy of God and hatred of all hallowed things’, was saved by visiting the shrine of the Virgin at Ipswich.11 In his youth More had seen at Barking Abbey kerchiefs reputedly sewn by Our Lady; ‘as clean seams to my seeming as ever I saw in my life’. These relics, hidden in the back of a golden tabernacle which had been shut away for four or five hundred years since ‘the abbey was burned by infidels’, had remained unknown, ‘till now that God gave that chance that opened it’.12 If relics and shrines were venerated by the most learned of Londoners, how much more emotive they might be to the ignorant and credulous. More (Moria) saw the folly of superstitious excess. Writing to Erasmus of the life of the courtier, he compared the King’s suitors to those London wives who, praying to an image of the Virgin by the Tower, ‘gaze upon it so fixedly that they imagine it smiles upon them’.13

The Virgin Mary, ‘mother and maiden’, ‘Queen of Heaven, lady of the world and Empress of Hell’, was ceaselessly invoked as mediator to God for men. The saints, her courtiers in Paradise, might act for their perpetual suitors as ‘holy patrons’ in the ‘blessed Court of Heaven’.14 The saints were believed to have power to ward off the disasters which might befall their supplicants, and their favours were daily called upon.15 The saints could also be angered, and must be placated. In 1533 ‘a letter written by Mary Magdalen’s hand’ was delivered to a London widow, warning that ‘if she did diminish any part of the gold hidden by her husband … and bestowed it not entirely in the ornaments of the church’, it would be ‘to her husband’s utter damnation and hers both’.16 Saints were glorified through their images and at their shrines. In every City church candles burned before the images of favourite saints set up by their faithful votaries. The narrator in The ymage of loue, published in 1525, told of the ‘many good men that be nowadays which honour the temples of God with many goodly images of great cost of silver and of gold set with pearl and stone’.17

Men and women called especially upon their own patrons, remembering their images particularly in their wills; ‘St John Evangelist’, for example, ‘whom I have always worshipped and loved’.18 To St Margaret Pattens Margaret Sale had given an image of Our Lady, and when she made her will in 1527 she bequeathed her funeral tapers to burn thereafter before the images she had honoured during her life: before Our Lady, St Katherine, St Anne, St Sythe, and the new rood at her parish church, before Our Blessed Lady at Barking, and St Gabriel at St Gabriel Fenchurch.19 The citizens of London often wished to be buried beside their own patron saints in their churches: before the image of St James the Apostle at St Michael Bassishaw; before the image of St John the Evangelist; at St Christopher le Stocks by the image of Jesus; before ‘Our Lady of pity’ at St Antholin; in the Grey Friars before St Francis; in Savoy Chapel before the image of St George.20 Londoners provided candles to burn forever to light the images. At St Mary at Hill John Causton bequeathed money for two tapers to burn

afore the image of Our Lady at high altar on Sundays and holy days, and two tapers burning before the Angel’s Salutation of the image of Our Lady every evening at the time of singing of Salve Regina, and one taper should burn at the south altar between the figures of St Thomas and St Nicholas.21

The saints looked down from the windows of the churches and from the walls and altars inside. In the windows of St Mary at Hill were images of the Trinity, of the seven works of mercy, and of St John.22 St Dunstan in the West and St Thomas Acon had windows enshrining St Thomas à Becket.23 The figures were often clad in special coats, and wearing silver shoes, which their faithful votaries kissed.24 The image of St George at St Peter Cornhill and St Mary Woolnoth was a martial figure, on horseback, with ‘coat armour of sarcenet’ and ‘a headstall for a horse’.25 Still in 1538 George Robinson found a woman kneeling before the image of St Uncumber (whose aid unhappy wives invoked when they wished to be rid of their husbands), who was ‘in her old place and seat with her grey gown and silver shoes’.26

The manner in which the citizens chose to build and adorn the churches where they worshipped is revealing of the nature of popular devotion. The late medieval parish churches of London were ornate and adorned, gilded and painted. Every space was covered with ‘gay outward things’, sacred paintings, tabernacles, banners, and veils. The churchwardens’ accounts of every City church reveal the parishioners’ continuing devotion to their special saints.27 In All Hallows Staining in 1528, for example, the accounts record the repainting of the image of St Luke:

bringing of St Luke’s tabernacle home from painting

2d.

for plaster, mortar and brick, for setting up St Luke

16d.

pulley and cord and a strap to pull up and down the shrine

...