The Life of Thomas More (22 page)

The priest enters, together with his ministers and servers, and stands before the altar step while the others take up their customary positions for the ritual; then he ascends to the altar and inclines before it while he intones the orison. After the Office and Kyries he censes the altar and then lifts up his hands to proclaim ‘Gloria in Excelsis’. So the Mass begins. The worshippers in the nave are separated from these rites by the rood screen; they can see only stray gestures and hear muttered words in a language most of them could not understand. They are not expected to participate in, or even necessarily follow, the Mass; they have their own sets of prayers and devotions, with particular attention being given to the hours of the Virgin, the psalms of penitence and the Office of the Dead. The Mass was in some sense a secret ritual, all the more powerful for being partly concealed; the prayers and blessings of the Mass were known to have mysterious efficacy and its words were not translated into the vernacular for fear that they might be misused by witches or ‘cunning men’. The host was a magical talisman which was reputed to heal sickness, to cure blindness and to act as a love charm. Those who saw its elevation would suffer no hunger, or thirst, or ill fortune, that day. The eucharist was displayed to some unruly Londoners in Fleet Street, as a way of quelling the disturbance. There was an inexpressible element of wonder and awfulness in a ceremony that brought the body and blood of Christ down to the earth once more; in a world of mysteries and miracles, this was the greatest mystery of all. It is what More meant when he wrote of ‘the mystycall gestures and ser-emonyes vsed in the masse’.
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But essentially it was a public, rather than a private, ceremony. The Mass at the high altar was conducted behind the rood screen, but in innumerable chapels and side-altars it was celebrated with the worshippers sometimes literally crowded around. The notable divine Thomas Cranmer relates how people called on their neighbours to ‘stoop down before’ so that they could get a better view.
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In ceremonial manner the priest enacted the stages of Christ’s ministry, passion and death; as one spiritual writer put it, ‘the process of the mass representeth the very progress of Christ to his passion’.
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Every movement and gesture of the celebrant had dramatic significance so that, for example, when the priest holds out his arms before the altar he is an image of the crucified saviour. The most sacred truths of the faith are given full material reality, leading up to that moment when Christ
himself becomes present at the altar. This was marked by the moment of elevation when the priest held up the host, become by a miracle the body of Jesus. At that instant candles and torches, made up of bundles of wood, were lit to illuminate the scene; the sacring bell was rung, and the church bells pealed so that those in the neighbouring streets or fields might be aware of the solemn moment. It was the sound which measured the hours of their day. Christ was present in their midst once more and, as the priest lifted up the thin wafer of bread, time and eternity were reconciled. The worshippers knelt down and held out their arms in adoration, since this was the sight for which they had come. There are reports of the people running from altar to altar to catch a glimpse of the consecrated host at different Masses, and one priest complained that at the sound of the sacring bell the people rushed away from his sermon to witness the elevation.

The lay congregation generally communicated once a year but, after the sacrifice of the bread and wine was complete, a holy object or ‘pax’ was passed among them to be kissed and handled. This was a small wooden tablet or metal amulet upon which was carved a paschal lamb, or a cross, with the legend IHS—
Iesu Hominum Salvator.
Then, at the conclusion of the Mass, bread is blessed and distributed to the congregation; it was known as ‘singing bread’, and, when one martyr at the moment of death in the flames is supposed to have smelled of baking bread, perhaps this was the variety implicitly meant. These were the rites of the community, affirmed and strengthened by Christ’s presence within it; the parishioners were bound to their church precisely because the Mass was the centre of their lives and activities. It redeemed them from their toil and their sinfulness, from their tedium and their suffering.

But this was not simply the communion of the living; at the most sacred moments of the Mass prayers were offered up for the dead and, once a year, the names of dead parishioners were recited from the ‘bede-roll’. The souls in purgatory, in particular, were anxiously watching the living, seeking their prayers and acts of charity to allay their own sufferings; the dead were in a real sense mingled with those still upon the earth. If at the moment of elevation time and eternity were reconciled, so also were the living and the dead, past and present coming together in the form of the body of Christ. His body was considered
not only to be the transubstantiated host, but also the entire Catholic Church from its beginning in human history. The public drama of the Mass was enacted each day as a memorial to this historical community, Christ returned to earth in the form of the consecrated host and in the presence of the worshippers. This is what Thomas More meant when he invoked ‘thys vyne of Crystes mystycall body the knowen catholyke chyrche’,
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and when he quoted from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, ‘We many be one bread and one body’.
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There are intimations here of Christian society making up one physical body, but we must see it more properly as a symbolic and imaginative order in which Christ, the eucharist and the Church partake of the flesh and the blood and are incarnated in the heart of the city.

On Corpus Christi, then, when the sacrament was carried in procession down the main streets ‘wyth baners, copys, crosses, and sencers’,
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London is not only a physical community but also a host of angels singing ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ The consecrated wafer was surrounded in Cornhill and Cheapside by a hundred torches of wax and two hundred priests chanting. It is the
genius loci
, the meaning of the place where they stand. In the same spirit passion plays were performed in Clerkenwell and Skinners’ Well. The presence of relics, of shrines and of holy wells, in London and elsewhere, testifies to a sense of time utterly at odds with the twentieth-century vision of the city as a quickly running mechanism or an endless flow of passing human beings. In early sixteenth-century London time was not considered to be some evenly flowing current or stream; although the comparison would not have occurred to the citizens themselves, it might be seen as resembling a lava flow from an unknown source of power. Some parts of time moved more sluggishly than others, and some parts did not move at all because they were already mingled with eternity. The sense of the sacredness of place is central here: in Rogation Week the bounds of each parish were walked in ritual procession with sacrament and cross, handbells being rung perpetually to banish demons and other evil spirits (Thomas More firmly believed in demons) from the vicinity. One foreign observer was surprised by the piety of Londoners, and remarked, with some exaggeration, that ‘they all attend Mass every day, and say many Paternosters in public (the women carrying long rosaries in their hands), and any who can read taking the Office of Our Lady’.
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Against that testimony
we must place More’s lamentations on the viciousness of the city, on the prostitutes and the cut-purses, but of course in such a culture the accounts of sacredness and sin are not incompatible. Who knows what might have happened in Paternoster Row, Creed Lane or Ave Maria Lane?

In St Paul’s itself we read of sermons and services being drowned out by the sound of general business being conducted elsewhere in the church and of what John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, called ‘the great noyse of the people’.
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Forty Masses were said each day within the cavernous cathedral, while outside in the courtyard and precincts the business of the city was conducted. The rood at the north door of the cathedral was supposed to have been carved by Joseph of Arimathea, and was the site of miracles; under the weathercock had been placed a relic of the Holy Cross. On the feast day of the commemoration of St Paul, a buck was brought to the high altar; it was then killed and its head fixed upon a pole for a procession to the west door, at which time horns were blown through the city.

The festivals and holy days of the ritual year now seem inconceivably remote, so thoroughly has the work of the reformation been done. Yet they were an important part of the faith, and the city, in which More dwelled. A long pole was kept on iron hooks beneath the roofs of a row of houses in Shaft Alley, off Leadenhall, and on May Day it was set up on the south side of St Andrew the Apostle, which was given the name ‘St Andrew under Shafte’; it was one of London’s many maypoles, with a ‘knape’ or bunch of flowers on its top, so high that it towered over the steeple of the church itself. It may also be seen, perhaps, as an emblem of the paganism generally present within London rituals.

John Stow tells the story of this maypole and how it was eventually hacked to pieces as an ‘idol’ in 1549. He is an altogether reliable chronicler of the London ceremonials that had all but disappeared in his own lifetime. He depicts the dances, pageants and ‘shows of the night’ on May Day itself, the ivy and bays put out before every house at Christmas, the procession of the Skinners’ Guild through the streets of London on Corpus Christi, the plays and disguisings of the Midsummer Watch when the doors of London houses were ‘shadowed with green Birch, long Fennel, St John’s wort, Orpin, white Lillies, and such like, garnished upon with Garlands of beautiful flowers’.
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There were bonfires
in the main thoroughfares; in New Fish Street, Thomas Street and other places hundreds of glass lamps were hung in curious display. These were the streets where More walked, and on these days of festival they created an atmosphere of play-acting and game which seems to have been close to More’s own temperament. Yet the play-acting was part of customary ritual and the games an aspect of religious observance. That is why everything, for More and his fellow citizens, has its source and origin in that single most dramatic moment of faith when the host is raised before the adoring people.

CHAPTER XII
CRAFT OF THE CITY

ICO della Mirandola had departed in the time of lilies, according to prophecy, while Thomas More still walked among the temptations of London: better to marry than to become an unchaste priest, better even to marry than to burn, and at the age of twenty-six, in the first month of 1505, he was duly wed. The little that is known about Jane Colt can soon be told; she was the daughter of a titled landowner, Sir John Colt, or Cowlt, of Essex. His household at Netherhall, in the parish of Royden, was fifteen miles from the Mores’ Hertfordshire estate at North Mimms; only a gatehouse of faded red brick still remains, but it is clear that it was an impressive and even grand house. If you are to marry the daughter of neighbours, it is important that they are affluent and well connected: the tomb of Jane Colt’s grandfather, in the parish church of Royden, proclaims him to have been
‘Edwardi regis consul honorificus’.
Jane Colt, sixteen years of age, was the oldest daughter of the family; More’s son-in-law, William Roper, records that More preferred a younger daughter but chose Jane out of a sense of propriety and ‘a certain pity’.
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The anecdote suggests the sense of duty which More carried with him everywhere, but if, as seems likely, it was told to Roper by More himself, it also confirms a slight attitude of dismissiveness or comic disparagement towards his wives. When asked why he chose short women, he is supposed to have replied ‘of two evils you should choose the less’; it sounds like a remark made by his father and is perhaps not to be taken seriously except to the extent that he feared or distrusted his own sensuality and therefore felt the need to caricature the women who ministered to it.