The English Historical Review Advance Access originally published online on April 28, 2009
The English Historical Review 2009 CXXIV(508):697-701; doi:10.1093/ehr/cep131
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© Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved.
The Plain Man's Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640
Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700
University of Edinburgh
The Plain Man's Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640, by Christopher Haigh (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2007; pp. 284. £26).
Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700, by Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2007; pp. xviii + 396. £75).
These works are the fruits of decades of painstaking research by three of the most experienced and innovative scholars of early modern church history. In his preface Christopher Haigh tells us how he spent more than twenty years accumulating material on parish religion and parish relationships from more than 700 court and visitation books in three national and twelve local archives. Similarly, Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke have each spent more than ten years examining the fabrics, fixtures, fittings and drawings of churches of the early modern period, as well as the relevant records of central government, diocesan records, churchwardens’ accounts and vestry minute books, personal papers and wills, and polemical works. To some extent the two volumes represent changes of style or focus for their respective authors. Haigh says he wished to turn his back on his reputation as ‘a middle-aged Turk’ by writing a ‘grown-up book’ driven by archives rather than controversy. Fincham and Tyacke here complete the process of applying their initial expertise in the early Stuart period to the wider period from the accession of Edward VI to the end of the seventeenth century, and also shift from the polemical and pastoral aspects of church life to parish worship.
The resulting works are both contrasting and complementary. Haigh's focus is very much on searching for the ‘voices of ordinary people talking about their religion and that of others’, and to achieve national coverage he ranges from Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire to Leicestershire, Essex and Sussex. Fincham and Tyacke also seek to examine the experience of the ordinary parishioner, but initially from a top-down perspective, by combining ‘a macrocosmic view of national developments with the micro-history of change in the parishes’ (p. 1). Haigh's approach is largely thematic: he structures his account around the attitudes of five contemporary stereotypes taken from Arthur Dent's The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven (1601) and George Gifford's A Dialogue between a Papist and a Protestant (1582): ‘a divine’, ‘an ignorant man’, ‘an honest man’, ‘a caviller’ and ‘a papist’. Fincham and Tyacke organise their monograph around the two attacks on ‘altars’, in the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, and their ‘restoration’ in the 1630s and from the 1660s, but also seek to integrate three narratives on the changing face of English worship: those of ‘theological debate, church politics and government, [and] parish practice and belief’ (p. 1).
Both of these projects pose problems of methodology. Haigh is aware that he might be accused of having cherry-picked his examples to fit a set of stereotypes, but insists that he ‘honestly tried to follow the Eltonian precept: work through the archive, and then see what it means’ (p. vi). He had not thought of using the Dent and Gifford characters until invited to give the Wiles Lectures at Queen's University Belfast in 2005, and then found that the documentary materials he had already selected frequently fitted and illuminated the typology in the dialogues. He was also aware that previous studies of ‘popular religion’ had been based either on what the educated élite claimed the common people thought, on wills or cheap print, or on detailed reconstructions of the religious life of individual parishes or believers, in which each phrase and action could be carefully contextualised. But the trustworthiness of the first three of these approaches is open to question, and the number of highly specific studies remains tiny. So Haigh feels that there is space for a broad-brush approach using thousands of examples from many areas, in which one could reasonably expect the biases and oddities which underlay specific cases to be cancelled out, and the clusters of phrases which are found both in printed dialogues and manuscript courtbooks to indicate a general pattern. Not everyone will like this approach, but it touches far more bases than most other studies on offer.
Fincham and Tyacke faced different problems. The pre-Reformation altar was certainly the focus of a wide range of Catholic devotions and Protestant suspicions, as Eamon Duffy indicated in the title of his book on the demise of ‘traditional religion in England’: The Stripping of the Altars (1992; rev. ante, cix [1994], 111–14). But it was by no means the only such focus, in that a number of other rituals, customs, fittings and fixtures survived the first wave of reformation and iconoclasm or metamorphosed into Protestant equivalents. Secondly, the Protestant substitutes for the altar—the ‘holy table’ or ‘communion table’—and for the mass—the ‘Lord's Supper’ or ‘Holy Communion’—raised a number of related questions. Of what materials should the table be made? Where should it be positioned? What should or should not be placed on it? Should it be railed off? Should recipients kneel, sit or stand to receive the elements, and be given wafer or white bread? Thirdly, there was clearly a growing variety of opinions on these matters, at court, in cathedrals and richer urban churches, and among some of the nobility and gentry whose arrangements never conformed to the Edwardian ideal; and later there would be disputes not just between ‘godly’ and conformists, but also between leading episcopalians such as Williams and Laud. Fourthly, the survival of relevant sources is very uneven: much more is extant on the relatively short periods of active conflict and polemic than on the period 1558 to 1625, and on those churches where change produced confrontation as opposed to a reaction which left few or no traces in the sources, such as partial or periodic co-operation. Fincham and Tyacke respond to these challenges by deploying a most impressive range of sources from different areas and periods, by treating a much wider range of fixtures and fittings than their title implies, including crosses, candles, communion plate, organs, fonts, glass, wall paintings, and carved pews, and by carefully teasing out the different strands of the contemporary debate.
Haigh's monograph covers a wide range of topics, and at each point enhances our understanding or gives a summary of current scholarship with a new twist, for example, on the genre of printed dialogues, the shortcomings and strengths of church court operations, the tensions between the clergy's perceptions of their duty (such as preaching the need for repentance and catechising) and lay expectations of their minister (pastoral care and peace-making), and the shifts in attitudes of those who followed different pathways between the 1560s and the 1630s. He is aware that his literary sources approach piety from a ‘godly’ rather than a mainstream perspective, and readily concedes (p. 13) that there were more than four or five ‘kinds of Christianity’ in early modern England: the faiths of John Taylor the ‘Water-Poet’ or, at a different level, John Donne or Viscount Falkland, for example, do not fit neatly into Dent's stereotypes. He is also aware that his record sources are loaded towards complaints at the misbehaviour of those, both clerical and lay, who persistently failed to meet generally accepted standards, rather than towards the positive achievements of Protestant indoctrination. But he compensates for these gaps by holding up a mirror to those complaints to suggest that positive or supportive opinions were probably held by many, perhaps a majority of early modern parishioners. Such men and women still wanted to be part of a Christian community, and came to accept the need to abandon some traditional practices and undergo some parish discipline, and for the young to be catechised. They came to like hearing the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer read, and expected the minister to preach a sermon, even if they slept through part of it or had ambivalent feelings about his superior education and rising status. There was latent antagonism and some name-calling between this majority and minorities such as the ‘godly’, the profane, and recusants who pursued different pathways, but only in special circumstances did the normal pattern of civil co-existence break down.
In Altars Restored Fincham and Tyacke begin with the Edwardian demolition of altars, altar steps, crucifixes and other furnishings, and a new doctrine of the sacraments which is taken to be in line with Diarmaid MacCulloch's ‘Strasburg–St Gall axis’. The period from 1560 to 1625 is then presented as a triumph for this ‘Edwardian legacy’, as opposed to the conservative imagery and ceremonialism of Elizabeth's chapel royal and the cathedrals. From as early as the 1570s and especially from the 1590s to the 1630s, however, Elizabeth's lead was followed by some clergy and laity, though their views have to be set in the wider context of ‘a significant revival of church restoration and refurbishing, which commanded broad support among different protestant groups’ (p. 4). The fullest chapters, Five and Six, are on the innovations of Laud and his allies in the late 1620s and 1630s, which are seen as twofold. First, there was an insistence on uniformity, with the table being placed ‘altarwise’, aligned north-south and railed off at the east end of the church—a position ‘probably’ adopted in ‘most’ parishes by 1640 (p. 210)—and with the laity (preferably) receiving at the rails. Secondly, encouragement was given to more ornate settings for worship and elaborate ritualism in those churches and chapels where the relevant parties wanted, and could afford, them. Historians have, we are assured, ‘often exaggerated the unpopularity of Laudianism’: many of the laity were sympathetic to the concept of the ‘beauty of holiness’, and many MPs in the Short Parliament were not opposed to an altarwise table so much as to the act of ‘bowing’ towards it. Although during the 1640s many sets of rails and recently-added ornaments were destroyed (just how many is not recorded) after the Restoration, there was first a cautious revival and then a widespread acceptance of the ‘railed altar’, as there was also of religious imagery, ritualism and music. In another piece of revisionism, these developments are here treated as the completion of the interrupted ‘Laudian’ programme of the 1630s.
This represents a much broader, more sophisticated and on the whole persuasive account than older studies on this subject, and certainly sets a benchmark for scholars who are currently working on other ways in which Protestantism impinged on parish—through regular sermons, a vernacular Bible and liturgy, new forms of ritual and church music, and new attitudes towards life after death—and their physical expression in elaborately carved pulpits, decorated texts on walls, striking gentry monuments and enlarged rings of bells. But some questions remain hard to answer. How many medieval altars actually were removed under Edward? Was the 1559 injunction which insisted on the communion table being moved regularly to one side between communion services ever seriously enforced, or was there the usual diversity of practice found in many aspects of early modern parish life and worship? What was the posture normally adopted by those receiving communion? Exactly how were the polemical works of a highly educated élite or the idea of cathedrals acting as models for parish churches communicated to parishioners scattered across nearly nine thousand parishes, and with what success, given that many of those parishioners (as David Cressy, Martin Ingram, Chris Marsh, and now Christopher Haigh have suggested) seem to have developed their own idiosyncratic views of Protestantism? At what point and why did the ‘broad support’ for church restoration and refurbishing of the early Stuart period come to endorse railed altars?
Other queries are more matters of interpretation. Why use the loaded term ‘altar’, abhorred by the ‘godly’ and made familiar by later High Church usage, when the term ‘communion table’ was normally used by contemporaries, including the authors of the 1640 canons who also continued to deny that the rails had any religious significance? And why insist on the post-1660 programme being ‘Laudian’ when, by the authors’ own account, from the 1570s a growing variety of Protestants, including moderate ‘Calvinists’ like Robert Aylett, non-Laudian bishops such as Williams, and non-Calvinist gentry such as Edward Hyde, had been drawn towards changes which would ensure greater decency in church worship, and the post-1660 model of ‘beauty of holiness’ was in many rural parishes much simpler than Laud's ideal? Restoration churchmen and laymen who pursued a piety which combined prayer, sermon and sacrament may have agreed with a number of Laud's initiatives, but this did not make them card-carrying, clericalist ‘Laudians’. Indeed, a distinctive and perhaps crucial element of his programme—enforcement—was, as the authors concede, largely lacking after 1660.
Every library and serious scholar with interests in the early modern period will wish to possess both of these works, not merely as highly useful works of reference, but also in Haigh's case for the most subtle typology and interpretation of lay religiosity between Reformation and Civil War we yet have, and in Fincham and Tyacke's for their wide-ranging and astute, if occasionally provocative, conclusions.
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