Eamon   Duffy

THE  VOICES  OF  MOREBATH:

REFORMATION AND REBELLION
IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE

       
        New Haven. Yale University Press. 2003. 260 pp. paperback
       
        ISBN-10: 0300098251

reviewed by Patrick Killough


(1) biblio.com  01/13/2011

Would you recommend this book to other readers? * * * * *   YES

review:

Eamon Duffy in his 2001 THE VOICES OF MOREBATH: REFORMATION AND REBELLION IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE has written another valuable Tudor history but one notably difficult and knotty for non-specialists to read. Would that some kind soul might condense, reorganize it and reissue it as MOREBATH FOR DUMMIES!

Were I that editor, I would retain unchanged 

(1) its two maps on one page of the maps of  southwestern-most 16th Century England;

(2) its 12 pages of colored photos;

(3) the reproduced woodcuts adorning each of its seven chapters;

(4) its list of all parish wardens of Morebath 1520 - 1575;

(5) its ample bibliography and finally

(6) the book's end notes.

I would retain (while drastically shortening text) the substance of the following elements:

(1) biography of MOREBATH's hero, its parish priest for 54 years (1520 - 1574) Sir (instead of today's "Father") Christopher Trychay (1490? - 1574);

(2) highlights of the religious innovations of any and all five Tudor monarchs; 

(3) the author's conclusions (without detailed appeal to scholarly underpinnings) of how Tudor religious innovations impacted the parish of Saint George in Morebath; and finally

(4) Eamon Duffy's general conclusions on the mechanics through which Christianity in England survived and adapted itself to the demands of the increasingly centralized, always at war secularizing, modernizing Tudor state.

In THE VOICES OF MOREBATH we meet the Vicar of Saint George's Church and year after year those more active lay parishioners who divided themselves into custodians and collectors of various funds aimed at parish projects. Surprisingly, there were elected representatives of both woman and "maidens" as well as young men and others. We see sheep as the basis of parish revenues and prosperity. We also see lay people with minds of their own knuckling under for five decades to pressure and/or advice from pastor, bishops and King in Parliament. 

Duffy's argument is that the Reformation in England was top-down, imposed on a lay population overwhelmingly content with inherited Latin-language, Saints venerating worship. (Scotland was just the opposite, a popular anti-Catholic movement opposing the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots).

Read THE VOICES OF MOREBATH for its maps, illustrations and sweeping, insightful generalizations. The price you pay is the effort of cutting though a thick kernel of scholarship. -OOO-


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(2) lunch.com  01/14/2011

name of review: Who Stole Saint Sidwell's Silver Shoes?

rating: * * * *

review:

There are four striking things about THE VOICES OF MOREBATH: REFORMATION AND REBELLION IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE, Eamon Duffy's history of the Reformation in southwestern England. Three of them you will like.  

The good news about this religious history of one Tudor village in Devon from 1520 - 1575 is
-- (1) There are two excellent maps of the three southwestern counties of England where most action takes place. These maps are fleshed out by a dozen color photographs of both places, buildings and a key manuscript source, and by many reproductions of wood cut illustrations from the times.

-- (2) The general English history and its lesson or moral is important: the coerced replacement of a thousand years of Latin-based, Saint-venerating, pro-Papal Christianity by a uniquely English form of Protestant reform.

-- (3) Duffy's  THE VOICES OF MOREBATH cries out for film versions. I can see a History Channel classic emerging. I can also see a BBC three or four hour miniseries fictionalized version which will sweep the boards for prizes.

The bad news is
-- (4) The book is too scholarly to be popular. The scholarship is minute and at times nit-picking, at others self-congratulatory.

There is little to add about (1) outstanding maps and illustrations except to note the book's cover as well. It shows a fragment of a 1558 (?) oil painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, called The Alchemist. Very well chosen to suggest life in a village resembling Morebath.

Point (2): the coerced, top-down coming of the Christian Reformation to England.

The first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, was a thoroughly orthodox, conservative Latin Catholic. Had his first son Prince Arthur lived to be king and produce a male heir with his Spanish Queen Catherine, England might conceivably have never gone Protestant.

In England, religious change came from the top: the secular top, the Monarch. Henry VIII was radical when his wife was radical (e.g. #2, Anne Boleyn) and conservative when his wife was conservative (e.g., #4, Anne's cousin, Catherine Howard). The pace of Reformation became frantic under the boy king Edward's Regency Council, was reversed (re-Catholicized) for five years (1553-58) under Mary I, and finally successfully re-Protestantized (1558 - 1603) by the third grandchild of Henry VII to rule, Elizabeth I.

This provides the general backdrop to THE VOICES OF MOREBATH.

"This is a book about a sixteenth-century country priest, and the extraordinary records he kept" (Preface).

Point (3): THE VOICES OF MOREBATH cries out to be filmed. Its central character is Christopher Trychay (pronounced Trickey, rhymes with Dicky). He was born about 1490, ordained a Catholic priest in 1515 and was appointed the parish priest (vicar) of Saint George's church in tiny Morebath in Devon in 1520. He remained pastor until his death 54 years later in 1574.

As a non-university but educated secular priest he was dubbed Dominus in Latin and "Sir" (not Father) in English. For 54 years Sir Christopher Trychay recorded in Latin and English and probably read aloud to the 100 or so members of his parish details of parish income and outgo.

From those ostensibly dull notes and accounts, author Eamon Duffy has reconstructed five decades of parish life and insights into the lives and occupations of the handful of families of Saint George's parish Church. In 1520 there were twelve sets of elected parish lay officials including four representatives of women and maidens (girls 12 years and over) and two for young men. Lay officials managed a number of small "stores" or accounts used to adorn or maintain the parish church. Young Men were especially important for their annual "ales," fund raising banquets heavily suppressed under Edward VI but later revived as indispensable money makers.

Let Duffy's treatment of an incident from the parish cult of Saxon Saint Sidwell or Sancta Saviona give some flavor of the book's movie potential.

The saint was a young girl murdered by her step-mother. Her tomb was outside the east gate of Exeter, Devon's capital, 25 miles south of Morebath, near the English Channel. Her local cult was introduced to Saint George's when Sir Christopher became pastor in 1520. Years later a local widow donated her silver wedding ring to be melted down to make shoes for the Saint's statue on a side altar in the church. Later yet, on a cold winter's night, a thief broke in and stole the shoes and other valuables. He was never caught, but as Sir Christopher recorded, he left his light making flint-box behind.

Under Edward VI veneration of saints was painfully forbidden. During re-Protestantizing Elizabeth's realm, however, Sir Christopher boldly baptized two girls by his beloved saint's name: Sidwell Webber (1559) and Sidwell Hill (1570). Old habits of popular religion were rooted out only by extreme coercion from the centralizing, conformity-demanding Tudor state.

We have details and names of many local families over several generations: illegitimate births, controversies, negotiations over farming out sheep, tending bees and coming to terms with ever changing theological and political realities. There is more than one great film in there somewhere.

(4) The scholarship: could have been done, I think, in a separate volume with most footnotes, too, shifted out of THE VOICES OF MOREBATH. Much ink is spilled on the state of the 16th century hand-written financial accounts written by Sir Christopher Trychay, the accidents that preserved the text, unique in its detail and continuity in Western Europe, and the sloppy work of early scholars and editors. Eamon Duffy is particularly proud of his own discovery of a golden needle in a messy manuscript.

Let this give you a flavor of the self-congratulatory scholarship that will not win many non-specialist, non-antiquarian readers. In the summer of 1549 conservative popular religious risings against the Regency took place, with a demand to return to the moderate reforms of the last days of King Henry VIII. Eamon Duffy argues in Chapter Six that he has found proof in the church records that Saint George's parish paid for five young men to join the rebels "at their goying forthe to sent davys down ys campe." That is what the manuscript says. An earlier transcriber had, however erred, by writing "sent denys down." The correct "sent davys down ys campe" in modern English says "Saint David's Down's camp." That was a rebel camp at Saint David's Down besieging the loyal county capital of Exeter. No one before Eamon Duffy had realized the import of these words: the parish priest officially recorded for posterity his parish's support of a failed rebellion.

I am sorry, but I don't think that the heart of one reader in a thousand will beat the faster for Duffy's antiquarian triumph. I am glad that he made his discovery. It is not trivial. It has been widely accepted by his scholarly peers. It is probably too late for a Reader's Digest condensed version of Duffy's history or for a written THE VOICES OF MOREBATH FOR DUMMIES. But the films I foresee coming will surely spare us such minutiae of scholarship!

-OOO-.  

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(3) bn.com  01/14/2011

title of review: The Reformation in England demoted statues of saints to mere furniture

rating: * * * *

review:

Posted 01/14/11:

Eamon Duffy's THE VOICES OF MOREBATH: REFORMATION AND REBELLION IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE is a handsome book. Display it on a coffee table and invite guests to admire its cover dating from a 1558 sketch of village life by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. If guests are unfamiliar with southwestern English counties, two maps fill that gap. Twelve colored photographs and numerous reproductions of 16th Century black and white prints elegantly set off this book's rich scholarship and historical overviews.

In a few words: from the mid 1530s until the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, with some backsliding under Queen Mary I, England moved inexorably, painfully, coercedly from allegiance to the Universal Church and to the Pope in Rome to become the largest and most powerful Protestant power in Europe.

Eamon Duffy builds his narrative around 54 years of account books written by the pastor (vicar) of Saint George's parish in tiny Morebath. The town of 30+ farm households was in Devon, 25 miles north of county seat Exeter, but also only two miles west of Somerset county. With Somerset and Cornwall to the west, Devon was one of the most conservative, un-innovative parts of the Tudor realm. Had Henry VIII and two of his offspring (Edward VI and Elizabeth I) not compelled them to become Protestants they would not have shifted their loyalties.

Duffy, focusing on the tiny sheep-grazing village of Morebath, shows us pre-Reformation and early Reformation rural England. Its parish was the center of community life. Every year 12 officials, including "maidens," women, young men and others were elected to administer various funds (called "stores') for upkeep and adornment of the church. Revenues came in from sheep and wool cloth, pigs, cattle, bees, banquet fund-raisers called "ales" and not much else.

Long before the end of the reign of the iconoclastic boy king Edward VI, the church of Saint George was a shell, a shadow of its former self. Gone were the beeswax candles before saints' statues, donated rosaries and altar cloths, even a great crucifix. Throughout England and well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth vocations to the priesthood plummeted. The Crown increasingly converted the old parish structures into secular engines to raise money for wars with Scotland, France and Spain.

In Morebath the Maidens store and other instruments of lay involvement in the parish had lost their reason for being even before the death of slowly moderating King Henry in 1547.

"This petering out of the Maiden store, not with a bang but a whimper, is symptomatic of a process of cooling and disenchantment within the devotional life of Morebath in the remaining years of Henry's reign. With the extinguishing of the lights and the abandonment of the patronage of the saints over the two remaining stores, a dimension of warmth and humanity evident in the accounts up to that point, fades a little. The statues of the saint remained in their tabernacles ... But with the ending of their cult, the offering to the images of candles and flowers, the gifts of (rosary) beads and kerchiefs and wedding-rings, they had dwindled from presences to not much more than furniture" (Ch. 5).

This is not always an easy book to read. Too much scholarly apparatus for the non-specialist. But it presents an original slant into how the increasingly centralized Tudor state reached down into the daily lives of several generations of men and women, boys and girls and infants in the tiny village of Morebath.  -OOO-

recommended reading:

-- James Fenimore Cooper - THE HEIDENMAUER.

-- Eamon Duffy - THE STRIPPING OF THE ALTARS, FIRES OF FAITH

-- Sir Walter Scott - THE MONASTERY, THE ABBOT.

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(4) amazon.com 01/15/2011

title of review:  Women And The Reformation in England 1520 - 1574

rating: * * * *

review:

In his 2001 history of Tudor reaction to and management of the Protestant Reformation, THE VOICES OF MOREBATH, what does author Eamon Duffy set out to do?

The first sentence of his Preface says it all: "This is a book about a sixteenth-century country priest, and the extraordinary records he kept." The priest is Sir Christopher Trychay (pronounced "Tricky"). The country is the sheep-raising part of Devon in southwestern England, more precisely the wee village of Morebath, 25 miles north of the county seat at Exeter. The years are 1520 - 1574 when Trychay was vicar of Saint George's parish church, and wrote up the fiscal accounts presented annually by elected lay parishioners. Laymen and laywomen managed various funds (called "stores") used for church upkeep and adornment and for other needs of the parish.

From the still rather jumbled manuscript of the Vicar's narrative of accounts, historian Duffy teases out a surprising mass of biographic and genealogical facts about the 30-odd farm families of Saint George's parish: men, women, boys, girls and infants. For 54 years their priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, baptized them, officiated at their weddings and funerals and fostered their pride in personal and collective religious service to the parish. Duffy treats all local cadres and both sexes fairly and evenhandedly.

The conservative but instinctively deferential Vicar of Saint George's begins Catholic, is forced to do Protestant things, enjoys five years of re-Catholicization under Queen Mary, then knuckles under to the victorious Protestantism of Queen Elizabeth. Why did Sir Christopher Trychay not resign his churches? Why not go underground in nonconforming opposition? Probably, argues Eamon Duffy, because at bottom the Vicar's personal Christianity was rooted in the local, the familiar, the dear. No mere change of monarchs would undermine his enduring loyalty to or cause him to leave "his" Morehead. Much the same seems likely for the conservative laymen of Saint George's parish. There was simply "no help for it." The inevitable had to be borne.

There are things you might care to know about the specfically feminine dimensions of Saint George's in the 54 years that Sir Christopher was vicar there. Here are some:
-- (1) local cult of the Virgin Mary,

-- (2) cult of Saint Sidwell,

-- (3) parish leadership roles of women and even girls,

-- (4) two wives' influence on King Henry VIII's religious leanings.
***

-- (1) Local cult of the Virgin Mary. Both Eastern and Western Christianity were in the 16th century thoroughly Incarnationalist, earthy, concrete, celebrating "the Word made flesh." And the Word was enfleshed in the virgin womb of Mary. Thus the most precious and valuable possession of any early Tudor country woman was a large rosary, with silver pater noster beads, and worn suspended from the waist. The fiscal reports of Saint George's record many donations of valuable rosaries to the church, to adorn statues or altars or to be sold back to relatives to fund good works for the poor and others.

But in Morebath the great Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God, also assumed a role more resembling that of minor "helper" saints invoked for special needs or on special occasions. Thus Our Lady of Sorrows was especially dear as companion to the severely ill as they prepared for a good death.

-- (2) Cult of Saint Sidwell. Buried outside the eastern gate of Exeter was the Saxon girl Saint Sidwell, murdered by her cruel step-mother. In 1520, almost upon his arrival as new Vicar at Morebath, Sir Christopher introduced the local cult of this saint. Remarkably soon, the women and girls of the parish embraced this cult. And one widow even willed her silver wedding ring to make shoes for the statue of Saint Sidwell. This statue was prominently supplied near an important side altar previously called "the Jesus altar," but soon the Jesus-Sidwell altar or simply the Sidwell altar.

-- (3) Parish leadership roles of women and even girls. Every year 12 laymen were elected to manage the parish funds or "stores" dedicated to the church's special needs: altar cloths, beeswax for candles, sheep for their wool, altar linen, etc. One of the several stores was the women's and another the "maidens" store. Girls as young as 12 (the traditional age for receiving first communion) were eligible for election and the record shows that they often served, too. Sometimes their fathers subbed for them in preparing the annual accounts. Women at times also filled the number one parish accounting role, or warden. Pre-Reformation Morebath shows women and girls heavily engaged in the daily minutiae of parish life, side by side with their menfolks and boys under the leadership of their pastor. As the Reformation juggeraut from on high destroyed old pious practices, participation of laymen in all parish activities fell off dramatically. In general, the numbers of clergy plummeted as did fresh vocations to the Protestant priesthood.

-- (4) Two wives' influence on King Henry VIII's religious leanings. Eamon Duffy credits Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, with pushing him into his earliest Protestant reforms. He credits his fifth wife, Catherine Howard and her conservative relatives, for pulling Henry back toward the end of his reign from earlier reforming zeal.

Bottom line: Women mattered in both Morebath and England, especially the two Tudor Monarchs Mary I and Elizabeth I. The Reformation, however, according to Duffy, greatly diminished the role of women in parishes. At the same time the centralizing Tudor state based in London increasingly converted parishes from religious to secular entities for raising revenues for the Crown.

The book is very visual, well illustrated and presents two useful maps of Morebath, Devon and southwestern England. For my personaltaste, there is too much minute scholarship scattered proudly through the text. Otherwise almost anyone keen to know more about how three Tudor Monarchs imposed Protestantism on an unhappy but compliant population will enjoy THE VOICES OF MOREBATH: REFORMATION AND REBELLION IN AN ENGLISH VILLAGE.  -OOO-


tags: morebath, devon, exeter, saint sidwell, reformation in england, prayer book revolt, parish finances, women in tudor parish life

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