The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (16 page)

Their families dispersed, their own kin distant and incidental, most people looked to other fellowships, other communities, to assume the traditional obligations of kinship. From their neighbours, whom they chose as ‘trusty friends’ and ‘gossips’ (
godsibb
), they might find the support and loyalty which kin had once provided in some lost world. Neighbours were chosen as godparents, attended childbirths, baptisms, weddings, sickbeds and deathbeds; celebrated or commiserated at the rites of passage; were witnesses to wills, and trusted to look after widows and orphans. They lent each other implements and money, and acted as guarantors and sworn witnesses before the courts. In the ‘play called Corpus Christi’, at the trial of Mary and Joseph the summoner calls Mary’s neighbours to appear: Malkyn Milkduck, Lucy Liar, Fair Jane, Robin Red, Lettice Littletrust – the familiar world of late medieval neighbourhood. True, it was neighbours who usually brought the charges in the first place, for neighbourly relations often descended into quarrels and recriminations. Neighbours who were offended might – like the Wicked Fairy at the christening – curse. It was for violation of the duties owed by neighbours and in retaliation for some breach of charity that alleged witches performed acts of maleficence, the darkest example of malign neighbourly relations.

Even in the supposed anonymity of a great city neighbourly obligations were taken seriously. In London neighbourhoods loyalties could transcend the divisions between rich and poor and sustain friendships
between families who otherwise moved in different social spheres. People remembered poor neighbours in their own parishes in their wills; paupers whom they knew by name, like ‘John with the sore arm’. John Stow, London’s chronicler, recalled the great summer festivals of the 1530s, of his youth, when wealthy citizens set out tables with food and drink and invited their neighbours to ‘be merry with them in great familiarity’. Bonfires were lit; ‘
bon
fires’, according to Stow, because of the ‘good amity amongst neighbours’ they engendered. But Stow remembered this social unity half a century later with the nostalgia of one who thought it lost and hardly to be recovered.

Neighbourliness and fellowship were Christian ideals; the amity in Christ created by one faith and one communion. In the course of the sixteenth century the fellowship of the neighbourhood was subject to strains which eroded concord. Population increase and subsequent impoverishment undermined the obligations of the rich to the poor, whom they were less and less likely to know personally. Religious divisions fractured the community of faith. Yet the bonds of religious and social obligation were strong and often held people together during this century when divergences in faith and economic exigencies threatened to drive them apart. That ‘perfect love and charity’ necessary before anyone could receive the sacrament was not forgotten, however hard that amity was to achieve; neighbours might insist upon it, and priests exclude the rancorous and unforgiving until they were reconciled with the community. That community was not only the neighbourhood, but also, more formally, the parish.

England’s parishes, more than 8,000 of them, had been formed by 1300, as a result of people’s wish to worship together in small congregations close to their priest. This wish remained in the early sixteenth century, and people worshipped in their parishes by custom, by desire and by ecclesiastical sanction. Everyone was necessarily a member of a parish, with attendant duties and rights: duties to attend and maintain the church and to support the priest; and rights to spiritual consolation through the sacraments. Parishioners not only worshipped but celebrated together. At St Margaret Pattens in London there was a bowl used, not for sacred, but for festive occasions: it was inscribed on the outside, ‘Of God’s hand blessed be he that taketh this cup and drinketh to me,’ and on the inside, ‘God that sitteth in Trinity, send us peace and unity.’ Where there were disputes within a parish they were put into arbitration, or ‘daying’. Churchwardens’ accounts everywhere tell of
the determination of parishioners to beautify their churches; of the church ales, plays and shooting matches organized to finance the continuing rebuilding and adornment. This was a great period of church building; perhaps a sign of devotional vitality, but not necessarily. In Renaissance Rome a high point of building corresponded with a time of spiritual inanition.

In an ideal world mutual concern and charity among fellow parishioners, living and dying, would have been guaranteed. But the world was not ideal, and the community of the parish was formal, compulsory, its boundaries fixed – no longer the voluntary association of fellow Christians it had been at its origin. Seeking closer fellowship, people chose to join religious guilds both within and beyond their parishes. Brothers and sisters in these lay confraternities swore oaths to support their living fellows through friendship and charity, and their dead members through their prayers. Brothers and sisters could be incorporated after death in the guilds’ immemorial membership. Sisters in the guilds had – as almost nowhere else – more or less the same status as brothers. Religious guilds existed in their thousands in England, and were still being founded, a vital expression of late medieval religious life. In the early sixteenth century Londoners remembered over eighty guilds in half the parishes of the City in their wills. In Dublin at the same period there were at least eleven religious fraternities flourishing in the City and the county. The guild dedicated to St Anne in the parish of St Audoen, with its own chapel and chaplains, who celebrated daily at St Anne’s altar, and six singing-men, was the most important. This guild survived into the seventeenth century, a focus of intense Catholic devotion. In Gaelic Ireland, where the bonds of kinship were so strong, there were no religious guilds, no invented brotherhood.

What marked the confraternities as religious? In which ways were the lay brotherhoods spiritual? All the guilds maintained lights before the image of their patron saint upon their own altars; their members attended mass on their patronal festivals; some supported their own priest. The Christian imperatives of preventing sin and fostering virtue were paramount, and the guilds insisted upon moral probity in commercial relations between the brethren. In their rules the first avowed purpose was to live in charity; in some guilds this ideal was symbolized by the kiss of peace. Their duty was also to offer charity of another kind: the seven works of mercy towards their fellows, especially burial of the dead.

Some sought fraternity in a religious life more intense by far. The
monastic way of life, to which all religious orders were in some way assimilated, had been in existence for almost a millennium by the early sixteenth century. Men and women still chose to live as brothers and sisters in communities of witness, dedicated to God’s service. At his profession, a monk took vows of lifelong poverty, chastity and obedience to his abbot and his Rule. Regular canons lived by a Rule like monks, but one step less divorced from the rest of the world. The mendicant orders of friars – so called because they were originally meant to live by begging – followed Christ in their preaching and apostolic poverty. The formal commitment of the religious orders to a shared and regulated life forever separated them from both the laity and the secular clergy (priests). They were, above all, celebrants of divine service, and their penances and prayers might inspire the laity living beyond their walls. Their houses also offered alms to the poor and sheltered pilgrims and travellers. In England in 1500 there were perhaps 10,000 monks and 2,000 nuns, living in 900 religious communities. In Ireland, a generation later, there were about 140 monastic foundations and 200 mendicant communities.

Most of these communities had fallen far from the pursuit of Christian perfection which was the ideal of their founders. Few truly religious houses remained. Spiritual corporations had, over the centuries, become economic corporations. The religious houses were an integral part of society not only – or even – because of their penances and prayers, but because of their immense power as landlords. The religious had come to hold more wealth than they could easily control without prejudicing their spiritual life, and a pervasive secularism had entered the cloisters. In Ireland, the hereditary principle often prevailed in the succession to abbacies, in violation of the vow of chastity. The extravagant projects of building and adornment in Irish Cistercian houses cast some doubt upon their austere following of a Rule which insisted upon simplicity, though they suggest vitality of a kind. Great and flaunted wealth attracted envy and detraction. In England, their critics accused the ‘monkery’ of degeneracy, even of depravity, and suspected that their every vow was travestied and broken. When the testing time came it was a matter of record that many of the religious thought too much of the flesh they should have subdued; that their spiritual aspirations were lost to the claims of the world. For the most part, if they did no good, they at least did little harm, though that was shame enough.

Some in the religious houses did seek Christ and provided an inspiring example to the very end. In the Charterhouses, the monks followed their
Rule of cold austerity, silence, prayer. The Bridgettine foundation at Syon Abbey, established at Isleworth on the Thames in 1415, manifested a spirit of renewal. In England, the Observant Franciscans revitalized the religious life of their order by reinstating the Rule from which it had fallen. There were six houses for Observants in the early sixteenth century. In Ireland, the spirit of reform touched three of the four mendicant orders and the friars’ fervour and moral authority gave them a powerful influence among the laity. True, the reform movement in Irish religious orders was partly an assertion of their freedom from being controlled from the English province, and a protest of Gaelic communities against Anglo-Irish ownership, but the spiritual inspiration was plain. That many of the religious orders were exempt from the hierarchical jurisdiction of the Church, and directly under papal authority, came to threaten them.

The
Lay Folks’ Mass Book
urged each attender at Mass to pray:

Loving enemies and outcasts was hardest of all. All the communities of household, religious fraternity, craft fellowship, neighbourhood and parish still left some, perhaps many, excluded. Brotherhood, it has been well said, implies otherhood. Personal disasters and social stresses left many stranded and outcast. For some, the rejection was of choice. Christendom might be spurned not only by infidels, but by those who doubted the faith of their ‘even christen’ and thought their own faith invalidated theirs. These were the heretics.

The poor are with us always, but at some times more evidently than at others. The Tudor century saw a terrible growth of impoverishment. A huge population rise from the early century; agricultural transformations; and the operation of the land market in favour of the aggrandizing, left many homeless, landless, destitute. Even in what passed for good times there was never enough work to go around; what work there was was seasonal and increasingly badly paid, and the poor were often driven on to the road to look for it. In bad times those who lived on the edge
of subsistence were especially vulnerable. Failing harvests drove up prices beyond the ability of the poor to buy, and destitution followed. At times the desperation of the poor cried out. At a dole of bread in Southwark in 1533 there was such a press of people that four men, two women and a boy were crushed to death. Some in their terrible poverty abandoned their children in the doorways of the rich. In the 1550s Londoners remembered foundlings in their wills, and sometimes bequeathed them in turn: ‘My little child William, whom I keep of alms, I give as freely as he was given me.’

Time was when the poor had been seen as somehow blessed, as Christ’s own image. But when the poor became so many that they confronted the rich on every street corner, covered with sores and begging with menaces, it became harder to see them as beatified. The destitute in towns, especially in London, did not keep a decent distance in ghettoes and out-parishes: rich and poor lived side by side, the rich in great houses on main thoroughfares, the poor in side alleys and lanes behind. A harsher doctrine began to prevail towards charity and the poor, and some recalled St Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians: ‘If there were any that would not work, that the same should not eat.’ There was increasing discrimination, in law and popular attitude, between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, the ‘able-bodied’ and the ‘impotent’; between those who wished to work but could not, and those who could work but would not. It was a long time before the authorities acknowledged that there was insufficient work to go around. The ‘sturdy [and] mighty vagabond’ was increasingly seen as a threat to the commonwealth rather than part of it.