The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (10 page)

At Corpus Christi the blessed sacrament which the feast honoured was consecrated at a special Mass, then carried by priests in a precious vessel, under a canopy, along a processional route strewn with grass and flowers. Unity was the theme of Corpus Christi; a social ideal of holy togetherness, worked out in the Mass of the feast, its hymns, its great procession. Here, in this feast, so intensely popular, so universally observed, embellished so spontaneously with plays and pageants, lay, if anywhere, a demonstration of a Christian community. Yet community in Christ’s saving sacrifice never meant social equality. In practice, this festival of unity also celebrated power and privilege; the precedence of the powerful, who walked closest to the Host, over the powerless.
The poor, women, children, servants – most people – watched from a distance. Yet although the celebrations sometimes became
dis
cordant,
dis
ordered, they were held in the name of the sacrament, which bound the Christian community as nothing else could.

What was the Christian community? Christians thought of themselves as one society, sharing in baptism with their ‘even Christen’ throughout the world: Christendom. Though torn by war, faction, doctrinal dispute and family quarrels, Christendom was one. Or, Latin Christendom was one. The Church in Rome had long been divided from the Orthodox Church of Byzantium by deep questions of doctrine and authority, but hopes of reconciliation had never been abandoned. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 was a profound blow to the West. Moscow had become the ‘third Rome’, and Eastern Orthodoxy seemed infinitely distant. Founded in Christ, the Church in Rome which revealed His message, claimed to be ‘one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic’, universal and unitary, timeless. Catholic means universal, and for the West there was as yet no question about which Church should claim universality. The Christian community was defined by its membership of the Catholic Church. Since this was a militant, missionary faith, people everywhere, including Turks and Saracens, infidels, and the pagans in the New World might eventually be incorporated. Christendom, by its nature, could have no conceivable frontiers. Though the worlds of most people were bounded by the hills and fields of their horizons, still they knew that Jerusalem was the cradle of the faith and Rome its capital. Many must have dreamed of travelling there, and some did.

Greater than the community of the whole Christian world on earth was the community of the dead. The Christian community extended from this world to the next and included all those who had ever lived, the faithful departed. The souls of dead family and friends seemed to the living scarcely less real and needy than their own bodies. Between the living and dead an intricate passage existed of love and fear. The Mass was not only a service for the living, visible congregation, but for a ghostly company of the dead, still in search of eternal peace, for whose souls the living prayed. The saints were with God already, enjoying the everlasting peace of heaven. Some of this ‘blessed company’ were sanctified because, like the Apostles, they had been chosen by Christ Himself during His life; others because they wore a martyr’s crown; others because in their own lives they had transcended the frailties of
the human condition. They were friends of God, and friends, in turn, to the human race.

The damned – unrepentant and unconfessed, beyond help, human or divine – were consigned to hell after death. There they became servants of the Devil, the tyrant of hell, condemned eternally to suffer the torments which he and his evil spirits had prepared for them. Punishments were devised to mirror sins on earth. So John Mirk, writing in the early fifteenth century and still read a century later, warned that worms ceaselessly devoured those who ‘eat their even christen here in earth with false back biting’. Some had visions of hell. The visionary Nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, claimed to have watched the disputation of devils for the soul of Cardinal Wolsey. Infernal spirits were believed to have the power to rise from hell to tempt the living. The torments of the damned were terrifyingly portrayed in sermons and in the doom paintings above every chancel arch. Anyone foolish enough not to believe in the afterlife would discover in a terrible and irreversible way that hell was not a fable: so they were warned.

It was a defining belief of Christians of the later middle ages – a belief that the Church finally endorsed in the late thirteenth century – that a third other-worldly place existed beyond heaven and hell. This was purgatory, through which the sinful soul must pass on its journey to God. To the faithful in the later middle ages purgatory was real; they could even visit St Patrick’s Purgatory at Lough Derg in the north-west of Ireland, an outlet of purgatory on earth. Purgatory was a place of fire and torment, incessant pain and seemingly endless languishing, but also of profound hope and consolation, for the torment was not endless; the dark fire was a cleansing fire. Like hell in its pains, it was contrary to hell in its promise, for the soul freed from purgatory would at last see God. Only those without sin could escape purgatory, but anyone who felt the least penitent, even if not until their dying moment, could hope for a penitential stay in purgatory and for heaven at last. The greater the sins on earth and the greater the penance unperformed by the living, the longer the stay in purgatory; perhaps thousands of years, when every moment seemed endless there. The faithful should perform due penance while on earth, in the time of grace, for after death, the time of justice, penance for sins was harder; yet where they failed, their family and friends could work by intercession for the ultimate redemption of their souls.

The faithful believed and the Church taught that merit could be
transferred by the faithful on earth or the saints in heaven to those who were paying for their sins in purgatory. Kinship and fellowship did not end with death, nor were family boundaries circumscribed by mortality. ‘Your late acquaintance, kindred, spouses, companions, play fellows and friends’ had special claims, wrote Thomas More, but a duty in charity was owed to all Christian souls. The belief that the living could hasten the soul’s release from purgatory held late medieval Catholics in thrall, for would it not be unforgivably cruel to abandon souls who were suffering so dreadfully? ‘What heart were so hard… that it could sit in rest at supper or sleep in rest a bed, and let a man lie and burn?’ asked Thomas More’s imagined souls in his
Supplication of Souls
(1529). But they had found the old saying true: ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ Ghosts returned to describe the horrors, haunting not places but people, appearing to those who through allegiance of blood had a duty to obey their commands. So Shakespeare’s King Hamlet, murdered unshriven, ‘cut off even in the blossoms of my sin’, called upon his son to avenge him. Christians on earth owed a duty to their fellow Christians departed: to remember them in their prayers. Gravestones and memorial brasses bore messages adjuring passers-by ‘of your charity, pray for the souls of…’, as they would that others would do for them, later. To friends, people left rings inscribed: ‘Have pity on me’. The faithful prayed for their own dead, and they prayed for ‘all Christian souls’, those they did not know, on All Souls’ Day.

Most powerful of the intercessors between God and men was the transcendental society of the saints. Their intercession healed the breach between God and the fallen world. Jesus was the most eloquent advocate to His Father, and Mary, the first of the human race to be redeemed, had special influence. Heaven, it was popularly believed, was ordered like this world, with God as ruler, Christ as prince, Mary as queen, and the saints, like courtiers, acting as ‘holy patrons’ in the ‘blessed court of heaven’. The saints were figures of awe and power; powerful enough to atone for the sins that called down destructive forces in the natural world, to ward off the disasters that daily threatened their supplicants. They were believed to protect against fire, flood and disease; to bring travellers safely home, and to save them from shipwreck. Their aid was often invoked for reasons which hardly seem Christian, because the safety of votaries might depend on the destruction of enemies. So unhappy wives prayed to St Uncumber when they wished to be rid of their husbands. In 1487 Henry VII prayed before the image of Our Lady
at Walsingham to be delivered from his many enemies, and after his victory at Stoke sent the battle standard to her in thanks. Rulers prayed to the Virgin for victory in war; the poor prayed to her for daily favours and protection.

Stories of the saints’ holy lives, their spectacular torments and their miracles were told in the
Golden Legend
, translated by England’s first printer, William Caxton, in 1483, and reprinted often. Particular saints were believed to have particular powers: St Sebastian, because of his many wounds, protected against plague; St Barbara, killed by her angry father, protected against thunder and lightning and sudden death (she was the special patron of soldiers and gunpowder makers). As figures of transcendant power, saints could be angered and must be placated. Yet the tenor of the devotion to them was not fear, but love. At one time the saints had lived, as their votaries did now, on earth; ‘Wherefore’, wrote John Mirk, ‘they have compassion of us.’ The devout looked upon them as heavenly friends. One woman left money to edify the image of St John the Evangelist, ‘whom I have ever worshipped and loved’. Everyone venerated the Virgin, but from among so many, many saints each Catholic chose one specially to honour; a patron saint. Thomas More’s was St Thomas the Apostle, doubting Thomas, who did not believe until he saw the wounds of the resurrected Christ. Although honouring one saint privately, the faithful should honour them all; the Church enjoined them to do so on the feast of All Saints.

Saints were venerated through their images and at their shrines. Miracles were performed at shrines to reveal divine power to the faithful. In 1482, in Ireland, a figure of the Holy Cross removed itself to the shores of the lake of Baile-an-Chuillin, ‘and many wonders and miracles were wrought by it’. A miracle occurred in Cheapside in July 1507 when a girl was run over by a cart and lay lifeless; reviving, she said that the image of Our Lady at Barking had lifted up the cart. Pilgrims travelled to see St Cuthbert at Durham, St Thomas Becket at Canterbury and Our Lady at Walsingham and Ipswich. At the tomb of St John of Bridlington little silver ships were left as votive offerings by merchants who sought protection for their ships at sea. Wax and silver models of afflicted parts of the body – legs, hearts, hands, breasts – were presented at shrines in expectation of or thanksgiving for cures. Images of saints – painted pictures and carved statues, gilded and adorned – looked down protectively from altars, screens, walls and windows in every church. The saints were instantly recognizable by their symbols: St Anthony had his
pig, St Barbara her tower, and St Catherine her wheel. The holy was served by art, often works of numinous beauty, paid and cared for by parishioners. Images were dressed in gowns and wore little silver shoes which the faithful kissed. In public streets and private houses there were images to be daily reverenced. The rich had paintings and tapestries depicting saints’ lives; the poor, little wooden crucifixes and single-sheet woodcuts: rich or poor, the object of the devotion was the same.

Communion with the saints through contemplation of their images was, for late medieval Christians, central to the experience of the holy. Art might excite people to devotion more readily than words. For the illiterate, images were ‘poor men’s books’. Like sacraments, images represented higher spiritual truths. Believers gazing upon an image of the Virgin saw, in their mind’s eye, more than a statue; they saw Our Lady herself and found an intimate exchange. Defending images, Thomas More insisted that the simplest, most credulous believers could distinguish between the image and the saint it represented, just as they could tell the difference between a real rabbit and a painted one. Yet there was a danger that images might be considered holy and worshipped for themselves; that the believer would serve the image rather than the image the believer; that people would seek in them what should be sought from God alone. More himself had written wryly to his friend Desiderius Erasmus of the London women who prayed to the image of the Virgin by the Tower and imagined fondly that it smiled back at them.

The quintessential image of popular devotion was the rood, the figure of Christ crucified. High above the congregation in every church, between the people and the priest, was the great rood of Christ, with the Virgin and St John the Evangelist at either hand, to move the people to remembrance of the Passion as the priest celebrated the Mass. Some roods inspired particular devotion. In 1503 German de la Pole commended Sir Robert Plumpton to the ‘blessed Rood of Radburn, who save you in His blessed keeping’. With the advent of printing, images were made widely available as objects of devotion and prayer: the Image of Pity – Christ on the Cross as the Man of Sorrows – or of Our Lady of Pity – the Virgin at the foot of the Cross with her Son in her arms, surrounded by the instruments of the Passion. Some of these images promised devout beholders indulgences of release from tens of thousands of years of purgatorial suffering. To contemplate the Image of Pity, or a picture of the five wounds of Christ, was to think not only of divine love
but of divine judgement. At the Last Judgement, so it was believed, Christ would show His wounds: to the saved as promise of redemption and to the damned in reproach. Banners of the five wounds were carried on pilgrimage and became rallying standards for rebellions.

For all the impassioned devotion to Christ in His suffering, pitying humanity, the adoration of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, the new feasts and Masses popularly dedicated to the holy name of Jesus, to the five wounds, to the crown of thorns, it seemed as though His mercies were not available to the faithful without mediation. The incessant invocation of saints implies a belief that the sinner could never reach God without ceaseless intercession. All the intercessions of family and friends, on earth and in heaven, could never bring souls to God without the mediation of the Church. Belief in the redemptive power of Christ was central, but the pathway to salvation also led through the seven sacraments, obedience to the teachings of Holy Church and penitential good works. The authority of the Church was fundamental; authority which lay not only in the hierarchy of the Church but in the sources on which the faith rested. For Catholics, the foundation of faith was not only scripture but also the ‘unwritten verities’ which Christ had confided to the Apostles, the decrees of General Councils of the Church, the writings of the Church Fathers, the pronouncements of popes. These only the Church could interpret.