The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (17 page)

A society which sought stability and order, which believed that every man must have a master, found a danger in the increasing number of utterly transient, rootless human flotsam; a danger which lay in their mutability and masterlessness. Parliament had first made masterlessness a crime in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the vagrant poor could be arrested not because of any action, not because they had committed any crime, but simply for being masterless and adrift from their family, members of no settled household, nor likely to be. Very many of the vagrant poor were young, not only because most of the population was young, but because this time of life was most insecure. Orphans and abandoned children were often left to wander the streets, unmarried servants who became pregnant (often enough by their masters) were cast out of the household, and passed from one
parish to the next which did not wish to shelter them. Derelicts gave their last trouble to society by dying in the streets. The authorities feared that there were ‘fraternities’ of vagabonds, conspiring to cause trouble. Not so; a few vagrants might band together for safety and mutual support, but companies of travellers were rare.

The worst desolation was not poverty or the recourses it led to – begging, prostitution, and crime – but the mental desolation of despair. Suicide was a kind of murder, a felony in criminal law and a desperate sin in the eyes of the Church. Suicides were tried posthumously by a coroner’s jury and, if convicted of self-murder, their goods were forfeit and they were denied Christian burial, instead being buried with macabre and profane ceremonies. For these reasons, evidence of suicide must often have been covered up. Yet in May 1532 there were fourteen suicides in London, by hanging or drowning, at the time that a traumatic assault on the liberties of the Church caused Thomas More to resign his office. Thomas More thought often upon suicide, and wrote in one of his last works of the ‘very special holy man’ tempted by the Devil to imagine that it was God’s will that he should destroy himself, and thereby go straight to heaven. But suicide was the ultimate act of religious defiance, a sin for which there could be no penitence, for the sinner would be dead.

Those who committed terrible sins and were impenitent were excommunicated, cast out from the Church and the communion of the faithful. ‘First we accurse all them that break the peace of Holy Church’; so went the curse of major excommunication pronounced quarterly by the parish priest. People who were cursed were denied sacramental grace, and the solemnity of the anathema was marked by the ringing of bells and the extinction of candles. In 1535 a curse was pronounced against Thomas Fitzgerald and his adherents for a terrible sin: the murder of John Alen, Archbishop of Dublin. It called on God to strike them with fire and sulphur, hunger, thirst, leprosy, madness.

And yet, divine forgiveness and salvation at last awaited even the worst sinners, if penitent. The curse ended with the hope that ‘Jesu Christ, of His infinite mercy, may call them to the grace of repentance.’

THE CHALLENGE TO THE CHURCH

Anyone who wilfully denied cardinal doctrines of the Catholic faith, and persisted in error, might be burnt at the stake as a heretic. This was the punishment for society’s worst enemy. People bringing faggots to the heretic’s fire were promised forty days of pardon from the otherworldly fires of purgatory. The burnings were terrible, but they were very rare: so they were meant to be, and had been, at least during the century since the penalty of burning for heresy had been instituted in 1401, and after heretics and rebels in Sir John Oldcastle’s abortive rising of 1414 had attempted no less than the dispossession of the Church and the capture of the King. As the darkest of sins, heresy threatened to call down the vengeance of God not only on the heretics but also upon the society which harboured them. Long before, in the reign of King John, when England had fallen under papal interdict, it was said that the corn had failed and neither grass nor fruit would grow. If England were ever cut off from Catholic Christendom again because of the will of a king, or if heretics became too many to be cast out, natural disorder would return. In 1532 Sir Thomas More thought that that time had come, and prophesied that God would withdraw His grace and let all run to ruin.

There were heretics within the community when Henry VII’s reign began, but they were few and, for the most part, hidden. The history of heresy is often inseparable from the history of persecution. Heretical enclaves were discovered only when the authorities sought and found them; the nature of their dissent revealed only in the light of the questions which the persecutors asked. Only the Church, which had been disobeyed, could define what was heresy, judge and condemn it. The heretics who were discovered were usually those who scandalized their
neighbours and offended against the ethics of the society in which they lived; those who held their heresies in private and lived obscure were likely to remain safe, unknown to the persecutors and to posterity. No single and adamantine code of heretical belief existed in England at the end of the middle ages. There were individual dissidents, with beliefs so deviant that they alone held them. There were also distinct heretical communities of men and women with their own creed, tradition, martyrs and code of behaviour; a sect which recognized itself as marked by special providences. To their enemies they were the Lollards; to themselves, the ‘privy’ or ‘known’ men and women; known, that is, to themselves, but, they hoped, not to others, for they kept their faith in secret, hiding from persecution.

Lollardy was first inspired by the ideas and ideals of John Wyclif at the end of the fourteenth century, but the movement was the creation of Wyclif’s early disciples as much as of Wyclif himself. Those ideas had been transmuted in the dissemination of them: Wyclif’s more subtle teachings upon the theology of the Eucharist were simplified as they were promulgated beyond the Oxford Schools to the wider community, and his more philosophical ideas upon predestination and dominion were gradually diluted. Wyclif’s argument that no one – priest or layman, king or peasant – whilst in a state of mortal sin had true dominion over anything, either inanimate object or animate nature, had radical implications: the clergy, if not in a state of grace, could lawfully be deprived of their endowments. Wyclif had looked to the Crown and nobility to reform the Church, but the spectacular ambition and failure of the Lollard armies under Sir John Oldcastle in 1414 had cost them any chance of support from the political orders or of conciliation with Church or Crown. Throughout the fifteenth century, the ‘known men and women’ had sustained their faith in secret, guarding their treasured manuscript copies of the Bible in John Purvey’s translation and of Wycliffite texts, but they were leaderless, and without theological guidance to ensure spiritual orthodoxy and regeneration. By the mid fifteenth century the Church was pleased to believe that the heresy had almost disappeared. But it had not. There were sufficient signs of Lollardy’s revival by the early sixteenth century for the prelates to begin to hunt for it again, and to find it. They discovered remarkable continuities in the Lollard communities and their beliefs.

Lollardy was a faith practised in households, not in churches. Lollards believed that theirs was the true Church, they God’s ‘children of
salvation’, and that the Catholic Church was the Church of Antichrist, the Devil’s Church. Usually, they conformed superficially within their communities, often attending their parish churches in order to evade suspicion. Salisbury heretics admitted in 1499 that they received the holy sacrament, not because of their belief in it, but because of ‘dread of the people’ and of the danger if they did not do ‘as other Christian people did’. Yet they saw themselves as set apart from ‘other Christians’. Was it true, asked Church officials in 1521, who were in the dark about this closed world, that Lollards only married other Lollards? Sometimes it was. Bound as well by ties of kinship and friendship as by their common faith, the Lollards sustained each other, a fraternity of an heretical kind. Lollard masters took Lollard apprentices and servants; Lollard children were brought up in the faith; Lollard widows remarried other Lollards. Lollard families protected the missionaries who travelled between the communities, and sheltered fugitives from the authorities.

Radical sectaries of the later middle ages were usually of artisan status, and so most Lollards were. In 1523 a disgruntled curate complained, ‘These weavers and millers be naughty fellows and heretics many of you.’ Yet not all were artisans, nor were they poor. The discovery of Lollards in higher ranks of society made the revival of the heresy the more alarming. In 1514 the Bishop of London’s summoner claimed that he could take his master to heretics in London who were each worth a thousand pounds. Fellowship in the faith might transcend the usual barriers between rich and poor. Robert Benet, an illiterate Lollard water-carrier, found shelter during the battle at Blackheath in 1497 at the house of John Barret, a goldsmith of Cheapside and Merchant of the Staple at Calais, one of the richest men in the City. In the Lollard enclave in the Chilterns ‘known men’ held respected positions within their communities. When the bishops began to look for them once more, the Lollards still congregated where they had always been before: in London, Essex, Kent, Coventry, Bristol, in the Chilterns, and through the Thames Valley from Newbury in Berkshire to Burford in the Cotswolds.

Lollards met together in order to read the scriptures. The Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament, in English, were their inspiration and the fount of their faith. It was the Lollard preoccupation with vernacular scripture which had outlawed the English Bible, not only to them, but to all others, since Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409. Reading the Bible aloud and evangelizing the Christian message was the purpose of any Lollard assembly, and if some, perhaps most, were illiterate, it
hardly mattered, for those who could not read could listen. This was a society used to committing words to memory. Lollards became deeply versed in the texts. Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Blake, the daughter of a Lollard living by St Anthony’s school in London, knew by heart and could recite the Epistles and Gospels. Wyclif’s belief in the priesthood of all believers was made reality as they expounded the Word without priests to enlighten them.

Knowledge of scripture was the rule of faith. Their texts sustained their movement. Robert Benet, the poor water-carrier, had already been detected for his heresy in 1496, but in 1504 he sold his looms and shears in order to buy a copy of the Four Evangelists. He could not read it, but kept it safe in his belt, and Thomas Capon, the stationer who sold it to him, taught him its truths. Joan Austy brought a copy of
Wyclif’s Wicket
with her when she remarried, as a Lollard dowry. Her first husband had entrusted this treasure to her on his deathbed. The texts were passed around, and read secretly, by night. Possessing them was dangerous. The disciples of Thomas Denys, a Lollard teacher, were forced to watch his burning in 1513, and to throw their books into the fire to burn with him. For the Lollards, as for their spiritual heirs, the puritans, to hear the Word of God was a kind of sacrament. John Whitehorn, rector of Letcombe Basset, who was burnt at Abingdon in 1508 for his heretical ministry, taught that ‘whosoever receive devoutly God’s Word, he receiveth the very body of Christ’. Asking, did not St John’s Gospel begin: ‘The word is God, and God is the Word’? he echoed Wyclif’s identification of Christ with scripture. John Pykas, a Colchester baker, converted by his Lollard mother, avowed in 1527 that ‘God is in the Word and the Word is God’.

A theological chasm opened between committed Lollards and their Catholic neighbours. Lollards thought Catholic devotion was superstition; Catholic veneration, idolatry. What Catholics held holiest, they denied, even derided. For their views on the Mass, above all, Lollards were persecuted, for here many of them were guilty of the gravest heresy of all: they doubted the miracle of transubstantiation. Though Wyclif himself had believed in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, many of his later followers, ignoring or misunderstanding his subtleties, rejected the central mystery. They asked how Christ, one and indivisible, could be at once on earth with mankind and in heaven with His Father; how Our Lord’s body could be made by corrupt priests. They maintained that the Eucharist was a memorial, commemorative event; that the bread and
wine were only figures of Christ; that priests could not make their Maker. Thomas Denys died for saying that the Eucharist was not ‘The very body of Christ, but a commemoration of Christ’s passion, and Christ’s body in a figure and not the very body’. Denying the sanctity of the Mass themselves, they would impugn its power to others. As he came from Mass at the Grey Friars in 1520, Rivelay, a Londoner, said that he had just seen his Lord God in form of bread and wine over the priest’s head. But John Southwick protested that it was only a figure of Christ. Lollards believed that to worship the consecrated Host was idolatry, as was the veneration of images and crucifixes, for the Commandments forbade the making of graven images. The Lollards were the first, but not the last, of English reformers to insist that God did not dwell in temples built with hands.